Christian Picciolini can pinpoint the moment he started down the dark path of extremism. He was 14 years old and standing in an alley smoking a joint when a skinhead named Clark Martell walked up to him and snapped the spliff out of his mouth.
“Don’t you know that smoking marijuana is what the Jews and communists want you to do to keep you docile,” Martell said.
Picciolini grew up in the Chicago area and had an aimless youth, which at the time he blamed on parents who were rarely around. Later in life, he realized that as first-generation immigrants from Italy, they had to work seven days a week “because it’s hard to get by in a new country.” Picciolini was attracted to Martell’s confidence, power and message, one that placed the blame for all of his struggles on other people, mostly minorities.
In 1987, Picciolini joined the Chicago Area Skinheads, one of the nation’s first organized Neo-Nazi groups. A few years later, when Martell was sent to prison for assaulting a woman in her own home and drawing a swastika on the wall with the victim’s blood, Picciolini was elevated to the group’s leader.
“I felt powerful,” Picciolini said of being in the group. “But it was false power.”
Picciolini told his story of leading a Neo-Nazi group, and how he eventually left the movement and started his own counter-movement, at a presentation in Whitefish on April 24 sponsored by the Montana Human Rights Network. Rachel Carroll Rivas, the network’s co-director, said her human rights group decided to invite Picciolini to Whitefish after white supremacy groups targeted the community.
Picciolini remained an active member of the Chicago Area Skinheads until the mid-1990s, when he got married and had a child. At that point, he decided to open up a record store that specialized in white supremacist music. But white supremacists weren’t Picciolini’s only customers, so he began selling a wide variety of music that attracted more and more people. Suddenly, people he had claimed to hate were becoming his friends.
“I finally met the people I claimed to hate, and they showed me compassion when I least deserved it,” he said. “They could have protested at the front door. They could of broken my windows. But instead they showed me compassion. I suddenly realized I had more in common with these people than I first thought.”
The reformed extremist decided to rededicate his life to helping those who have been sucked into similar groups and ideologies. Picciolini believes that many of the people who subscribe to such racist beliefs are looking to belong while also casting blame on others for their own shortcomings. In 2009, Picciolini organized a group called Life After Hate and authored a book about his time in the neo-Nazi movement.
In regards to Whitefish’s situation, where followers of a white extremists website launched an online “troll storm” on local Jewish residents and their supporters, Picciolini said the community did the right thing by supporting each other.
“The community banded together and embraced each other rather than attacking the enemy, and that’s the right thing to do,” he said. “Even under threat of an armed march, Whitefish came together as a community, and that’s a great thing.”