I’m Alex Hinton, a professor and Director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University. With a long-time focus on mass atrocity and its resolution in Cambodia and other parts of the world, my research is looking all too relevant to the U.S. with the extreme polarization and rising threat of democratic backsliding, extremism, and even violence with the resurgence of former President Trump.

As an anthropologist who studies peace and conflict, I recently went to the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), to better understand the Make America Great Again faithful – and their diehard support for Trump, and wrote about it for The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news organization that gets experts like me to write for the public.

I’m taking over their reddit for this AMA.

I’m also the author and editor of seventeen books, including two of my most recent: It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US (NYU, 2021) and Perpetrators: Encountering Humanity's Dark Side (Stanford, 2023).

Feel free to ask me anything about human rights, depolarization, genocide debates about Israel and Hamas or Russia and Ukraine (I wrote other Conversation articles on these topics), the Cambodian genocide and the country’s search for justice, or MAGA and my key takeaways from attending CPAC last month.

*Thoughts and opinions are my own.

I’ll be starting around 2PM ET/11AM PT/1600 GMT today, AMA!

Proof: https://preview.redd.it/were-getting-started-on-an-ama-in-r-politics-im-an-v0-thbxmckf1brc1.jpg?width=2320&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4ca0378325eb4d3885a29f7e8cb6d956deea43a3

by The_Conversation

5 comments

  1. How much of a role does Social Media play in radicalization? and is that role more of a result of people isolating themselves within an echo chamber, or is it more algorithm fed and manipulated?

  2. Hi Alex!

    I’d love to know your key takeaways from CPAC and dealing with MAGA. Anything that surprised you at all?

    Thanks for what you do. All the best.

  3. Professor, thank you for your time and work. My question:

    The extremist aspects of the US, especially in the far right, are backdropped by the fact that most extremists live relatively comfortable lives. Homes, cars, food in their bellies, electronic devices in their hands. Do you think that the possibility of losing all that will stem the likelihood of wide-ranging violence (large scale insurrection or even civil war), or are the extremists extreme enough to be willing to risk all that for the white christofascist world they want?

    Basically, is there an ACTUAL risk of large scale conflict if Biden is reelected, or just an uptick in lone wolf nut jobs?

  4. In terms of polarization, what draws people to the far-left or far-right? They couldn’t agree with EVERYTHING their side espouses.

  5. Do you think the UN definition of genocide should be revised? I’m sure you’re aware of the Soviet Union’s role in keeping class factors out of the definition, which means on the face of it, the Cambodian Genocide didn’t meet the definition (although political factors means it was defined as such later). Also the ‘in part’ issue – that surely makes the definition incredibly broad as to become almost useless?

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