What I Learned from a Blue-Eyed Blonde

And why it matters

Image: Pixabay CC0, woman in white sweater

She was tall, blond, with sapphire-blue eyes. And I was enthralled. Not because of her appearance, per se, but because of the story she was telling our high school Religion class. (I went to an all-girls Catholic school; I know, go figure!) She fidgeted with her hands and hair, paced back and forth, her face flushed from bewilderment, sadness, anger, disappointment, frustration. My classmate was on fire.

I will call her Sophie.

Sophie, our class learned that day, was adopted. By Latin-Canadian parents. She grew up with a huge Latin family, spoke Spanish, and embodied the Latin culture. In her presentation about—I can’t remember what topic—she spoke of an old friend from elementary school. He came from an abusive family, dropped out of school in the middle of 10^th grade (just the year prior), and was homeless for a time. I will call him Zach. Sophie relayed how she and Zach bumped into each other over the summer, and after catching up for a grand 10 minutes, he grew bold and told her: “You should find your real parents. Your adopted family is beneath you. You are better than them.”

Zach also had blond hair and blue eyes.

Zach, Sophie explained, had been taken under the wing of a white supremacist group.

Sophie recalled Zach’s bright, wild eyes and excited tone as he explained that his new friends took him in when he was homeless. He was panhandling on a street corner one afternoon, and Zach remembered a guy in his 20s squatting down next to him and telling him, “Wanna go get something to eat?” Zach hadn’t eaten in days by that point, and the relief he felt must have been like breathing in rays of sunshine that filled his chest and spread all over his body.

From then on, Zach had a place to stay, food to eat, friends, and his friends told him he was special. His friends told him he and their kind were better than others, that they were the ruling class, and that they were on a mission to make things right again. His friends gave him a purpose.

That was one of my first eye-openers on the subject of how people become prey to deceit.

How they get you

Since then, I’ve learned more about the recruitment process of terrorist organizations and the vulnerable young people they prey upon.* It is always the same: they target lonely, isolated, disenfranchised individuals who felt cast aside or wronged by society in some way.

Recently, I read an article from The Atlantic (July 2024, “The Painful Reality of Loving a Conspiracy Theorist”) about a similar issue, psychologically, but with a QAnon overlay. Like terrorist organizations, “...conspiracy network capitalized on loneliness and anxiety in the early days of the pandemic, or how it exploits real injustices, such as systemic racism, to further seed paranoia.”

Watch for these signs, because these are the ingredients for becoming an easy target for predatory behavior, deception, and gaslighting:

• Feeling rejected

• Feeling isolated

• Shame, humiliation

• Falling out of favor, ostracized

• Feeling friendless, misunderstood

• Sense of being wronged or punished

• Loss of control

• Feeling empty, aimless, without purpose

When you experience any of the above, and another human being reaches out to you and tells you, “I will be your friend, I understand you, you will be part of our community, and we will have your back,” it’s not hard to see how that can be very enticing, as if the universe has thrown you a lifesaver, and the noose around your neck has been loosened. It is very enticing to believe that all your problems will finally go away, and that you have been given a new lease on life because you are being saved for a higher purpose.

But what happens when your new community, your new friends, ask you to denounce what you believe in your heart is right? What you once valued? And what if they ask you to believe what is untrue, and to do the things you never thought you would or even could, to prove your loyalty to the group? To show your gratitude for “saving your life?” And that, without them, you would still be out on the streets, aimless, purposeless, friendless, and alone?

The 2010s saw an alarming number of jihadists and suicide bombers, thanks in large part to social media, which made recruitment much easier and propaganda more widespread. Those radicalized were mostly young men in their teens and early 20s; lost, aimless, and feeling isolated, they were perhaps rejected by someone they had a crush on (true story), maybe mocked, shamed by family and friends, and publicly humiliated. It’s too much for an underdeveloped teenage brain. Now, give them a “higher purpose” and a sense of righteous grandiosity while leveraging their sulky “I’ll show them” sentiment, and just like that, we have senseless murder and mayhem. And their new “friends” rejoice at having recruited yet another willing young life to carry out their dangerous vendetta.

Listen, friends: Connection is the antidote. As are kindness and compassion. When you are friendless and suffering alone, facts don’t matter. Facts don’t feed your soul. Facts will not fill the emptiness inside you, which is what vulnerable people ache for.

We all carry burdens and various levels of trauma, but some of us are more vulnerable to being pulled toward the shadows, be that addiction, uncontrollable anger, dysfunctional attachments, or a vulnerability to deception, like buying into conspiracies. It’s not easy to do for those who are already feeling dispirited and alone, but when you’re deep in the dark and in your lowest lows, the shield to deception is this: Know who you are. Know what you stand for. Your values, your principles. Hold on to yourself. Everything is temporary, even darkness. There will be light, soon enough.

In the meantime, don’t sell your principles for fake gold.

Back to Sophie…

She went home that day, sad and disappointed at how life turned out for her old friend, and hugged her brown-eyed, dark-haired Latino parents. But Zach was still young, she said, and expressed hope that he might one day break free and find his way back to himself.

---

*Studies and articles on this subject can be found between 2015 - 2019 in the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Columbia Magazine, TIME Magazine, BBC, Scientific American, and Scientific American Mind.