It’s about more than ideology. It’s about identity.

In a 2025 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Tony McAleer shared how identity can maintain the chains that bind a person to their beliefs, even after they’ve evolved beyond them.

He would know. Starting in his late teens, McAleer spent a decade and a half as an active white supremacist, advancing from a kid involved in the movement to a leader of the White Aryan Resistance.

After 15 years, McAleer would leave the movement behind. But moving from a mindset of hatred to one of empathy took more than just walking away. The causes of the anger, feelings of insecurity and isolation that led him to embrace hatred and find community within the white supremacist movement remained.

“When I left the movement, I still had the beliefs intact,” McAleer told the CBC. “It’s not just the ideas in someone's head. It was my whole identity … I still had all of the wounds that were spilling out all over everywhere.”

McAleer visited Butler County Tuesday as he and documentary filmmaker Peter Hutchison visited the Cranberry Township library in support of “The Cure for Hate,” a film about his journey away from hateful ideology, including a trip to Auschwitz in search of atonement.

His story illustrates both a dark side of human nature and the ability to choose to move past it.

Fear and suspicion of the “other” — those who look different or hold different customs or beliefs — is rooted in the human psyche.

Those feelings often lead us to point to those who look like ourselves or share our backgrounds, beliefs or views and decide, “Those people. That’s who I am.” From there, the leap to convincing ourselves the group we are a part of is superior to others is a small one.

The sense of being part of an easily identifiable group can give more than a sense of belonging — it can provide a sense of security. It’s hard to fear those we feel superior to, especially if we’re one of many just like us.

That feeling of being part of a group can become less about the beliefs we and those around us hold and more about our sense of personal identity being almost entirely tied to being a part of that larger whole.

McAleer’s story shows that even for those deep within such tribalism, it is possible to evolve beyond it and eventually walk away.

He credits a counselor he interacted with more than two decades ago with allowing him to truly cut ties with his past and move on to pursue compassion toward others.

The counselor revealed to McAleer that he was Jewish and told him, “That’s what you did. That’s not who you are.”

It’s an important message: Our past doesn’t define who we are. Our previous actions don’t determine our future ones. The biases and hatreds we held — toward race, religion, politics or culture, whatever defined who we saw as the “other” — aren’t things we have to hold on to.

Our identity doesn’t have to be defined by past beliefs or ties to those who still hold them. We can evolve past all of that. We can move forward a better person than that.

— JP