It’s more vocal, in your face, and prominent than it has been in years. Across the world we’re seeing rallies where chants echo with “blood and soil” and Nazis are emboldened enough to publicly show their faces. These aren’t benign forces at work, they claim lives. Atomwaffen, a neo-Nazi terror cell , was connected to five deaths last year, and an anti-racist protester was run down and killed at a Charlottesville rally last summer.

There are myriad reasons for the far-right’s sudden growth: the proliferation of the internet allows for neo-Nazi spaces like Storm Front and the Daily Stormer to flourish and actively recruit; the announcement that in a few decades whites will no longer be the majority in Western countries has stoked hate; and even some high-level politicians have hinted sympathy with their movement. There is no doubt it’s here and it doesn’t seem to be going away and we need to acknowledge that.

For a long time, the majority of research and deradicalization efforts surrounding extremism were hyper-focused on the threat of Islamic terrorism. Ignoring this other homegrown threat was a costly mistake. As Heidi Beirich, director of SPLC’s Intelligence Project, puts it “there isn't too much known about deradicalization of this type.” In the last year we’ve seen some efforts spring up that work to remove people from this movement—Life After Hate (which had its funding pulled by the Trump administration) and the Exit programs in Sweden and Germany—but they are still woefully underfunded. To put it bluntly, we’re playing catch up. "It's like we've forgotten we have another homegrown terror threat that's pretty serious here as well. Nothing has been done about it,” Beirich told VICE.

One of the ways to learn about this subject by is speaking to people who, in the past, harboured despicable views. "I think it's really important to know how people get into these movements. What are the social, familial dynamics that lead to someone becoming radicalized,” said Beirich. “We can't prevent it if we don't know how that happens and formers are a very good source of information on those processes. Formers are the one who can give us an understanding of a successful path out."

As Beirich explains, knowledge is power when it comes to ideological movements like this, and by knowing how some of these "formers" left, we can use that to fight the growing ideological war on our own soil. Often it's family or other close relationships that encourage an exit. Here are four of those stories: