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Content
HOOKED ON HATE
by
MICHAEL GOLDBERG
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ANNENBERG SCHOOL FOR COMMUNICATION
AND JOURNALISM
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM)
August 2022
Copyright 2022 Michael Goldberg
ii
Table of Contents
Abstract iii
Introduction 1
The Descent 4
Enter the Void 10
Life After Hate 14
Bibliography 18
iii
Abstract
Tony McAleer and Sammy Rangel were violent extremists on opposite sides of the racial divide.
With the help of addiction counselors, they left their movements behind and joined forces. Their
stories reveal why hate-based violence can be addicting and what policymakers can do to stop its
spread.
1
Introduction
Here he is, a man ready to get his fix. The place is a party to which skinheads have
procured an invitation. The fix is the feeling that Tony McAleer gets as his knuckles make
contact with another man's cheekbone. He and his brothers are awash in hatred and ready to do
what neo-Nazis do after dark: enacting violence. Total domination. The good stuff.
McAleer had been chasing this feeling for quite some time, and with it came a heavy
dose of clarity. This is what he'd been missing all along. And so, alongside his fellow
malcontents, he felt right at home brawling in the front yard of someone else's home.
McAleer had recently joined the White Aryan Resistance. On the night in question, they
got the better of their opponents and took off by foot. Afterward, McAleer reveled in a powerful
buzz. For the first time in his life, he knew that someone had been afraid of him.
"You know, they were really afraid of me, they were afraid," McAleer said, repeating
himself as if to emphasize the feeling's hold over him. "From the kid that always got bullied to
experience the other side of that. Well, I didn't ever want to go back to that feeling. I wanted to
stay in this one."
McAleer is a former neo-Nazi. After leaving the White Aryan Resistance, he co-founded
Life After Hate, an organization that helps "deradicalize" members of far-right extremist
movements. Just as McAleer was filling a personal void by joining the white power movement,
2
his co-founder, Sammy Rangel, was doing the same with a movement that had a diametrically
opposite ideology. Rangel, who is Latino, joined the Maniac Latin Disciples street gang when he
was eleven years old. While in prison, Rangel became devoted to a “revolutionist” ideology that
encouraged adherents to commit violence against white people.
McAleer and Rangel’s experience with hate-based extremism, and the violent acts they
committed in its service, inform a shift in thinking among those attempting to stem the rising tide
of extremism in the U.S. The pair are teaming up with national security experts, public health
officials and social workers to develop treatment programs for treating extremism like an
addiction.
In 2017, a team of sociologists working for the Department of Homeland Security
analyzed a data set of 89 former U.S. white supremacists and found that their identity and
ideology persisted long after disengaging from extremist groups. They found that white
supremacists who leave their extremist ways behind experience "substantial lingering effects"
that some of them compare to addiction. But the research is still "very, very early in the
identification of the problem," says Andrew Dreyfus, the chief executive officer of Blue Cross
Blue Shield of Massachusetts. "This is where we were with opioid addiction 10 to 15 years
ago."
With rates of polarization increasing, the specter of domestic extremism looms large in
the U.S. Some polls show that a growing number of Americans may increasingly accept political
violence. Nevertheless, there is no peer-reviewed approach to deradicalization, nor is there a
3
robust infrastructure to assist disillusioned extremists in rebuilding their identity, community,
and purpose.
While lawmakers say they are concerned about domestic extremism, some experts
familiar with deradicalization programs in the U.S. say the federal government is not providing
enough grant funding to connect academic researchers with law enforcement and public health
agencies to solve the problem.
"During the Trump Administration, I think the obstacle was political will and alignment
in some ways with the movement, so they weren't about to fund it," said Christian Picciolini, a
former Neo-Nazi who writes about deradicalization. President Joe Biden said he was inspired to
run for the White House after former President Trump proclaimed there to be “very fine people”
on both sides of the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.
While the Biden Administration published a national strategy for countering domestic
terrorism, the document does not lay out a detailed plan for collecting data on new approaches to
deradicalization. For example, combating extremism with the tools of addiction treatment is a
nascent practice that needs to be backed up with data, said Kevin Lowry, the former chief
probation officer for the U.S. District Court of Minnesota.
"If you find out about things that work, what was it specifically?” said Lowry. “There’s a
void in ongoing research in this area, both in developing the practices and measuring the
practices," said Lowry.
4
Without a large body of research, policymakers risk repeating past mistakes. "We
shouldn't make the same mistakes we made in the war on drugs, going after solely the ‘addicts’,”
Picciolini said. “Early intervention and, most importantly, prevention are key," he said.
Researchers from the Rand Corporation, a prominent think tank, caution that attempts to
curb terrorism and substance use disorders reveal the pitfalls of a punitive approach that doesn’t
encourage rehabilitation. According to a recent report, "Approaches that further stigmatize or
marginalize these individuals often seem to backfire, causing the problem to worsen. New
approaches that incorporate community-centeredness, harm reduction, and radical forgiveness
show promise at addressing what have been persistent, recalcitrant problems."
McAleer and Rangel were enmeshed in extremist movements with different ideologies
and in different countries. Yet their journey into and out of extremist movements reveals how
addiction treatment helped them leave hate behind.
The descent
McAleer grew up near Vancouver, Canada, in a middle-class home. His formative years
carried the hallmarks of suburban loneliness, from Catholic school beatdowns to friends who
never came to his defense. At the root of his angst was a distant father whose approval never
came. This strained relationship created a void he tried to fill for years to come.
5
“My dad loved us. But we were an immigrant family from England, and he worked 80
hours a week. He was a psychiatrist, but I could never unlock the mystery to get his approval,”
McAleer recalled.
McAleer begged his parents to remove him from high school. He argued that if they sent
him somewhere far away, his grades might rise. They agreed, sensing his pleas were rooted in an
alienation that guidance counselors or after-school tutors couldn’t help. In 1982, he left Canada
for England. He attended a Methodist boarding school in Scarborough, a resort town on the
North Sea coast. With a last name like McAleer, Tony could not hide his Irish Catholic heritage,
so the bullying continued. Alone in his new home, he spent his evenings exploring the city and
soon discovered an underbelly beneath the beach town’s surface.
The area was home to several skinhead punk rock bands, and along with them a
subculture that appealed to some of the city’s disaffected youth. Catching a glimpse of the
skinhead scene imparted him with a curiosity that endured until he returned to Canada the next
summer. One night, he slid on a pair of Doc Martens, the footwear of choice for skinheads, and
set out to his first skinhead punk show in Vancouver. It was the first time he could remember
feeling at home with others. The men he met that night would become his brothers-in-arms as he
gave himself over to the cause of white supremacy.
McAleer solidified his bond with the men through shared acts of violence. But the
intoxicating buzz he experienced was also tied up in the newfound camaraderie he had long been
chasing.
6
“It was a very clear recipe for how to get fatherly attention from this other group of men
that I could never get from my father,” McAleer said. “I got it through a very transactional,
clearly defined mechanism. And that is showing that you’re brave, that you're not a coward. You
do this and you get an instant reward.”
McAleer believes that gaining the approval of his superiors allowed him to channel his
"toxic shame" — the term he uses to describe his teenage state of mind. This psychoanalyzing is
McAleer’s riff on the work of Dr. James Gilligan, a prison psychiatrist who theorized that shame
is the “primary or ultimate cause of all violence.” In his 1996 book, “Violence: Reflections on a
National Epidemic,” Gilligan wrote that “the purpose of violence is to diminish the intensity of
shame and replace it as far as possible with its opposite, pride.”
For Gilligan, prisons made ideal "laboratories" to investigate the causes of violence and
the quest for pride. In prison, racial sorting into prison gangs links pride to group identity. This is
why prisons are hotbeds of group-based violence. “If the purpose of the imprisonment were to
socialize men to become as violent as possible—both while they are there, and after they return
to the community—we could hardly find a more effective way to accomplish it,” Gilligan wrote.
McAleer never went to prison, but like many inmates, he saw violence as a ritual around
which group membership was strengthened. But all of the dynamics that gave rise to his
radicalization would have been turbocharged in prison. The “voids” afflicting many extremists
follow them inside the prisons’ walls and into their cell blocks.
7
Just ask Sammy Rangel, McAleer’s cofounder at Life After Hate.
Rangel’s voids began taking shape at his childhood home in Chicago when he was three
years old. That was when his uncle began sexually abusing him. This was compounded by
chronic physical abuse at the hands of his mother and stepfather. In his memories, the emotional
experience of the abuse remains more vivid than the physical pain he endured. Rangel doesn’t
remember his mother laying a finger on his sister or two younger brothers. He felt singled out,
like an outcast in his own family.
Rangel bounced between mental institutions, foster homes, and detention homes. At 11
years old, he joined the Maniac Latin Disciples, the second largest Latino street gang in Chicago.
He went to prison for the first time at 17 after stealing a car. But Rangel didn’t dread going to
prison. Already a father of one child with another on the way, prison offered a respite from
responsibility and a setting where violence was a form of social currency.
“I was just a kid when I walked into that prison, but I was a hothead. I was a fighter, and
because of that I made a name for myself,” Rangel said. “I attacked a warden, I started fights.
This was really seen as something to be proud of.”
While in prison, Rangel spent 28 months in solitary confinement for instigating a brawl
between rival racial gangs. The solitude afforded him time to read an underground newsletter
given to him by gang members whom he describes as “anti-government, anti-law enforcement
8
and anti-white.” Rangel’s ideology was more amorphous than his neo-Nazi counterparts, but it
called for violence against whites for the injustices visited upon people of color.
“I didn't go to school, I got my education in prisons,” Rangel said. “I didn't give a shit
about culture or history. But I was surrounded by these older men who were all gang leaders and
they sold these ideas as a mission to fight for justice.”
Rangel thought his cause was righteous, which is common among extremists. It also may
be one of the qualities of extremism that can make it addictive, according to Dr. Jessica Stern, a
senior preparedness fellow at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She
researches initiatives to reduce recidivism among violent extremists released from prison. She
has also written about counter-radicalization programs for both neo-Nazi and Islamist extremists
for over 20 years.
“They imagine themselves to be making the world better. That can be addictive. One
[research subject] said to me, I'm as addicted to Jihad as you are to writing,” Stern said. “These
kinds of ideas give you a kind of adrenaline and excitement. So we’ve been thinking about
whether interventions should partly be based on the notion that these ideas are hard to give up for
that reason.”
Rangel rose through the ranks of his prison gang. When members of the Maniac Latin
Disciples entered the prison, he forced them to fall in line with the race-based, “revolutionist”
ideology he had come to support. They understood the importance of joining a prison gang for
protection, but Rangel’s newfound ideological fervor puzzled them. “Imagine a group of your
9
friends who are in prison for violent crimes telling you you're becoming too extreme for them,”
Rangel said.
After three years, Rangel left prison more radicalized than before. Two weeks after he got
out, he attempted to kill a rival gang member in broad daylight. “I didn't start the fight. But I
certainly intended to finish it,” he recalls.
With a target on his back, Rangel fled to Kenosha, Wis. While there, he conducted a
string of armed robberies targeting residents in a predominantly white neighborhood. His victims
were not chosen accidentally but by the color of their skin. He was arrested and later convicted
on multiple counts of armed robbery. And so began a seven-year prison sentence during which
his violent streak reached its apex.
“I went to war with the Wisconsin prison system as an inmate,” Rangel said. “I was using
my influence and power to take over the prison, assault guards and have gang members on the
outside threaten them at their homes.”
Picciolini's story parallels both McAleer's and Rangel’s in several ways. A child of
immigrants who felt estranged from his surroundings, he also sought brotherhood before a Neo-
Nazi recruiter approached him on a street corner in Chicago. Picciolini sought a sense of
belonging, which he traces to a childhood marked by loneliness and isolation. Loneliness factors
into most prominent theories of extremism.
10
In her definitive book of twentieth-century political history, “The Origins of
Totalitarianism,” the philosopher Hannah Arendt writes that socially isolated people are more
likely to be attracted to totalitarian mass movements. These movements rely on individuals,
propagandized into groups she calls “the masses,” who are susceptible, due to their loneliness, to
violent ideologies.
“The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his
isolation and lack of normal social relationships,” wrote Arendt.
Arendt published her writings long before researchers began noticing extremism’s
addictive allure. But her analysis resonates with today’s former extremists. "Replacing the
identity, community, and purpose of extremist movements is paramount," Piccioloni said.
Without that, I've seen people slide sideways into other negative pathways like drugs, gangs or
trafficking."
Enter the void
McAleer’s children were looking at him. He was lying face down on the living floor. His
head was resting next to a few of his teeth, which had been knocked out of his mouth by two
members of a skinhead metal band. He doesn’t remember how the argument started, but he
knows it was over something inconsequential. The mother of his children, one son and one
daughter, was far away; she had left him and moved to Australia. Their children watched as he
struggled to regain consciousness. This was the moment when violence began to lose its grip on
11
McAleer. He still hadn’t realized the ills of his way and denounced white supremacy. Instead,
fatherhood offered a justification for living with a greater purpose.
“I left from a place of wanting to raise my children,” McAleer said. “If I really want to do
something for the white race, I could make sure these two children thrive and survive. That’s
how I rationalized leaving but keeping my identity intact. I didn't leave because I had an
epiphany. I left because I had to take care of these children.”
It was 1998, and McAleer began seeing a counselor. He soon realized that extricating
himself from the White Aryan Resistance wouldn’t solely be a matter of personal responsibility.
“You may have left the movement, but the movement hasn’t left you,” the counselor told him.
McAleer was entering a phase in his deradicalization that he now calls “the void.” It
refers to the period when an extremist has committed to leaving their old social circle behind but
hasn’t yet found a new one to take its place. Many extremists are tempted to return to their old
friends during this period.
“It's very difficult to leave the network that is enabling a violent person who no longer
wants to be violent,” Stern said. “Having a pro-social network, which is, in this case, a network
of friends and family that do not promote violence, is essential.”
McAleer searched for a new community to replace the White Aryan Resistance. He
thought back to days he spent wandering around Scarborough, looking for a group that would
12
have him. Music was the interest through which he last found community, so he sought out a
subculture whose ethos could not have been more different: ravers. He dove headfirst into the
rave scene, a community governed by the values of Peace, Love, Unity and Respect (PLUR).
“I don’t think it’s an accident that they couldn't have been more diametrically opposite.
We operate in polarities,” McAleer said.
A propensity for gravitating toward the fringes is a quality many former extremists apply
to other areas of life, even after they leave their movements behind. For some, it’s less about
“deradicalization” than refocusing their radical proclivities on more positive interests.
“I don't believe one necessarily needs to become an ‘extremist’ about something
positive,” Picciolini said. Being a ‘radical,’ however, is not always a bad thing. We've had
radical thinkers that have changed the world for the better haven't we? I simply try to refocus the
radical in someone to bend towards good.”
In the five years after McAleer left the White Aryan Resistance, he completed over 1000
hours of one-on-one and group counseling treatment. These sessions, in conjunction with the
new values he imbibed through the rave scene, caused McAleer to make the final step toward
recovery. He no longer felt an urge to justify leaving the white power movement, he felt a moral
urge to do it and help others do the same. This set him on a path to meeting Rangel.
13
When Rangel battled guards and fellow inmates in prison, he was more “angry than
methodical, more disorderly than focused.” He thought he was fighting for justice, but the fight
had only brought him punishments of an increasingly brutal variety. He was transferred to a
mental ward, where, according to Rangel, he spent every waking moment in physical restraints.
He could not even go to the bathroom without asking for permission. He had lost the basic
elements of freedom afforded to prisoners and showed few signs of improvement. “Incorrigible”
is the word one prison psychologist used to describe Rangel. Incorrigible, until he wasn’t.
The moment things began to turn around started with a knock on his cell door. The sound
was unfamiliar to Rangel because he’d never heard it before. When the guards wanted to enter
his cell, they’d walk in unannounced. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, he heard a knock and the
voice of a new prison psychologist asking if he could come in. The small gesture awoke
something in Rangel.
“I'm in a portion of the prison where I can't even control when I use the bathroom. I can't
control when I'm fed or what I'm fed. I can't even stand up. There is no need to knock on my
door because you can just come in,” Rangel said. “It shocked me because there's something
about that gesture that expressed my value as a person. I hadn't experienced it in my whole life,
that kind of respect.”
The psychologist came into the cell to greet Rangel, who was strapped to a steel chair.
They talked about his past and the dark path he had forged for himself. It was the first
conversation in a relationship that would last for the remainder of Rangel’s sentence. The
14
psychologist, whose name Rangel wishes to keep private, noticed that Rangel’s pattern of violent
behavior seemed compulsive in nature. It was as though he couldn’t stop. He referred Rangel to
the prison’s intensive addiction program. It was a slow burn, literally and figuratively: Rangel’s
first assignment was to watch as a counselor burned the photo albums he had preserved from his
gang years. Then, he underwent a treatment program modeled after twelve-step programs.
Twelve-step programs are peer support groups based on the idea that people can help one
another abstain from “substances of abuse.” The programs are also informed by the premise that
recovery cannot be achieved unless addicts “surrender to a higher power,” which can be religious
or secular. Rangel chose compassion as his north star.
“What worked for me was somebody showing me kindness and compassion in a world
that was empty of that,” he said. And so Rangel set forth to bring compassion to the people no
one else would — the incorrigible.
Life After Hate
After Rangel left prison, he earned a master’s degree in social work. At the same time,
McAleer began a new career as a financial adviser. They both spoke about the dangers of
extremism in their spare time and eventually crossed paths at meetings where counterterrorism
analysts, public health experts and former extremists joined forces to rethink deradicalization
programs. After September 11, 2001, and a spate of terrorist attacks in Europe, public demands
for a policy solution to extremism reached a fever pitch At the same time, McAleer and Rangel
15
noticed the beginning stages of what would become, between 2014 and 2019, a 320% increase in
far-right terrorism in the West.
McAleer’s experience in the white power movement allowed him to see firsthand the rise
of internet chat rooms and the role they played in radicalizing people at a rapid pace. Gone were
the days when lonely young men needed to seek out compatriots in the real world. Now, they
could find and join new communities from the comfort of their homes.
McAleer and Rangel knew that deradicalization needed to be accessible to disillusioned
extremists across the ideological spectrum. So they joined forces. In 2010, they co-founded Life
After Hate. The organization helps extremists distance themselves from violent movements
“without all the noise bouncing around the internet, on online forums and social media.”
The “offline” nature of the program is increasingly heterodox in the policy circles
dedicated to combating violent extremism. The favored solution to the issue by governments has
focused on developing “counter-narratives” to those vulnerable to extremism’s appeal. This often
involves identifying “authentic” voices in local communities, such as former extremists, to
demystify the appeal of their former ideologies. While a focus on counter-narratives might seem
like a logical response to extremism in the digital age, it might underestimate the social
conditions that make people susceptible to internet propaganda.
“Despite their popularity, there is little proof that counter-narratives in isolation are
effective in reducing the threat of violent extremism,” wrote Eric Rosand, who led the
16
Organizing Against Violent Extremism project at the Brookings Institution. “The field has a
propensity to focus overtly on online radicalization and ignore the significance of offline contact
in the radicalization process.”
According to Rosand, the counter-narratives are popular because they allow the focus
of government to remain on “the behavior and ideology of the violent extremists and not on the
predatory and other counterproductive behavior of governments towards their citizens and the
grievance-generating structural issues in a society.”
Other addictions, namely the opioid epidemic, are often linked to material conditions —
such as deindustrialization, the breakdown of civic institutions and the decline of religious
affiliation. If governments are to slow the rise of domestic extremism and the violence it
foments, Rangel believes they must take a hard look at maladies suffered by foot soldiers in
extremist movements.
“Some of these men and women going down the extremist pipeline have valid
grievances,” Rangel said. “They have real world problems that have affected them. And just like
what happened to me when I was in prison, somebody exploited [my problems] and helped me
assign meaning and value to my experiences.”
Rangel believes addiction treatment acknowledges the hardships endured by extremists
while providing them with the tools to disengage from their movements. Others seem to agree, as
Life After Hate and other programs that use an addiction approach received a surge in demand
17
during the Trump years and even more so following the January 6th riot at the U.S. capitol. He
welcomes the attention; in order for these programs to meet rising demand, they need more
funding. Since 2020, Life After Hate has received $1.5 million in grant funding, a figure he says
is inadequate.
American public health resources that counter extremism lag behind their European
counterparts in terms of their quality and funding, according to Stern. “There's absolutely no
doubt that much of the world has been looking at extremism through a public health lens for
much longer than the United States,” she said. Western European countries have a tradition of
deradicalization programs that back to the end of the second world war.
Rangel believes it’s not an accident that a rethinking among American policy is taking
place. Now, far-right terrorism has supplanted Islamist terrorism as a preeminent political
concern.
“There is a pattern in our country, to criminalize minorities for the same crimes that
nonminorities, mostly white males, commit,” Rangel said. “It can’t be the case that when a white
male commits an act of domestic terrorism, it’s filtered through the lens of mental health and
addiction but when a person who does not fit that description commits a similar crime, it’s
filtered through the lens of criminality.”
18
Life After Hate is driven by a conviction that extremism’s spread can’t be slowed without
understanding its addictive lure. Without such an understanding, individuals are treated as
incorrigible.
“We’re in a dangerous place in our society when we view people as unable to be changed
or too far gone to be changed,” Rangel said. “Because that's the same way we used to talk about
the same groups we hated. We can’t dehumanize anyone. That’s the point.”
McAleer, Rangel, Picciolini and a growing crop of experts believe that the social ills that
make extremism seem reasonable will not be eradicated through government surveillance or
punishment. If extremists are to be stopped, they need to have a viable path toward the other side
of the “the void.” Only then can they start to rebuild their identity.
“Nobody comes into the world of the neo-Nazi, or neo-Nazism” McAleer said. “If I think
back to who I was at the age of four, and little Tony is this bright, curious, mischievous,
stubborn, defiant and open to the world kid. Then life happens and we learn not to be so curious
and not so open. So the process of our therapy and counseling is to get people back to that core
essence of who they are.”
19
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21
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
Tony McAleer and Sammy Rangel were violent extremists on opposite sides of the racial divide. With the help of addiction counselors, they left their movements behind and joined forces. Their stories reveal why hate-based violence can be addicting and what policymakers can do to stop its spread.
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Goldberg, Michael Ross
(author)
Core Title
Hooked on hate
School
Annenberg School for Communication
Degree
Master of Arts
Degree Program
Specialized Journalism
Degree Conferral Date
2022-08
Publication Date
08/04/2022
Defense Date
08/04/2022
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
Addiction,extremism,OAI-PMH Harvest
Format
application/pdf
(imt)
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Winston, Diane (
committee chair
), Kahn, Gabriel (
committee member
), Mittelstaedt, Alan (
committee member
)
Creator Email
mgoldberg@ap.org,mrgoldbe@usc.edu
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111376147
Unique identifier
UC111376147
Legacy Identifier
etd-GoldbergMi-11104
Document Type
Thesis
Format
application/pdf (imt)
Rights
Goldberg, Michael Ross
Type
texts
Source
20220805-usctheses-batch-970
(batch),
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.
Repository Name
University of Southern California Digital Library
Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Repository Email
cisadmin@lib.usc.edu
Tags
extremism