ATLANTA — As part of a series created for VOX-Pol to complement forthcoming journal articles, Georgia State University researchers including Transcultural Conflict & Violence faculty and students, Dr. Anthony Lemieux, P.I., Dr. Dror Walter, Rebecca Wilson, Katherine Kountz, John Hendry, Allison Betus, and Mor Yachin, along with the University of Cincinnati’s Dr. Michael Loadenthal are working on analyses of a corpus of leaked interviewing and vetting calls provided to our research team by the Southern Poverty Law Center ( n = 127) for membership in the white supremacist, neo-nazi accelerationist group The Base.
Part 1 entitled Capitalizing on Rhetorical Ecologies: Indoctrination Strategies of The Base has been published. Written by Katherine Kountz, M.A., the article dives into the use of red pill narratives to strategically recruit and vet candidates for membership. Kountz, is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University and a presidential fellow in the Transcultural Conflict & Violence initiative. She researches American political culture in the context of digitally networked communication and everyday discourse using computational methods to investigate political identity and subjectivity, citizenship, and pathways to radicalization.