Some Kind of Hate
TL;DR: a powerful, timely novel for young adults about extremism
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This week, a jury found Henry “Enrique” Tarrio and three other members of the Proud Boys extremist group guilty of seditious conspiracy for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The Proud Boys are a far-right, male-only, paramilitary organization created in 2016. They seek to promote so-called “Western culture and values” and target feminism, Jews, diversity, and progressive groups, among others. Designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Proud Boys have provoked violent street riots throughout the United States.
Like other hate groups, the Proud Boys do much of their recruitment online. The rise of hate groups may not seem like a natural subject for a young-adult novel. But in the hands of Sarah Darer Littman, the story feels vital and timely. While we may not like the ideas she explores, they make for a gripping story that shines needed light on a real and dangerous part of life for teens, especially boys.
Some Kind of Hate starts in a seemingly safe place. Declan is that popular, sports-mad boy who seems destined for a great life. But he seriously injures himself, ending his baseball career. Jake, one of Declan’s oldest friends, is Jewish. As Declan recovers alone at home, he finds solace online. New friends seem at first to understand and sympathize with his anger as more misfortune rocks his family. Things seem headed in one direction: down.
Gradually, the new friends reveal themselves as a hate group determined to attack local Jews. The ideology of white supremacy seeps through the pages. Declan feels a visceral disappointment that acts on him like a drug, opening him to increasingly vile and violent rhetoric. Only after an actual act of violence does Declan finally realize how much he’s hurt his family, himself—and Jake.
It’s a disturbing, gripping, thrilling read that feels ripped from the headlines.
If you know teens, especially boys, who spend a lot of time online, this would be a great book to give them.
Girls aren’t immune to the poison of hate. For background on women in far-right movements, I recommend Seyward Darby’s Sisters in Hate: American Women and White Extremism.
Here’s my interview with Sarah Darer Littman.
Tell me how you came to choose this place, time, and story for Some Kind of Hate.
I was a columnist for Hearst CT newspapers and CTNewsJunkie.com for thirteen years, and I was used to getting nastygrams from people who disagreed with me. But starting in 2015/2016 I noticed a distinct change in tone. The nastygrams became increasingly misogynistic and antisemitic. I’ve shared a milder example below. (TW: antisemitism). Like Jewish kids who grew up in the post-Holocaust generation, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering and studying how genocide happens. I read about the signs of how it started, trying to figure out how the Jewish families who did escape Nazi Germany knew it was time to leave—just in case it ever happened here.
The rhetoric I saw, amplified by social media platforms and algorithms, triggered alarms. But what made me finally understand the answer to how could genocide happen? was seeing my “nice” neighbors willing to turn a blind eye to the hateful rhetoric because they were promised big tax cuts and weren’t affected personally.
But it wasn’t until 2019, after I read an article in The Washingtonian and attended an ADL presentation about the Mainstreaming of Antisemitism, that the idea for the book came together.
Describe the world of your book in a sentence or two.
The book is set in upstate New York but it could be any of the small rural towns and hamlets in our country where there are vacant storefronts on Main Street, homes and barns are falling into disrepair, and the population is dwindling because jobs have all but disappeared.
You ease us into the antisemitism that frames your story. I fear that for many of your readers, this isn’t as immediately obvious as it would be for older readers. For some, the clues—like the Rothschilds, “globalists,” or a focus on money—can seem odd. How did you balance the teaching part with making sure the story advances?
With difficulty! There was so much to talk about, it took a lot of revising to find that balance.
Quite early on in my research, I read an anonymously-written piece in The Washingtonian, What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the Alt-Right. I was so struck by the fact that the young man was from a liberal Jewish family and yet still went down the rabbit hole of extremism. I ended up writing to the editor of The Washingtonian asking if she’d be willing to put me in touch with the family, promising to keep their identity confidential. I was able to interview the young man and ask him the question that had been nagging at my brain since I read the article.
“You’re Jewish. Didn’t it bother you when they said antisemitic stuff?” His answer gives me chills to this day: “They never said Jew. They said ‘globalist.’”
This was at a point when the then-president of the United States was using the word to describe a Jewish cabinet minister. Most people aren’t aware of the antisemitic history of the term. It derives from the conspiracy theory promoted by The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which the US Holocaust Memorial Museum calls: “the most notorious and widely distributed antisemitic publication of modern times.”
It’s so important that we educate young people about the kind of code words and dog whistles they might encounter online, especially because a recent ADL survey found that the exposure to white supremacist ideology is increasing in gaming spaces.
How has writing this book shaped the way you think about how young people are drawn into hate groups?
I came away with several important realizations that changed my thinking:
1. People aren’t initially drawn to hate groups because of the ideology. They’re looking for community, identity, and purpose. Declan loses his identity and what he believes is his only hope for the future. That makes him a perfect candidate for recruitment.
2. There are multiple vectors to radicalization – young people can come to it through different channels: the ‘manosphere’, gaming, the incel community, Christian Nationalism, etc.
3. We’ve failed to educate our population in information literacy. Not just our kids – some of the worst offenders are Boomers, who share misinformation on Facebook or through those Fw: Fw: Fw: emails. One of my Jewish relatives forwarded an email with a link to the National Vanguard website. The email didn’t have anything antisemitic, but I sent him back screenshots of all the antisemitic propaganda on their site (right now they literally have pro-Hitler stuff on the front page) and asked why he was doing the work for the people who killed my great-grandparents in Ukraine.
If we want to save our democratic republic, we need to build information literacy into every part of the curriculum, starting from kindergarten. That’s why we need trained media specialists in every school.
The work of groups like The News Literacy Project is key.
There are big, contemporary political questions swirling around this story. Yet you manage to keep your characters grounded in what young people care about: baseball, dates, college, and families. Did one character come to you first? Were others harder to realize? Why did you decide to use Declan and Jake as contrasts?
What’s interesting is that when I originally sold the book on proposal, it was from two points of view but male and female. I’d written about 20K words (about a third of my first draft) while continuing to research when I realized that because toxic masculinity was such an important point of entry, it seemed important to tell the story from two male points of view, so the reader could see that there is more than one way to “be a man.”
I spent a lot of time watching “alpha male” videos on YouTube, which consisted of a lot of buff bearded guys telling other guys “What women want”— except what they said women want bears zero resemblance to what any woman I know actually wants. It’s terrifying that young men and boys are taking away these toxic messages. We’re seeing the negative impact in schools, but I don’t hear groups like Moms for Liberty complaining about protecting children from that.
Did you play any online games to get a feel for how the players, especially boys, interact and talk? It’s so creepy and realistic how the online crew starts reaching out to a boy they know is hurting. The depiction in the book is excellent.
I’m not much of a gamer (Tetris was my jam) but I checked the gaming stuff with people who are. I also spent more time than I would have liked lurking in white nationalist chatrooms.
My fourth novel, Want to Go Private?, was about a girl who becomes involved with an internet predator. I noticed that the recruiting tactics seemed very similar to the tactics I learned about to write the novel. Find someone who is lonely, insecure, and looking for connection and reflect back their feelings so they feel like you are the only one that understands them. Then start manipulating them to do what you want.
When I was interviewing a former NeoNazi, I commented that the process of recruitment seemed similar. He agreed.
Jarred Stonepen seems inspired by another real-life university professor who preaches a toxic version of masculinity to men. From being immersed in this world, why do you think this is effective with young people, especially young men?
Change is difficult for most people, and our societal norms about gender roles have been evolving for decades. If young men don’t have healthy role models of how to “be a man” in their lives, they will search for it elsewhere.
One of the young men I interviewed said that a real-life university professor was a “father to our generation.” The professor became a gateway drug into the extremist pipeline for this young man because through this professor he became acquainted with white supremacist figures like Stefan Molyneux. From there, YouTube’s recommendation algorithms delivered him further down the pipeline.
I saw this with my own searches. For quite some time after researching this book, I found that when I searched for Jewish topics, almost the entire first page of Google results were from Christian Nationalist or Messianic Jewish sites. I’m Jewish, so I can spot an authentically Jewish website providing information about Judaism, but someone who isn’t aware could be getting a very inaccurate view of what Jewish people think.
Were there things that you read as you did the research for the story that particularly moved or inspired you?
What inspired me the most was hearing that for several people, the first crack in their extremist worldview came from being treated with kindness and respect by the people from whom they least deserved it.
I don’t want anyone to think that I’m advocating that the burden of fighting extremism should lie on the shoulders of the oppressed. Not at all. But having learned that what brings people to extremism is that search for community, identity, and purpose, we can’t fight it without providing an alternate, healthier way of filling those needs and finding ways to support people who want to leave.
I’m still fighting my own protective instinct to shut myself off from people who hate me for the mere fact of being Jewish. But I was inspired by the work and courage of documentary filmmaker Deeyah Khan. Her documentary, White Right, Meeting the Enemy is a must-watch. Learning how to see the humanity in people we vehemently disagree with is also behind the work of the One Small Step project from StoryCorps. I’m trying to incorporate those principles into my own life – to overcome my natural fears through curiosity and listening.
Right now, we’re in an awful moment of libraries and schools banning books that have challenging stories. Tell us why you want kids to read Some Kind of Hate and what you want them to get from the story.
I hope that reading Some Kind of Hate will help kids to recognize some of the antisemitic code words they might be seeing and hearing online and, unfortunately, on some news channels and in Congress. I hope that it will help them find the courage to speak out against extremism in their offline lives – to be upstanders not bystanders.
Do you feel hopeful about this latest cycle of hate being countered by better information and a deeper understanding of where it comes from?
It’s hard to feel hopeful at a moment when social media is a morass of hate and misinformation when AI is being used to create deep fakes of political figures (deepfakes were the topic of my previous novel) and memes spread inaccurate information aimed at generating outrage.
I urge everyone who reads this to sign up for Rumorguard, which sends out timely alerts about misinformation being spread online. If someone you know is spreading misinformation, try to have a quiet, private interaction with them, providing the facts and discussing how important it is to fact-check before sharing. It’s particularly important to stop and fact-check if what you’re sharing generates big emotions—that’s how propaganda works.
What’s next for you?
I’m working on a new novel for Scholastic that hasn’t been announced yet so I can’t tell you much about it, except it’s the first novel I’ve ever co-written. I look forward to sharing more at a later date!
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Thanks for taking the time to do the interview (couldn't be more timely).