Hate Exhaustion, Emotional Support, and Desistance From White Supremacist Groups

This study examines how and why people join, participate in, and leave White supremacist terrorist (WST) groups. In-depth life history interviews and biographic timelines of former White supremacists in the United States and Canada were collected. Findings indicate that former members’ decisions to engage and desist from WST groups are greatly influenced by their experiences of emotional support—or lack thereof. Participants lacked emotional support prior to joining WST and the emotional support they received from group membership was toxic. Participants exited WST because they experienced hate exhaustion and were willing to sacrifice all or most of their emotional support to alleviate it. This research contributes to the theoretical understandings of emotional support’s influence in engagement and disengagement from WST by speaking to Snow and Machalek’s (1983) characteristics of converts, the Identity Theory of Desistance (Paternoster and Bushway 2009), and Latif et al.’s (2018) WST emotional dynamics models. Moreover, this study asks if desistance is similar to burnout and if radicalization is similar to conversion. This work has practical implications regarding the prevention of initial involvement, the development of interventions to disrupt these activities, and the facilitation of disengagement from WST groups.