Colton Brown, who lived with his father and stepmother in a single-story house outside Seattle, earned about fifty thousand dollars a year as an assistant electrician—but his real passion was fascism. In recordings of his private conversations, he argued that an “international cabal” of “hook-nosed bankers” was conspiring to replace white Americans like him with people of non-European descent, and he expressed alarm that the U.S. population would soon be less than half “ethnic American.” This so-called “great replacement” may have felt personal: his stepmother was Vietnamese. Brown, who has blue eyes and short, wavy blond hair, wore clothing with Nazi iconography, believed that white people deserved their own ethnostate, and told his dad that other races could “go to hell.”
In 2021, when Brown was twenty-two, he became a regional director of Patriot Front—one of the most active of the white-nationalist, neo-fascist, and anti-government organizations that academic researchers collectively characterize as the modern far right. (Such groups lie beyond even the fringes of the Republican Party.) Patriot Front’s leaders routinely summoned members to travel across the country, on short notice, for demonstrations: hundreds of young white men marched in identical uniforms, with protective helmets disguised as baseball caps, and neck gaiters pulled over their faces. At some rallies, Brown shouldered one of the tall metal shields that Patriot Front members were trained to use in street battles. The members frequently marched through racially diverse neighborhoods, almost baiting residents into fights (while maintaining that marchers would never throw a first punch).
The organization placed Brown in charge of a crew of a dozen men. He led them on nocturnal expeditions around Seattle, to plaster public spaces with Patriot Front propaganda. They stole Black Lives Matter and gay-pride signs, and spray-painted white-nationalist slogans and symbols over public art promoting tolerance or racial justice. His crew posed, masked, for photographs while on long hikes together, and they trained for street brawls by sparring with one another in boxing gloves. Sometimes they were invited to participate in “fight club” competitions with other white nationalists.
Like a pyramid scheme, Patriot Front effectively paid for its operations by amassing new members. Brown required his team to buy all sorts of supplies—badges, banners, posters, stickers, graffiti stencils—exclusively from the organization. An order of stickers was forty-five dollars, a rectangular badge was five, a round one was ten. Patriot Front’s founder, Thomas Rousseau—a twenty-five-year-old from an affluent suburb of Dallas, whose manifesto for the group maintains that the only true Americans are “descendants of Europeans”—told members that, without their repeated expenditures, “I can’t pay rent anymore. And then I have to get a job.”
Brown’s crew often tried to enlist men from other far-right groups, such as the Proud Boys. But he was always on the lookout for undercover F.B.I. agents. He was aware that Patriot Front’s vandalism (and occasional street fighting) broke the law, and could be met with increased penalties under civil-rights statutes. “Rule No. 1 is don’t get caught,” he often told his crew. “No face, no case. Nobody talks, everybody walks.” Yet he couldn’t be that picky in his vetting process; after all, he was under pressure to increase membership. Nor could the movement expect every new member to be already “fashed out”—fully fascist. One of Patriot Front’s goals was to lure more mainstream MAGA types into the far right. Brown assessed applicants by quizzing them about their political evolution and influences, and about what future they foresaw for white people. As a “pro-white” organization, of course, the group required recruits to be Caucasian themselves. After a teen-age applicant admitted that he was a quarter Filipino, others in the Seattle crew recommended rejecting him. (“His phenotypes are wack as fuck,” one complained.) But the recruit responded that Hitler’s Nuremberg race laws would have allowed him to have sex with an Aryan woman. What could they say? He’d out-Nazi-ed the neo-Nazis. The teen was let in.
Another recruit, whom they code-named Vincent Washington, was a much easier call. He had read Patriot Front’s manifesto and understood the need for a white homeland; at six feet four and about two hundred and twenty pounds, and trained in martial arts, he could also fight well. After Vincent joined Patriot Front, in July, 2021, he threw himself into even mundane chores, such as making banners. (At Halloween, he proposed carving “very fascist” jack-o’-lanterns.) He also turned out to be a skilled photographer, and used a high-end camera to take pictures of the group’s rallies and vandalism. Thanks to his skill and utility, Brown and Rousseau quickly began including Vincent in private online meetings that Patriot Front held for planning and coördination. One member recently told me, in an e-mail, that Vincent’s “nice camera and good experience” had likely sped his ascent in the group, and that Vincent had displayed a remarkable enthusiasm “to take part in any and all activism.”
Early that December, Rousseau summoned every available member to Washington, D.C., where the group planned to march without a permit on the National Mall. The Seattle contingent met at the airport. But Vincent didn’t show up. Although initially surprised, the crew soon learned why: Vincent wasn’t actually their ally. He’d made off with a huge cache of internal information, which documented everything from their bigoted and misogynistic rants to their recruitment methods and vandalistic exploits.
Vincent wasn’t a Fed, though. He was one of a growing number of far-left vigilantes who are infiltrating the far right. Sometimes such impostors adopt false online personas in order to gain entrance to chat groups or private servers. Others, like Vincent, go undercover in the real world, posing as white nationalists to attend meetings and demonstrations. Some even participate in low-level crimes in order to establish their credibility—almost like undercover F.B.I. agents do, though they lack any of the protections, training, or restraints that come with a badge.
Rebecca Weiner, the deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism for the New York Police Department, told me that “part of the complexity of today’s Internet-driven threat environment is that law enforcement doesn’t have a monopoly on intelligence gathering anymore.” Amateur spies such as Vincent have become common enough that they pose “operational challenges.” She went on, “Government agencies collecting human intelligence have systems to deconflict with each other, but it muddies the waters considerably when you have civilians impersonating bad guys.” Such vigilantes can place themselves in life-threatening danger, Weiner said, and their ruthless exposure of far-right groups “can certainly ruin lives,” by getting members fired from their jobs or shunned by their communities. Still, she acknowledged, the disclosures could be useful. “The spectre of infiltration by Antifa is, in some ways, as inhibiting for far-right extremists as concern about infiltration by law enforcement,” Weiner said. “In fact, sometimes they are even more worried about their adversaries than they are about cops.”
Patriot Front has just a few hundred members, and scholars who study the far right say that only about a hundred thousand Americans actively participate in organized white-nationalist groups. But the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021—and the deadly riot in Charlottesville before that—proved that even just a few hundred organized men can spearhead a devastating, history-making mob. Moreover, the far right’s online promotion of the great-replacement theory to countless sympathizers is accumulating an ominous death toll. In the past decade, lone gunmen inspired by far-right propaganda have killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston (2015), eleven Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh (2018), twenty-three Walmart shoppers in El Paso (2019), and ten Black residents of Buffalo (2022). Inside Patriot Front and across the far right, these mass murderers are venerated with the title of “saint”—as in “Saint Dylann Roof,” who carried out the Charleston massacre. (Roof’s name was chanted at the Unite the Right rally, in Charlottesville, in 2017.) Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor at American University who studies extremist violence and sometimes advises the White House and the F.B.I., told me that Patriot Front’s marches and vandalism—even if they appear merely performative—“are intended to normalize these ideas, to help mobilize other people, to make them think that there’s a groundswell, to inspire violent action. And it’s effective.”
This year’s Presidential campaign drew its first blood with the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, at a rally in Pennsylvania on July 13th, which resulted in the death of one attendee. F.B.I. officials have said that the shooter apparently maintained a social-media account, active in 2019 and 2020, in which he endorsed political violence and expressed antisemitic and anti-immigrant rhetoric that was “extreme in nature.” The shooting itself, however, does not appear to have been ideologically motivated—before Trump’s rally, the shooter evidently searched for targets in both parties. The F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security have since warned of potential “follow-on or retaliatory acts of violence,” noting that “individuals in some online communities” are threatening or encouraging revenge attacks. Rousseau, of Patriot Front, has portrayed the assassination attempt as a sign that white MAGA supporters should do more than simply vote for Trump. “You’ve done that twice already and Our People are worse off than we were before,” he wrote on Telegram. “You must organize outside the system with others of Our People. Tribe & Train, build power, start to resist or cease to exist.” (He placed triple parentheses around “system”—a notation that is far-right code for “Jewish.”)
Trump has thrilled white nationalists from the moment he entered national politics—sowing doubt about Barack Obama’s birthplace, denigrating immigrants as criminals and rapists, bemoaning “shithole countries” in Africa and the Caribbean. Rousseau once told a journalist that although he understood why Trump could support white nationalism only indirectly, his rhetoric was nonetheless “encouraging,” adding, “Sometimes he even utters some truth about the Jew.” Trump recently complained to Time that the United States suffers from “a definite anti-white feeling” and “a bias against white,” which he vowed to end if he returned to the White House.
The F.B.I., which has worked to protect Americans from extremist violence since the nineteen-twenties, when it took on the Ku Klux Klan, has warned of a resurgence of the far right. Near the end of Trump’s term in office, the Department of Homeland Security declared for the first time that domestic violent extremists, rather than foreign terrorists, were “the most persistent and lethal threat” to the nation, primarily in the form of “lone offenders and small groups.” Christopher Wray, the F.B.I.’s director, clarified to a congressional committee that the threat was largely from adherents to “some kind of white-supremacist-type ideology.” Then came the storming of the Capitol. President Joe Biden, on his first day in office, commissioned White House staff to draft the first-ever “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.” The document, issued in June, 2021, promised “a comprehensive approach to addressing the threat while safeguarding bedrock American civil rights and civil liberties.”
This past spring, I visited the headquarters of the F.B.I., a brutalist hulk of a building in Washington, D.C. Four F.B.I. officials, all of whom spoke on the condition that I not name them, joined me in a small office. I expected to hear about the Bureau’s accomplishments under that strategy, but the first thing I learned was the F.B.I.’s special vocabulary for political violence. The officials explained that the F.B.I. avoids using the term “far right.” They insisted that we instead talk about a more neutral category: “domestic violent extremism,” or D.V.E. Nor does the agency track violence by white nationalists as a category. The F.B.I. favors the broader rubric of “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism,” or remve, which can include militant chauvinists of any race. (For a time during the Trump Administration, the Bureau referred to “Black-identity extremists,” as if such militants were regularly shooting up predominantly white churches and supermarkets.) Far-right militias fall under the category of “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism,” or AGAAVE, which could also include, for example, the leftists protesting Cop City, outside Atlanta. The officials acknowledged that their codifications could be confusing.
Liberal critics of the F.B.I. complain that its laboriously nonpartisan terminology hides the disproportionately greater size and lethality of the current threat from the right. According to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, at the University of Maryland, between 2012 and 2022 far-right extremists killed two hundred and nine people; the far left killed thirty-seven. (Most of that violence took place after Trump’s election, including a hundred and fifty of the killings by the far right.) Yet the F.B.I.’s odd taxonomy serves a purpose: it avoids any hint that the agency is basing investigative choices on an antipathy toward certain political beliefs. The officials repeatedly reminded me that the First Amendment protects even the most abhorrent bigotry. One of them noted, “We will not investigate people for being antisemitic, because it is not illegal.” And ever since the Senate’s Church Committee revealed, in 1975, that the F.B.I. had conducted politically motivated surveillance of civil-rights leaders, environmentalists, and others on the left, agency bureaucrats have feared the wrath they would face from Congress and the public if they were again caught crossing that line.
Once I had mastered the lingo, one of the officials, a senior intelligence analyst, told me that around 2018 the F.B.I. began seeing an increase in racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists—in particular, “individuals espousing the superiority of the white race.” The toll from domestic terrorism continued to rise: the year 2019 was the deadliest since 1995, when Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City. By 2021, the F.B.I. had more than doubled the number of analysts at its headquarters who focussed primarily on domestic violent extremism.
But if I thought that the Biden Administration’s national strategy signified a crackdown, the officials told me, I was mistaken. The strategy focussed on prevention, especially on enlisting local authorities and the public to look out for telltale signs that an individual—on either the left or the right—was moving toward extremist violence. Federal law-enforcement agencies distributed forty thousand copies of a previously published booklet enumerating “violent extremism mobilization indicators,” including “disseminating one’s own martyrdom or last will video or statement” and “conducting a dry run of an attack or assault.” But the F.B.I. officials told me that the agency’s fundamental approach to the problem “didn’t change” under the Biden Administration.
In fact, the officials said, the First Amendment meant that there was little more that law enforcement could do to stop extremist violence. One of the officials told me that respecting constitutional rights is “probably the hardest part of the job on the domestic-terrorism front,” in part because it requires understanding that “rhetoric and intent are two different things.” Glorifying violence against a minority—even wishing aloud for it—is free speech: “Only when that moves to, say, plotting to kill Jewish people and planning to burn down a synagogue—that is when the F.B.I. can open an investigation.”
The officials refused to discuss specific far-right organizations known for engaging in property crime or street fighting, such as Patriot Front and the Proud Boys. The U.S. designates numerous foreign organizations, including Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, as terrorists, and many other countries, including the U.K., ban domestic groups that promote or glorify terrorism. Canada and New Zealand both classify the Proud Boys as a terrorist organization. But the First Amendment precludes criminalizing support for any domestic political group—even the Ku Klux Klan. As a result, the F.B.I. maintains that it focusses on individual offenders, not on the groups to which they may belong.
The case of Robert Rundo, a founder of the Rise Above Movement, a white-nationalist group based in Southern California, illustrates the difficulty of the F.B.I.’s job. Rundo, a thirty-four-year-old who once travelled to Germany to celebrate Hitler’s birthday, served twenty months in prison in New York for stabbing a Latino gang member in 2009. (Rundo belonged to a rival gang.) By 2017, the Rise Above Movement claimed to have more than fifty members. The group boasted online of “smashing commies,” and posted videos of Rundo and a small army of white street fighters attacking counter-demonstrators at far-right and pro-Trump rallies in California. The next year, four Rise Above Movement members pleaded guilty to conspiring to riot at the Unite the Right rally. Afterward, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles arrested Rundo on similar charges for his brawling at the California rallies.
But Judge Cormac J. Carney, of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, has repeatedly held that those charges impermissibly violate Rundo’s constitutional right “to spread vitriolic and hateful ideas.” Carney has also faulted the prosecutors for selectively targeting Rundo without bringing charges against any of the Antifa counter-demonstrators who clashed with Rise Above Movement fighters. Meanwhile, as the trial and appeals dragged on, Rundo used a fake passport to escape to Eastern Europe, where he met with other neo-fascists; last year, Romania extradited him back to the U.S., and he was imprisoned in Los Angeles. “Free Rundo” stickers, graffiti, and videos have spread around the world. Now a hero to the far right, Rundo has expanded his white-nationalist movement to include an online media arm, a Web site selling merchandise and apparel, and a fast-growing network of at least thirty fight clubs—known as Active Clubs. (His media outlet promotes Patriot Front, and members of the two movements often hike, train, and spar together.) Adam S. Lee, a former F.B.I. special agent who was in charge of a Virginia field office, told me, “If we start targeting extremists for their speech, we can create martyrs, so we risk making them even more dangerous.”
Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, have repeatedly claimed that the “deep state” has weaponized federal law enforcement against Trump and his supporters; this conspiracy theory has made it even more treacherous for the F.B.I. to investigate Americans on the far right. In 2022, for example, the F.B.I. ramped up its monitoring of a figure who had triggered concern: Xavier Lopez, an unemployed twenty-three-year-old who lived with his aunt outside Richmond, Virginia. As a younger man, the Bureau knew, Lopez had posted online about killing politicians. Once, while buying assault rifles, he’d been overheard talking avidly about political violence. Lopez had served a year in prison, for vandalizing a car, and prison authorities had recorded him having phone discussions about amassing weapons to kill abortion-rights advocates, L.G.B.T. people, and Jews.
Several months after his release, Lopez joined a house of worship belonging to the Society of St. Pius X, a sect that broke away from the Catholic Church in opposition to Vatican II reforms. The Anti-Defamation League, citing the sect’s long history of statements about Jews and Judaism, has called it “mired in antisemitism.” (The society’s Web page denies that it espouses “racial hatred” toward Jews.) On social media, Lopez posted that he was delighted to have found a church that wasn’t “totally kiked.”
The F.B.I. placed an informant in the church, who reported that Lopez was attempting to enlist congregants in violent schemes. That November, Lopez bought a truck, declared online that he planned to use it in an attack, and posted a photograph of a mass shooter. Only then did agents raid his bedroom. They found firearm components, a stockpile of ammunition, and eight Molotov cocktails mixed using a form of napalm. A crucifix and a rosary hung over a Nazi flag on his wall. Lopez pleaded guilty to possession of a destructive device and has been sentenced to eighteen months in prison. In all likelihood, the F.B.I. averted a massacre.
House Republicans, though, seized on an internal memo from the Richmond field office which noted that agents in Oregon and California had found other violent members of “the far-right white nationalist movement” trying to network in the Society of St. Pius X. Cultivating sources in such churches, the memo proposed, could help counter future threats. House Republicans decried the memo as evidence that the Biden Administration had weaponized the F.B.I. “against traditional Catholics,” and accused the Bureau of proposing “to infiltrate Catholic churches.”
Wray, the F.B.I. director, repudiated the memo, testifying to Congress that he’d felt “aghast” when he saw it. An internal review later concluded that the memo’s authors had failed to use proper F.B.I. terminology for discussing extremism, and had wrongly suggested that the agency might scrutinize religious beliefs. Uproars of this type have had a chastening effect on F.B.I. agents and analysts, according to Elizabeth Neumann, who was a senior Department of Homeland Security official in the George W. Bush and Trump Administrations. She told me that she has “watched people in multiple agencies with responsibility for law enforcement or intelligence gathering err on the side of not getting their hand slapped.” When it comes to First Amendment questions, she added, “there is a gray space where even the lawyers inside the agencies can’t agree what the line is. People are trying to stay away from that gray area, and, yes, that might mean that things are getting missed.”
As I sat in the F.B.I. office, I was feeling increasingly secure in my freedom to espouse bigoted violence (were I so inclined) but less sure of my personal safety from extremist attacks. Then the conversation turned scarier. The four officials described how digital technology had both further diffused and compounded the threat. In retrospect, the terrorists of the analog era—whether Al Qaeda, from abroad, or the Ku Klux Klan, at home—now looked like easy targets. These were physical organizations with leaders, hierarchies, telephone calls, face-to-face meetings. One of the F.B.I. officials told me, “The United States government got pretty good at stopping that kind of attack.” The Internet has given extremist groups new ways to recruit and organize that make it virtually impossible to contain their menace. The official told me that domestic violent extremists appeared to have learned from the success of their foreign counterparts in leveraging social media and online chats “to build a horrific lone-actor threat.” The official continued, “Someone can essentially self-radicalize ‘on their own’—‘on their own’ in quotation marks, because there’s always somebody on the other side of the keyboard.”
The F.B.I.’s achievements in thwarting these lone actors often go unnoticed. When I asked the officials to describe some of the Bureau’s recent accomplishments, they handed me a stack of press releases: a year in jail for a Michigan man who had threatened synagogues; eighty months for an incel who had obtained firearms for an intended mass shooting at an Ohio State University sorority; the arrest of three white nationalists from different parts of the country who met in Columbus, Ohio, and conspired to start a race war by shooting rifles at electrical substations. On March 3, 2022, a soldier entering Fort Liberty, in North Carolina, was caught with a 3-D-printed handgun; at his home, authorities found a short-barrelled rifle, neo-Nazi patches and flags, and notes for an “operation” to rid the area of Black, Latino, and Jewish people. (He was sentenced to eighteen months in prison.) Experts at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism say that the F.B.I. now thwarts about forty domestic extremist plots a year.
One official explained that many Americans suspected of moving toward domestic terrorism end up being arrested on other, sometimes unrelated, charges: “I’m not exaggerating when I say that every week one of our field offices briefs us that they are going to arrest someone on, you know, felon in possession of a firearm, or domestic violence—a local sheriff may even make the arrest—but in actuality we had a very meticulous investigation, starting with a lead that some source picked up, showing that this was an individual going down a pathway to shooting up a synagogue or a church or something else.” The Bureau seemed to want to have it both ways. The officials thought that they deserved credit for respecting civil liberties by waiting for clear evidence of a threat to start an investigation. But they also wanted credit for getting volatile extremists off the streets by arresting them on charges that some might call pretexts. (F.B.I. officials say that they adhere to consistent standards for both opening investigations and bringing charges.)
Where the F.B.I. has hesitated, civilians such as “Vincent Washington”—the vigilante spy who penetrated Patriot Front—have entered the breach. Just as technology has opened new doors for extremists, it has also opened new doors for amateur surveillance and infiltration. Alarmed at what they see as the failings of law enforcement, left-leaning “antifascist researchers” have formed their own elaborate networks. They often adopt such anodyne names as the SoCal Research Club or Stumptown Research Collective, and together they form a kind of intelligence counterpart to Antifa street fighters. The vigilantes’ primary weapon is the Internet, which they deploy to track and sometimes expose the activities, identities, addresses, and employers of supporters of the far right—in other words, to dox them. The disclosures produced by amateur infiltrators have furnished evidence for civil lawsuits that have crippled several white-nationalist groups. Experts say that information from antifascists has also led to the discharge of dozens of active-duty military personnel, not to mention a handful of police and government officials. Some vigilante research has even spurred criminal prosecutions led by the F.B.I.—most notably, against participants in the Capitol attack. According to Michael Loadenthal, an expert in domestic extremism at the University of Cincinnati, the charging documents in nearly a fifth of January 6th cases explicitly acknowledge information from civilian “sedition hunters.” The four F.B.I. officials told me that they welcomed the help. “We’ll take tips from whoever gives them to us,” one said.
It seems stinting to describe Vincent Washington’s intel as “tips”; it was more of a trove. According to court records, his birth name was David Alan Capito, Jr., although in 2017, possibly in connection with his infiltration work, he renamed himself Avenir David Capito; he then became Vyacheslav Arkadyevich Arkangelskiy, and more recently he changed his name to Ryan Smith. (I attempted to reach him through multiple intermediaries, but he didn’t respond.) He belonged for a time to the Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club, which declared in a manifesto that its members “work to counter the rise of fascist and far-right groups” and “don’t rely on the state to do our work for us.” In 2019, a longtime member of the club, Willem van Spronsen, attempted to firebomb an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Tacoma; the police shot and killed him. Vincent carried a banner at a memorial march in Spronsen’s honor, and sometimes wore a bullet that once belonged to Spronsen on a necklace. Antifascist activists like Vincent take a dim view of the police, and he was not about to hand over information to the F.B.I. Instead, he transmitted the results of his sting to an online publication called Unicorn Riot.
The headquarters of Unicorn Riot is a duplex loft carved out of a former bottling plant in Fishtown, a trendy neighborhood of Philadelphia. The loft is also the home of Dan Feidt, one of Unicorn Riot’s founders, a forty-one-year-old with a boyish mane of wild curls. He got his start in journalism in Minneapolis, working for a local alternative-news Web site. During the 2008 Republican Convention, which was held in the Twin Cities, his height—he is six feet eight—helped him record unobstructed footage of a sweeping crackdown on protesters outside the event. He then worked on a film, “Terrorizing Dissent,” and helped document crackdowns on protests at the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, in 2009; Occupy Wall Street, in 2011; and a series of protests in the West over pipeline and mining projects. Among the people he worked with was Chris Schiano, a skinny thirty-four-year-old with deep-set eyes. I met with both men in the loft. Feidt, a self-described “homebody,” told me that he usually ran the video control room; Schiano, who was raised as a Quaker and graduated from Naropa University, a beatnik-Buddhist institution in Boulder, Colorado, dodged police batons in a helmet and body armor. After a while, Schiano told me, “it started to feel like ‘We work well together, let’s start something.’ ” With a handful of others, they set up a nonprofit and released a grand mission statement: to report “underrepresented stories” and illuminate “alternative perspectives.” The name Unicorn Riot, I was told, was the result of an online brainstorming session in which marijuana may have played a role.
The group’s coverage of the far right was shaped, in part, by a police killing. In November, 2015, an officer in Minneapolis fatally shot Jamar Clark, an unarmed Black man. Unicorn Riot live-streamed eighteen days of protests outside the officer’s station. During this period, Feidt and Schiano were surprised to see racist slurs surfacing in an online chat on their Web site. Many of the comments used the argot of the online far right. Schiano was at his computer one night, deleting the slurs, when two masked white men appeared in the live stream. Both wore armbands labelled “/K/”—for a gun-enthusiast forum on 4chan, a bastion of far-right extremism. A few nights later, three of the gun enthusiasts, who called themselves Kommandos, returned to the protests; this time, a handful of demonstrators began escorting them away—until one of the Kommandos pulled out a handgun and fired seven shots, severely wounding five protesters. Unicorn Riot recorded the scene.
All the victims survived, though some were permanently disabled. The shooter, Allen Scarsella, a West Point dropout, was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. On the drive to the protest, he and another Kommando had live-streamed themselves brandishing a pistol and bandying far-right memes. (A favorite was “make the fire rise,” an allusion to the catchphrase of a Batman villain.) Feidt said to himself, “Wow, this is more than just shitposting. They are coming off the Internet.” The battle lines, he realized, were no longer only between protesters and police: “People who are not the government are coming out, too.”
Unicorn Riot’s connection to undercover antifascist espionage began in 2017, shortly after Scarsella’s trial ended. Schiano got a call from an antifascist contact: a comrade in Seattle had infiltrated the online chats of people planning the Unite the Right rally, in Charlottesville, which was scheduled for the next day. Was Schiano interested?
The full ramifications of this call have only recently become clear, thanks to a series of court cases that culminated, this past July, in the federal appeals court in Richmond. The infiltrator, who asked me to withhold his name, has never before spoken publicly about his role. In a telephone interview, he told me that his politics could be fairly described as anarchist, “although I cringe at the term.” On the night of Trump’s Inauguration, he said, a friend had been shot and severely wounded during a melee around the appearance of a far-right speaker at the University of Washington. In the months that followed, the infiltrator became increasingly involved in attempts to dox members of neo-Nazi and white-nationalist groups. He took surreptitious photographs at demonstrations in the Pacific Northwest where street fighters from far-right groups such as the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer rumbled against leftists. A few times, he crawled under parked cars and planted magnetized G.P.S. devices, to track targets. He told me that he’d helped expose the identities of at least two members of the Atomwaffen Division, a particularly violent neo-Nazi group, causing one to lose his job and the other to move from Washington to Texas.
That spring, the infiltrator saw posters around Seattle advertising a group that called itself Anti-Communist Action; the posters included the address of a Discord chat for new members. Thinking that he might be able to dox some members, he adopted the online handle Einsatz—a reference to Hitler’s paramilitary death squads—and applied to join. His code name was evidently credential enough: Einsatz was admitted to a series of online chats that eventually included about twelve hundred far-right extremists across the country.
Anti-Communist Action publicly described itself as “physically resisting leftist terrorists and rioters.” But in the private chats its users insisted that “Hitler did nothing wrong”; disparaged immigrants and Jewish, Muslim, and Black people; and predicted a coming “civil war” that might be “more of a massacre.” “Death to all non whites,” one wrote. “Let’s bomb a major federal building,” urged another. Some members shared detailed instructions for building bombs and booby traps. “Do it Boston bomber style,” one suggested.
That July, after Einsatz had been lurking for months, he saw a link inviting members to the Unite the Right rally. Clicking on it introduced him to another Discord chat, for the people planning the event, including the leaders of several far-right groups. They talked openly of their desire for “a race war,” for the extermination of Jews and nonwhites, and for hand-to-hand combat at “the battle of Charlottesville.”
Rousseau, Patriot Front’s founder, who was then helping lead a group called Vanguard America, said that he wanted to see “jackboots on commie skulls, blood on the pavement.” Robert Ray, a.k.a. Azzmador, who edited the neo-Nazi Web site the Daily Stormer, said that he was even more excited to fight Black Lives Matter activists than to square off against Antifa, adding, “Blacks are the easiest people on earth to trigger.”
Jason Kessler, a Proud Boy who first conceived of the rally, wrote, “Can you guys conceal carry? I don’t want to scare antifa off from throwing the first punch.” Planners discussed which flagpoles would most effectively double as clubs or spears. One organizer noted that “impaling people is always the best option.” The conversation returned repeatedly to using vehicles as weapons by driving them into counter-demonstrators.
Einsatz told me, “It was nothing but race hate and genocide, but the purpose was planning and coördination for violence.” Still, he never thought of warning the F.B.I. “I don’t talk to cops,” he explained. Instead, on a mass Signal chat of antifascists, he shared details of Airbnb rentals that far-right leaders had reserved around Charlottesville. Activists besieged Airbnb with complaints, and the company cancelled reservations for many of the rally-goers—hundreds, according to the rally’s organizers.
Then one of the activists put Einsatz in touch with Schiano. At the time, Schiano was with two colleagues in a rental car, headed for Charlottesville. Einsatz told Schiano about plans for an unauthorized torch march that night through the University of Virginia campus—a deliberate evocation of the Klan. The tip enabled Schiano to be one of the few journalists in a position to cover the march, which culminated with hundreds of far-right protesters assaulting a few dozen counter-protesters. Later that weekend, a neo-Nazi named James Fields plowed his Dodge Challenger into counter-protesters, injuring dozens and killing Heather Heyer, a waitress and paralegal. “For all it’s worth, we fucking killed someone,” a member of the Discord chat posted. Kessler, the rally’s organizer, called Heyer “a fat, disgusting Communist.” Rousseau used a white-nationalist meme intended to mock Black people who complained of false arrest or police abuse: “Fields dindu nuffin tbh.”
Einsatz had given Unicorn Riot a password for the Discord chats, and Schiano logged on. He told me he couldn’t believe that the organizers “were this stupid”: they’d laid out explicit plans, in writing, for instigating violence. Anarchist computer programmers eventually helped replicate the entire cache, which Unicorn Riot published online, in searchable form.
The leaks became the basis of a landmark lawsuit, Sines v. Kessler, which concluded this past July, when the court in Richmond approved a verdict awarding a group of Charlottesville residents more than nine million dollars in punitive damages and legal fees, from a roster of far-right groups and their leaders. Prosecutors used the leaks to help convict Fields of the killing—he was given a life sentence—and to win plea agreements from four members of Rundo’s Rise Above Movement, who had been charged as “serial rioters.” The suit also led to the implosion of several white-supremacist groups, including Vanguard America. (Afterward, Rousseau led hundreds of the group’s members to form Patriot Front.) In addition, the leaks caused the dishonorable discharge of two U.S. marines who had participated. One of them, Lance Corporal Vasillios G. Pistolis, a member of the Atomwaffen Division, had boasted on Discord that during the rally he had “cracked 3 skulls together.” Sergeant Michael Joseph Chesny had asked in a Discord chat, “Is it legal to run over protesters blocking roadways?”
If federal law enforcement had been paying as much attention to the planning for the rally as Einsatz had, could the involvement of “serial rioters,” or organizers with a record of provoking street fights, have justified an investigation? Could the F.B.I. have prevented the bloodshed? In December, 2018, months after Unicorn Riot published the chat archive, the Bureau cited it in a search warrant seeking its own copies of the digital files, in order to determine whether the rally planners “had been aware of the potential for violence and may have encouraged or incited individuals to violence.” There is no indication, though, that this inquiry led to further charges, or to any charges against the Anti-Communist Action members who shared instructions for bomb-making.
After Charlottesville, Schiano told me, Unicorn Riot “got this new reputation as a clearing house” for data dumps on far-right groups: “People who had done other infiltrations started sending us stuff.” Sorting through stolen troves of far-right communications became a virtually full-time occupation. “I was, like, ‘O.K., this is what I do now,’ ” he said. By 2022, Unicorn Riot had published at least fifteen major leaks delivered by antifascist infiltrators or hackers, in addition to two smaller leaks from Patriot Front. (Unicorn Riot enjoyed a wave of critical praise for its unfiltered coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests in Minneapolis, generating a flood of donations.)
It’s not the only operation publishing such leaks. Two years ago, for example, the Anti-Defamation League published the membership records of the Oath Keepers, an anti-government militia; the hacked files had been obtained by a nonprofit called Distributed Denial of Secrets. The Oath Keepers roster included nearly four hundred law-enforcement officers, among them ten police chiefs and eleven sheriffs, in addition to a hundred and seventeen active-duty service members, eleven reservists, and eighty-one people who either held or were seeking public office.
In 2022, the antifascist veterans’ group Task Force Butler, founded by Kristofer Goldsmith, an Army veteran of the Iraq War, obtained Telegram messages from inside a group called Nationalist Social Club-131, which is led in part by a former Patriot Front member; Goldsmith’s disclosures prompted the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New Hampshire to file civil-rights lawsuits against the group. (The Massachusetts complaint accuses N.S.C.-131 of, among other things, unlawful intimidation of hotels offering emergency shelter to immigrants; a lawyer for the group told me that prosecutors were contorting statutes “to apply to political protests.”)
But Michael Loadenthal, the University of Cincinnati scholar, who runs a project tracking prosecutions involving domestic political violence, told me that Unicorn Riot has taken on a unique role as a “data launderer.” It repackages leaks obtained by antifascist researchers—most of whom insist on anonymity and use deception, hacking, or other unsavory tactics—into forms that journalists, advocacy groups, civil-rights lawyers, and prosecutors can trust and exploit. “On-the-ground activists are delivering actionable intelligence to challenge and destabilize these networks, while law enforcement is often ineffective,” Loadenthal told me.
“Virtually every single data dump and leak,” he noted, has exposed members of the military, the National Guard, and the police as part of the far right, confirming what he said was a worrisome overlap. For example, in 2019 Unicorn Riot published hundreds of text messages and dozens of audio recordings from Identity Evropa, the neo-Nazi group that coined the slogan “You Will Not Replace Us.” Journalists studying the leaks identified at least ten active members who were serving in the U.S. military or the National Guard. (A spokesman for the Pentagon declined to comment on how many of these service members had been discharged.)
The leaks also revealed a concerted effort to draw MAGA Republicans into unvarnished white nationalism. In the leaked Identity Evropa recordings, Patrick Casey, the organization’s leader at the time, stressed that it sought to reach “the average conservative white person.” He recommended that the group’s members set up front organizations like “a San Diego MAGA group,” or attend conferences “with your college Republicans.” (Casey was subsequently present at the Capitol on January 6th, but has not been charged with any crime in relation to the storming.) In an Identity Evropa seminar about political activism, Alex Witoslawski, then a Republican consultant, instructed members to avoid explicitly defending Nazism or denying the Holocaust. “You are essentially allowing the opposition to define you,” he explained. Instead of saying that “diversity is bad,” he advised, “say, ‘We want a unified, cohesive society.’ ” This, he argued, amounted to the same thing, because “when you have a more homogenous society, your society is more cohesive.” (Witoslawski, whose Gmail profile picture shows him making a white-nationalist hand gesture, told me, in an e-mail, that this “strange seminar” was his final involvement with Identity Evropa.) Soon after the leaks, the group collapsed.
Several years ago, Sam Bishop, a Boston-based freelance journalist and a contributor to Unicorn Riot, was browsing a public far-right message board, Fascist Forge, when he stumbled across an archive of private user data from a larger and more influential forum called Iron March. Founded in 2011 by a Russian neo-Nazi, Iron March had become an influential gathering place for roughly twelve hundred far-right extremists from around the world. It helped incubate major white-nationalist and neo-fascist groups in at least seven countries, and it was the online birthplace of the Atomwaffen Division, the American neo-Nazi organization, whose members have been linked to five murders and to a plot to blow up synagogues and a Miami-area nuclear power plant. (Atomwaffen’s founder belonged to the Florida National Guard.)
Bishop assumed that he was not the first person to notice the Iron March cache. He told me, “If it was that easy to do it, you would think that law enforcement would have done it.” But, just in case, he shared the files with a Unicorn Riot chat group, and it soon became clear that he’d made a discovery. The database spread from the chat: other Web sites published its contents, and journalists and researchers soon confirmed that among the Iron March users were at least eight active-duty American service members. (At least six members of Atomwaffen were in the military or the reserves.) Bishop, whose role in the leak has not previously been exposed, told me, “They could have been fired from those jobs a lot earlier—if the F.B.I. had known.”
Other than the no-show of Vincent Washington, Patriot Front’s demonstration in Washington, D.C., on December 4, 2021, started out as planned. After the Seattle crew landed, they drove to a park in suburban Maryland, where more than two hundred members of the group soon gathered. When it was time for the march, all of them squeezed into the back of several U-Haul trucks, which dropped them off in downtown D.C. Sock-puppet social-media accounts reported sightings of the Patriot Front march and posted video clips; the Rise Above Movement’s online media arm was on hand to film it. Outside the Capitol, Thomas Rousseau delivered a speech about “we the people born to a nation of the European race.”
Kevin Lowy, a Patriot Front member from New York with a short beard and glasses, stayed behind at the park in Maryland to watch over the group’s vehicles. As night fell, he later told police, he was working on his laptop inside his Dodge Ram when a masked figure splattered paint across his windshield. Lowy called the police as he drove off in a panic, but his tires had been slashed. He met a patrol car outside the parking lot. “It scared the shit out of me,” he told an officer.
By the time the U-Hauls returned and began disgorging hundreds of identically dressed men wearing Patriot Front gear, several other officers—most of them Black and Latino—were at the lot. When some of the men dissembled about their purpose, an officer told them, “We are not stupid, O.K.?” Another officer used his phone to Google “Patriot Front”: “That’s a hate—nationalist—group.” But, after consulting the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security, the police let the marchers go on their way. (One of them, Nathaniel Noyce, was later arrested for participating in the January 6th riot.)
The Patriot Front members had little to celebrate, though. Someone—presumably Vincent—had shared the location of the parking lot with allied activists in the D.C. area, who had slashed the members’ tires, smashed their windshields and mirrors, covered their windows in paint, and scrawled “Patriot Fail,” in bright red, across the side of a white van. Colton Brown, the Seattle-area director, later complained to Rousseau that a rental-car company had charged his credit card $1,975.54 for vehicle damage. He also lamented that his “fav flannel” had been stolen from one of the cars, in addition to a special pillow. “That’s a $100 pillow bro,” he informed Rousseau, who told him that the parking-lot damage had cost more than nineteen thousand dollars in total.
Vincent, with the position of trust he’d earned, had found his way deep into Patriot Front’s internal communications, which were conducted on the online platforms Rocket.Chat and Mumble. Patriot Front members later asserted that Vincent had conspired with hackers to further penetrate the group’s electronic files. One way or another, membership names and details of internal messages soon surfaced online, along with audio recordings of private conversations and meetings. In Seattle, members of Patriot Front found their neighborhoods plastered with posters identifying them as racists, and antifascists around the country exposed dozens of other members online, linking some to specific acts of bigotry or vandalism. The doxing was sometimes pointedly belittling. A “Nazi Watch” Web site reported that a Seattle-area Patriot Front member was “known for his extreme social awkwardness” and “incel-like behaviors” and was “so subservient to his Network Director”—Colton Brown—“that he would, and has, peed in a bottle on the highway rather than be a mere few minutes late to a meeting.” The site also declared that Brown “is unashamed to hold neo-Nazi beliefs and should not be welcomed in our community.”
By May, 2022, Unicorn Riot had released audio files documenting at least seventeen hours’ worth of internal Patriot Front meetings and calls, in addition to nearly a hundred thousand lines from internal chats. (Feidt and Schiano refused to talk about their source.) The chats revealed that Rousseau and other members had privately described the U.S. as a “Zionist Occupied Government.” Recordings captured members discussing the need to ban homosexuality and to make women subservient, and fantasizing about how “rape gangs” could exert control over women in their future ethnostate. In one recording, a Florida network director of Patriot Front advised members to enlist their girlfriends in racist vandalism; then the members could blackmail their girlfriends, insuring their loyalty. The director mused in another recording that Patriot Front was, in some ways, “a criminal organization.”
Patriot Front officially disavowed violence. It also prohibited members from bringing firearms to events. But the leaks revealed that some members had a keen interest in guns. Photographs showed 3-D-printed “ghost guns” inside the home of a Seattle-area member. A video captured someone in Brown’s crew firing a rifle at a stolen Black Lives Matter sign, and chats indicated that another member brought two loaded handguns to the Washington march. (At least two people linked to Patriot Front in other areas have been arrested for illegal gun possession.)
The leaks also provided detailed evidence of coördination to carry out dozens of acts of vandalism intended to intimidate minority groups. These acts included defacing a statue in Portland, Oregon, that honored George Floyd; a mural in Olympia, Washington, that celebrated gay pride; and a mural in Richmond, Virginia, commemorating the tennis star Arthur Ashe. Rousseau, it was revealed, insisted on personally approving all major vandalism operations, in addition to some detailed schemes to evade arrest. (While defacing the mural in Olympia, members distracted police with a bogus 911 call.) Private photographs showed Patriot Front members posing in front of stolen signs about diversity, L.G.B.T. dignity, and racial justice. At one meeting, Rousseau ordered members to steal “a duffelbag-full” of American flags, so that they could be flown upside down, Alito style, at demonstrations.
Some prosecutors took action: a district attorney in Olympia brought charges against members for graffiti. Police in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, received a tip about “a little army” of some thirty masked men with shields climbing into the back of a U-Haul. Among the men were Rousseau and Brown. A physical search revealed that Rousseau was in possession of a document describing plans to establish a “confrontational dynamic” by marching into a local L.G.B.T.-pride rally; prosecutors charged Rousseau, Brown, and dozens of others with conspiracy to riot. (The charges against Rousseau were later dismissed on technical grounds; Brown pleaded guilty to parading without a permit.) Several civil-rights advocates, meanwhile, drew on the leaks when suing Rousseau and Patriot Front under the Ku Klux Klan Act, passed in 1871, which prohibits conspiring to intimidate on the basis of race or to deprive citizens of their civil rights.
A Black teacher and musician in Boston is suing Patriot Front over a clash at a demonstration which sent him to the hospital for stitches, and several Richmond residents are suing the group over the defacement of the Arthur Ashe mural. Arthur Ago, an attorney who helped file some of these lawsuits while working at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told me that Patriot Front’s vandalism was “a twenty-first-century equivalent of cross-burning,” intended to make vulnerable communities “live in fear.” Ago, who is now at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-leaning advocacy group that tracks the far right, added, “We don’t see the F.B.I. involved at all.”
Phone campaigns and other pressure from antifascist activists cost many of the exposed Patriot Front members their jobs. Among those fired were a civil engineer, a real-estate broker, an H.V.A.C. technician, and an analyst at a tech company. Colton Brown, who lost his electrician job, moved to Utah. (A lawyer representing Brown told me that Brown’s views have since changed, but declined to say how.)
In e-mails, members of Brown’s crew told me that they quickly unearthed Vincent Washington’s history as David Alan Capito. On social media, the Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club had posted photographs of him marching in a demonstration, and one Patriot Front member claimed to me that he had seen security-camera footage of Vincent’s “face and fat ass” as he slashed the tires of Patriot Front members’ cars in Seattle. In 2019, the men on Brown’s crew noted, Vincent had been the subject of a temporary restraining order, for alleged harassment of an ex-girlfriend. In retaliation for his leaks, a Web site called Antifa Watch labelled him “a politically motivated violent extremist” with a history of “stalkerish behavior including hacking, vandalism of people’s property, trespassing on people’s homes, and just being a general creep.”
The exposed Patriot Front members were furious at Vincent. To strike back, they appear to have enlisted an unlikely ally: the F.B.I. A former friend of his told me about receiving a phone call, in the spring of 2023, from an agent investigating whether Vincent was a dangerous left-wing extremist with access to ghost guns.
Other members turned to Glen Allen, a lawyer who has emerged as a kind of one-man far-right legal-defense team. On behalf of Brown and four others who lost their jobs, Allen has filed a novel lawsuit against Vincent which, if successful, could set a precedent for severely penalizing vigilante infiltrators, and help end the leaks that have bedevilled the far right.
Allen, a seventy-three-year-old with a short white beard and a slender, athletic build, lives in a modest brick house in Baltimore. He told me that, in 2022, he was contacted by Paul Gancarz, an exposed Patriot Front member who had been fired from his job as a civil engineer in Virginia. Gancarz needed a lawyer to negotiate his severance. But when Allen heard about Vincent’s sting, he told me, “I said, ‘This guy’s going to get away with this?’ ” After enlisting Colton Brown and other exposed members as additional clients, Allen filed a suit for damages and lost wages under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which prohibits the use of computer systems for unauthorized purposes. Vincent has now disappeared, and Allen is petitioning a judge to allow the publication of a summons in lieu of hand delivery.
Allen has personal experience with being exposed. Forty years ago, he became close to William Pierce, the leader of a far-right group called the National Alliance; Pierce is also the pseudonymous author of “The Turner Diaries,” a novel about a coming race war, which has inspired generations of white nationalists. Allen told me that he eventually broke with Pierce over his violent rhetoric and views on women. But Allen attended an Alliance conference that questioned the Holocaust, and he contributed five hundred dollars to the group after Pierce died.
Allen kept all that to himself. He worked for twenty-seven years as a litigator at the law firm DLA Piper, and when he retired, in 2015, he took a job for the city of Baltimore. Soon afterward, the Southern Poverty Law Center unearthed and publicized his ties to Pierce, calling Allen a “neo-Nazi lawyer.” The city immediately fired him. Allen told me, “I never talked politics at work. I was doing good work for the city. And none of that mattered.”
Antifascist doxing, Allen argued, was unfair, extrajudicial suppression of controversial speech. He has set up a nonprofit, the Free Expression Foundation, to defend what he called “victims of the thought police.” A lawsuit on his own behalf against the Southern Poverty Law Center failed, but it helped him garner numerous clients from across the far right. He is currently representing a dozen Patriot Front members, including the defendants in the Arthur Ashe mural case—Gancarz, the civil engineer, is one of them. Allen has asserted in court filings that civil-rights statutes don’t apply to the incident, because a Patriot Front logo does not convey the same threat of violence that a burning cross or a swastika does. In every case, his central argument is a First Amendment claim: that courts and prosecutors are unconstitutionally targeting his clients because of their views.
Allen, who told me that he would represent left-wing dissidents, too, if they came to him, said that he sees his role as safeguarding the singular American tradition of free speech—the same tradition that F.B.I. officials told me constrains their ability to investigate the far right. He noted that in Brandenburg v. Ohio, a 1969 case involving a Ku Klux Klan leader, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protects more than criticizing the government, urging its overthrow, or deprecating a racial minority. Calls for violence or even genocide are also protected—unless those calls entail “inciting or producing imminent lawless action.” Allen told me, “It’s an amazing doctrine, when you think about it—only in America, I would think.” Antifascist spies like Vincent, Allen argues, are conspiring to deprive Americans of their civil liberties.
But some scholars, and some members of Congress, argue that Allen and the F.B.I. present a false choice between policing the far right and respecting free speech. They say that a clear-eyed, empirical assessment of crime data could cut through claims of bias by showing that some organizations on the far right can be fairly classified as street gangs or criminal enterprises, rather than as political movements merely expressing unpopular ideas. Mike German, a researcher at N.Y.U.’s Brennan Center for Justice and a former F.B.I. agent who worked undercover among far-right groups, told me, “The First Amendment issue is resolved if the F.B.I., and law enforcement in general, just focus on the criminal activity, rather than on the ideology.” The problem, he said, is “the F.B.I.’s positioning of far-right violence as political activity protected by the First Amendment,” because it deters law enforcement from cracking down on organized criminality—from brawling by the Proud Boys to property crimes by Patriot Front.
Goldsmith, the Iraq veteran who has been involved in vigilante infiltrations, told me that he has provided the F.B.I. with damning information about several far-right groups, including a militia that was preparing for violence on January 6th. He thinks that racial bias partially explains the Bureau’s caution about initiating investigations of far-right groups. Law-enforcement officers “see white people and think, Oh, that can’t be a gang member,” Goldsmith said. “But if law enforcement just examined these groups through the lens of criminal street gangs and organized crime, they have got all the predicate they need to at least start investigations.”
Congress, in defense-spending legislation passed in 2020, required the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security to collect and share more comprehensive data on domestic violent-extremist crimes. But this isn’t happening. In a follow-up report, issued in November, 2022, Senator Gary Peters, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, expressed frustration over the fact that the federal government still has not “systematically tracked and reported this data itself.”
German, the Brennan Center scholar, told me that the failure to collect accurate domestic-terrorism-incident data—“actual crimes committed by various people for a political purpose”—has also made it needlessly difficult for the government to settle the question of “whether prosecutors are acting in a biased manner.” In the case of Robert Rundo, the Rise Above Movement founder, reliable data collection could have helped prosecutors allay the judge’s concerns about selective prosecution—for example, by documenting the over-all frequency and severity of violence from both the left and the right, and by keeping track of who got arrested after clashes between the two sides. Such data could also have shown how Rundo’s pattern of aggression stood out from, say, the actions of counter-protesters who engaged in violence at one heated event. (In July, a federal appeals court overturned the district court’s dismissal of the charges against Rundo and ordered a new trial, ruling that Rundo and company—whatever their politics—“behaved like leaders of an organized-crime group.”)
Despite all the Republican talk in recent years about the deep state, academic experts have frequently asserted that the F.B.I. devotes disproportionate resources to policing radical environmentalist and anarchist groups, which may threaten property but do less bodily harm than the far right does. In the tumult after George Floyd’s killing, these critics have noted, police forces often conducted mass arrests at racial-justice protests but let far-right rioters walk away—including many of the people who later stormed the Capitol.
Trump is now promising to pardon people convicted of crimes related to January 6th. German said, “What the far right is hearing is ‘Violence against our political opponents is not something that should be criminalized.’ It absolutely invites more violence.” He added, “So many people felt that they could mass and engage in violent criminal conduct at the Capitol on January 6th because a sense of impunity had developed over years of engaging in similar violence at various rallies and protests—including at Charlottesville—without law-enforcement interference. They were conditioned to believe that their violence was sanctioned by law enforcement.” When Trump has been asked about the potential for violence if he loses again, he has done little to discourage it. He told Time, “It always depends on the fairness of an election.”
Antifascist vigilantes, of course, can never match the scope of U.S. law enforcement. But they are determined to keep showing up both the police and the F.B.I., in part by building on Vincent’s leaks to Unicorn Riot. Last summer, about a week after the filing of the lawsuit against Vincent, a far-right Telegram account calling itself Appalachian Archives posted his supposed address. And last year Appalachian Archives attempted to dox nearly two dozen other people, including community leaders who had denounced antisemitism. Appalachian Archives threatened a Nashville television correspondent, Phil Williams, saying that “the day of the rope” was approaching, and also targeted another journalist, Jordan Green, who lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, and writes for the left-leaning Web site Raw Story.
At the time, Green was reporting on the 2119 Crew, a neo-Nazi gang linked to brick-through-the-window attacks against a synagogue and a Jewish center, in addition to vandalism targeting Muslim and Black people. (“2119” is alphanumeric code for “Blood and Soil.”) Appalachian Archives posted a head shot of Green and wrote, “The bastard above had been found out to be harassing our boys.”
One afternoon this past January, Green’s doorbell rang: a pizza that he hadn’t ordered was being delivered. The next day, Appalachian Archives posted a photograph of Green answering the door. A few weeks later, half a dozen men—many wearing skull masks, a neo-Nazi hallmark—gathered outside his house. Some gave straight-armed Roman salutes, and one carried a sign warning of a “consequence” for Green’s reporting. Appalachian Archives posted a picture of the stunt, as well as a photograph of the same contingent standing next to a marker commemorating the Greensboro massacre, where, in 1979, white supremacists shot and killed five labor organizers.
But an antifascist collective called Appalachia Research Club, which was working with Green, had obtained a photograph of the vehicle driven by the stealth photographer at the pizza delivery. Armed with the license-plate number, they were able to identify the car’s owner: Kai Liam Nix, a twenty-year-old from North Carolina. Having scoured social media and Unicorn Riot’s database of leaks, they were able to match his face and birthday with a Patriot Front member operating under the pseudonym Patrick North Carolina. It seemed likely that Nix either ran the Appalachian Archives account or was closely linked to it. With the help of Jeff Tischauser, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the researchers discovered that Nix is also an active-duty soldier in the Army, serving in the 82nd Airborne Division and stationed at Fort Liberty, in North Carolina. Tischauser told me, “These antifascist researchers may not be up to the ethical standards of professional journalists, but some of them get quality information.”
I reached Nix by phone, and he denied any involvement in the Appalachian Archives account or with Patriot Front. He told me, “That is a hate group, and you can’t be in the military and a hate group at the same time.” Nix pleaded with me not to publish the allegations, which, he said, would hinder an application he’d made to become a police detective after leaving the military, “to stop criminals.” We agreed to discuss the matter the next day, at a Starbucks near Fort Liberty. Before we hung up, I asked him for his license-plate number—the key detail linking him to Appalachian Archives—and he claimed not to remember it. The next morning, he backed out of our meeting and stopped responding to my messages. On August 16th, a few days after I called the Army, a government official told me that the previous day federal agents had arrested Nix for illicit sales of firearms and lying on a background check. (Spokespeople for the F.B.I. and the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of North Carolina declined to comment.)
The online war between the far right and the far left continues. After recent marches in Nashville by Patriot Front and a neo-Nazi group, some antifascist researchers launched a campaign called Name the Bozo, which aims to publicly identify as many neo-Nazis as possible. About twenty “bozos” have been exposed so far. One member of the Appalachia Research Club told me that members of far-right groups “have a First Amendment right to be assholes and voice their opinions—but I have a First Amendment right to call them out on that, and if that results in repercussions where they lose their jobs or go to jail, that’s on them, not me.” He continued, “It doesn’t seem like the authorities are interested. I don’t know if they are just turning a blind eye, or if there is something else. But I think this is important work, and I am going to keep doing it, because I think some of these guys are legitimately dangerous.” ♦
An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the Distributed Denial of Secrets and how it obtained Oath Keeper membership records.
