When Christian Picciolini left the White Power movement in 1995, he said it wasn’t difficult because he still believed in the movement’s ideology. Instead, it was because the identity and the community were so hard to walk away from.
In 2009, he met someone he had known in the movement, and found out they both had left and were both working to help others who had left extremist movements rebuild their lives.
Together they founded Life After Hate and Exit USA, nonprofit organizations that work to help people who want to leave or have left hate groups.
Picciolini says they’re the only group like this in North America. They’ve helped people from all over the world, and they’re in a good position to do it, he says, because they’re all former extremists themselves. So they’ve been there before, and they understand the challenges of getting out.
