Once notorious for her racist and bigoted tweets, Katie McHugh saw the dark insides of the white nationalist movement. Where is McHugh? The first time we met was late last summer, on the stoop of a house where she was then living in Washington, DC. She looked gaunt and anxious. When I shook her hand, it felt tiny and frail. We sat facing each other across a patio table on a hot, sticky day. She smoked. It was a little over a year after Charlottesville. The bad things from the internet had started to come to life, with terrible, violent, and real consequences.
It was bizarre to see in person someone who had existed for me only as an online symbol of the very worst parts of contemporary politics. A difficult relationship had left her isolated, and she was on the outs with her former friends. She was going broke and could barely afford the expenses incurred by her Type 1 diabetes.
Her time in Washington had ruined her life, and not in just a bump-in-the-road kind of way. I met her again in September in a town a few hours outside of Washington where she was staying. As I approached her in a coffee shop on a Monday morning, she looked well enough. Her makeup was neatly applied, her nails were painted, and she was wearing a navy-and-white dress with coordinating white cardigan and loafers. Her skin had previously looked mottled and gray but now shone with a new vitality.
She shook my hand with a firm grip and we started talking. Her story is fascinating, and sometimes frustrating. She seemed unable to face her full complicity in her own behavior. Although Black represented the old guard of white nationalism — his godfather is David Duke — McHugh was part of the vanguard. Her set took the emerging own-the-libs ethos that animated the online right and combined it with the new iteration of white nationalism, which called itself the alt-right.
Where was McHugh radicalized? Her story is about support systems and pipelines. It's about how an angry young conservative with reactionary views got herself involved with a small coterie of ideologues in Washington and prepped for a conservative media career in the crucial years before the rise of Donald Trump , as extremism became more popular on the right and as people could optimize themselves for success through attention on social media.
