She went from a liberal non-voter to burning books with white supremacists. Here's why she finally left the movement
CNN)In May 2017, Samantha went to a book burning in upstate New York. She had entered the inner circle of the modern white power movement called the alt-right, and it was the moment its activists see in retrospect as the peak of its power.
The home was classically suburban, with a picnic table and a fire pit in the backyard. The atmosphere was like a family barbecue, but she felt an air of intensity. They stood around the fire and cheered as books were tossed into the flames. Some gave Nazi salutes. Samantha did, too.
"It's all so surreal," Samantha says now. "You're literally standing there, going, 'I'm at a book burning at someone's house. Like, there are families that live next door. There's probably a nice person who lives across the street, and I'm burning books about Jewish people.' ... It doesn't even feel like it's wrong or right. It just feels unreal."
At the time, she texted a friend that it was the best weekend of her life.
It had taken Samantha six months to go from a vaguely liberal non-voter to what she calls "a productive racist." She is one of very few women who joined the alt-right, and an even smaller number who left and are willing to talk about it. Her story helps explain what draws people into this movement, and the misogyny that drives it.
Samantha took this selfie during her involvement with racist groups. She said later it took some time to come to terms with what she had done.
In the fall of 2016, Samantha's indie-rock-loving boyfriend changed. He started lifting weights and making jokes she didn't understand. When she finally Googled them, she discovered they were based on an elaborate, violent, white supremacist fantasy called the "Day of the Rope," in which people of color, Jews, gays and the "race traitors" who helped them, are murdered.
"I couldn't believe it," Samantha said. "We both knew so many people that fit that description." Her boyfriend reassured her they were just jokes. But then, she says, he looked her in the eye and said that he was a fascist, and that he couldn't be with anyone who wasn't.
She started researching the alt-right -- a movement that shaped old white supremacist ideas into ironic memes that spread online to a very young audience. The grotesque jokes on imageboards such as ***** and 8chan were not her scene.
But she found something appealing in the white power activists who presented themselves as intellectuals, like Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor. Just a few weeks after her first online search, she became a dues-paying member of a white power fraternity called Identity Evropa.
That took her into the organization's chatrooms on Discord, where some members spread similar messages to the ones that had shocked her not long before. "Like it starts as a joke where you laugh nervously. Then you kind of stop laughing, 'cause you're used to it," she said. "And then you start to post it yourself, because you want to be a part of that. And it's this really quick, quick descension into that."
Samantha, now 29, was open about her past in her interviews with CNN, but asked that her last name not be used to protect her and her family from possible violence or retribution. She now rejects white supremacy, and has joined Life After Hate, an organization that helps people leave hate groups.
CNN knows the identities of the men Samantha and other women we spoke to had close relationships with. We have verified their real names, locations and, in one case, criminal records through contemporaneous messages and public records. The women asked us not to use their names, because they're afraid of those men and their followers.
Samantha has spoken out before. In 2018, she contacted Andrew Marantz, who was working on a book about social media and extremism that published this fall as "Anti-Social." Marantz later reached out to me, and suggested I talk to Samantha. He gave me the iPhone she'd used during her time in the alt right. The screen was shattered. I had it fixed and began looking through it.
Samantha's iPhone opens up the hidden world inside the white power movement, frozen in time in 2017.
And once Samantha was in, she was all the way in. She became an interviewer for Identity Evropa, testing whether new applicants were fluent in white power ideology and screening out Jews and people of color. She told herself that she wasn't racist, just "pro-white." She rose in the organization past her boyfriend, and they broke up. She was named women's coordinator for IE, and ran a women's chatroom, an essential organizing tool in a movement that's almost entirely online.
Samantha changed her look and her demeanor. She bought dresses with full skirts and nipped-in waists, clothes with which she wanted to project an "all-American, delicate sexuality." Samantha said, "I wanted to be more feminine, I wanted to be more desirable, I wanted to be more appreciated, I wanted to feel smart. So I just played into these roles. And the standards for how women are treated in there are pretty low, so I was able to lean into that and make that work for me."
A photo from that time shows Samantha smiling demurely in a white dress, flanked by five white men, four of them wearing white polos with the Identity Evropa logo.
Samantha booked a rental at a vineyard as an "ironic" place for white supremacists to stay.
It was mid-May 2017, and Samantha had helped plan a protest now known within the white power movement as "Charlottesville 1.0." During the day, a few dozen protesters gave speeches by the Robert E Lee memorial in the Virginia city. At night, they stood and chanted with tiki torches.
Samantha had picked the rural rental where she and other IE members stayed. It was a cabin on a winery, with two bedrooms and a deck with an extra dining area. "I thought it would be funny if [anti-fascist activists] wanted to chase us out of town... you know like, 'Oh these big scary Nazis retreated to a vineyard.' I thought it would be profoundly ironic."
Charlottesville rally violence: How we got here
There wasn't much interest from the mainstream media, or violence at the rally. But the images the rallygoers posted on social media were dramatic, and they inspired the Unite the Right rally now often referred to as "Charlottesville" three months later, where a counterprotester was killed and two state troopers patrolling near the site of clashes died in a helicopter crash.
"After that I was in," she says. "I was in the movement. It felt so good to be an activist, to be in the movement."
The torch-lit protest at the Robert E. Lee statue from May 2017, a precursor to the deadly Unite the Right rally.
A couple weeks after the gathering in May, she was taken to the book-burning by a rising leader within Identity Evropa who was trying to impress her by introducing her to white supremacist "celebrities."
The party was hosted by men associated with The Right Stuff, a group that makes podcasts that are something like drive-time radio shows obsessed with race science. It was attended by Richard Spencer, who gained national notoriety when he declared "Hail Trump" to a crowd doing Nazi salutes shortly after the 2016 election. There was an array of other men most people have never heard of but who are famous in the racist podcasting world. Samantha filmed one of them throwing a book into the fire.
An image taken from video shows a book being thrown into a fire at the party.
Spencer told CNN: "I don't remember the event." He added: "I've been to lots of parties and seen plenty of wild stuff." When CNN talked to The Right Stuff's Mike "Enoch" Peinovich, he declined to comment on the book burning.
"The people that you hear on the podcasts, and people that you see making the speeches, and going on different news shows, are showing up at these parties. So you feel like you're meeting a rock star," Samantha said. "It also encourages you to stay, incentivizes you to stick around. You could be the next big name in the movement if you meet the right person."
Even as Samantha thought she was rising through the ranks, she was aware of a meme known as white sharia, a misogynistic twist on Muslim religious code. The "joke" is that white women are ruining Western civilization through promiscuity and voting for liberals, so the only way to save it is to impose Sharia law on women and, in the supremacists' twisted view of Sharia, treat them like property.
A flyer at the book-burning said "WHITE SHARIA ZONE. THOTS MUST WEAR HIJAB AT ALL TIMES." (A "thot" is slang racists have enthusiastically ripped from hip-hop; it means "that ho over there," or a woman who seeks attention through her sexuality.) Samantha took a picture of it. She is holding it with French-manicured fingernails
CNN on Instagram: “Samantha went from a liberal non-voter to burning books with white supremacists within six months. She spoke to CNN's Elle Reeve about why…”
CNN)In May 2017, Samantha went to a book burning in upstate New York. She had entered the inner circle of the modern white power movement called the alt-right, and it was the moment its activists see in retrospect as the peak of its power.
The home was classically suburban, with a picnic table and a fire pit in the backyard. The atmosphere was like a family barbecue, but she felt an air of intensity. They stood around the fire and cheered as books were tossed into the flames. Some gave Nazi salutes. Samantha did, too.
"It's all so surreal," Samantha says now. "You're literally standing there, going, 'I'm at a book burning at someone's house. Like, there are families that live next door. There's probably a nice person who lives across the street, and I'm burning books about Jewish people.' ... It doesn't even feel like it's wrong or right. It just feels unreal."
At the time, she texted a friend that it was the best weekend of her life.
It had taken Samantha six months to go from a vaguely liberal non-voter to what she calls "a productive racist." She is one of very few women who joined the alt-right, and an even smaller number who left and are willing to talk about it. Her story helps explain what draws people into this movement, and the misogyny that drives it.
In the fall of 2016, Samantha's indie-rock-loving boyfriend changed. He started lifting weights and making jokes she didn't understand. When she finally Googled them, she discovered they were based on an elaborate, violent, white supremacist fantasy called the "Day of the Rope," in which people of color, Jews, gays and the "race traitors" who helped them, are murdered.
"I couldn't believe it," Samantha said. "We both knew so many people that fit that description." Her boyfriend reassured her they were just jokes. But then, she says, he looked her in the eye and said that he was a fascist, and that he couldn't be with anyone who wasn't.
She started researching the alt-right -- a movement that shaped old white supremacist ideas into ironic memes that spread online to a very young audience. The grotesque jokes on imageboards such as ***** and 8chan were not her scene.
But she found something appealing in the white power activists who presented themselves as intellectuals, like Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor. Just a few weeks after her first online search, she became a dues-paying member of a white power fraternity called Identity Evropa.
That took her into the organization's chatrooms on Discord, where some members spread similar messages to the ones that had shocked her not long before. "Like it starts as a joke where you laugh nervously. Then you kind of stop laughing, 'cause you're used to it," she said. "And then you start to post it yourself, because you want to be a part of that. And it's this really quick, quick descension into that."
Samantha, now 29, was open about her past in her interviews with CNN, but asked that her last name not be used to protect her and her family from possible violence or retribution. She now rejects white supremacy, and has joined Life After Hate, an organization that helps people leave hate groups.
CNN knows the identities of the men Samantha and other women we spoke to had close relationships with. We have verified their real names, locations and, in one case, criminal records through contemporaneous messages and public records. The women asked us not to use their names, because they're afraid of those men and their followers.
Samantha has spoken out before. In 2018, she contacted Andrew Marantz, who was working on a book about social media and extremism that published this fall as "Anti-Social." Marantz later reached out to me, and suggested I talk to Samantha. He gave me the iPhone she'd used during her time in the alt right. The screen was shattered. I had it fixed and began looking through it.
Samantha's iPhone opens up the hidden world inside the white power movement, frozen in time in 2017.
And once Samantha was in, she was all the way in. She became an interviewer for Identity Evropa, testing whether new applicants were fluent in white power ideology and screening out Jews and people of color. She told herself that she wasn't racist, just "pro-white." She rose in the organization past her boyfriend, and they broke up. She was named women's coordinator for IE, and ran a women's chatroom, an essential organizing tool in a movement that's almost entirely online.
Samantha changed her look and her demeanor. She bought dresses with full skirts and nipped-in waists, clothes with which she wanted to project an "all-American, delicate sexuality." Samantha said, "I wanted to be more feminine, I wanted to be more desirable, I wanted to be more appreciated, I wanted to feel smart. So I just played into these roles. And the standards for how women are treated in there are pretty low, so I was able to lean into that and make that work for me."
A photo from that time shows Samantha smiling demurely in a white dress, flanked by five white men, four of them wearing white polos with the Identity Evropa logo.
It was mid-May 2017, and Samantha had helped plan a protest now known within the white power movement as "Charlottesville 1.0." During the day, a few dozen protesters gave speeches by the Robert E Lee memorial in the Virginia city. At night, they stood and chanted with tiki torches.
Samantha had picked the rural rental where she and other IE members stayed. It was a cabin on a winery, with two bedrooms and a deck with an extra dining area. "I thought it would be funny if [anti-fascist activists] wanted to chase us out of town... you know like, 'Oh these big scary Nazis retreated to a vineyard.' I thought it would be profoundly ironic."
Charlottesville rally violence: How we got here
There wasn't much interest from the mainstream media, or violence at the rally. But the images the rallygoers posted on social media were dramatic, and they inspired the Unite the Right rally now often referred to as "Charlottesville" three months later, where a counterprotester was killed and two state troopers patrolling near the site of clashes died in a helicopter crash.
"After that I was in," she says. "I was in the movement. It felt so good to be an activist, to be in the movement."
A couple weeks after the gathering in May, she was taken to the book-burning by a rising leader within Identity Evropa who was trying to impress her by introducing her to white supremacist "celebrities."
The party was hosted by men associated with The Right Stuff, a group that makes podcasts that are something like drive-time radio shows obsessed with race science. It was attended by Richard Spencer, who gained national notoriety when he declared "Hail Trump" to a crowd doing Nazi salutes shortly after the 2016 election. There was an array of other men most people have never heard of but who are famous in the racist podcasting world. Samantha filmed one of them throwing a book into the fire.
Spencer told CNN: "I don't remember the event." He added: "I've been to lots of parties and seen plenty of wild stuff." When CNN talked to The Right Stuff's Mike "Enoch" Peinovich, he declined to comment on the book burning.
"The people that you hear on the podcasts, and people that you see making the speeches, and going on different news shows, are showing up at these parties. So you feel like you're meeting a rock star," Samantha said. "It also encourages you to stay, incentivizes you to stick around. You could be the next big name in the movement if you meet the right person."
Even as Samantha thought she was rising through the ranks, she was aware of a meme known as white sharia, a misogynistic twist on Muslim religious code. The "joke" is that white women are ruining Western civilization through promiscuity and voting for liberals, so the only way to save it is to impose Sharia law on women and, in the supremacists' twisted view of Sharia, treat them like property.
A flyer at the book-burning said "WHITE SHARIA ZONE. THOTS MUST WEAR HIJAB AT ALL TIMES." (A "thot" is slang racists have enthusiastically ripped from hip-hop; it means "that ho over there," or a woman who seeks attention through her sexuality.) Samantha took a picture of it. She is holding it with French-manicured fingernails
CNN on Instagram: “Samantha went from a liberal non-voter to burning books with white supremacists within six months. She spoke to CNN's Elle Reeve about why…”
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there's millions of alt right women in America. The vast majority are either asian or white.
Like it's strange for white women to be a part of white supremacist groups, like only white men are into that sort of thing