Samantha’s Journey into the Alt-Right, and Back

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 November 2019

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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 “seig 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 out 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 naive and foolish to think that you are impervious to it. No one is impervious to this.” Samantha appears in Andrew Marantz’s new book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.”

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.7	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:14.2	Around the time that Donald Trump was elected president, our staff writer Andrew Morantz took on a new beat.
0:20.4	He's been covering the right-wing extremism
0:22.7	that's burgeoning on the internet, the alt-right. It's a movement that embraces white supremacy,
0:28.5	misogyny, homophobia, conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, you name it.
0:34.2	We are determined to take our country back. We're going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump.
0:40.2	I mean, we have people who have been here for hundreds of years.
0:42.8	People of African heritage who have not fully assimilated into the American society.
0:48.8	Hail Trump. Hail our people. Hail victory.
0:54.6	The rise of the alt-right is the subject of Andrew Morantz's new book, Antisocial.
1:00.1	Online extremists, techno-utopians, and the hijacking of the American conversation.
1:05.1	And one of the things he's tried to understand is how people get radicalized into joining these hate groups. How does it happen and to whom?
1:13.1	Here's Andrew Morance. It took me a few years of reporting on these groups and this whole
1:18.6	subculture before I really felt like I understood that. And one person who's really helped clarify
1:24.3	a lot of that for me was this young woman whose first name is Samantha.
1:28.9	We've been talking for a couple of years. Probably we've had hundreds of hours of conversations at this point.
1:34.1	And her story has completely changed the way I think about these movements and who gets drawn into them and why.
1:41.9	And then I'd be her.
1:43.9	So recently, Rianne and Corby, who's a producer for the New Yorker Radio Hour, traveled a few
1:49.9	hours away from New York.
1:50.9	We're not going to say exactly where.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WNYC Studios and The New Yorker, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.