Katie McHugh, now 28 (pictured at an earlier age), who was fired from Breitbart in 2017 for tweeting racist comments about Muslim people, now claims she's changed and has turned her back on the 'alt-right' movement which made her Internet famous

Katie McHugh, who was fired from Breitbart in 2017 for tweeting racist comments about Muslim people, now claims she's changed and has turned her back on the 'alt-right' movement which made her Internet famous.

In an interview with Buzzfeed, McHugh, now 28, details how a lonely college experience and an early, long-term romance with white nationalist Kevin DeAnna led her down a path that encouraged her 'vindictiveness and capacity for cruelty.'

'I take full responsibility for everything I said, every mistake I made, anyone who I hurt in this process, period,' McHugh said, while detailing the path she took to where she is today, struggling to find employment and to pay her medical bills for diabetes.

Unable to get her own essay about her reckoning with an ugly past published, McHugh eventually agreed to share the story of her journey with Buzzfeed, but not before becoming a source for the website, exposing media and political connections of the alt-right.

She said she takes responsibility for tweeting things like, 'There would be no deadly terror attacks in the U.K. if Muslims didn't live there,' (inset) as she did on June 3, 2017, which got her fired from Breitbart, but that the outlet encouraged her to be vindictive and cruel

It was a tweet in 2017 that started the unraveling of what looked like a promising career as an ultra-conservative media personality, with not-so-secret ties to white nationalists

It was a tweet in 2017 that started the unraveling of what looked like it could have become a promising career as an ultra-conservative media personality, with not-so-secret ties to white nationalists.

While working for Breitbart, which was founded by Steve Bannon and who once declared it 'the platform for the Alt-Right,' McHugh tweeted on June 3, 2017:

'There would be no deadly terror attacks in the U.K. if Muslims didn't live there.'

At that time, Bannon had left the site to work for President Donald Trump's administration as chief strategist and senior counselor.

McHugh was promptly fired, but according to her own account the Muslim tweet wasn't even her most offensive post.

Some other notable tweets include:

'Funny how Europeans assimilated, unlike Third Worlders demanding welfare while raping, killing Americans,' and 'British settlers and their descendants built civilization. Indians never bothered to build more than a few teepees,' both posted in September of 2015, while she was working for Breitbart.

She also wrote: 'Another Crusade would do a lot of good. Let’s turn Mecca into a strip mall!'

McHugh was promptly fired, but according to her own account the Muslim tweet wasn't even her most offensive post

'Funny how Europeans assimilated, unlike Third Worlders demanding welfare while raping, killing Americans,' she posted in September of 2015, while working for Breitbart

'I was a racist, certainly,' she admits. 'And I patted myself on the back, saying, "Well, I’m not, you know, some kind of Cro-Magnon racist. I just believe that they’re violent and unruly,"' referring to nonwhite people.

But McHugh now claims she has changed, and has seen the error of her ways.

In the profile she says her first move toward white nationalism came with an application for a 2011 fellowship at the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS).

The group is a nonprofit organization with ties to George Mason University and claims to promote 'classical liberalism' and libertarianism on college campuses. It grants fellowships to students.

In applying, McHugh connected with the then-program director John Elliott, who personally responded to her application with praise for her love of Joe Sobran, a syndicated columnist who late in his career questioned Holocaust history. He died in 2010.

She said his death and her subsequent search for his obituaries led her to find VDare and American Renaissance, two online publications associated with white supremacy.

Around the time she applied for the fellowship with IHS, she had been writing a column for her school newspaper at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, including one where she wrote, the 'homosexual movement, a liberal sub–faction, proliferates like melanoma.'

Elliott advised her that she should take an internship as a journalist, and return to writing columns later in her career after she had learned the principles of reporting, according to an email provided by McHugh.

'John essentially selected me to come to D.C. as part of the libertarian–alt-right pipeline,' McHugh said of Elliott, who placed her in an internship with the Daily Caller, founded by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel.

Elliott took issue with this characterization, telling Buzzfeed via email:

'I chose Katie to mentor as a libertarian, not as a member of the "alt-right." The "alt-right" didn’t exist in 2011, and I’ve had no connection with the "alt-right" since it was invented. I tried to be a mentor and a friend to Katie for a decade, even as she went down some of the dark paths of those fringe groups. But her decision to go down those paths had nothing to do with me. I truly feel bad for her.'

It was Elliott who invited McHugh to dinner with Holocaust denier David Irving in 2013, a few months after she started dating DeAnna, who was heavily enmeshed in the white supremacy movement.

In an interview with Buzzfeed, McHugh details how a lonely college experience and an early, long-term romance with white nationalist Kevin DeAnna (pictured) led her down a path that encouraged her 'vindictiveness and capacity for cruelty'

McHugh said it was easy to align with white supremacists, because they had been rebranding white nationalism as something more benign. McHugh said if she had thought her behavior was not allowed, she would have stopped, but it seemed to be dismissed so she continued

'I was a white nationalist,' McHugh told Buzzfeed in a text message. 'I wasn’t completely aligned with Irving’s anti-Semitism, but I was compelled to his ideas for the wrong reasons. Ideas which now horrify me.'

McHugh said it was easy to align with white supremacists, because they had been rebranding white nationalism as something more benign.

'They didn’t have swastikas covering their foreheads,' she said. They were 'polished, sophisticated.'

There was also an allure to the superiority they claimed, she said. 'There’s a very high culture aspect to it,' she added, noting the value placed on genetics and IQ within the group.

'They think that people with [a] high IQ confers them with some kind of super ability and makes them leaders, natural leaders,' she said.

After college McHugh went to work full-time at the Daily Caller, where she eventually worked alongside Scott Greer, who while working there wrote racist long form essays under a pseudonym for Richard Spencer’s website Radix Journal.

Spencer is president of the National Policy Institute, a white supremacist think tank. McHugh revealed Greer's anonymous side gig to Buzzfeed, which reported it in September of 2018.

McHugh eventually moved on to Breitbart in April of 2014, where her ties to white nationalists started to garner attention, but seemed to be tolerated by the website.

She would often spend weekends at the home of VDare's Peter Brimelow, who was a friend of DeAnna's.

In August of 2015, she was called out over email for her posts by Breitbart Texas editor Brandon Darby, who wrote:

'Katie, You just retweeted 9 times in row retweets from Adolf Joe Biden, an open member of the American Nazi Party. They were tweets defending you. I am very concerned with your racially-tinged tweets, the fact that most of the American Nazi Party members follow you and commune with you, and the fact that most of the Ku Klux Klan accounts follow you and do the same. What is going on here?'

Bannon, who was copied in along with then-editor Alex Marlow, replied, 'WTF. Katie call me ASAP.'

Darby then wrote, 'I think you are a white supremacist. Am I correct? He is not a parody account at all and you know it.'

To that, Bannon wrote, 'Brandon stop.' McHugh then replied, writing:

'Dropping Brandon,' referring to removing Darby from the chain, she told Bannon that the account, @bidenshairplugs, was actually 'a popular parody account that's been around for years with tens of thousands of conservative fans.'

She continued: 'The Left and Right play low and dirty. They know that if they act outraged, someone will get scared and apologize, and then they win. I retweeted someone who defended me against Hollywood people calling me a ‘human centipede’ and other adorable names. So too bad that upsets him more than the well-fed right hurling repulsive insults at an editor for a website they trash non-stop. Twitter has a 'mute' button which I use frequently for good reason.'

The account @bidenshairplugs was later suspended from Twitter and resurfaced on Gab, a site known for being friendly to white nationalist accounts.

McHugh said if she had thought her behavior was not allowed, she would have stopped, but it seemed to be dismissed at Breitbart so she continued.

In 2016, a Daily Beast reporter contacted Breitbart about McHugh's role in going after Bannon's enemies and inquired about her tweets, including one about deporting 'anchor babies' to keep families of immigrants who have to the come to the U.S. illegally together.

To that, Marlow replied, 'Neither Steve nor I are big fans of Twitter, but after reviewing these tweets, we’re considering giving Katie a weekly column.'

In 2016, a Daily Beast reporter contacted Breitbart about McHugh's role is going after Steve Bannon enemies (pictured) and inquired about her tweets, including one about deporting 'anchor babies' to keep families of immigrants who have to the come to the US illegally together. To that, Marlow replied, 'Neither Steve nor I are big fans of Twitter, but after reviewing these tweets, we’re considering giving Katie a weekly column'

McHugh told Buzzfeed, 'They thought my mean tweets were funny. My horrible jokes.'

As her role grew at Breitbart and she became a producer on Bannon's SiriusXM show, McHugh said she found herself increasingly isolated.

'These alt-right people were often, like, the only friends I had besides my work colleagues,' she said.

When her employment at Breitbart ended, she briefly found work with far-right political activist Charles C. Johnson, who also questions Holocaust history.

That working relationship began to deteriorate around the time McHugh wrote a piece critical of the methods employed at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where counter-protester Heather Deyer was murdered by a man who drove a car into a crowd.

McHugh admits she was still a white nationalist then.

It's not clear exactly what turned her away from white supremacy in the profile, but the article suggests her ousting from the spotlight at Brietbart, which led to her falling on hard times, played a role.

Whatever it was, McHugh now has a message for those who have found their way to the fringes.

'People like me should be given a chance to recognize how bad this is and that the alt-right is not a replacement for any kind of liberal democracy whatsoever, any kind of system; they have no chance, and they’re just harmful,' McHugh said.

'There is forgiveness, there is redemption. You have to own up to what you did and then forcefully reject this and explain to people and tell your story and say, "Get out while you can."'