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On a late summer morning in Athens, Georgia, Shannon Foley Martinez sits barefoot on her back patio, still in her pajamas, and clicks 鈥渇ollow鈥� on the Twitter profile of a White nationalist named Adrian. He has almost no followers, so he notices her within minutes. 鈥淗ello,鈥� he types via direct message. 鈥淗ello!!!!!鈥� she responds as her 3-year-old son plays nearby.

Martinez is a former neo-Nazi who now works to deradicalize people who are still in the movement. She was referred to Adrian by a friend of hers who researches right-wing extremism. When Adrian (not his real identity because of the sensitivity of the conversation) first started speaking to the friend, also via Twitter, the friend asked Adrian if he鈥檇 like to talk to someone who used to hold similar beliefs. 鈥淚n response to your offer of a turncoat to talk to, that would be great,鈥� Adrian replied. 鈥淎s small a chance as it is, there is still a technical possibility I am misguided, and I owe it to myself to see that if I am.鈥�

Adrian and Martinez talk about the findings of an earlier study she鈥檇 conducted on the online viewing habits of the far right that he鈥檇 also taken part in. Birds are chirping, the sky is blue and the temperature is in the 70s. Then he asks her, 鈥淲hat convinced you that the Jew鈥檚 were right after all?鈥�

Martinez, smoking an American Spirit, is unfazed. She works without an office and smokes without an ash tray. She alternates between her back patio鈥攌nees up, feet propped on the base of the deck table鈥攁nd her front porch, where she reclines, legs crossed, in one of those low-to-the-ground camping-and-soccer-games chairs. She bartends about 30 hours a week, and her husband works at a restaurant. She is raising her seven children, ages 3 to 22, and a teenage stepson with autism. Her phone is a portal to her jumbled network of 鈥渇ormers,鈥� academics, activists, law enforcement officers, policymakers, and amateur experts who are collectively working to counter the rise of far-right extremism. And it鈥檚 a means of connection with 鈥渁ctives鈥� like Adrian, whom Martinez hopes she can help to heal.

She steers their conversation away from doctrine (she鈥檚 given up on the idea of changing people鈥檚 minds via argument) and toward emotion. 鈥淢ost of my change in worldview,鈥� she types, 鈥渉ad literally nothing to do with the ideology. It had to do with why the ideology was seductive and felt empowering to me in the first place.鈥�

鈥淎nd why did it?鈥� he asks.

鈥淏ecause I needed an explanation for why the world seemed like a threatening and brutal place for me. Because I wanted to believe in something that felt like it mattered and was part of something bigger.鈥�

鈥淒o you now believe in a different explanation or none?鈥� he asks.

鈥淲ell鈥� I guess I have more understanding about why those needs rose to such an acute level in my life. And also an understanding that what I chose didn鈥檛 functionally meet my needs over the long term.鈥�

She sees conversations like these as her responsibility, as amends-making for the four-and-a-half years she spent perpetrating violence on everyone鈥擩ewish, gay, or Black people鈥攈er ideology told her to hate. 鈥淢y entire life,鈥� she is fond of saying, 鈥渋s predicated on apology.鈥� This doesn鈥檛 mean she鈥檚 mired in guilt. Instead, it means naming and working to repair the harm that she caused. 鈥淎nywhere my voice is invited to be, I will go,鈥� she says, from Holocaust museums to universities to the U.S. Institute of Peace. 鈥淭here have to be White role models for what it means to unearth and begin to deal with our relationship with White supremacy.鈥�

Often, Martinez isn鈥檛 entirely sure of the real identity of the people she talks to. That doesn鈥檛 normally concern her. 鈥淚 just need to know that I am not interacting with a bot. Which is pretty easy to tell. As long as they aren鈥檛 making direct threats I meet people where they are at,鈥� she says.

Adrian wants to know if she empathized with a famous scene from American History X in which a Black educator asks a White skinhead, 鈥淗as anything you鈥檝e done made your life better?鈥�

鈥淭his is where it gets complicated,鈥� she tells me. 鈥淏ecause honestly, at the time, my beliefs did help me.鈥� Without them, 鈥淚 probably would have killed myself.鈥�

One night in 1974, Martinez says, her father was up late doing homework for college when her mother interrupted him to say she was going into labor. 鈥淎nd he was kinda like: 鈥楴ow?鈥欌�� Once they got to the hospital in Lowell, Massachusetts, little Shannon came out so quickly that her mother nearly gave birth to her in the bathroom. Her upwardly mobile middle-class family valued conformity and perfectionism, and she was inconvenient: 鈥渢he little girl almost born on the toilet鈥� who 鈥渟eemed to come wired asking 鈥榳hy?鈥欌��

In first grade, for example, no one could give her a satisfactory answer as to why she needed to do her homework. 鈥淚t didn鈥檛 make sense to me, so I just opted out.鈥� She could never seem to get a handle on what exactly her parents wanted from her, so 鈥渇rom pretty early on, I treated the rules and expectations as irrelevant.鈥� As she got older, and started coming home late, her parents decided she would be spanked with a ruler, once for each minute she was late. 鈥淢y takeaway from that was not 鈥榖e on time.鈥� It was 鈥業 can do whatever I want if I鈥檓 willing to endure the pain.鈥欌��

The kids in her neighborhood tended to self-segregate, but she had Black friends at school. She said she wasn鈥檛 explicitly taught to hate, though her parents did reflect the sort of socially acceptable racism of the era, cracking racist jokes, for example, or hurling racial epithets in traffic.

At the age of 11, Martinez鈥檚 family moved from Delran, New Jersey, to the much Whiter town of Temperance, Michigan. She wound up in a largely childless neighborhood and started hanging out alone. She had trouble starting over and fitting in. She started dabbling in hippie and leftist culture, from early Vietnam War literature and The Autobiography of Malcolm X to The Beatles and the Beats. She also took solace in sports, where she had always thrived. But when she started attending a Catholic high school across the Ohio state line, she was no longer allowed to play. Though she was elected class president, she still didn鈥檛 feel like she fit in.

When Martinez was 14, two White men in their 20s forced her into sex at a party. She woke up the next morning with blood in her underwear and thought, 鈥淥K, I guess that really happened.鈥� Her next thought was 鈥淚 can鈥檛 tell my parents.鈥� It was the late 1980s, and she didn鈥檛 have today鈥檚 language and understanding of sexual assault and consent. She figured this was just the unfortunate way she had lost her virginity, and it would be about a decade before she realized it was rape.

She tried to move on, but the trauma metastasized into a burning rage. Her music and books started getting darker. She drifted from the skateboarders to the punks, then realized the angriest people at the punk shows, the ones always getting into fights, were the skinheads. She started listening to their White power music. Things continued to fall apart with her family. 鈥淭here is no access to goodness in me,鈥� she decided. 鈥淚t won鈥檛 be seen in me.鈥� So she turned to the skinheads, figuring she was joining people who couldn鈥檛 judge her and would have to take her in. After all, 鈥渨ho鈥檚 worse than the Nazis?鈥�

From the time she was 15 until she was 20, Martinez bounced around the country, living with her parents and various skinhead boyfriends. She said she dated five neo-Nazis, and four of them were physically abusive. Meanwhile, her own extremism mirrored her relationships: after the honeymoon phase, the isolation set in, and the violence started, and once it started, it escalated, and kept escalating. She became addicted to the sense of power her violence-based hate afforded her, and, in true addict form, she kept needing to take bigger and bigger risks to get the same payoff.

She posted racist flyers, including ones featuring images of lynchings, in neighborhoods and under windshield wipers and on the doors of houses of worship. She shouted racial epithets at strangers and neighbors. She started fights at shows over the tiniest of slights and jumped people of color for no apparent reason. She attended Klan rallies. She fell in with gun runners. She started engaging in paramilitary training, learning tactical maneuvers on paintball ranges and heading to the woods for target practice. She was convinced a long-promised race war was imminent. The work of dehumanization was demanding and constant.

One night, Martinez and her friends were driving in Houston and noticed the door to a gay nightclub was propped open. They hurled a can of tear gas through the door, closed it and blocked it from the outside with a cinderblock. Their plan was to head around back and beat people as they clamored through the exit. The only thing that stopped them was the approach of police sirens, and they fled the area.

It was around this time that Martinez, who was no longer welcome in her parents鈥� home, was in Texas and moved in with her then-boyfriend鈥檚 mother, a teacher named Carol Selby. Each time Martinez tells this part of her story, she insists she was an angry and imposing mess of a human when she showed up at Selby鈥檚 door.

But Selby remembers things differently. 鈥淚 thought she was cute,鈥� Selby says of Martinez. 鈥淪he had this real short hair and big eyes and a beautiful smile.鈥� Selby saw, or chose to see, not a vile skinhead, but more of a 鈥減recious little elf.鈥� And this perspective gave her young charge room to breathe. Martinez did dishes and helped take care of Selby鈥檚 younger sons and realized she didn鈥檛 want them to be exposed to her 鈥渟cumbag friends.鈥� For the first time in a long time, she began reflecting on the impact of her actions on other people. Within months, the White supremacist ideology, which Martinez had already begun to question, fell away.

But even as she was leaving, the movement was transforming. Quite intentionally, the . As Christian Picciolini, another former who was in the movement at the same time as Martinez, once told NPR, 鈥渙ur edginess, our look, even our language was turning away the average American White racist, people we wanted to recruit. So we decided then to grow our hair out, to stop getting tattoos that would identify us, to trade in our boots for suits and to go to college campuses and recruit there and enroll to get jobs in law enforcement, to go to the military and get training and to even run for office.鈥�

Michael Jensen has spent the last five years studying individuals who have radicalized in the United States and committed illegal acts motivated by their extremist belief systems. A senior researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, his dataset stretches back to 1948 and has . While it is not limited to any single ideology, one group stands out.

鈥淔ar-right perpetrators have committed more attacks in the United States than any other ideological group,鈥� Jensen says.

When it comes to the most recent trends, he says, 鈥渨hat we鈥檙e seeing really is a movement towards more of an emphasis on this kind of mass casualty terrorism that鈥檚 being motivated by far-right extremist ideologies.鈥�

Jensen鈥檚 assessment is echoed by several other institutions. A recent report by New Jersey鈥檚 Office of Homeland Security Preparedness showed that . And a separate report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) concluded that .

The ADL report also noted that last year was the fourth deadliest in terms of domestic extremist-related deaths since 1970. In first place is 1995, due in large part to the Oklahoma City bombing, which Jensen identifies as a 鈥渂ig watershed event.鈥� That attack caused an outpouring of research and law enforcement activity to be 鈥渇ocused on the extremist far right in the United States.鈥� Accordingly, 鈥渨e saw a number of law enforcement operations to disrupt the far right,鈥� he says.

鈥淎ll of that changed on Sept. 11.鈥�

After the 9/11 attacks, the federal government focused its massive resources almost exclusively on preventing Islamist terror attacks. 鈥淎ll while that鈥檚 happening, the extremist far right is still very active in the United States,鈥� Jensen says, adding 鈥渢hey鈥檙e not getting the attention that jihadists get.鈥� Until recently, Jensen adds, the media was following suit, making it harder for him and his team to even identify far-right crimes in the first place.

In 2009, a security analyst at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security named Daryl Johnson wrote a report that stated potentially driven by such factors as gun restrictions, economic uncertainty, immigration, a perceived rising influence of other countries that undermines American sovereignty, and the election of the first Black president. Republican lawmakers condemned the report and forced the department to retract it, ushering in an era of virtual silence on far-right violence, and of treating instances of far-right terrorism as hate crimes, which are classified as a lower priority and afforded fewer resources.

Even when the Obama administration reframed its counterterrorism work as 鈥淐ountering Violent Extremism,鈥� or CVE, few resources went to combatting right-wing extremism. In 2017, the administration issued a $400,000 grant to Life After Hate, a formers-led organization cofounded by Picciolini with which Martinez was volunteering at the time. (Neither is still involved with the group.) But the Trump administration changed the name of the administering office to the Office of Terrorism Prevention Partnerships, revoked the grant, and slashed the budget and staff.

In October 2018, as domestic terrorism incidents continued to mount, they only received a cursory mention in the administration鈥檚 National Strategy for Counterterrorism. It wasn鈥檛 until the end of the summer of 2019 and the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, that Kevin McAleenan, then the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security, issued a Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence that explicitly named White supremacist violence as a crucial threat to the nation. (McAleenan resigned Oct. 11, 2019.)

One of the formers with whom Martinez works is Caleb Cain, who was radicalized online from his home in West Virginia and recently left the far right. He explains his trajectory by drawing a five-tiered pyramid which he said he had climbed: from libertarian to conservative (watching Fox News, listening to Ben Shapiro) to civic nationalist (watching Alex Jones, reading Breitbart, following Lauren Southern and the Proud Boys). Cain said he was just about to advance to the next level, White nationalist fascist, which he defines as those who explicitly embrace fascism or neo-Nazism, or advocate for a White ethno-state, when he finally started to climb back down the pyramid. The only step left would have been accelerationist: those actively seeking to commit violence.

In Cain鈥檚 eyes, 鈥渃ivic nationalist鈥� is also the level President Trump occupies. Indeed, just a few days after McAleenan鈥檚 report, Trump went before the United Nations and delivered an explicitly nationalist speech. In doing so, he was continuing the pattern he set when he launched his campaign by referring to immigrants from Mexico as drug dealers and rapists, called for a Muslim ban, responded to Heather Heyer鈥檚 2017 murder at the Charlottesville 鈥淯nite the Right鈥� rally by arguing there 鈥渨ere very fine people on both sides,鈥� and uttered countless other far-right viewpoints.

Meanwhile, CVE work remains underfunded and poorly understood. Organizations like Life After Hate and Free Radicals (Picciolini and Martinez鈥檚 new group) are unregulated. There are no industry standards and few empirical studies to guide deradicalization work. Their lack of measurable outcomes, in turn, makes securing funding even harder.

Nonetheless, Picciolini says he鈥檚 helped hundreds of formers get out of violent extremism. Martinez says she鈥檚 worked with about 75, and that about a third of those have been intensive, ongoing relationships. She lands the occasional paid contract, as in the case of the research study, and sometimes鈥攂ut not always鈥攔eceives speaking fees. But most of her work is entirely unpaid.

鈥淎fter five years of that way of life,鈥� Martinez types to Adrian, 鈥淚 began to see how it really kept me looking at the world through victimhood, and that blaming/targeting Jews, blacks, and other races/ethnicities didn鈥檛 make me actually feel any safer or more empowered. It just kept my world really small and kept me focused on hurt and pain.鈥�

鈥淪o, your current position,鈥� Adrian responds, 鈥渋s a sort of centrist self-improvement drive?鈥�

A pattern was starting to emerge. Martinez would seek to explore the emotional needs that had drawn her鈥攁nd him鈥攖o violence-based extremism. Adrian would try to pin down her new ideology: what simple answer of hers had replaced the simple answer to which he was still clinging?

But she had no simple answer. Her unidimensional worldview was instead replaced with complexity. She tells him she doesn鈥檛 have a label for herself, nor does she know all the answers. 鈥淲hat are your biggest issues?鈥� she asks him, trying to pivot their conversation. But it doesn鈥檛 really matter if he answers, especially not during this first round. He is engaging with her, and that is enough for now.

One of the few things most experts agree on about extremists is that ideology is often secondary to the process of radicalization. In every case she鈥檚 ever encountered, Martinez said, she鈥檚 been able to identify some type of unhealed trauma. Sometimes it鈥檚 extreme, as in the case of a young woman interviewed for this story who was repeatedly raped as a child by her grandfather鈥攁nd then, once in the movement, raped again by a White nationalist boyfriend. Daisy (a pseudonym to protect her privacy) got out of the movement, then found out her father and grandmother had known about her grandfather鈥檚 abuse, and it was at that moment, Daisy said, that she almost killed her family members and shot up a church. She calls Martinez 鈥淢om鈥� and reaches out to her regularly for advice, encouragement, and in one case, financial support.

Sometimes the trauma is less extreme, but there are always fundamental and unmet needs, Martinez says: the need to love and be loved, to speak and be heard, and to be a part of something greater than yourself. Deradicalization involves identifying the trauma, and finding new resources, behaviors and networks outside extremist groups to meet those needs.

It鈥檚 grueling work, and Martinez isn鈥檛 exempt from what she refers to as 鈥渇ash fatigue鈥�: the exhaustion that comes from fighting fascism. When she feels really overwhelmed and wants to quit, she drives over to Moore鈥檚 Ford Bridge, less than half an hour from her house. It鈥檚 a nondescript span over the Apalachee River. There, in 1946, a White mob shot and killed two Black couples, among them a woman who was seven months pregnant. It鈥檚 widely considered to be the last documented mass lynching in America, and no one has ever been found guilty or held accountable.

鈥淔or me, it鈥檚 grounding,鈥� Martinez says. The bridge is a reminder, when she gets too steeped in books and studies and Twitter conversations, that this isn鈥檛 just about ideas. 鈥淭he reason that this [work] matters is that there are actual human beings who are harmed and communities that are devastated.鈥�

Too often, she says, White supremacy is seen as an extremist ideology belonging only to a small group of terrorists. 鈥淎nd so, we have something outside of us, as White people: that 鈥榖ad White supremacy out there,鈥� which then recuses us from having to do the internal work of identifying our own ways that we participate in and gain advantage from White supremacy.鈥�

There鈥檚 a temptation, she says, to blame it all on YouTube algorithms, or sinister terrorist recruiters, or other outside forces. But in fact, we are all implicated. 鈥淲e have to look at our children as potential White supremacist terrorists. And maybe that requires us to do something.鈥�

In 2018, Martinez took a few of her children to visit the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, which commemorates the lives of those who were killed at Moore鈥檚 Ford Bridge and thousands of others who were murdered in racial terror lynchings since the end of the Civil War. She watched as her son鈥檚 鈥�12-year-old consciousness came to terms with the reality.鈥� Afterwards, she said, they headed to the memorial鈥檚 sister site, the Legacy Museum. There, a security guard, noticing her devastated son, suggested she take the boy to get some ice cream and cheer him up. She couldn鈥檛, she told the guard. 鈥淚ce creaming it away is not going to help him as he grows up as a White man in America. It鈥檚 not going to help any of us.鈥�