-The audio, visual, the rapid fire nature of the images --
we think it connects really not just cognitively,
but deeply emotionally to a lot of people, I imagine.
It struck us as a unique instance
of white supremacist propaganda.
-This six-minute video,
which has been circling on social media
and gaming platforms, is called "The Last Battle".
It shows the increasingly sophisticated methods
that far-right groups are using to recruit new, younger members.
-We don't know who it's sourced from,
and we don't know how wide it is spread.
You know, a broader swath of people can sort of latch on
to at least some of it, and say,
"Well, I agreed with that at least or that,
but not all of this." They're opportunists.
If they just get you a little bit,
they feel like they've won the battle for the moment,
and they'll keep trying to win the war.
-As a sociology professor at the University of Nevada,
Robert Futrell studies far-right and white supremacist movements.
-We've been talking about how white supremacist culture
has been shifting to some degree away
from just pure ideological propaganda
into really hammering at kind of a cognitive emotional focus.
-There are these images that are just normal snippets
of television news,
and then there are images that are extremely racist,
and they're all presented on one platform
that you're consuming it,
you know, in the same time period.
-But you're supposed to think every image is racist,
and you're supposed to think every image
is about the United States,
which is not clear to me, at least, either.
I mean, a lot of those images are decontextualized.
They're very rapid.
-This is the same tactic the NSM used,
is we would find these videos or these horrific race crimes
and things that were happening in, like, South Africa,
but we would amplify those instances, like this is common,
this is everywhere, this is happening all the time.
The media's hiding it.
It's pure propaganda in its clearest form,
but it's not reality.
-Jeff Schoep was a Neo-Nazi for nearly three decades.
For 25 years, he led the National Socialist Movement,
one of the largest white supremacy groups in the country.
Tell me a bit about how you guys used videos.
What sort of things worked in early recruitment like this?
-The National Socialist Movement was engaged
in a lot of different --
every kind of propaganda you could think of.
Videos, in specific, are one of the greatest recruitment tools.
-Schoep now runs an organization
to get people out of extremist groups through deradicalization.
He says the main tool for recruitment videos
like this is a focus in stoking fears.
-Almost entirely, what the movement believes
is all fear-based.
It's based on fear.
It's just when you're in that hyper-masculine environment,
you're not gonna go to your friend or the guy next to you,
"Hey, I'm afraid of this."
Nobody does this.
And fear is a lot bigger motivator than hate.
-Similar fear tactics are used
in this piece of recruitment propaganda
that splices a compilation of quick and unrelated images
into categories to fit a narrative.
-To somebody who's been researching this,
the themes are quickly apparently,
you know, this notion of a war on our children.
-They show rioting. -The notion of anti-white hate.
-They show violence. -The Jewish Communist takeover.
Opening the borders, coming for your guns,
and that's a fear of government position.
-And then towards the end,
when they're showing white people --
-What we're seeing is very clear white supremacist propaganda.
-A mother and child walking through a field
is very calm and nice-looking.
-White children at play and mothers in white.
-That's the messaging that they're trying to use,
is portraying the other side as being evil.
This is pretty common in propaganda.
The other side dehumanizes the other,
and then your side, the side that you're trying to promote,
is one of virtue,
it's holy, it's something everyone should want, you see?
-But I particularly think about teens and 20-something
white males,
especially the stuff at the end with the MMA images.
That kind of thing I think is very effective,
and again, this isn't something
that was just put together on a whim.
Every image is very strategic.
-I was curious your thoughts on extremist ideas
becoming more mainstream,
whether we're seeing that more and whether that concerns you.
-Extremist ideas have become more mainstream,
and this is one of the biggest challenges
that we're currently facing.
-We're not going to ignore all of this,
once you've been denounced as a white supremacist --
-To the concern of researchers like Futrell,
some of the same extremist messaging
is being pushed on cable news shows.
-I'm watching along. I hear his argument.
I'm saying, "This is replacement theory."
He might as well just say it. He said it.
-The Democratic party is trying to replace
the current electorate.
-And then he said, "I'm gonna be painted
as a white supremacist for saying it."
I was like, "You know."
-Listen, everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it.
"Ooh, the white replacement theory."
No, no, no.
-He knows where that idea resonates,
it seems to me, by making those statements.
-But what took place at the Capitol on January 6th
is these extremist thinking and extremist ideologies
seeping into the mainstream.
It's not something that we've seen a lot of in the past.
At the Capitol, the FBI and different
law enforcement agencies were saying --
they started picking this apart and saying,
"Okay, it's not all white supremacists."
There was just, like, regular Republicans
and regular Sally Soccer Moms and Joe Sixpacks
that weren't on nobody's radar,
including the movement or the feds
or anybody else that all of a sudden
were swept up in this stuff that wouldn't have been before.
-Futrell says the broad range of topics
in this video highlights
the changing strategies of white supremacists.
Agreeing with even a portion of this propaganda
is seen as a victory to these extremist groups.
-Their sense of how to get power and how to retain power
and how to persist has shifted
and become strategic in this way.
Moving what the acceptable discourse,
political discourse is within a culture,
and moving that more and more to the right,
moving that more and more extreme.
But once you're there, agreeing with any of it,
they've got you in some way.