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

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

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

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 August 2020

⏱️ 39 minutes

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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 “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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.0	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.5	Around the time that Donald Trump was elected president, our staff writer Andrew Morantz took on a new beat.
0:20.1	He's been covering the right-wing extremism that is burgeoning on the internet, the alt-right.
0:25.7	It's a movement that embraces white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, conspiracy theories,
0:31.7	anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, you name it.
0:35.1	I mean, we have people who have been here for hundreds of years.
0:37.8	People of African heritage who have not fully assimilated into the American society.
0:43.9	Hail Trump. Hail our people. Hail victory.
0:50.3	The rise of the alt-right is the subject of Andrew Morantz's recent book called Anti-Social.
0:56.4	And one of the things he's tried to understand is how people get radicalized into joining these hate groups in the first place.
1:02.2	How does it happen? And to whom? Here's Andrew Morantz.
1:07.1	It took me a few years of reporting on these groups and this whole subculture before I really felt like I understood that.
1:13.6	And one person who's really helped clarify a lot of that for me was this young woman whose first name is Samantha.
1:20.5	We've been talking for a couple of years.
1:22.5	Probably we've had hundreds of hours of conversations at this point.
1:25.8	And her story has completely changed the way I think about these movements and who gets
1:31.0	drawn into them and why.
1:33.7	And that might be her.
1:35.6	So recently, Riannon Corby, who's a producer for the New Yorker Radio Hour, traveled a few
1:41.6	hours away from New York.
1:42.6	We're not going to say exactly where.
	...

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