During her mid-20s, Samantha spent about a year of her life embroiled in a white supremacist hate group.
"I never thought of myself as a racist person, but I was," she said.
Samantha, who asked for her last name not to be used, was involved in the group "Identity Evropa."
"When you're in there, you think that you just know the truth…[that] white people are more intellectually capable than other people… White people were the best," Samantha said.
"I started to believe that…there is some sort of white genocide happening," Samantha continued. "I start[ed] to use the phrasing and the language...that there is an overwhelming majority of Jewish people in media and banking…and you start to ask yourself, are Jewish people white?"
Identity Evropa joined other groups within the white supremacist movement in Charlottesville, Virginia, for the now-infamous "Unite The Right" rally on Aug. 12, 2017. On that day, 32-year-old Heather Heyer was killed and nearly three dozen others were injured after rally-goer James Alex Fields Jr. barreled his car into a group of counterprotesters. Earlier this year, Fields was sentenced to life in prison on federal hate crime charges.
"Up until the Unite the Right rally, there was no explicitly connected death to the alt-right… Everything changed that day," Samantha said.
Samantha said she wasn't at the rally, but that's when she realized that it was time to get out. By the time she had left Identity Evropa, she said "there was a promotion of a peaceful ethnic cleansing."
"There's nothing not hateful about that," she said.
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Samantha said she's chosen to speak out now in an effort to warn others about the prevalence of hatefulness and the means by which these alt-right groups bring people into their fold.
"People need to understand that…it's not the kid in Wyoming who grew up with gas station beer and a toothless father who becomes [involved in a hate group]." Samantha said. "It is your mailman, it is your surgeon, it is your doctor, lawyer. It is everyone."
Samantha's story is included in the new book "Anti-Social: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation" written by Andrew Marantz of "The New Yorker."
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While in Identity Evropa, Samantha said she attended a few white supremacy events, including one held in Washington, D.C. in spring 2017 during which alt-right leader Richard Spencer was a speaker.
Around that same time, Samantha said she also attended a rally in Virginia to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
Samantha said it was rare to see women involved in white supremacist groups.
"There was always at least a woman at every party that I had gone to, other than me, but it was a handful," she said. "Most of the women that were in there were tied to someone who was already in there."
Marantz said these movements are mostly made up of men.
"They went to great lengths to make her feel important," he said. "She was important because they needed someone to be the female face of their movement."
Samantha said she became very active in online chatrooms under a pseudonym. Although she didn't "specifically recall" posting hateful messages, she said, "I probably did."
"That's part of being there," she continued.
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Samantha said she wanted to feel like she belonged so badly.
"Those groups make you feel like you are excellent. You are 'it' just for existing -- for doing absolutely nothing -- and I needed something."
Marantz said it's easier for people to be sucked into these groups if they are lonely or don't have a strong sense of self.
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Samantha said she worked as a volunteer for former President Barack Obama's campaign before she was old enough to vote. Then, in 2014, she met someone and fell in love. But, she said everything changed one day when her boyfriend started acting differently.
"He started saying strange things to me that didn't make any sense," she said. "He would call me a degenerate… He started saying phrases like he couldn't defend me on the Day of the Rope."
The Day of the Rope, as it is written in the 1978 novel "The Turner Diaries," Samantha said, is "where white people, as a race, take people that they have deemed degenerates, unworthy, people of color, people of disabilities, people that are gay or whatever, whatever it deemed un-pure, unfit for the white race, and they drag them out of their houses and they hang them by lampposts."
Samantha said that as time went on, her boyfriend used this phrasing more often. She said she spent the next five days scouring the internet for information in an effort to convince herself that her boyfriend wasn't racist. A few days later, they spoke on the phone.
"I tell him, 'I've done some research. I've looked all this stuff up, and I get it. I'll try and understand this with you,'" Samantha said. "So I start consuming more media."
A lot of the videos she watched online were not violent, Samantha said. One, she said, involved a baking show that featured a white woman in traditional prairie garb. Another one was of a white woman talking about the fact that it was OK to be white and "that it was the general public's fault for making white people feel bad about themselves."
"It was presented as wholesome," she said.
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