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A mother struggles to get close to her son, a man with a Buddha tattoo who turned to hate

2022-07-04T00:04:15.238Z


It used to be different between Karen Amsden and her son, Jared Boyce, who is now part of the extremist and hate group Patriot Front.


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(CNN) --

The first sign of trouble was brief.

Just a couple of comments during the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

Karen Amsden was chatting with her son in her driveway while picking up her grandchildren when she mentioned something about a quote from Anne Frank, one of the most famous victims of the Nazis who kept a disturbing diary before she was captured and killed in the Holocaust. .

"He was like, 'That's not real. The Holocaust is not real,'" Amsden recalls.

She thought her son was joking.

She now she says that it is clear that she did not.

Amsden is many things: a grandmother of two, a longtime social worker, and now in her 40s, she's also a theater performer in her small Utah town.

She also claims that she is the mother of an extremist.

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It wasn't always like this and Amsden says she still hopes to get back the son she grew up with, the one who seems to have disappeared.

"It's complicated," she says of how her son grew apart from her, going from someone she described as a friend to being arrested and charged with conspiring to disrupt a Pride event as a member of the Patriot Front extremist group.

"I'm looking for a solution or some advice for myself because I feel like the things I've tried haven't worked," he said.

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A mother tells how a young pacifist embraced hatred

It used to be different between Amsden and his son, Jared Boyce, who is now 27.

"We were very close," he said of his only son.

Growing up in Utah, he was kind and loving and had friends from many different backgrounds and races, she said.

He struggled in particular after his father left the family to live as an openly gay man, Amsden said.

He recalls that his son's relationship with his father became strained, though almost non-existent after his father left.

Karen Amsden says that her only son has moved between various ideologies.

What became most apparent was Boyce's apparent desire to find his own place in the world.

"I don't blame his father for what Jared decided to do, but he has struggled to find acceptance," Amsden said.

"At a certain point he was interested in Buddha. And pacifism. He even has a Buddha tattooed on his arm," he said, adding that he had another tattoo that read: "Don't give in to hate, anger and rage." .

But hate, anger and rage seem to be the place where he finally found his place.

Turning to the internet in recent years as her marriage fell apart, Amsden said her son was sucked into a group that radicalized him and made him feel he had to act to save people from evil.

When Boyce was contacted by CNN for his views, he responded by texting a video of a drag queen dancing in public in front of a large audience before her costume ripped open exposing her legs. genitals.

The text did not contain any message.

Boyce's mother interpreted it as emblematic of her son's belief that he has to work with the Patriot Front to save children from being deceived by gays.

He acknowledged that this is a false and bigoted concept and says he believes he learned it from the Patriot Front, a white nationalist hate group that formed after the deadly "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. .

Amsden says Boyce joined the online group in 2018 and has tried to convince her ever since that their online "sisterhood" is fair and good.

He said he has tried to convert her with the group's manifestos, but she keeps telling him she has no interest in people spouting hate against gays, immigrants, black people and more.

But he doesn't know what to do.

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A turning point for the mother, if not for the son

Amsden had hoped that Boyce would disassociate himself from the Patriot Front after he and 30 other men believed to be associated with the group were arrested after piling into a rented truck with shields, flags on long poles and a smoke bomb.

Police charged the 31 with conspiracy to commit a riot on the day of the gay pride parade in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

CNN has contacted the attorney listed as representing one of the men, but has not received a response.

Jared Boyce is scheduled to appear in court in Idaho next month.

Boyce spent the night of his arrest in jail, and his mother hoped that it would serve as a wake-up call, that the group he was in was not good and that it could keep him away from his young children, ages 3 and 5. .

Amsden was babysitting her grandchildren that weekend, as Boyce said he wanted to go camping.

But when he came back and she berated him for the detention, he found that her stance had hardened.

Instead of coming to his senses, he was more determined than ever that he and his associates were doing the right thing.

And that pushed Amsden to the limit of his patience.

He says he has tried to love Boyce.

She has tried to be patient with him.

She tried to help him.

She gave her adult son a place to stay when her marriage fell apart.

She gave him gas money when she didn't have enough.

She has tried to reason with him.

She has yelled at him.

She says that she has argued and has listened to him.

And now he can't take it anymore, so he told him to get out of the basement where he was living.

Karen Amsden says she tried to listen and argue with her son, but he seems out of her league.

"I'm not kicking him out of my house because I want him to suffer and feel miserable and homeless. I just want him to realize where the love and support really comes from," she said.

"It's not coming from them. He feels like it is. But they're not going to take him in and help him find a job," he added of the men in his group.

"I tried everything. He chose the Patriot Front over his family," Amsden said through tears.

"It's a slap in the face."

Stay in touch, but set limits

Amsden says she's desperate to keep her family together, but doesn't know how to bridge the gap with her son.

Psychiatrist Joseph Ma Pierre says that desire can be valuable.

"If we're talking about family members or loved ones, I think the most important principle is to just try to stay in touch," says Pierre, who has studied why people join groups for decades, and is a clinical professor of Health Sciences in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

"So if that person later decides they want to come back out of the hole or make a change, there's something to go back to."

But he warns that those who come close to someone who has been caught up in hate or lies should set limits on their own mental health, to avoid being sucked in.

"I think sometimes you can say, 'Look, we're going to have coffee, but we're not going to talk about whatever (stressful), okay, we're going to talk about other things,'" Pierre said.

That may be the best or only option when family and friends become "true believers" in a cause and are unwilling or unable to be challenged, he said.

"For the true believer, it's not just the belief. It's about 'I define myself based on that belief,' and that's when it becomes very difficult to undo," Pierre told CNN.

"At that stage, it becomes very dangerous (arguing) because then people see the threat to the ideology, to the belief, as a threat to themselves."

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In the early stages of a person's radicalization, when they may be what Pierre calls a "non-believer" who isn't really connected, or an "indecisive" when someone is flirting with new ideas, other approaches might work.

There is no general answer because each circumstance implies different circumstances that lead people to that point, the psychiatrist said.

Do they feel lonely, angry, worried or scared?

Could they need professional mental health help?

And while challenging beliefs can drive people further into their corners, offering alternative viewpoints and evidence can be worthwhile if someone is in the early stages.

Pierre suggests those dealing with a troubled loved one find a support group where others understand them and even have people who have left hate groups and extremists who can talk about why they were drawn and how and why they changed their minds.

"If we hope that they will ever come out of the symbolic rabbit hole, we have to understand what made them go in the first place," Pierre explained.

Traveling across the United States, I find families in tension

For most families, it is not extremism that entered their family, but rather political polarization that entered the equation and began to tear their relationships apart.

I've heard many versions of this scenario in homes when I travel across the United States to do a story for CNN.

People whisper to me that their aunt is no longer spoken to because she is a "crazy liberal socialist" who rejects any idea that has any ties to conservatism.

Others tell me that she no longer invites her grandfather to be around his children because he has become a "raging Trump cult right-wing nut" who spews "xenophobic nonsense."

Some Americans also let go of their lifelong friends.

They removed their acquaintances and friends from their Facebook and other social networks.

They uninvited their colleagues to parties.

All this because it is too stressful to have them around when talking about politics, religion or anything else important.

You yourself may have felt the tension in social gatherings.

Many people don't know what to do and walk away.

It is too exhausting and too toxic to try to fix this part of a world that already feels overwhelming.

One of the things that makes combating extremism and polarization difficult is the enormous amount of misinformation now available to the public.

"We're not dealing with the same set of facts," says Pierre.

"So when you try to reason with each other, you come from two different worlds."

Here, too, there are ways to bridge the gap, such as agreeing to disagree on issues that cause friction and moving on to other issues that can spark understanding and bring back the joy of togetherness.

sharing the hate

But in any relationship that has become rocky, there may come a point where walking away may be the only way to preserve one's sanity, Pierre added.

That's not an option yet for Karen Amsden.

She says that she will always love her son, but that he is not the only one that worries her.

Amsden wants to be able to be close to her grandchildren.

She fears for the children, her precious grandchildren, and how they teach them to hate.

"They're both amazing kids," Amsden says of the boys.

But her heart breaks when her father's extremist beliefs are repeated.

"We go out in the car and (he) sees a rainbow flag and says... 'My father hates the rainbow flag. The rainbow flag is bad.'"

extremismhate groups

Source: cnnespanol

All news articles on 2022-07-04

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