Until we challenge the patriarchy, the far right will always appeal to vulnerable young men

The Cornish teenager arrested on charges of terrorism reminded me of another young boy I worked with – both were lonely and seeking positive male role models

A photo the Cornish teenager recently arrested on charges of terrorism took of himself, aged 14, performing a Hitler salute inside his grandmother's home (Crown Prosecution Service)

“Heil Kate!”

T greets me with his right arm raised in a Nazi salute, grinning and watching to see if I’m offended.“

That says way more about you than it ever will about me,” I reply, refusing to return the smile. 

T is 14 and attends a school for young people who cannot manage in mainstream education. His favourite pastime is finding ways to offend people. Having discovered that I’m ethnically Jewish, this often involves morning “Heils”. Other days he’ll start a conversation by telling me the Holocaust didn’t really happen. I am (to his chagrin) wholly unoffendable.

Through various discussions, I learn that T has received most of his political education via 4Chan and Reddit. Genuinely curious and fiercely intelligent, T lacks social skills, which has limited his opportunities to make friends. This means most of his political opinions have been formed online.

The Cornish teenager recently arrested on charges of terrorism reminded me instantly of T. Aged just 13 when he committed his first offence, he eventually admitted 12 terror offences, including the dissemination and possession of documents on bomb making. At his trial, the judge noted that he was “susceptible to the influence of others”.

Desperately isolated and willing to do almost anything to feel part of a community, he had wrapped himself in a cloak of other’s rhetoric and proudly paraded his new opinions online. Before joining Feuerkrieg Division (FKD), a neo-Nazi organisation, he would have been alone, lonely and isolated.

The thrill of finding people whom he could impress and whose praise made him feel a part of something would have been intoxicating. I thoroughly believe his statement that he believed none of the lines he spouted and was merely trying to “look cool”.

For young men like T and the young Cornish member of the FKD, the internet is both a blessing and a curse, providing them with people they can call friends and the constant validation of likes, up-votes and human contact. All that’s asked in return is that they spout the party line.

As with the Incel (involuntarily celibate) community, the extreme anti-Semitic groups provide their recruits with the ultimate enticement – It’s Not Your Fault. If you can’t get a date– blame women. If you can’t get a job – blame Jews, the Bame community or immigrants. Blaming the true culprits – a government which priced you out of higher education, or a society which fetishises masculinity and systematically rejects those who do not fit in – is scary and requires actual confrontation of your own values. Far easier to externalise those emotions and place them onto a pre-existing scapegoat.

Part of the problem is our unwillingness to recognise that working-class white boys can be victims of grooming and extremism. The media obsession with presenting low-income, Bame young men as potential terrorists has blinded us to the extremist right wing groups Pied Piper-ing lost young men into dangerous ideologies right on our doorstep. Their memories of loneliness and school bullying are swept away as their powerful new friends claim they’re Proud of Their Boy and give them an important-sounding role in an organisation.

The dangers of joining terrorist groups like Isis are all around us; we see the bombings and beheadings and know exactly how awful it all is. Likewise, the dangers of county lines gangs are taught in schools, as young people are shown how to avoid being roped into running numbers. The presence of online gangs is rarely tackled despite the fact that most of these groups work in exactly the same way. There is a preference for presenting those who commit shootings to punish popular girls or spray paint 1488 on the shed as loners, outliers whose crimes are their own to bear.

Last year I came face to face with the extreme end of these ideologies. While researching a piece on paedophile communities, I encountered Nathan Larson. An American ex-congressional candidate, Larson had run on a platform of legalising incest and revoking the 19th Amendment. A long-time member of the Incel community, he was also a proud white supremacist, outspoken paedophile and anti-Semite.

Unemployed and unemployable, having spent time in prison for sending death threats to (then president) George Bush, everyone but Larson was to blame. The result was a 32-year-old man whose only friends were the young men whom he encouraged to express their frustrations on his pro-rape web forum.

Larson is the outlier’s outlier and it is unlikely that the young men above will come close to his lifestyle. However, if we are to ensure that boys like T do not go down this road, we need to start talking to and about them in different terms. We need to acknowledge that they are vulnerable and provide safe outlets for them to express their needs.

There also needs to be a shift in the narrative regarding responsibility. It has long been assumed that women exist to be the caretakers and mopper-uppers of male distress. For men like T and others, they need positive male role models willing to challenge the patriarchy and make it acceptable to be different.