how old are you? i need someone to explain it to me and ive been on Second Life off and on for years which is rife with furries, so i get the jist.. but still dont get it.
Explain what? The furry thing in general or the extremist angle?
From the extremist angle I'd just offer anyone can be an extremist. How we code and speak about that is very subject to issues. Anyways though "what" type of extremist you are is going to be heavily based on sociocultural, sociopolitical, and socioreligious factors. As we increasingly see with the 'nihilistic' types, they are integrated heavily into internet meme culture and things of the sort will undoubtedly end up being present with their group.
If you want a weird example that doesn't get talked about much - I wouldn't even classify these as nihilistic. Anyways, there is an offshoot of the "Save Europe" movement w/ mostly youth (under-18s) that are into very memeified esoteric Nazism. You have perhaps seen the tiktoks where they'll lay "chud" type memes over hype music and call out to things like "Hyperborea"/"Agartha" and "Vril".
The thing is a lot of these kids aren't even racist necessarily either, it is very much internet memeing about the esoteric angle. It's "funny" stories about Nazi UFOs and Aliens working in Antarctica in some underground megacity. Of course, it touches on tricky subjects though, and if someone part of those communities were to become a violent extremist, it's likely this sort of meme-ified symbolic presentation would occur since its "part" of that persons psychology. So they may write some of the memes out on their, items, or in manifestos, etc.
There's a bit of a dynamic issue here too since the US heavily leads thoughts for these fields across most of the globe. There are differences of course in micro points but in re the broader sense.
If we go back to post 9/11, all the counterextremism focus went towards islamic extremism. About 10-15 years later, this began to be markedly noted as an issue that contributed to the 'rise' of right wing extremism. Why? Because not only did it get "missed" - the resources and interest in looking elsewhere were disincentivized. Right-wing extremism "wasn't a problem", or "it's not in enough quantity to focus on" (note its basically the same exact semantics used to defend against overfocusing on RW extremism and disincentivizing resources and interest elsewhere).
Just as we see now, back then, a lot of these people in these roles fell into that issue themselves. They didn't/don't see the problem until its too late, and then it's "oh yeah we were maybe a bit too narrow".
If we step back before that, a sad bit of irony. For as much as these apparatus' got hate pre-2000s for civil rights era reasons (that ARE STILL ENTIRELY LEGITIMATE ISSUES not a statement against that), that was actually really the only period they were formed closer-to-objectively. There was issues still of course but these sorts of narrow silos and debates didn't exist then (as an example, as much legitimate hate as COINTELPRO got, their heaviest resourced and most intensive investigation was into the KKK).
Now we go through rotating cycles of ideological interest by employees and management, and political interests by the administration. Manpower cycles can work odd in this regard (eg Staff A from President A may still be entirely present under President B and not change until President C) so there may be bits of lag time to "match" the administrations political interest.
Alas, joins the buckets of things that sounded great but we didn't really think out well, and created the exact greater issued form we were worried about. We largely don't talk about it now though because it's in the RW-angle cycle and 'controlled' by nominally left folks. These are the same folks that legitimately called out the issue with overfocusing on Islamic extremism, but have fallen into the issue themselves of overfocusing on RW extremism. Now the right unfortunately gets some accuracy wiggle room calling out the sort of narrow silo with that - althogh with the explicit note they exaggerate the hell out of the reality surrounding it (there's not some spooky mega liberal plot or anything). We basically pushed it into being a system explicitly driven by political interest, when these are subjects you
do not want driven by political interest - in fact so much so that this is the exact line of reasoning used to advocate against issues in these fields up until 9/11 where they got resourced again because of the public scare w/ islamic extremism making it a socially acceptable capability to have again (of course would've happened anyways but with far less resources and attention/care towards it).
i'm glad to find out this is not the case as it was driving me a bit nuts.
