"You don't know me but I just wanted to say hello," says a 50-ish man, clutching his drink and leaning in close. He recognized her — it’s Cassandra Fairbanks, isn’t it? — from Twitter.

Fairbanks nods and smiles graciously, albeit a little awkwardly. This happens to her a lot: People recognize her — her cascading blonde curls, aggressively pouty lips, sharply arched brows, the lyrics from a Bob Dylan song, tattooed on her collarbone, peeking out of her dress. This is what happens when you’re any kind of social media star, but especially a right-wing, unapologetic #MakeAmericaGreatAgain Donald Trump fan (“I love him,” she’s tweeted, on multiple occasions). People are kind of in awe that you actually exist.

She makes polite small talk with the man, taking long glugs of her cider. When he finally walks away, she exhales. "Twitter in real life," she laughs uncomfortably, as if she likes the Twitter part more than the real life part.

We’re at Shelly’s Back Room, an old-timey cigar bar a few blocks from the White House where the stench of smoke will linger on our clothes and in our hair until we all take vigorous showers. The venerated watering hole is the hub of conservative Washington, and tonight, a new group of right-wingers has gathered to celebrate its takeover of the Republican Party. It’s a Friday night in late February, near the end of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a four-day policy schmooze fest that marks the apex of the Republican social calendar. Unlike last year, when many Republicans still clung to the #NeverTrump mantle, this year’s attendees have, for the most part, coalesced around the president.

Fairbanks livestreams her friend Mike Cernovich speaking at the Deplorable party at Shelly’s cigar bar, in Washington, D.C. Rebecca Smeyne

Fairbanks’s friend Mike Cernovich, a fellow pro-Trump internet personality who has made his name in politics furthering unfounded conspiracy theories about, among other things, a pedophilia ring in Washington, D.C., organized this bash. Cernovich takes the mic and addresses the increasingly wasted crowd. “We have to send a message that we don't care what Paul Ryan, CPAC, all these — we don't care what they say! We're doing our own thing. We're doing our own movement.” As soon as Cernovich starts talking, Fairbanks pushes to the front of the crowd. Her iPhone is lifted above the scrum; she’s livestreaming the scene to Twitter with a grin. Finally, some action.

Fairbanks, like Cernovich, is a leader in the Deplorable movement, a once-fringe faction of the fractious right that sprang up to defend then-candidate Trump from his many detractors in the Republican Party and beyond. Fairbanks and Cernovich both parlayed their online followings — Fairbanks has more than 95,000 Twitter followers — into real-life cache and influence. The “Deplorable” name is a reference to Hillary Clinton’s campaign assertion that half of Trump’s supporters could be placed in a “basket of deplorables,” and the movement — also known as the “new right” — bears little resemblance to traditional conservative ideology. But it’s emerged as a fresh take on the GOP, rocking the Republican status quo.

Fairbanks hasn’t always been a Trump supporter, but she has always been drawn to the counterculture, what’s seen as edgy. In 2017, that happens to be the president. “Supporting Trump is pretty rebellious. You're getting hate from the right and the left,” she says. “His whole presidency is kind of like a rebellion against the establishment, or the neo-cons, and just D.C. in general, the way things were going. It's pretty punk rock.”

"Supporting Trump is pretty rebellious. ... It's pretty punk rock."

With her brash online persona, Fairbanks epitomizes this burgeoning, distinctly Trumpian cabal, which, just like Trump, eschews political correctness and aims to blow up politics as usual. And, like Trump, her winding journey to political prominence started in an unlikely place.

Twenty-five months before Fairbanks was celebrating Trump’s election win, she was in Ferguson, Missouri, shouting, “Fuck the police.” She went back and forth to the area over the course of three months, covering the aftermath of teenager Michael Brown’s death at the hands of a Ferguson police officer for the Free Thought Project, a site focused on "the promotion of liberty and the daunting task of government accountability." She posted photos and videos of the protests on Twitter and shared selfies of her red, bleary face after she was pepper-sprayed by a cop.

“Police are a fucking gang,” Fairbanks tweeted in December 2014. When an officer accidentally pepper-sprayed himself: “FUCK YES.”

Leigh Maibes, a St. Louis-area activist who got to know Fairbanks in Ferguson, says Fairbanks had a “balls to the wall” attitude. “Somebody would bust off a piece of a cop car. Pieces of it would go flying. Cassandra would disappear, and she would run [back] and be, like, ‘Oh my god, guys, I just had to go get a piece of this cop car! Like, this is the most awesome thing ever!’” Fairbanks called herself an anarchist and tweeted that she was “extremely unapologetic about it.”

A year before that, she was a sound technician living in Pittsburgh and organizing protests to call attention to the young woman in Steubenville, Ohio, who was repeatedly raped by two high school football players. She was active in Anonymous, a hacktivist collective, and helped run a popular Anonymous Twitter account. The collective’s biggest aim, Fairbanks told Glamour in a 2013 story about anti-rape activists, was “to let rapists know: If you guys do this, we will see you. And we’re going to make sure everyone else does, too.”



Fairbanks works on her laptop at CPAC. Rebecca Smeyne

In Ferguson, she says, her provocative posts caught the eye of the editor of Sputnik International, a Russian-owned news site. The site hired her in early 2015 and she moved to Washington, D.C., for the position. Soon after, she started to dip her brand of caustic commentary into the emerging presidential race. She reviled Hillary Clinton, tweeting that “the amount of disgust and disdain that consumes my entire body every time someone mentions Hillary Clinton is probably unhealthy.” Instead, she favored Clinton’s rival, Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders. “He is totally punk,” she wrote on Twitter in September 2015.

“I’ve loved him forever,” Fairbanks says. “He’s an independent. … Because he didn’t have party loyalty, he could look at things for what they were. And so, even if I didn’t agree with something he was doing, I respected the fact that he was able to do that.”

She respected it so much that, as the campaign heated up, she shelled out $19.99 a month for a Tinder Plus subscription so she could get unwitting matches to, ahem, swipe right on Sanders. “On the premium accounts, you can change your location,” she says. “I was changing my location to swing states and then being like, ‘Hey, who are you voting for?’ And then giving the whole spiel about why they should support Bernie.

“I was insane,” she tells me.

Meanwhile, she tweeted that Trump was a “lunatic” and a “monster” whose fans were “so fucking scary.” In a tweet from December 2015, she included him on a list of “things I hate,” below “sour cream” and “clowns.” A few months later, she opined: “Its [sic] so embarrassing how many people are willing to show their faces openly supporting Trump.”

But her allegiance to the left started to chip away, she says, when students at Emory University protested that the words “Trump 2016” had been written in chalk on campus, claiming that just seeing the candidate’s name caused them distress. “I always felt like free speech was a liberal issue,” she says, citing conservative protests of Marilyn Manson concerts and violent video games, which some felt glorified violence. “I feel like the left kind of left me on that one. I didn't leave the left; they just stopped caring about it.”

That’s when she started paying attention to another conservative provocateur, the inflammatory writer and Twitter troll Milo Yiannopoulos, who at the time worked for far-right news site Breitbart. As part of his “Dangerous Faggot Tour,” he spoke at Emory a few weeks after the chalk incident, decrying “oversensitive” students and advocating for free expression. Yiannopoulos had initially been invited to speak at CPAC but organizers rescinded his invitation after a damning video surfaced of Yiannopoulos appearing to condone pedophilia.

As we sit in the CPAC convention hall, Fairbanks defends him, explaining that she didn’t think he was serious when he said that being attracted to a “sexually mature” 13-year-old isn’t actually pedophilia. Yiannopoulos had just revealed that he was molested when he was 13, and she believes he was making light of the situation as a coping mechanism. Of the ensuing media firestorm: “I feel like it was a political hit job.”

As she became more disenchanted with the left, she started warming to Trump. She liked his views on education, particularly his promise to ax Common Core, because she blames the policy for her daughter’s complicated first-grade math homework. She liked that he, like Sanders, promised to pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a major trade agreement that critics say would have shipped more jobs overseas. She liked that he called the shooting at an LBGT nightclub in Orlando, Florida, a radical Islamic terrorist attack, rather than using it as an opportunity to push for more gun control (she has long been, as she puts it, “very pro-gun”; she wears a bullet necklace). She liked that he didn’t advocate for “needless war,” as she thought Clinton did. And during his March 2016 sit-down with the editorial board of the Washington Post, which some considered baffling, one particular sentiment struck a nerve.

“I watched as we built schools in Iraq and they’d be blown up,” Trump told the Post. “And we’d build another one and it would get blown up. And we would rebuild it three times. And yet we can’t build a school in Brooklyn. We have no money for education, because we can’t build in our own country. And at what point do you say, ‘Hey, we have to take care of ourselves?’”

That was a turning point for her, Fairbanks says. “I was like, This could have come from Bernie Sanders’s mouth.

“That was kind of the moment I was like, If it's not Bernie, it should be Trump.”

Fairbanks walks through the conference with a bag from the Breitbart pop-up store. Rebecca Smeyne

Fairbanks grew up in a small town in central Massachusetts, about an hour outside of Boston. In second grade, her class did a mock election where the kids split into teams for each candidate. “I had Ross Perot,” she tells me, “and I was so into it.” Her parents weren’t particularly political, but, in typical Massachusetts fashion, leaned liberal.



In high school, she was a part of the “counterculture” group, the kids who hung out with local bands, remembers Manda Rose Hendrickson, one of her friends at the time. She was “sort of a spitfire,” Hendrickson says. “A big personality but a sweetheart at heart.” Once, in high school, their friends tried to get Fairbanks — who, at age 3, saw Bambi and decided that she wouldn’t eat anything with a face ever again — to eat a bite of meat. But, Hendrickson recalls, she “stuck to her guns.”

Fairbanks is evasive about the specifics of her childhood, citing her concern that online trolls would harass her family, or otherwise “dox” her by publishing her private information. When I asked her to confirm that she went to a specific high school, she balked, writing in a Twitter DM: “Wow you’re going for the full dox huh?” She’s received graphic threats to her own safety, as well as her daughter’s, and was spit on when someone recognized her at Trump’s inauguration. “If psychos track down my relatives to start harassing because of too much information being published I will lose it,” she told me in another DM. “Just saying.”

She attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst to study physics, she says, but dropped out after a few months and moved to California. She went to the Los Angeles Recording School and became a sound engineer for bands in the Warped Tour vein (“I'm sure they don't want to be associated with me now that I support Trump, so I'm not going to say specifics,” she says).

She transitioned into activism, doing a stint at Greenpeace, protesting at SeaWorld and circuses. When WikiLeaks dumped documents from Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who leaked classified national security information, Fairbanks says she “became completely obsessed,” joining Twitter to follow the news. (She’s still an ardent supporter: She named her dog "Wiki" and brought her “Free Assange” tote bag to then-FBI director James Comey’s House Intelligence Committee hearing on Russia, in March.) After learning about incendiary social media from Anonymous and becoming more active on her personal Twitter account, she was offered a job writing for the Free Thought Project, which she did for almost a year. She wrote mostly about police brutality and honed her acerbic online voice. “I'll definitely tweet things just to be a jerk and rile people up,” she tells me. “I think it's funny. And I think that it's important to push the limits sometimes and force people to have uncomfortable conversations.” But, she concedes, “I'm definitely not as good at it as Milo.”

"I'll definitely tweet things just to be a jerk and rile people up."

But she doesn’t aspire to Yiannopolous levels of provocation. Fairbanks often regrets the more inflammatory things she says online, and frequently deletes her past tweets. “I tweet way too much. There's always things that I regret,” she says. “I'm sure my feed is filled with probably half of it. But … it's what I was thinking at that time. It's like regretting a tattoo or something.” (She has “probably 14 or 15” tattoos, she says.)

And her in-person disposition is much kinder than her social media persona. At the party at Shelly’s, when I mention that I’m chilly, she offers me her shawl, and she’s patient with the admirers who approach her for selfies.

Luke Rudkowski, who started the nonpartisan blog We Are Change, praises Fairbanks’s resilience in the face of criticism, especially when she announced that she supported Trump. “A lot of people would kind of crack under the pressure and not be as vocal as she is, but she remains steadfast and uncensored, which is very brave of her,” he says. In addition to their professional relationship — she’s written for his site — the two are close friends, and he says they enjoy, among other activities, putting on face masks while watching Tucker Carlson on Fox News. “She’s a very passionate human being that has a lot of core principles,” he says.



In March 2015, after photos of an overweight man dancing in public were posted on the anonymous chat board 4chan and the man was subsequently body-shamed online, Fairbanks initiated a search for “Dancing Man.” The hashtag #FindDancingMan spread across the internet, and in less than a day, she found him: Sean O’Brien, then a 47-year-old hotel financial controller in London. Fairbanks helped organized a dance party for him in the States, and she and O’Brien appeared on the Today show. They’ve kept in touch too; he flew to Washington to visit her in January of this year.



“She’s got a heart of gold,” O’Brien tells me, in a thick Liverpool accent. “She’s so humane. She’s so humble. She's great fun when you’re out with her.”

Fairbanks dances with Sean O’Brien, also known as “Dancing Man,” in May 2015. Getty

Though Fairbanks says she gained “like, 30,000 followers” on Twitter after the #FindDancingMan sensation, O’Brien says she wasn’t doing it to raise her profile. “She was just very passionate about negativity on the internet.”

How could someone who launched an international quest to find and comfort a victim of cyberbullying be drawn to a politician who has attacked federal judges, teenagers, former beauty queens, reporters, a Gold Star family, and many, many others with impunity? I pose this to Fairbanks when I meet her: “Do you see any contradiction, I guess, in—”

She knows where I’m going. “People ask me that all the time,” she interrupts, sounding annoyed. “I don't. Because I think that a lot of the stuff about Trump is a little bit exaggerated,” she says. “He can be a little bit abrasive. I wouldn't necessarily call him a bully. I think that he — he can be a little bit too straightforward, perhaps. But, ultimately, it was more about the policies than the person. So, I wasn't voting for a personality. I was voting for who is going to keep us out of World War III.”

Just a few months into his presidency, though, he’s just barely holding on to that promise. After Trump launched 59 Tomahawk missiles on an air base in Syria in April, Fairbanks felt betrayed. “I still support Trump. For now,” she tweeted. “Intensely disappointed, however.” Another tweet ended: “#NoWar <3.”

But she’s willing to overlook other divergences. “I wish that he was more concerned about environmental issues,” Fairbanks tells me during CPAC. “Like, a lot.” He’s said climate change is a Chinese scam, I remind her. His EPA chief has regularly fought the mission of the agency he leads. Does that worry you?

“There's some concern,” she concedes, “But I'm waiting until something terrible happens before I react. I don't want to prematurely freak out or panic. I'm trying to just have faith in the people around him. I thought it was great that he met with Al Gore.” This is the second time she’s brought up Al Gore as an antidote to Trump’s shortcomings on the environment.

As a Steubenville activist, she fought for justice for a victim of rape. But after Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood tape came out, and at least a dozen women accused him of sexual assault and harassment, Fairbanks tells me she was suspicious of their claims. “There were no claims of it before the campaign,” she says. “If he sexually assaulted somebody, why didn't they speak up and sue him? He was already famous and he's wealthy.”

"If he sexually assaulted somebody, why didn't they speak up and sue him?"

So the women that came forward after that, I say, did you just think they were full of shit?

“I mean, I tried not — I feel like everybody deserves to be heard and generally you should believe people, because why would they lie about something like that? But the timing, I think, was a little bit suspicious. Why wouldn't they have spoke out about this before? I mean, he was already very well-known. He was, you know — but on the other hand, once one person does it, it does make it easier for the next person to do it if they had been holding something in. So it — it was a little bit of a disturbing moment. But, again, ultimately, I had to [choose] policies over the person.”



Fairbanks’s sharp veer right has turned people against her. When I call Leigh Maibes, the activist who met her in Ferguson, I start explaining that I’m working on a profile of Fairbanks, as a member of the pro-Trump media.

Maibes interrupts, correcting me: “A sellout,” she says. “I hate to speak ill of the dead, but that’s what she is to us.”

Maibes and other liberal activists feel betrayed by Fairbanks and are skeptical that she had an ideological change of heart. “Cassandra has had a history of stepping from movement to movement to movement,” Maibes says. “And now she's this? Within a few months? Give me a break.”

"I hate to speak ill of the dead, but that’s what she is to us."

Fairbanks’s “transformation,” says Emmi Einstein, who worked with her on the Anonymous Twitter account, “was incredible to watch. Like a butterfly dying in reverse.” Both Einstein and Maibes cite Fairbanks’s desire to be part of the counterculture, the rebellious cutting edge, as part of her shift. “She just wants be the girl in the scene,” Einstein says. And once she lands, she becomes a devoted disciple. Says Maibes: “Whatever Cassandra does, she goes all in.”

And then there are the allegations that she’s a Russian operative, a pawn in the confirmed Russian plot to meddle in the election and swing things to Trump. In February, Louise Mensch, a former British member of Parliament who has floated a series of unfounded conspiracy theories, claimed in a lengthy blog post that Fairbanks was a part of a far-ranging Russian plot to frame Anthony Weiner, which gave the FBI an excuse to seize his computer, resulting in Comey’s letter to Congress, and therefore tilted the election to Trump. The 15-year-old girl Weiner was sexting, Mensch claimed, was actually a Russian hacker.

According to a government intelligence report released in January, Sputnik, where Fairbanks worked until last week, “contributed to the influence campaign by serving as a platform for Kremlin messaging to Russian and international audiences.” And along with the news channel RT, the Russian site gave increasingly favorable coverage to Trump, while “consistently offering negative coverage of Secretary Clinton.”

Fairbanks calls the claims that she was involved in a plot to sway the election “bizarre” and has filed a complaint with the FBI against Mensch, with whom she has a longstanding feud. “Louise Mensch, a former British MP living in New York, has been engaging in a months long campaign of cyber stalking and harassment against me. She has published outlandish claims about me ranging from accusations of plastic surgery, to sex scandals, to allegations of treasons,” she wrote in a portion of the complaint she shared on Twitter. Fairbanks, for her part, has tweeted that she "giggled" when Mensch was doxed. (Mensch didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.)

“I actually know very little about Russian politics, to be honest.”

Fairbanks does claim, however, that she communicated with Guccifer 2.0, the online persona that last summer hacked a trove of documents from the Democratic National Committee and leaked them to WikiLeaks. Emails revealed in the dump made it seem like the DNC had worked to fix the primary for Clinton and added to the confluence of events that ultimately doomed her campaign. The January intelligence report assessed “with high confidence” that Russian intelligence had used the Guccifer 2.0 persona to give material to WikiLeaks. Fairbanks tweeted screenshots of her conversations with Guccifer 2.0, writing that because the persona told her, “I don’t like Sputnik coz it’s Russian,” that the hacker was “not a creature of Russia.” She also denies knowing much about the country that paid her. “I actually know very little about Russian politics, to be honest,” she tells me.

“She's a useful idiot,” says Joe Fionda, a former hacktivist who briefly worked with Fairbanks at Sputnik in 2015. Fionda has a thick New York accent, bushy mutton chops, and wears an “Our Democracy Has Been Hacked” shirt. He says everyone who worked at Sputnik at the time was aware that they were a cog in the Russian disinformation machine, but according to Fionda, who says he earned $50,000, the salaries make the propaganda aspect of the job easy to ignore. “I didn't think she really gave much thought” to her outlet’s Russia ties, he says.

After I spoke with several of Fairbanks’s critics, I asked Fairbanks if we could schedule another interview so, among other things, she could respond to their claims. But by that point, she was already upset that I’d reached out to her high school friend and no longer wanted to talk. “I would never have agreed to this if I realized what a pain in the ass it was going to be,” she DMed me.

Then she unfollowed me on Twitter.

Fairbanks shares an Uber with Patrick Howley, a former Breitbart writer who now runs the new site Big League Politics. Rebecca Smeyne

Whatever the motivations for her political 180, Fairbanks’s timing was felicitous. She hopped on the Trump train right as a new movement was blossoming. She and her cohort reject the “alt-right” label — the name for the far-right fringe group that spurns mainstream conservatism and promotes white nationalism — in favor of “Deplorables” or the “new right.” But the lines are inextricably muddled.



Cernovich says that the rise of the new right — and, therefore, Trump — can be attributed, at least in part, to Democrats’ “identity politics.” If you’re “just a regular person who has student loan debt, you want to be able to find a good job and live kind of a nice life,” he says. Democrats “don't have an answer for you. The Democrats say, ‘Are you a woman? Are you a Muslim? Are you transgender? Are you a white man? Are you gay? Are you this, are you that?’ They plug in the little boxes and that's all they talk about.”



Cernovich first gained prominence as an anti-feminist activist who wrote a blog on how to pick up women, writing, for instance, that “misogyny gets you laid.” He’s since become one of Trump’s fiercest defenders. (Cernovich denies that his message was serious and sometimes that he even wrote his posts at all: “A lot of things attributed to me weren't even, I didn't even — multiple people had access to my account.”) He and Fairbanks covered protests together at the Democratic National Convention, and when he began organizing the DeploraBall, an inauguration celebration, he sought her input, specifically, he tells me, on flowers and decorations. “We knew a lot of women were going to be there and we wanted it to look nice, and we wanted everybody to feel welcome,” he says. “And she was important in getting advice for that.”

Last month, he and Fairbanks caused a media firestorm when she tweeted a photo of them in the White House briefing room making what, to some, looked like a white supremacist hand gesture. (Fairbanks vehemently denies this interpretation, tweeting that it was simply the universal sign for “OK.”)

That this faction associates with the right at all is damaging to conservatism, says Dana Loesch, a conservative talk radio host. “It goes down to the definition of what conservative is, which I believe is e pluribus unum. It is about preserving the rights and liberties of the individual,” she tells me. Though Loesch had never heard of Fairbanks before our conversation, in early April, she says the kind of “right” Fairbanks and Cernovich preach is only a “tiny fringe of the right. The things that they espouse are completely anti-e pluribus unum. They are completely opposite of conservatism.”

Fairbanks admits that she doesn’t fit neatly into the traditional conception of the Grand Ole Party, and she regularly pillories establishment Republicans (“put him in a home already,” she's tweeted of Arizona Sen. John McCain). But her somewhat awkward place in the party mirrors the president she so strongly supports. “I feel like Trump kind of nails where I stand on a lot of things,” she says. “And I don't think he really fits into the Republican Party, either.”

Fairbanks mingles at the Deplorable party at Shelly’s. Rebecca Smeyne

This month, Fairbanks announced that she was joining the staff of Big League Politics, a new site edited by former Breitbart writer Patrick Howley. (The name refers to Trump's penchant for using the words "big league" as an adverb.) After attending a Deplorable soirée hosted by Yiannopoulos in Miami earlier this month (where the dress code stipulated “cocaine dealer chic”), Fairbanks wrote in a story on the site: “This party highlighted the fact that the new right is the hip new counter culture — as those who stand for free speech will always be cooler than those wishing to silence it.”



In a climate of what they view as intolerance to Trump supporters, Deplorables have to band together. “We gotta kind of stick up for each other at this point,” Fairbanks tells me.

Still, there’s an upside to being so publicly vilified. “It’s like that phrase, ‘haters make me famous.’ It’s true. The more the left attacks somebody, the more famous they’re gonna get,” she says. We’re talking about Trump and his implausible rise, but it could just as easily apply to hers. “There’s no such thing as bad press for somebody who’s trying to get their name out there, you know?”

Follow Rebecca on Twitter.