The New Yorker Radio Hour - Samantha’s Journey into the Alt-Right, and Back

Episode Date: August 14, 2020

Since 2016, Andrew Marantz has been reporting on how the extremist right has harnessed the Internet and social media to gain a startling prominence in American politics. One day, he was contacted by a woman named Samantha, who was in the leadership of the white-nationalist group Identity Evropa. (She asked to be identified only by her first name.) “When I joined, I really thought that it was just going to be a pro-white community, where we could talk to each other about being who we are, and gain confidence, and build a community,” Samantha told him. “I went in because I was insecure, and it made me feel good about myself.” Samantha says she wasn’t a racist, but soon after joining the group she found herself rubbing shoulders with the neo-Nazi organizer Richard Spencer, at a party that culminated in a furious chant of “Sieg heil.” Marantz and the “Radio Hour” producer Rhiannon Corby dove into Samantha’s story to understand how and why a “normal” person abandoned her values, her friends, and her family for an ideology of racial segregation and eugenics—and then came back again. They found her to be a cautionary tale for a time when facts and truth are under daily attack. “I thought I knew it all,” she told them. “I think it's extremely naïve and foolish to think that you are impervious to it. No one is impervious to this.”   Samantha’s story appears in Andrew Marantz’s book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.”  This episode originally aired on November 22, 2019. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Around the time that Donald Trump was elected president, our staff writer Andrew Morantz, took on a new beat. He's been covering the right-wing extremism that is burgeoning on the internet, the alt-right. It's a movement that embraces white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, you name it. I mean, we have people who have been here for hundreds of years. People of African heritage who have not fully assimilated into the American society.

Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory! The rise of the alt-right is the subject of Andrew Morance's recent book called Anti-Social. And one of the things he's tried to understand is how people get radicalized into joining these hate groups in the first place. How does it happen? And to whom? Here's Andrew Morance. It took me a few years of reporting on these groups and this whole subculture before I really felt like I understood that.

And one person who's really helped clarify a lot of that for me was this young woman whose first name is Samantha. We've been talking for a couple of years. Probably we've had hundreds of hours of conversations at this point. And her story has completely changed the way I think about these movements and who gets drawn into them and why. And that might be her. So recently, Rianne and Corby, who's a producer for the New Yorker Radio Hour, traveled a few hours away from New York. We're not going to stay exactly where.

And met Sam at the house where she's staying with family right now. Are you Sam? How are you doing? I was there on Halloween, and it was just like an incredibly blustery gray day. And I drive up, and she's just, like, sitting outside her porch, chain smoking cigarettes. I think she was anxious. I think she was really anxious to talk. It is hard to talk to people when you first get out.

It's seemingly impossible. But, you know... Just because you're afraid to tell people... Yeah, you're afraid to... You're afraid to... You spend all your time in there believing that you're right and that you see the truth and everyone else is missing in. And then when you get out and you realize that you've actually been entirely wrong the whole time,

you're terrified to, like, you don't know... You kind of forget what it feels like to be. so wrong. It took a long time for me to admit that I even liked being in there. Because I didn't go in for the politics. I didn't go in for racism. I went in because I was insecure and it made me feel good about myself. Hi. How are you? Good. So that day when Riannon was visiting Sam, I called them from a studio in New York. And Sam talked us through the entire story of how she got into this from start to finish. Tell me about who you were before this whole thing started.

Um, I was just kind of one of those, like, weirdos, you know? Like, I was, I liked music. Sam grew up in New Jersey, and then when she was halfway through high school, her family moved to the south. And it wasn't that she was a misfit, really. She had friends, but she was always looking for her place and things. So she would cycle through these different identities. She'd be really into being an athlete, and then she'd be really into kind of punk, and then she'd be really into indie movies.

I was just always searching for more, for my place, for that thing that's bigger than me for me to fit in. But people seem to generally like me. I went to parties. I hung out with everyone. I enjoyed myself. I was pretty left-leaning, almost annoyingly so. So Sam was really close with her maternal grandmother, who was German, and who actually had grown up. in the 30s in Germany and was part of Hitler youth.

So obviously Sam knew that that was horrifying, and yet as horrifying as that part of her history was, she still wanted some way to connect with her German heritage. You know, I have a very broad jaw, and I have a very serious face when I'm not interacting with people. And my excuse for everything was always, you know, I'm stoic because I'm German. I, you know, and this because I'm German.

Everything was always, oh, it's because I'm German. So she finishes high school. She doesn't go to college. She starts working in service jobs mostly in bars and cafes. And eventually she meets this guy. Now, in my conversations with Sam, we've called him Richie, but that's not his real name. So she meets Richie, and immediately this becomes the kind of relationship where it just feels like a really deep, instant connection. I mean, I really felt like he loved me and I felt like I belonged with him.

and there was never any need to think that I needed to talk politics with him. There was never, like, we took a day off and drove to Atlanta to see Andrew Jackson Jihad, you know, which is like a folk punk left-leaning, like very like almost anarchist band. We love Neutral Milk Hotel, which one of the albums is about like the Holocaust. Yeah, their second album has songs from the perspective of a reincarnated Anne Frank. Yeah. You would think that somebody who loves that album is not going to become a. Holocaust denier. Everything that we loved together was just strange and different and he had never

said anything, at least for the first year that we were together, that gave me pause. At first, Richie's this really fun life of the party kind of guy, really outgoing, knows how to play music, knows how to cook really well, knows how to dance. And then over time, he starts changing. He had kind of buckled down a little bit. He was going to bed earlier. He was playing a lot of chess, reading a lot of Dostoevsky, which is fine. All of those hobbies are fine, but, you know, with his, this darker personality, and he, like, almost spoke in a lower register sometimes when he was serious, and he was much more unwilling to accept me making any mistakes.

He just kept calling me a race trader or race baiter, which I had no, I had no idea what that meant. And then he just kept saying that he couldn't defend me on the day of the rope. Anytime that I did anything, it was always saying, I love you, but I can't defend you on the day of the rope. Can you explain what the day of the rope is? The day of the rope is a day that was written about in this book called The Turner Diaries. And what it says is that it's, they also call it like white utopia or something like that. But it's where all cisgender, heterosexual, normative, you know, fully abled white people, find all people that don't fit that very narrow description and drag them out of their houses and hang them on lampposts.

So he was saying he couldn't save you should this day? Yeah, because I was a degenerate because I liked to party because I was friends with all kind of people because I was sexually active before I met him. I could not reconcile it in my brain how this happened. And so I went to his house. I asked if we could talk. We like sat down and I remember asking him what it meant. And he turned to me. And it was like he was testifying in court and just looked at me dead in the eye and said, I think I'm a fascist and I don't want to be with anyone who's not. I just got my things and left. And when you left, what were you thinking?

Like, what was happening at that moment? I mean, I got in the car and my first thought was like, well, obviously, I can never, never be with him. And I was crying and I was like eating cigarettes. I was so upset. And I somehow, from the time that I got in the car to the time that I got out, I just convinced myself that I needed to understand where all of this, like what all of this actually is. Like, where is this coming from?

So as soon as she gets home, she opens up her laptop. And she just starts reading everything she can find about the alt-right. Listening to podcasts, watching videos on YouTube, she just wants to try to understand it. I completely dove into it. You know, I skipped past most people's stages of getting into the far. right? Like I went straight into like Richard Spencer, David Duke, Nathan Domingo, like all of these people

that spoke calmly and spoke rationally. And my intention originally was, you know, all right, I'm going to go in and I'm going to find these points and then I'm going to find the counterpoints and I'm going to confront him and we're going to have a discussion and he's going to be fixed. But that is not quite how it played out.

Some parts of the alt-right internet are just truly horrific and abhorrent. like the worst stuff you can imagine. But the stuff that Sam is looking at at this point is a more kind of pseudo-intellectual, more buttoned-up version of the alt-right. Stuff like American Renaissance, the site that Jared Taylor runs, or Radix Journal, which was Richard Spencer's site, they're no less racist, but they dress it up in all kinds of pseudo-intellectual vocabulary. And in a way, they're more dangerous because they don't immediately reveal themselves to be as odious as they are. are. But if you're someone who doesn't have much context, it's much easier to get drawn in by that stuff. There was some interview on the young Turks with Nathan Domingo, and he was just, I remember

Nathan was just very calm, and he was saying, like, how he loves ethnic food, but he loves white people, too. I really enjoy about other cultures. I love Lumpia. If anyone, like, wants to, like, ever make me happy, just a big pan of Lumpia, like, will cheer me up. Filipino delicacy. Yes, very much so. So, you know, yeah, there are things that we can enjoy and that we can experience from other people. You know, however, you know, again, there is this other side in which there is this feeling of isolation. When I was going through the motions of learning about the alt-right and learning about what all this stuff was, it was always marketed to me as this is just pro-white.

There's no anti-anyone. We, you know, respect and show, you know, adherence for black like we care about everyone else that you know it's it had nothing to do with thinking that anyone was lesser than everyone you know there was some line where it was like everyone is superior in their own way i remember calling my grandmother and talking to her about this and saying like hey you know i i'm talking to someone about these ideas and i just i don't know like what what do you think like you went through a war you've had this this full and vibrant life and like what are your thoughts on these things. And she was like, you know, that's, you know, Nazism is horrible. Like, she point blank called it out for what it was. And I just remember, and I remember telling her, like,

you know, I, you know, should I feel bad for being white? And she paused and she said, you should never apologize for who you are. And I took that line and just ran with it and said, I am pro white. I'm not anti anyone else. I'm not a Nazi. I'm not a Nazi. I'm not anything, I'm just pro-white, I am for my people. And that was the okay that I took to join. I remember calling him and I was just like, you know, I looked at all, I looked at all the sites, I looked at everything that you said, and let's do this. So once Sam decided that she wanted to go down this road, she decided to make it formal because that's kind of how she is. She describes herself as a tryhard.

And so I looked into Identity Europa, and I think like a day or two later, I didn't tell Richie that I was joining, but I sent it an application. So there's no one official group called the alt-right. But one of the main groups, the one that Sam was looking into at the time, was called Identity Europa, or for short, I.E. This is a group that was formed in early 2016 as Trump was running for president. At the time when I joined, I really thought that it was just going to be like a pro-white community where we could talk to each other about being who we are and I guess gain confidence and build a community and, you know, exchange recipes or visit each other. And just it kind of becomes like a chat just like anything else, any sort of like, you know, go on meetup.com. And that's what it felt like it was going to be.

Sam first joins I.E. in December 2016. And basically as soon as she joins, they start wanting her to do more and more stuff within the group. Partially this is because she's a woman and they really wanted more women in the movement. At the time, there were only about half a dozen women in all of Identity Europa. So she starts getting more and more involved, proving herself, and within just a couple months, she has become the women's coordinator of all of National Identity Europa. So it would just be generally, like, I think I tried to do like a question of the day. And so sometimes it would be like, what's your favorite meal or who's your favorite

classic Hollywood actress? What's your favorite perfume? What kind of music do you like? Any sort of, you know, just thing to get women chatting and to make them feel like they were a part of a community. If women had problems, they would call me if, you know, or message me and I would, you know, give them counsel. What kind of problems would they call you with?

It could be honestly anything. You know, they met a man and the man wanted to be physically intimate and they were torn between wanting to be intimate with him but not wanting to be looked down upon or, you know, they don't know how to talk to their family about their views or they're having, you know, they remember one woman, so that she had to go to a birthday party for a Jewish sorority sister and like how does she reconcile? style that in her head that she still is Jewish friends, but it's true. I didn't know about that one. Yeah. It was, you know, there was just a lot of stuff like that that, you know, what, you know, my family's coming over. How do I bake a good meal so I could tell them that I'm an identitarian? Anything like that. So not long after Sam joins the movement, she and Richie break up. And this leaves her feeling pretty lonely, pretty cut off. And even though I.E. is an online movement, they are also interested in forging community in real life.

So they start planning a big event to try to get everyone together, a big rally, and the place they choose to do it is Charlottesville, Virginia. So this was not the big Charlottesville rally that everybody remembers. This was the precursor to that. This one was in May 2017, the first one. And the purpose of it was the same as the one that would come later. It was they all wanted to get Tiki Torches, light them, and bring them to this statue of Robert E. Lee. and they wanted it to be a public statement.

I drove up with a few people that were also from my region, and we got this Airbnb at a vineyard. And so we'd drive up, and I remember thinking that no one was going to notice me. And I go in and we give our names, and I just remember being so confused, because everyone would, like, give one name, and then they would give another. So it was either, like, their internet name,

like their alt-right pseudonym or their real name. And they'd be like, hi, my name is like, you know, John, oh, I'm kidding. I'm actually so-and-so. Or hi, my name is so-and-so, but my real name is blank. But any time that anyone found out, like, my alt-right name, they were like, oh, my God. Like, I can't believe it? You're a court. Like, you're, you know, the women's coordinator.

Can I get my picture with you? Can I get this? Can I get that? Like, I have so much respect for what you do. You're doing God's work, all of this stuff. And it just, it felt insane to be going through all of this stuff. And I had just gone through this breakup with Richie, I felt, so lost and so insecure again, and the movement was really all that I felt like I had.

I had isolated myself from my real friends, like my real life friends who were normal. So all I really had was the alt-right. So to have them praising me and telling me that I'm like this incredible person, I've helped them and I've inspired them, meanwhile, I've pretty much done nothing. It just felt so good. So after all the marches and banquets and everything, that night, they go back to the Airbnb and they have this big party. know, everybody was there, all the big names and the movement,

including Richard Spencer, who was kind of the biggest, most public face of the entire movement. And so she felt flattered when Richard spent the whole night kind of attending to her. I think I went out onto the porch to smoke a cigarette or something, and Richard Spencer and I had started talking, and we just started talking about ideology. And again, like, it was just one of those things. Like, he's great at rhetoric. And he's great at conversations when he wants to be. You know, they're at this house party.

You know, they shared a cigarette and they were kind of having this bantery conversation. She went inside the house and was standing in this big room with all these young guys who were all hopped up and energetic. And Richard Spencer walked into the room. And this one kid just said Sieg. And another kid said, Hy. And they were pointing at Richard Spencer with this stiff-armed Nazi salute. We started with like, hail, victory, hail victory, or seek. And then everyone would say, hi, I'll seek, high, seek, high, seek, hale.

I don't know, there was just this energy in the room. It was palpable. Like, you could, you could have eaten it. It was so intense. Sam had this moment of, like, she always said that she wasn't into Nazi stuff. and that that was over the line and that was inappropriate. And yet now she's in this room where there's just dozens and dozens of people at this fever pitch of like doing this kind of ritualistic thing.

This is the one thing they're not supposed to do. This is the one thing they can't do in public. And they are high on the just sort of transgressive energy of it. And Sam describes this. one moment where she looks over and sees Richard Spencer as this is happening. And he looks back at her and gives her this sort of raised eyebrow look like so. Are you going to do it? He was staring me dead in the eyes.

And I did it. Samantha's story continues in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We're hearing an extraordinary story about a young woman named Samantha, which first aired on our program in November. of 2019. Samantha was radicalized into the alt-right, and within just a few months after joining,

Sam had made her way into the leadership of the white nationalist group called Identity Europa. And when we left off, Sam was hanging out at a party with Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi organizer, and a crowd of people shouting, seek Kyle. But about six months after that party, Samantha, who was thinking about leaving the group, reached out to staff writer Andrew Morantz. Andrews covered the alt-right for the New Yorker, writing about 4chan and neo-Nazis. When Andrew was reporting, he kept finding it wasn't easy at all to get members of the alt-right to sit down for interviews. So I had been putting out feelers for a while in this world. I was trying to find someone who could really just tell me honestly what it was like inside the alt-right,

not give me spin or movement propaganda, but just what their experience was getting in. and ideally getting out, and I had not had much luck. And so one night I was sitting at work. I was in the conference room, actually, and I got an email from this anonymous person, this anonymous woman, basically saying, I don't know if you've heard about me, but I'm trying to leave the movement.

And I'm, like, physically about to go on the run because essentially when I leave, I don't even know if I'm going to be physically safe. Hey, sorry about that. Do you want to talk? And I said, yeah, I want to talk. He was like, yeah, just crashed me for a few days. So I've just been kind of in and out of different places right now until, I think I have like five more days until the place that I will be renting is ready.

Okay. And you're, and so I think it's, I think it's like super interesting to be where you are. I know interesting is like maybe a trivializing word for a very scary moment in your life. But I do think it's, I don't know, I don't think this thing has been around long enough where people, can go in and then go out. I've never thought there was someone in your position. Yeah. In a way, I felt like her story was kind of too good to be true.

Like, I felt like, why would someone reach the upper echelons of the alt-right movement and then go run and tell some Jewish journalist at the New Yorker, their whole life story? Like, there are professional organizations on the far right that try to trap mainstream journalists into believing false stories. This is like a thing that happens at scale. So I didn't really trust her, and she, of course, didn't trust me. You know, but when you're sitting here presenting ideal, like, I'm telling it, like, I'm being pretty vulnerable with you, you know, and it's like I have not done that with

anyone. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. I mean, look, this is going to sound kind of weird and like Forrest Gump-ish, but, like, ideally, I would really, if we were going to really have a real conversation, It would be in person. I mean, but like, where do you even live?

I live in New York. I mean, I would, like, get on a bus and come see you if you had time to really sit down. I get in my car. I drive to this random town in Maryland and meet her at this hotel lobby. And we just sit and talk. And she shows me photos and audio files and videos. And the more we talk, the more it becomes clear to me, what she's saying is all true. Obviously, by the time Sam contacted me, things had changed for her pretty dramatically.

After little less than a year in the movement, she now wants to get out. But I spent a lot of time trying to piece together exactly how she got to that point. It wasn't like there was some Hollywood moment where she just, the clouds parted and she realized that she had been a racist all along. It was a process. But there was one big turning point that set her. her on the road to getting out of the movement. And that was when this group that she was in called Identity Europa started helping to plan another big rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

This was the big one that you've heard of, the Unite the Right rally. So every day as this rally got closer, Sam started to doubt more and more whether this event was going to be a good idea. Plenty of us were talking to each other saying like this is not going to end well. There's just no way. And that's not even accounting for opposition. Like that's just within the movement itself. We all knew that it was going to be a mess.

How could you tell? The first rally was only done by IE with invite. Like it was like an invite only thing basically. And so it was all done under like this one roof. So everyone shared the same common vision of, you know, we're just going to go. We're going to protest this. And then with Unite the Right rally, it was like, we're going to invite literally everyone on the right. And whoever shows up, do whatever you.

it is that you do. There was so much at that point in 2017 with that ball rolling of like what the alt-right was and what it meant and people were breaking off and going into different factions and wanting to distance themselves from this group because they're too violent or they're too out in the open about their Nazism or whatever that no one was willing to like cooperate. So she was having serious doubts about this alt-right demonstration. But the other thing that was going on is she was in this new relationship, actually with the leader of Identity Europa at the time. And things in the relationship are going south pretty quickly.

They have been living together, but when she tries to break up with him repeatedly, he essentially just refuses to leave her apartment. We, you know, we're not sleeping in the same room. We weren't, like, I did not appreciate this person at all. if I had point blank said, we're done, I'm done, get out. I could have been exposed. I could have been kicked out. This person had a lot of pull and a lot of he had told me that he had ruined other people's lives. Now, the way Sam tells it is that this guy is threatening to docks her, meaning releasing her personal information online.

And that is a very powerful threat because even though, a lot of people in I.E. are willing to go to a public rally. They're still trying to mostly stay anonymous online. Like, Sam is not telling people in her family or at her job that she's going around doing Siegheiles with Richard Spencer. And she knows very well what happens to members of the alt-right after they get doxed. Yeah, become a social pariah. Just absolutely become, like, you're quarantining yourself if you get exposed. So the day of the big Charlottesville rally comes along, and Sam is still not really on board with the rally,

but she also has this guy living in her apartment, threatening to expose her. So she just says, okay, I'm just going to sit this one out. So she takes a work shift that day. It was a weekend of street battles and stark displays of racism, exploding into a deadly act of domestic terror. So as all the chaos in Charlottesville is on, unfolding.

As a white supremacist named James Alex Fields is ramming his car into a crowd of people, ultimately killing Heather Heyer, one of the protesters. That's being broadcast on the TVs above the bar where Sam is working. There were TVs where I work, and it was all over the place, and I remember some coworkers were like, oh, I hope it's those Nazis that are getting, the car ran into someone. I remember that. And they were like, oh my God, a car hit somebody. I hope it's one of those Nazis.

So that happened. when it was confirmed that it was someone who was not in the alt-right, it was a nice, normal person. It just broke my heart. Oh my God, family. She just can't really deny it to herself anymore. The bottom line is, this is her team who's doing this stuff. And right about that same time, she gets set up to do an interview with a woman named Glena Gordon. So Glena is a photojournalist who shoots for places like the New York Times Magazine,

and she was doing this photo documentary project about women in the far right. Glennah was looking for someone who was kind of a leader in this part of the alt-right movement, and she got set up with Samantha. And so they met up at a coffee shop, and they ended up talking for hours. And Glennah really directly challenges Sam on her beliefs in a way that no one really had before. And actually, Glena gave us that audio. I am not against the idea of separation.

And I'm not against it because exactly like you said, like, exactly like both said, like... But you realize the company you keep when you advocate separation. Mine. And the Aryan nations. I understand what you're saying,

but again, to just do this large blanket of saying, like, okay, so the KKK was white, was white, by the advocacy. So that must mean that I have some sort of proverbial bloodline within that. I mean, you have direct rhetorical identicalities. Like, proverbial bloodline or not, like, the words that are coming out of your mouth are the same as the words

that come out of their mouth. And what have I done that is similar to them? You've said the same words. She was really, since I had joined the first person that actually dissected and dismantled everything that I said I believed in and held me accountable for it. And this was when? Like three days after the rally. Oh, wow. I remember picking and choosing these things.

Like, the points that I was always going to say is like, no one is white enough. Like, I'm pro-white. I don't hate anyone else. I'm pro-ugenics because I don't want to give society the burden of having children with problems. And there was like one other thing. Like, I believe in separation because I want communities to be able to support themselves. Those are the three tenants of the alt-right that I had decided.

it were going to be my platform. Like why I'm in- Separation meaning racial segregation or racial ethno-states. Yeah. And I just, yeah, like, even, see? Like, even now I try to, like, be euphemistic about it because I'm just so embarrassed by it. Yeah.

Separate but equal. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. segregation. And this woman is sitting across for me with her sandy blonde hair and her little California vibe and just saying like, well, you know, as it turns out, like, you are connected to the KKK and this is actually how, you know, opportunity works and this is how housing structure and school systems work. And I couldn't pretend like this was something that I

believed in. And even if it was something that I believed in, it was being taken apart right in front of me and very calmly, very easily. I just remember at the end of the interview, just being like, I'm actually just afraid that you're 100% right. Coming home and being like, I, I can't do this. I stopped caring about what it meant for me if I left. I knew I would still have to be careful. I knew that I would still have to, you know, cover my tracks and be safe and, you know, be quiet and disappear for a little bit if that's what it took.

But I knew that if I didn't leave then, I wasn't going to leave. And so I did. I just resigned. it took me a few more weeks to get out of the chats. It took me a few weeks to get out of the house. It took me a few weeks to do everything. And then it took me months to even feel like I was fully out of it, like even in my brain. I remember.

I remember that time. I mean, I remember you calling me and you still being kind of scrambled up and just kind of, just very fragile. Yeah. I remember I was like simultaneously. determined to get through it, but also so resigned to the fact that what if that's just who I was? Ooh. Yeah. Didn't realize I had feelings about that still. Sorry.

Yeah. It's not that surprising to me, honestly, because I remember that was when I met you during that time, and you were just so messed up and confused. But I also, like, I couldn't tell. tell like how much to try to help or how much to be like, should I be angry at this person because she was just doing and saying all these terrible things or should I be like reaching out to her and trying to pull her out of it? Like I didn't know how active to be or how passive to be.

It was. Yeah, I remember that. I remember you were the only safe person that I knew. Yeah. Like now you can look back and be like, I'm embarrassed or I feel I feel sad or I feel angry at myself or whatever. You have this distance. Back then you had no distance.

So I remember we had this conversation where you were like, look, look, I know the Holocaust happened, but like, did it though? Oh, my God. And I was like, yeah, it really did. And you would, and you would, I mean, it was so interesting because you'd be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Totally. I know. You're right.

But like, it probably wasn't six million, though. Yeah, there was always this like seed of doubt. And like I think not in terms of the Holocaust, but like in terms of anything that I hear now that someone claims to be true, I just instinctually am like, yeah, but like how much of that is true? Like I'm just, I'm just skeptical of everything. But yeah, I mean, that was, it was, it took such a long time for me to like, I couldn't accept, I couldn't accept facts. I mean, do you, um, How do you deal with that now? Like, how do you, where do you get your information now? How do you apply skepticism to the information you hear now, but not too much skepticism. Like, how are you? I mean, I kind of just, there's no one website that I go to. There's no one piece of literature that I go to.

There's no, I know you want me to read, what is that stupid book by David Foster Wallace that you think I should read? It's not stupid. It's called Infinite Jest. And when you read it, you're going to come back to me and tell me that I was right, just like I was right about the goddamn Holocaust. If you... Jesus. You're gonna, you know, you can double down on your disdain for this book all you want,

but you're just going to be eating more. You just sound like every guy in his late 20s who really loves the band, Tool. And you're like, just give it a chance, man. Lateralis is brilliant. I just, I can't. Well, it is. Is it, though? But, um, anyway, yeah, like, there's no one piece of literature.

I just, you have to think critically of everything. I've spent a lot of time reporting on groups like this. And a lot of the people I see get drawn into it, they're just looking for a racist movement to join, and that's all there is to it. But with most other people, it's a little more complicated. Like in Sam's case, maybe they're lost, maybe they're gullible, maybe they want some kind of sense of purpose in their lives.

And in a way, even though Sam ended up getting out of this stuff, I still find her story really unsettling because by any measure, someone like Sam who grew up the way she grew up and had the friends she had and had the political behaviors she had, she should not have gone down this road. And that all points to what I think is a pretty deep and sort of scary question, which is whether any of us can ever really truly know who we are and what we believe. because if people's beliefs can change in such a core way, then how certain and how solid was that stuff to begin with? I thought I knew it all. I thought I was above it. I thought I could spot bad ideas from a football field away.

I now, to this day, I've had a couple friends send me, quote-unquote, edgy memes that I know were created by the alt-right years ago. The conversations need to happen. People need to sit down and challenge themselves. And I think it's great that people are so against far-right ideology that they think they're better than it. But I think it's extremely naive and foolish to think that you are impervious to it. No one is impervious to this. That was Samantha.

She left Identity Europa in 2017. and she asked that we not use her full name. Andrew Moranz is a staff writer and the author of the book, Anti-Social, Online Extremists, Techno-utopians, and the hijacking of the American Conversation. You can read him on these topics and much more at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening today. See you next week.

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