This week, we’re sharing an interview with Chris Mathias, author of To Catch A Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right, a book about militant antifascists and researchers in the so-called USA with a particular insight into Vincent, an anarchist who infiltrated Patriot Front and helped facilitate the sabotage event some know as Patriot Fail in December of 2021, after six months undercover as a member and official photographer for the group and leaking chats and pics who, with the help of other researchers and Unicorn Riot, led to the doxing of over 80 PF chuds.
For the chat we talk about the construct of Antifa, antifascist research, adaptations among fascists and thus how antifascists do work, and other topics.
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Transcription
TFSR: We’re speaking with journalist Christopher Mathias, author of To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right from Atria Books this year. Thank you so much for joining me, Christopher. Do you want to introduce yourself further with any pronouns, affiliations, location, anything else?
Chris: Yeah, sure. Thanks so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to talk to you. Chris Mathias, he/him, I live up in New York City.
TFSR: Would you mind giving a little thumbnail sketch of the book for the audience?
Chris: To Catch a Fascist is a narrative nonfiction book that follows anti-fascist activists in the Trump era as they go undercover into fascist groups and then often do research to expose this new generation of white supremacists, Nazis, and other assorted far-right groups, to expose thousands of members of this insurgent fascist movement in the Trump era. Along the way, it tells the story of Antifa in America, the Antifa boogeyman, and the way we talk about Antifa in America. I tried really hard to make it a compelling narrative, and it profiles a particular anti-fascist who goes undercover into a Nazi group, in hopes of making it a page turner to introduce militant anti-fascism to a wide audience.
TFSR: It definitely has a spy novel vibe to a lot of it, which is very cool.
Chris: Thank you, that’s the highest compliment.
TFSR: Could you talk a bit about how you found yourself drawn to covering fascism and anti-fascism in your journalism? Because you were already a journalist before this point. What pushback have you and the publisher gotten so far for the book?
Chris: Sure. The story of this book begins when I was a reporter at HuffPost. A couple quick stories: I started off at HuffPost covering police shootings, criminal justice, the early Black Lives Matter movement around Eric Garner in New York and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and the police shooting of Ramarley Graham in the Bronx. As I started to cover the NYPD, it was around the time of the NYPD’s Muslim surveillance program, and so I started to cover that. I started to cover Islamophobia more broadly, and that segued naturally into covering the broader far right. So, in early 2017, one of the first far-right things I covered on the ground was actually back in my hometown of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. There were about a hundred Neo-Confederates and Klansmen and assorted MAGA folks and militia types. Which, looking back, was the nation’s coalition of MAGA fascism that would eventually storm the capital. But they were on the National Park Civil War battlefield that day because they had all read a rumor that spread primarily on Facebook that Antifa was coming to Gettysburg, coming to the battlefield to shit on Confederate graves.
Being someone from Gettysburg myself, and with a slight bit of research and asking around town, there are no marked Confederate graves in Gettysburg, so Antifa wouldn’t know where to shit. This was obviously a fake rumor that started on Facebook, but it nevertheless galvanized about a hundred heavily armed people, all carrying long guns, to come to the battlefield and stage this demonstration. I ended up writing a story about that. Funny coda to that story: Antifa obviously never showed up, but a militia man did accidentally shoot himself in the leg. It was this farcical scene where these militia dudes had binoculars, looking out over the battlefield for this Antifa menace. But I quickly recognized that it was also pretty scary and dangerous, and felt the beginning of something.
Then two months later, I covered the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which I feel most of your listeners already know what happened there. It was the largest white supremacist gathering in a generation, and obviously ended with a particular neo-Nazi named James Alex Fields Jr. driving his car into a crowd of counterprotesters and killing Heather Heyer. I was on the ground in Charlottesville, and what I saw there obviously rattled me a little bit. I often say that if you were in Charlottesville either as a fascist, an anti-fascist, a journalist, a cop, whatever you were, that day inalterably shapes or changes your life going forward. For me, it meant covering fascism full-time, covering the far right full-time, and investigating the alt-right, which is how the fascist movement in America was euphemizing itself at the time, making it sound more palatable to a wider audience.-
As I started to investigate the alt-right, research the alt-right, I learned pretty quickly that there was this vast underground network of more radical leftists that were already doing this work to great effect, and that they were doing the best research and intelligence gathering on the far right. They were often doing it with infiltration tactics and going undercover in these groups, both online and in person. We forget the degree to which the alt-right and this early insurgent fascist movement in America under Trump and emboldened by Trump… when it began, a lot of it was people hiding behind masks, hiding behind pseudonyms and avatars online. Because they knew that if they espoused these views publicly by their real name, they would face some consequences. Over the next decade, basically, a lot of my biggest investigations as a journalist were dependent upon anti-fascist research. I started to get to know a lot of anti-fascist activists while there was so much misinformation, misunderstandings, and misapprehensions about what Antifa was.
Around 2022 or 2023, I realized this had the makings of a book. I submitted the book proposal in 2022, signed a book deal in 2023, and the book came out earlier this year. A year of research and interviews, a year of writing, and then about a year of editing. The response has been really great. I have spoken to a lot of people. When I was writing this book. I wanted it to be for a big audience, and even people in more radical circles will appreciate it. I was also writing it for “normie boomers” to explain what this is. And the response from that crowd in particular, I’ve been pretty heartened by.
As for the far right’s response, it’s been a little bit muted, to be honest. I keep waiting for something to happen. There’s been obviously some chatter and people calling for me to be arrested and stuff, some fascist figures that we can talk about later. But it’s been a really good response, and I’ve been excited to see a lot of people reading it and really picking up what I put down.
TFSR: Yeah, that’s interesting about the Gettysburg rally. Some people, I imagine, it would be easy – if you were not engaged in politics, maybe because of your age around that time – to see the weird melange of different ways that the far right was presenting itself, or ways that it was engaging publicly: from large Trump rallies or pro-Trump demonstrations, or just Patriot Prayer demonstrations in the Northwest, or Klan gatherings. So much of the public aggrieved white anger was focusing around the memory of the Civil War from the perspective of the Reconstruction era or the end of Reconstruction with those statues, and forgetting that the protests in Charlottesville were a follow-up to another Klan gathering that had gone to protect the Lee statue, right?
Chris: Yes, exactly. I’m so glad you brought this up because I do think a big part of why I was drawn to this work is partly because of where I grew up is where the battlefield at Gettysburg was and how we remember that battle. The battle was insane, by the way, 50,000 people died in three days. And the way we write that history and memorialize what happened there says so much about what country we want to be. You’re exactly right that so much of the street confrontations revolved around this fight over how we remember the Civil War. Gettysburg is the site of this huge defeat of the Confederate Army. If you go around town, if you go into the shops, this Lost Cause mythology about the Confederacy as this noble cause is everywhere. It’s very much at the center of everything that’s been going on over the last 10 years. In a way, the Civil War was a war that we never stopped fighting.
TFSR: Just for any listeners who might not be familiar with the Lost Cause narrative. I know people have written books about it, but could you say a few things about what that shorthand is for?
Chris: Yeah. After the Civil War, there was this revisionist project by a lot of old Confederates to valorize the Confederacy. Sometimes, they make the argument that it wasn’t about slavery and that it was about northern aggression and states’ rights and holding up the Confederacy and Confederate soldiers as heroes and a lost noble cause. In reality, it was essentially a proto-fascist army and movement to enslave millions of people and keep them in chains.
When we talk about Lost Cause mythology, we are talking about all of these Confederate statues that weren’t put up right after the Civil War. They were put up in the decades following to cement white supremacy as the law of the land. This leads us into movies like Birth of a Nation, which is this absolute blockbuster that valorizes the Klan. We’re still dealing with the effects of the Lost Cause project, and this is why, as a country, we have, in many ways, struggled to move on.
TFSR: And it’s often presented not just as a ‘noble society,’ but a natural order that had its own balance. I could keep asking about this.
Chris: I know, we could talk about that for hours.
TFSR: It’s fair to say that the main character of your book is the anti-fascist, mainly through Trump 1.0, but also into 2.0. Antifa is quite a colorful character in the U.S. imaginary over the last decade. Can you talk a bit about who you found Antifa to be, what they do as anti-fascists, and what are some of the popular misconceptions that might be about that identity?
Chris: What’s really interesting is that no one in America really knew what Antifa was before 2017, and then by the end of 2017, I believe it’s Merriam-Webster that adds Antifa to the dictionary. Oxford Dictionaries names it one of the words of the year, just because it’s everywhere. It’s on the tip of everyone’s tongues, and everyone knows it. There are a few reasons for that. One is a series of incidents: Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi figurehead of the alt-right, who coined the term alt-right, gets punched on inauguration day in D.C. and it goes super viral. The person who punches him is dressed in black, wearing a black mask, and is described as Antifa. There are these confrontations with the far right in Berkeley, California, at UC Berkeley, where again, some anti-fascist groups are involved. This triggers a lot of media explainers about what Antifa is. Then of course it really explodes after Charlottesville when there was an anti-fascist confrontation of the fascists that came to town there.
In the public imagination, Antifa is most often associated with activists, radical leftists in black bloc, all black, faces covered, and that they are punching people and doing property destruction and stuff like that. That was honestly my impression as well. But what I ended up finding was that public direct action, occasionally punching a Nazi, represents just such a tiny, tiny fraction of the work these anti-fascist networks do.
I should step back really quick. Antifa is essentially this decentralized underground network of primarily anarchists, socialists, and communists who might not agree on everything ideologically, but what they agree on is that the far right needs to be defeated by any means necessary. That essentially means no platform for the far right, which means if you see their propaganda on the street, you take it down, you cover it up. You try to get them deplatformed from social media. You try to get their permits revoked if they’re trying to hold a rally. Sometimes that means being militant and confronting them. It also means the far right doesn’t get to enjoy anonymity. You can’t hide behind a mask while calling for a system of racial violence.
Much of the work Antifa has done has been research and intelligence gathering. What I found was that they were just these remarkable journalists, essentially. They were doing remarkable investigative journalism to expose the Nazis in their community, and this was a tactic, by the way, that exploded. In the digital age, we often refer to it as doxxing. When I say doxxing in the anti-fascist sense, I mean the digital equivalent of ripping the white hood off of a Klansman. This was a tactic that groups like Anti-Racist Action and Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice did in the 80s and 90s, where they would identify their local Nazis. They would do stuff like digging through the trash outside a known Nazi house to find discarded mail; they would go undercover too. What they would do in the pre-internet era is they would put up a Meet Your Local Nazi poster on telephone poles to alert the community about their local Nazi. The whole idea is that these people not only pose an urgent threat but also depend on organizing in the dark. So it’s important to shed a light on it.
In the digital era, a lot of this work went online, went into online sleuthing and investigations, where, let’s say, there is a Nazi online who has a big following, but they use a pseudonym. You will pore through their online footprint to find clues to identify them offline. I ended up talking to some anti-fascists who did just these remarkable feats of investigation. One dude – it was actually down south in North Carolina – he went through 60,000 tweets to do one doxx, to identify one guy. In a lot of people’s minds, Nazis are these caricatures of a neo-Nazi skinhead—shaved head, swastika tattoo, or maybe some KKK redneck in the woods. In fact, when they make these identifications, they are identifying people in positions of power. It’s police officers, pastors, politicians, teachers, professors, and it’s pretty scary what they end up finding.
TFSR: Some concerns that I have heard raised, whether in good faith or bad faith, around the tactics of that are attributed to Antifa or modern anti-fascist organizers, include questions of, “while you’re doing this anonymously, you’re posting this information; why do you get the freedom of speech to identify me, but you’re hiding your own identity?” I’d be curious to hear your perception of why there was the shift from the more public-facing mass mobilization stuff that was around during the ARA period that preceded the 2010s. And then also people concerned about like, “Well, this is just anti-anyone who doesn’t agree with me. It’s anti-free speech. They’re going to come after me because I have conservative views or because I’m a Christian.” This is something that the Trump administration is weaponizing in a lot of their language around Antifa as a terrorist, anti-Christian, anti-traditional, whatever movement, if you can address those concerns.
Chris: That’s a great question. To start, I should have mentioned that Antifa is an underground phenomenon or subculture. Its members are largely, almost always anonymous. They do that for a few reasons. It’s to protect themselves from reprisals by the far right or from the state, because they do employ some extra-legal tactics occasionally. We talked about maybe punching a Nazi, maybe committing a little sabotage, slashing a Nazi’s tires, or occasionally maybe some computer hacking. So that’s largely why Antifa is anonymous. Why this modern iteration of Antifa is more anonymous than previous ARA stuff is because maybe the threat really did get all that much more dangerous. I also think we’re in this environment now where if you are involved in anti-fascist activism or work, if you are exposed or unmasked for doing that work, you can face professional consequences yourself.
As for the free speech element here, there has been real effort to paint this doxxing tactic as anti-free speech. I would argue that is an attempt to conflate free speech with speech without consequences. You can say fascist stuff online or in person, but you’re going to face consequences for having those beliefs. This maybe dovetails more into a discussion about confrontation and violence, but one of the examples or analogies I often give is that if you are in a bar, and a dude walks into that bar and has a swastika tattoo, starts making Nazi salutes, starts saying racial slurs, there is an understanding that that guy is a threat, and that he poses a threat to people in that bar. If you are a bartender or bar owner, you will ask that person to leave. If they refuse to leave, you might make them leave, which might involve pushing, punching, or kicking them out. From the militant anti-fascist perspective, that dynamic exists outside of the bar. It exists in a public park when a Nazi decides to hold a demonstration. People that are part of these movements always pose this imminent, urgent threat to a community, and it has to be confronted head-on. So, I don’t think it’s anti-free speech. I think it is creating consequences for speech.
TFSR: Yeah, and speech (what someone says) is one thing. If somebody believes some crappy, racist, misogynistic, anti-trans things, what have you, that sucks. But I think that there were some anti-fascist organizers, maybe near the end of the book, that you had quoted in here from interviews where the question comes up of like, “Are they just going after MAGA folks or conservative people or whatever?” And a lot of them saying like, “Yo, I can’t control what’s in your head. It’s when you start organizing and trying to rally violence in this instance that I feel like it’s my civic responsibility to engage and interfere with that for public safety and community safety.”
Chris: Yeah, and that’s a really important distinction because obviously the people in the alt-right and other fascist formations during Trump 1, they share a lot of views with the people at MAGA rallies for sure. There’s a ton of crossover, but Antifa is not necessarily focused on doxxing people attending a Trump rally or a MAGA rally. They are focused on the most immediate, urgent threats, which is the extreme of the extreme and the people, like you said, that are doing this really active organizing and agitating.
TFSR: The main character, if there is an individual main character in the story, is someone who goes by Vincent, an anti-fascist who infiltrated Patriot Front at great personal risk. Can you introduce the audience to him? What about his motivations and the infiltration that you talk about in the book?
Chris: Vincent is kind of the main character of my book. As I said at the beginning, I was really trying to find a way to make this a page turner so I could introduce militant anti-fascism to a wider audience, because as vital as it is, a lot of the writing about militant anti-fascism and anarchism and other things can often be a little academic or in the weeds for a general audience. I really wanted to find a compelling narrative, and I interviewed 60 anti-fascists for this book. At the end of every interview, I’d be like, “What’s one of the craziest stories or the most compelling stories you’ve heard?” And so many people ended up pointing me towards Vincent and what Vincent did.
Vincent is in the Seattle area. That’s not where he’s originally from, but he grew up in a conservative rural part of the country. Has probably pretty normie liberal beliefs. Goes to college, gets interested in socialist activism at college, and then gradually becomes interested in anarchism and starts to identify as an anarchist. He’s in the Pacific Northwest in 2015, 2016, and 2017, and really starts to see how pronounced the far right is becoming there. He sees the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer holding rallies in the streets, sees groups like Identity Europa, which is a suit-and-tie white supremacist group, hold rallies and try to recruit people on college campuses.
In his anarchist circles, he starts to see people that are organizing against what the far right is doing. He has this formative moment where one day he is waiting for the MAX train in Portland to see some friends. He gets on the train, goes to see his friends, and has a good night. But then he wakes up in the morning and reads a story that a white supremacist had boarded a MAX train the night before and started harassing two black Muslim teenage girls and screaming, “Go back to your country” and stuff like that. Three men stand up to intervene and protect these two teenage girls from this man. He pulls out a knife and slashes their throats, and two of them die. I actually went out to Portland and covered the aftermath of that story. It’s a very awful story.
But Vincent, when he reads about this, he realizes that he missed that train by about two minutes. He could have been on that train. He’s a big dude who knows how to handle himself, and he likes to think that he would have been one of the people that stepped up to intervene, and that essentially, that could have happened to him. He could have been killed. And at this time, this fascist violence keeps getting closer and closer to people Vincent knows and loves, and people in his community.I describe in the book, but there’s just this wave of awful hate crimes in the Pacific Northwest at this time, targeting queer people and targeting the Latino community, targeting Black people. Vincent decides that he really wants to be a part of the fight to push back. Initially, he starts surveying groups like the Proud Boys. At one point, he pretends to be a Proud Boy. He takes photos. He gets people’s names. He starts to hand off this intelligence he gets to other anarchists and anti-fascist activists in the Pacific Northwest, and they start to doxx Proud Boys. And it’s pretty effective up until January 6.
After January 6, a lot of groups, initially, when it felt like there were going to be repercussions for groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, and various other groups that were at January 6. A lot of those groups went to ground and weren’t active because they were fearing prosecution and other repercussions for their involvement in the insurrection. In 2021 and around that time, Vincent began focusing on other far-right formations, especially those operating more anonymously and in the dark. That’s how he decided to look at Patriot Front. Patriot Front is a neo-Nazi group that grew out of the ashes of Charlottesville. It used to be called Vanguard America, but James Alex Fields Jr. (the guy who drove the car into counterprotesters and killed Heather Heyer) was associated with Vanguard America. That was bad PR, a bad look for them. Even though they agreed with what he did, they decided to rebrand. And they called themselves Patriot Front, which is essentially this red, white, and blue rebrand of straight-up neo-Nazism.
Vincent sees a lot of Patriot Front activity in Seattle and the Northwest in general, and he finds it annoying and dangerous. I should say that Patriot Front around this time is also on a hate crime spree. They are vandalizing and destroying Black Lives Matter murals and pride murals. They are stealing transgender pride flags and burning them. Vincent looks around and realizes that the best way to disrupt or destroy Patriot Front is to go undercover and to do an in-person infiltration, which is a really risky thing to do. He initially doesn’t think he’s going to do it himself, but realizes that he has a lot going for him. He realizes that he can pretend to be someone on the far right because he grew up in a conservative place in a conservative family, he knows the social mores. After talking to his family and other activists, he decides to do it.
He joins Patriot Front. Initially, there’s a phone interview with three high-ranking members, followed by an in-person interview with the head of the Patriot Front chapter in the Pacific Northwest. And he gets in. From there, the book follows the remarkable things he does; in order to stay in good standing in the group, he has to go on all these in-person meetings. He has to go on these hikes they do together in the wilderness for days at a time. He goes on vandalism missions and propaganda missions, hanging banners off highway overpasses, putting up posters, and, in one case, vandalizing a Pride mural.
He ends up earning the trust of Patriot Front. He method acts as a Nazi so effectively that they trust him to be the official photographer and videographer, which means he is the one responsible for photographing and filming their propaganda. When Patriot Front publishes their propaganda, they will blur out their members’ faces. But Vincent has access to this raw footage. Over the course of his infiltration, which lasts about five or six months, he learns that Patriot Front is planning a big demonstration in D.C. Some information about the march ends up in the hands of anti-fascists in D.C., and the march is in many ways sabotaged. A lot of their vehicles and cars get redecorated; maybe some tires get slashed. It’s a disaster for Patriot Front in many ways.
Shortly after that, Patriot Front figures out who the infiltrator was. Vincent’s infiltration is over, and they think that’s it. But what they don’t know is that Vincent and his anti-fascist friends had acquired about 440 gigabytes worth of Patriot Front’s internal messages to each other, including a lot of photos and videos and other things that, in January 2022, go live on a database on Unicorn Riot, which is an independent media site that created a platform for leaked or acquired Nazi internal messages. So when all these 440 gigabytes worth of messages go online, suddenly this network of anti-fascist researchers across America can mine those messages for clues to identify their local member of Patriot Front. What I end up revealing in the book is that, through Vincent’s infiltration, you can probably tie the doxxings or unmaskings of 80 Patriot Front members to his infiltration. That’s essentially the story of Vincent. There’s more to talk about, but yeah.
TFSR: Read the book.
Chris: Yes, please, read it. It’s so good.
TFSR: The storyline is just peppered with Patriot Front people getting identified and what led to the identification, or some of the process by some of the researchers, what they were able to put together to identify these members at various points of that movement. It’s super interesting to watch through the process. It’s also cool to see how this individual who makes these choices isn’t, as far as I know, or not as far as is represented in the book, is not acting on behalf of an organization, but is in social network with other people that have common ideas, and throughout is able to share the information with journalists, researchers, or independent folks maybe who identify as anti-fascists or Antifa. A lot of them probably don’t use that term for themselves. It allows an insight into going from the individual actions into wider social activity.
Chris: Yeah, it’s like the affinity group model. It’s the people doing this work who trust each other, begin working together, and end up collaborating in really remarkable ways. I should mention quickly that a big part of this book is not only about what Vincent does, but what other anti-fascist projects did, which was to destroy a lot of alt-right groups, including Identity Europa. Anti-fascists doxxed hundreds of members of Identity Europa to the point where they had to fold. The Charlottesville lawsuit that ends up bankrupting and destroying and dividing a lot of the alt-right that marched in Charlottesville was based completely on intelligence and messages gathered by an anti-fascist infiltrator. As you said, what is so remarkable about what Antifa has done over the last decade is that they were the hidden hand behind thousands of news stories that we all read, even if they were never credited. Because the research they did was one of the earliest alarm bells about where this country was headed and what we were up against. So it’s a pretty remarkable story.
TFSR: Not that Andy Ngo would listen to this, but we’re not pointing to any known existential organized black hand organization operating, as you point to in the book it’s people that decide: “I don’t like this. I’m going to start digging into what information’s available and do some research into this group that’s harassing people locally and start a blog and just be anonymous about it and put it out there.” Then other people are going to be able to work with that, whether that means putting up flyers around a neighborhood where someone who is a fascist lives, or contacting their employer or someone else who recognizes this person’s activities make them a threat to other people. “We should inform the public about it.”
Chris: Exactly. The profile of your typical militant anti-fascist activist, Antifa: uniformly, they all described this idea of we protect us – and I should have said this in the beginning when I was defining Antifa – one of the defining elements of Antifa is that they do not trust the police or the state in this fight. They see those institutions as inherently white supremacist or always siding with fascists. The people doing this work largely start doing it because they have personal brushes with fascists in their community, and realize that no one else is going to do anything to stop these guys.
One of the more memorable ones was an anti-fascist researcher in Texas, whose close friend lost someone in the El Paso Walmart massacre, when a white supremacist opened fire and killed, I believe, 22 or 23 Latino people. Also overrepresented in Antifa are a lot of queer and trans and neurodivergent people who see what’s happening as an urgent threat in need of confronting for their communities.
TFSR: As targeted individuals and people with targeted identities, that makes a lot of sense.
Chris: Yeah.
TFSR: So, as you say, Vincent was one of a few people that you introduced to us who had taken the step of infiltration, including others dating back to the second KKK era of the early 20th century. The work of those folks informs and supports those who come after. Even if there’s not an institutional genealogy you can point to, people build on the experiences and the documentation collected in these ways. It’s not always from people who have a militant anti-fascist positionality. There was the case of Buffalo, there was a cop who had done this infiltration and who did not have a revolutionary egalitarian perspective, but was doing a hired job and also probably had some ideological reasons to focus against this terrorist organization.
In fact, this last year there was an announcement of a federal indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center by Trump 2.0 DOJ, Department of Justice. I wonder if you could explore the range of ways that movements and groups gain inside scoops from within fascist and far-right groups. Some of the differences in approach and politics between the militant anti-fascists (like Vincent, for instance) – what they do versus groups like the SPLC, Southern Poverty Law Center, or the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, and break down some of these Trump DOJ allegations against the SPLC and what you think is going on there.
Chris: The Southern Poverty Law Center obviously is a civil rights organization based in Alabama, and for decades they have done remarkable research and tracking of the far-right and of white-supremacist movements in America. They release this annual hate report, they will list certain groups as hate groups or extremist groups. For example, newspapers have relied heavily on the Southern Poverty Law Center when writing about the far right because they’ll often say “the KKK, which is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center,” et cetera. The SPLC gets a lot of donations and has millions and millions of dollars behind it. It is, in a way, more formalized, above-ground anti-fascist work. But also where it deviates from militant anti-fascist organizing is that they do work with the state and have occasionally worked with law enforcement or gone through legislative channels to enact reform. But militant anti-fascists don’t do that.
The reason that in Trump 2.0 they’re going after the SPLC is that I would argue the SPLC has been really effective in destabilizing a lot of far-right groups over the last decades. A lot of people on the far right have a seething hatred for the SPLC. If you go to one of their offices in Alabama, they have a display in the lobby where a KKK member tried to bomb their headquarters at one point. They’ve really come under attack. The reason Trump 2.0 is going after the SPLC so hard is that the SPLC has been a thorn in that movement’s side for a long time, and for organized fascism in America. SPLC was the one that got Stephen Miller’s leaked emails showing just how involved in fascist movements he was.
SPLC has written and uncovered a lot about people in the Trump administration and the Republican Party. So this attack on the SPLC, now with this lawsuit and these charges, is an attempt to dismantle it and destroy it. They want to dismantle and destroy any groups that do this type of organizing. As you mentioned earlier, this attack is often done by saying that SPLC is anti-free speech by labeling just plain old conservative activists as Nazis, which of course they are actually Nazis. The accusations that the Trump administration is making against the SPLC are essentially that they were paying infiltrators to go undercover into Nazi groups. That they essentially were paying Nazi groups to survive, and that every Nazi group that exists is essentially paid by the SPLC. It’s a total farce, these kind of allegations. Sure, did the SPLC work with people undercover in certain Nazi groups? Yeah, of course. It’s my understanding, at least. If not actively doing it, they were receiving information from people going undercover into these groups, just as I have as a journalist. But what the Trump administration is doing in going after the SPLC is really, really scary and will eventually start to come for a lot of the rest of us.
Another quick addendum there is that the ADL, of course, has also done this work and has done a lot of great research into the far right over the decades. But they have also always been a centrist institution that has done this dance where they have created a false equivalency between people on the far right and people maybe on the left, where they have painted Antifa and other radical leftist groups or pro-Palestinian groups with the same brush as they do white supremacists and Nazis. They have done a lot of stuff that the left doesn’t like. So a lot of people have looked at the ADL very warily over the years. Now the ADL, ever since October 7, has really leaned into pro-Israel stuff, and a lot of people are more distrustful of the work they’re doing now.
TFSR: Yeah, they might be described as an anti-extremist research or action group. There’s a parallel between anti-fascist work and anti-extremism work. But as you said, the anti-extremism comes in as erasing and normalizing state violence.
Chris: Exactly.
TFSR: Saying anything that is parastate or extrastate is unacceptable, no matter what the political perspective it comes from. But it’s always cherry-picking anyway. There’s a huge source of federal funding for that research.
Chris: Exactly. You really hit the nail on the head there. That term “extremism,” I use it myself because it’s a good shorthand, but it is problematic because it implies that these extreme white supremacist views also aren’t systemic and mainstream in so many ways.
TFSR: Around halfway through the book, you describe how while the second KKK, Ku Klux Klan, was in many ways waning, due in part to the unmasking (also in part due to its multi-level marketing nature) its seeds had already been planted and influenced government policy moving forward. Its language of 100% Americanism, also espoused by the American Legion at the time, its anti-immigrant policies to restrict Jews, Catholics, Slavs, and other non-WASPs from entering and staying in the country, eugenicist interests in limiting procreation by some populations, and increasing the birth rates of others through focused sterilizations and limiting access to contraception. There were federal pressures against anarchists, socialists, and communists, or the labor movement more generally, via a tremendous Red Scare that saw thousands imprisoned or deported. So I feel like a clear parallel is already laid from the MAGA marches and street organizing of chauvinists from the first Trump administration versus this maximalist capture of government power at many levels in the second Trump administration. Especially seeing the way the January 6 folks have been treated by the administration, and the reversal not only of charges but also of claims that the DOJ acted unjustly. Can you talk a bit about what can be found in comparing these situations? Again, the receded Klan having already seeded into seats of power, and what you and your interviewees think that this means for the type of movements and tactics that we as anti-fascists need to engage today?
Chris: Great question. One of the most interesting aspects of researching this book was diving into the first and second Klans. The argument I make in the book is that masked fascism, masked white supremacy- they wear masks in hopes that one day they won’t need to wear masks at all. That their racist worldview will be so widespread and mainstream that they don’t need the masks anymore. This is essentially the story of the first and second Klan. The first Klan is born after the Civil War to essentially terrorize and destroy Reconstruction. When Reconstruction is abandoned, the first Klan dissipates. They’re no longer needed. The line I use in the book is that they traded the anonymity of the hood for the anonymity of the lynch mob.
Fast forward to the Second Klan. There are all these remarkable efforts to unmask the Second Klan and create division in the Second Klan. It really eats itself and falls apart. But as you said, part of the reason it disbands is, in a way, that it was successful. They played a part in the enactment of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which essentially limits immigration to Northern Europe and implements some eugenicist policies. Even fast forward to the present, the groups that marched in Charlottesville are almost all gone or disbanded now. That was in many real ways an anti-fascist victory in organizing against them.
But also, part of the reason that those groups aren’t around anymore is that everything that they were agitating for has gone mainstream. The way I describe the alt-right in the book is a vanguard or shock troops for MAGA. They opened the Overton window to ideas, rhetoric, and policies that were previously unimaginable or unmentionable. They made them respectable in the mainstream.
One of the most alarming things for me as a reporter, and this is a sentiment I’ve heard from a lot of anti-fascist activists as well, is the degree to which the stuff we used to read in private Nazi chats 10 years ago is now being tweeted from the White House social media account. Terms like remigration, which is a euphemism for ethnic cleansing, phrases like “import the third world, become the third world,” you saw Nazis say that all the time, and now you have Trump writing it on Truth Social.
Obviously, you mentioned this earlier: this tactic of unmasking and doxxing fascists and exposing them- the reason you do that is to create consequences. If you unmask someone as a Nazi, they’re liable to lose their job. Their girlfriend might dump them. Their family might shun them. It creates a social cost for being part of organized fascism. It was really effective there for a while. What that tactic does, and what it’s dependent on, is a social taboo against explicit white supremacy, explicit fascism. It leverages that taboo to create those consequences. The animating question of the book is what happens when that taboo starts to disappear. Part of the narrative of the book is anti-fascists seeing their doxxings, their unmaskings; there’s diminishing returns. Some people that they doxx and expose as Nazis, various communities collectively shrug their shoulders and don’t really care about having a Nazi as a neighbor. For this reason, anti-fascists, before, certainly before the mainstream media and a lot of other political observers saw the direction the country was headed in, to where we are now. Where you have ICE doing what ICE is doing, where we have this growing archipelago of detention centers and arguably concentration camps, where you have an administration talking about ethnically cleansing, remigrating millions and millions of our neighbors and friends, of eradicating trans people from public life.
I wrote a piece for the Guardian about this, but I thought it was interesting that five years ago, Antifa was focused on unmasking Nazis and fascists. Now the people wearing masks are ICE agents. A lot of the work they are doing is about unmasking ICE agents and creating that social cost for being in ICE. You asked about what anti-fascist work looks like now. An observation I keep making is that the parallels between the uprising in Minneapolis against ICE and what anti-fascists were doing on the streets in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 against various new fascist groups like Identity Europa or the Proud Boys or Patriot Prayer, et cetera. There are really striking parallels there. It was everyday people in Minneapolis realizing that no one was coming to save them. They realized that they had to do it themselves, and they ended up embracing militant anti-fascist tactics. This idea of “we go where they go.” They were monitoring and surveying ICE and warning their neighbors about ICE. They were pressuring venues, hotels, and businesses not to do business with ICE. They were doing research to identify and unmask ICE agents and let communities know who these people were.
In many ways, that work was successful, and, essentially, the anti-fascist work has shifted. Militant anti-fascist work has also always involved things that are central to anarchist, socialist, and communist organizing in general, like providing mutual aid to your neighbors and so on. But the fight has also changed, where anti-fascist tactics of unmasking and exposing, in some ways, are focused on agents of the state now, which is a really interesting and alarming development.
TFSR: That tactic is important or could be useful for a few reasons. With certain activities, there is the likely outcome, but there’s always a wider insurgent threat to an activity. People having a march or demonstration is often presented as a civic show of disagreement in front of the government. But there’s a threat in that mass mobilization that it could become a force that would overtake the government and create a new order. Similarly with things like doxxing, there is underlying it the possibility that unmasking will lead to physical consequences against someone. I know that’s been a charge that the state has levied against the very thin-skinned ICE and Customs and Border Patrol and other federal or even local law enforcement, like “Antifas are trying to doxx us so that they can attack our homes” or something like that. And cops are so afraid of that happening, not because there is a wide history of anti-law enforcement activity by leftists outside of guerrilla movements in the ’70s, maybe. That’s not a thing. What they’re afraid of in actuality is to be embarrassed because they’ll have to show their face at the market down the street where they buy their groceries or pick up their kids from school. The other parents are going to know what daddy or mommy does for a job is break up other people’s families.
Chris: Exactly. ICE is very much like the Nazis in this. And a lot of the work that Antifa is doing now, and not just Antifa, but people in general, is bringing back shame for what they are involved in, in creating that shame, creating that social cost. I don’t know about you, but my algorithm, my timeline, I get so many videos of people shaming ICE agents in public and being like, “Get out of here. You’re not welcome here,” when ICE agents are trying to get coffee and stuff. That is and can be effective.
One of the interesting things that happened after the murders of Alex Pretti and Renée Good, and after the Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, is that slogan “Abolish ICE” was considered radical years ago, but after Minneapolis, you saw support for that phrase skyrocket to, I believe, a majority support it, and even a fraction of Republicans supported it.
TFSR: It’s got to be competing with “Live, laugh, love” at this point for general popularity, right?
Chris: Exactly. That’s right. There is a concerted effort right now that will and can find success in making ICE the pariah it deserves to be.
TFSR: To reiterate, in terms of who is resisting ICE or documenting ICE activities, there’s a small number of people in this country that identify with the term ‘Antifa’, or who are part of groups that identify as ARA crews or parts of Torch Antifa or even SRA, whatever popular anti-fascist organizations exist. The generalization of those tactics says something, and it shows this interesting – not to sound Marxian – dialectical evolution of tactics in response to power is adopting the modalities, the philosophy (and the terminology) that the fascists in the streets were. And we’ve seen in instances where people have seen a visual challenge, the massing and then bragging about massing of these troops in people’s neighborhoods getting broken apart with SUVs and people jumping out of them and kidnapping people. People have been able to respond similarly by generalizing tactics of resistance that I would absolutely describe as anti-fascist. It is really inspirational. The Trump administration has, as you’ve discussed in the book and has panned out over the last years, been building a Red Scare by calling anti-fascists and their allies terrorists in the media, claiming conspiracies, or attempting to shape the reapplication of ‘conspiracy’ to mean something wider and looser. You can point to past trials, from J20 or the Stop Cop City trial in Georgia or the Prairie Land One or the Spokane Three, there’s been a number ongoing with the Minneapolis 15 cases where they’re trying to apply these charges, constructing conspiracy cases in the courts and pursuing decades in prison for protests where property maybe got damaged, maybe ICE raids were interrupted, but no person’s been harmed, unlike what happened on January 6. I wonder if you’d talk about the anti-Antifa repression that we’ve seen under Trump 2.0, and how far you think it’ll go.
Chris: Yeah, it’s really scary. To do a quick and dirty history of the Antifa boogeyman: as long as Antifa has been part of the American lexicon since 2017, there’s been this real effort by the right to manufacture an Antifa boogeyman and to distort what Antifa is, to make it synonymous with extremists outside of political respectability, to make it synonymous with domestic terrorists. After the fallout from Charlottesville, this really interesting thing happens where there’s this MAGA influencer named Microchip who starts a viral petition to label Antifa a domestic terrorist group. He gives this incredibly frank interview to Politico in which he spells out why he does this. This viral petition to the White House gets almost half a million signatures, and it’s again to designate Antifa as a domestic terrorist group. Microchip acknowledges in this interview with Politico that there is no domestic terrorist statute on the federal level to make that designation, and that’s not the point of the petition. The point of the petition, he says, is to set up Antifa as a punching bag. It is to create a false equivalency between violence on the right and the left. The phrasing he uses is an extreme form of whataboutism, essentially a way of distracting and deflecting from the right’s very real violence, and saying like, “Look, they do it too,” which is an absurd thing, but ends up being really effective. There is a concerted effort in the following years after every natural disaster or mass shooting to rush into the initial information vacuum about what’s happened and blame it on Antifa. Antifa’s blamed for every mass shooting. They’re blamed for setting wildfires out west—all this stuff. And there’s just this Antifa panic.
Fast forward to 2020, the Antifa boogeyman is used during the George Floyd uprisings, where MAGA essentially blames the uprisings on Antifa, which of course is false. Those were organic community-led uprisings. But by blaming it on Antifa, it’s a way of portraying those uprisings as inorganic or the work of outside agitators. What it also provides is a pretext for the far right to show up and start targeting, attacking the George Floyd uprisings. Some stories I tell in the book: entire towns in Idaho and Oregon are taken over by armed militias patrolling the streets because they’re protecting the towns from Antifa. You have the far right attack Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the country repeatedly.
Fast forward to Trump 2.0: Antifa is repackaged again to describe anyone opposing the Trump agenda. In September, the Trump administration claims to declare Antifa a domestic terrorist group. Even though there is no federal statute, they make this designation; they issue a memorandum detailing what Antifa is. Throughout this Antifa boogeyman, their definition of Antifa is really expansive, and they will use it against whomever they want to target for violence or repression. It’s interesting: they made this designation calling Antifa domestic terrorists in September, and then Alex Pretti and Renée Good are murdered by ICE agents. We all see it with our eyes in these videos, these awful videos. What does the Trump administration, what does MAGA do right after those murders? They retroactively label Renée Good and Alex Pretti domestic terrorists, essentially as a means of saying, “Yeah, we killed them, but they deserved it.” So, when you step back and look at the rhetoric, when they are saying that Antifa is domestic terrorists and they are starting to do these prosecutions against organized resistance to ICE and calling those movements Antifa, what they are saying is that we can do whatever we want to these people.
What happened in Prairie Lands with the insane sentences that these activists were given for nonviolent resistance. There were fireworks, one person opened fire, and a bullet grazed or hit a police officer in the neck, non-fatally. The sentences they were given, including, I believe, 30 years for an activist who moved some zines, should horrify us all, because that state repression that prosecution and persecution will come for a lot of us. It’s really important to stand up for the people that are also being targeted by the state right now. Like you said, the Spokane Three, the Minneapolis 15, and so on. It’s important to keep an eye on the way MAGA and the GOP and the right talk about Antifa and who they label Antifa going forward.
TFSR: Getting back for a moment to the focus of Vincent’s infiltration, Patriot Front. You got some insights into how, in part, because of the lengthened infiltration of the chat logs that anti-fascists had, you could see how Patriot Front members were talking about the doxxing at the time. Then you’ve also spoken to at least one “former,” which is a term within the movement for someone who has moved away from fascist or white nationalist organizing, at least separated from it, if not actually gone into anti-fascist politics. There are some insights about how some innovations or some developments within Patriot Front or within the right in terms of dealing with doxxing. Could you talk a little about what they’ve learned and where Patriot Front is now in terms of mass demonstrations and their connection to the so-called White Nationalist 3.0 Active Club Network.
Chris: Obviously, what Vincent did to Patriot Front really hobbled Patriot Front, and they were pissed about it. There was even chat about them trying to find Vincent and maybe do something to him. But Patriot Front’s still around. Out of all the groups that emerged, pre-, during, and post-Charlottesville, they’re one of the few remaining. Part of what I get into the book, and part of what this former Patriot Front member told me, is that they started to develop methods to make them a little more doxx-resistant. If someone’s doxxed, they’re brought further into the fold. There’s been some reporting on this. Patriot Front is developing its own businesses where it can employ members. So if someone’s doxxed and loses their job, they can get a job with a Patriot Front-affiliated business.
The other thing, which the former Patriot Front member quipped to me, was that because there this social taboo against explicit white nationalism is crumbling before our eyes; he joked that it might be advantageous for him to put Patriot Front on his resume, which maybe is another reason why it’s surviving. But the other really big development with Patriot Front, as you mentioned, is its growing cooperation, collaboration, crossover with Active Clubs. Active Clubs are essentially a network of neo-Nazi groups organized around mixed martial arts gyms. They have tournaments, they have gatherings, and they are essentially always training for violence. It was started by Rob Rundo, who was in Charlottesville as part of the Rise Above Movement. Active Club networks have started to spread far and wide. A lot of Patriot Front members are also mixed up in Active Club networks. Why they are particularly scary is that I could foresee a moment in the future, and this is something the former Patriot Front member himself thought to me, was that if there’s a point where MAGA, Trump, GOP needs to deploy vigilante violence, these are the type of networks that could be tapped to do that, which is a scary prospect, almost like the Black Shirts in Mussolini’s Italy.
So that is where Patriot Front is at the moment. Patriot Front got a lot of press for its July 4 march in D.C. amid the festivities. They stage these flash-mob marches to surprise people. Their numbers have grown. In Vincent’s time, there were probably 300; there are maybe 500 now. It’s definitely something to keep an eye on. One thing I’ll say for the D.C. march was that it produced a photo that went viral, which is all these Patriot Front members on the train going into the National Mall. They’re just standing around in their masks, and there’s one Black woman on the train, just surrounded and looking up at the camera. I don’t know, man. Something’s just gonna get your blood boiling, but you gotta keep an eye on these guys.
TFSR: Absolutely, and just counterposing that to the story you told about the MAX Train. They will do violence. They’ve done violence in Nashville. They attacked a Black bartender during one of their spontaneous riots or one of their flash mobs or whatever. I think it was Nashville a couple years ago.
Chris: They attacked a Black man in Boston, a musician, and there was a lawsuit. I’m always a little confused. They’ve been found guilty in three lawsuits now, but no one’s really gone after them or collected money. Another element here is that we are talking about the Trump administration, the federal government going after Antifa; the flip side of that is that the FBI, the federal government, isn’t really devoting resources as much, if at all, to countering groups like Patriot Front now. Interesting dynamic.
TFSR: I’m reading Spencer Ackerman’s Reign of Terror. At the beginning ofit,there’s a focus on telling the story of the Oklahoma City bombing and the way that the media and the government responded immediately to that, looking at the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, saying, “Oh yeah, this has got to be Islamic fundamentalists. We’re going to go right after them.” But in the late ’90s, the two focuses of terrorist investigations were Animal and Earth Liberation Fronts and Muslim terrorists. This is totally ignoring the fact that the body count lies in the hands of white nationalists, historically in the U.S. So it seems it’s pretty clear that thing is just meat for the base. It’s scary. Can you talk about the stakes that you see on the table right now in the U.S. for marginalized communities, queer folks, differently-abled and neurodivergent folks, non-citizens and people of color, non-Christians and non-believers?
Chris: All of the marginalized groups that the GOP and the Trump administration are going after are at real urgent risk. Obviously everyone knows that. There is no moderating influence on the GOP. There’s no moderating influence in the Republican Party. They will keep going further and further. The stuff of our most dystopian novels and movies, the stuff we thought was consigned to history, is coming back. Never really went away. But one thing I try to get across is that anti-fascist activists were often a Cassandra story. They saw up close and personal how dangerous this growing far-right movement was. They saw up close how it was starting to get a real foothold in power, and they were screaming about it. But no one really listened to them because they were dismissed as extremists on the other side of the political spectrum.
It’s really important to take a step back and take perspective on the daily outrages that we are forced to consume and witness and see, and the way these daily injustices are a blip in the news cycle, and how routine it’s become for blatant racism and white nationalism to be espoused at the highest levels of power. If the GOP wants to eradicate trans people from public life, they want to ethnically cleanse this country of millions and millions of people. The number keeps going up and up for how many they want to deport. Forcibly remove. We keep hearing stories of people dying in detention centers, being refused treatment. There was a story today, I believe, of a detainee on hunger strike who was being force-fed, which is a form of torture. We are seeing people separated from their families. We are seeing essentially secret police force disappear people off the street. We are seeing our books and history under attack. Going back to our discussion about the Lost Cause, there is an effort to enshrine it as the official history of the U.S. It’s just hard to scream loud enough about what’s happening. Obviously, we all know, but it’s still frustrating to watch and read the news and the mainstream media, for there’s still no understanding of just how bad it is. There’s still this urgency that’s missing, and I can’t quite articulate it. Does that make sense?
TFSR: Yeah, there’s the question that when we’ve read about atrocities or atrocious periods of regimes coming into power doing terrible things, the question is how did that happen? How did the world let that happen? How did the people there let that occur when they knew at least some of what was going on? If you’re sitting by, not that you are personally able to do everything as a listener, as an individual, as a journalist, as an activist, but this is how it happens: ispeople sit on the sidelines because they’re tired, because they’re overworked, because they’re scared, and allow things to move forward when even the smallest activities, the smallest focus, the smallest conversations can be the start of the resistance that we would need to roll this back and create worlds that we that are worth living in.
Chris: That’s spot on. Something that became clear to me in the book and researching the book and reporting the last few years is that there’s a reason that fascists and MAGA are going after trans people first and immigrants first and pro-Palestinian activists first. They know that those groups and people won’t receive the solidarity and support that they deserve from liberals and centrists. They know that those groups can be peeled away. What liberals and centrists need to understand is it really does go back to that Niemöller poem that’s so bandied about and goes viral all the time. “First they came for the socialists, and I did nothing because I wasn’t a socialist,” and then eventually it comes for him. We are on that trajectory now.
The thing about fascism is that it constantly needs to manufacture new enemies and scapegoats and people to repress and marginalize and target for death and expulsion. So, even though fascism will fail and fall, it’s a self-destructive phenomenon or ideology; the task right now is to stop it from doing as much destruction as it can.
TFSR: Absolutely. It’s very well put. On that depressing or challenging note, Chris, are there any projects, journalistic or anti-fascist, that you want to shout out that you think are inspirational, or that you think folks should be paying attention to, and maybe could learn and build off of?
Chris: Yeah, I always want to take the opportunity to shout out Unicorn Riot, without whom this book would not have been possible. Because this book is based in large part on those leaked Patriot Front messages and the leaked messages of so many other fascist groups that Unicorn Riot decided to build a database for, make it open to the public, open source, so that anyone could use it and mine it. I was able to reconstruct a narrative and do some research that exposed some other Nazis because of what they did. Also, Unicorn Riot does so much fantastic work in general, and it’s that independent media is always ahead of the curve of mainstream media, and also never gets the credit it deserves. I want to shout out to them, and I know they’re still doing good work now. I’ll leave it at Unicorn Riot. But there are so many people still doing great work out there.
TFSR: Thank you. Are you working on anything else right now? You mentioned a Guardian article, but any longer-form publications? Any books in the works?
Chris: No, no books in the works yet. But if you guys have ideas, please let me know at letsgomathias@protonmail.com. I’m writing for The Guardian, and I’ve written for The Nation, Zoteo, MS Now, and Talking Points Memo. You can follow me on Blue Sky at @letsgomathias.bsky.social for what I’m working on. I imagine that I will figure out what the next book is.
TFSR: Cool, Chris. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat and for this really good read. If you end up coming through Asheville, you should definitely show up at Firestorm and do an event there. I’d love to meet you and get to see you talk.
Chris: I would love that so much, and it’s such a pleasure talking to you. Also, writing a book can be really hard, so being here, talking to you, and having the book resonate with you is really amazing. So thank you.