Originally published at National Justice.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) intelligence program “Hatewatch” has declined heavily since the departure of Joseph T. Roy, but the law firm and left-wing extremist organization has over the years relied heavily on a small group of informants — overwhelmingly mentally unstable women — to blog about nationalist movement gossip, violate people’s privacy, and expose individuals to intimidation campaigns from adjacent communist and anarchist paramilitary groups.
Previously, National Justice exposed one operative, Katie McHugh, who decided to betray her friends for money.
Now, after an exhaustive investigation, National Justicecan report that 27-year-old American Airlines flight attendant Samantha Taylor Froelich of Farmers Branch, Texas, serves as the SPLC’s self-described Antifa activist Michael Edison Hayden’s “go to” for help obtaining information — some of it inaccurate and all of it outdated — of people she once crossed paths with during her stint (roughly from 2016-2018) as an alt-right activist.
Identity Evropa Women’s Coordinator
Froelich joined defunct group Identity Evropa in late 2016, according to media interviews she has done using only her first name.
While individuals familiar with Froelich recall that she was not very thoughtful, she was able to memorize slogans and use her sexuality to quickly rise through the ranks.
Eventually, Froelich became a relatively known organizer inside the alt-right despite her general lack of deep understanding of the politics or ideas involved. One individual characterized her as treating politics as more like a fad than a worldview, while three other individuals believe she may suffer from Borderline Personality Disorder.
Why She Left
According to two individuals familiar with Froelich, she began expressing concern of suffering personal financial or social retaliation for her political activism after the 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville.
She had agreed to do an interview with a Jewish activist named Glenna Gordon after the rally, where her photograph and information would be published in a New York Review of Books attack piece, then began expressing fears about what would happen when it would come out. At the time, there was widespread belief that Identity Evropa would be subjected to lawsuits for the rally and she did not want to be targeted.
Gordon then allegedly agreed to not publish her name in exchange for denouncing.the alt-right and collecting all the information she could find on her comrades and friends and giving it to hostile actors. Eventually, a network of Jewish journalists encouraged her to provide other people’s sensitive information to Antifa groups and the SPLC.
Informing On Her Friends
Froelich, along with McHugh, has provided the SPLC with almost everything it has published since 2018 on alt-right groups and individuals.
For example, two years ago it was Froelich who provided video of a private gathering during an event she attended. Froelich also provided the SPLC with a photograph of this journalist at a private meeting, though this was never published, likely to protect her collaboration.
She has also personally helped attempts at doxing numerous individuals in Identity Evropa and various other groups, which has subjected them to institutional retaliation like the loss of careers, as well as prolonged periods of violent threats from anarchist street gangs.
While Froelich claims in public that she fears imaginary neo-Nazis will pursue her for “leaving the movement” without providing any evidence, individuals whose lives she has ruined never held ill-will towards her and were hurt by her cowardly betrayal, they told National Justice.
Froelich’s behavior, in reality, was simply an amoral act of self-preservation, not motivated by fear of “white supremacists,” but fear of being persecuted by the media and NGO groups she now serves.
A Failed Attempt At Forming A “Re-Educated Racist” Career
While Froelich makes painstaking efforts to hide her full name, she does not hide her work with the SPLC on other front.
She has made numerous media appearances using her first name Samantha, including on the SPLC’s attempt at podcasting, “Sounds Like Hate.”
Like McHugh, Froelich publicly presents as a former white nationalist who suddenly saw the light and became a radical leftist.
While both women have been goaded into performing to bolster media narratives about “white supremacy” and “domestic terrorism,” neither of them appear to have had the success of individuals like Christian Picciolini in transitioning this into a lucrative scheme.
While left-wing activists are eager to use information provided to them by the occasional unscrupulous or cowardly “re-educated racist,” they do not ever truly “forgive” those who have ever engaged in thought crimes, making a life of loneliness and isolation the only reward for collaboration.
