Wolz Media.
Hello, and welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I'm your occasional host, Molly Conger, and today we're going to be talking about something that is happening here, doxing Nazis. Specifically, I'm talking to Christmathias about his new book, To Catch a Fascist, The Fight to expose the Radical Right. Chris, thanks for coming on today.
Oh my god, Molly, It's such a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
I'm so excited to talk about this book. You sent me a copy of it recently. I don't think I remembered until I was reading it and I talked to you while you were writing it.
Yes, yes, yes you did. Yeah, yeah, you're one of the many, many people I talked to, and you are quoted in the book. In fact, I can't remember if you told it to me or if I cite it from somewhere else. But you once compared the research that goes into doxing unmasking Nazis to basically investigating your Instagram account, which I thought was an amazing comparison, because you're basically saying, like, this type of work is accessible if you've done that type of slew thing.
Which is not something I'm admitting to doing. I got brazy about my exes. I'm just saying it is something many women are very good at.
It, exactly.
Yes, and they don't realize it's a transferable skill.
Yeah, exactly.
But for those who don't know, christ Rhramathias has been covering the far right for more than a decade, right, Yeah, yeah, you're with Huffington Post for a long time, and you've been independent for a couple of years.
Yeah. So I was at huff Post for like almost fourteen years, and about ten of those I know, it's wild, and ten of those years I was covering the far right, which is how I ended up in Charlottesville in twenty seventeen for Unite the Right rally, which is something Molly and I have talked a lot about before. And yeah, after I got back from Charlottesville, my editor at the time was like, this is your beat now covering the
far right. So I was kind of like among this like initial through of like digital media journalists who suddenly found themselves on the like the right wing extremism beat. And pretty quickly, you know, I realized while I was trying to unmask people in the far right, that there were already people doing that work and they were anti fascist activists.
Yeah, and so to prepare for today, I listened to a couple of interviews you've done about the book so far. It comes out first week of February.
February third. Yeah, We're we're close. Yeah. Yeah.
I was listening to those interviews, and I was thinking about, you know, this is a different audience, Like you don't need to explain to people who listened to it could happen here what antifa is or what docing is. Yes, but I think the book very delicately and unapologetically explains those things to people who might be afraid of them.
Yeah. I mean that was the entire intent of the book,
and I'm so glad you picked up on that. You know, I think I kind of imagined writing this book for my parents, for like kind of you know, boomer liberals, if you will, or centrists and other people just I think that have a lot of misapprehensions about antifa, understandably, and you know, the kind of the goal of the book was to to demystify what antifa is, explain it to a wider audience, and to make kind of more radical politics that Antifa represents more palatable to a wider audience.
And the way I tried to do that was to make the book a bit of a thriller so that was accessible, and make it into like a spy narrative. And I'm hoping that the very kind of average reader will be able to dive into this and come out understanding more radical leftist politics that maybe wasn't accessible to them before.
That's such a hard needle to threat, because like, I could give this book to my dad, right right, but I also enjoyed reading it.
Yay, good for the listener.
You should go out and get this. It's not just for your dads. You will like it to the cold open, right, Like the introductory chapter starts sort of in media res with your framework of the book. Right, this Vincent Washington, this infiltrator inside Patriot Front. And the thing is I know about Vincent Washington. I read the leaks that Vincent was responsible for. I was actually the one who told Thomas Rousseau in person about the leak.
What I didn't know that book?
Oh yes, for the listener, Vincent Washington is not a real person. Surely is a real person, but that's not his real name, yes, right, So within Patriot Front they all get a pseudonym and then their last name is like their state. So Vincent Washington was a man whose name is not Vincent, who might be from Washington, and he infiltrated Patriot Front and he leaked all of their rocket chats. And the day that leak was published, it was January twenty first, twenty twenty two. Yes, it was
the day of the March for Life. Yes, So Patriot Front was in Washington, DC, and I had a suspicion that Patriot Front would be there. They don't announce that the kind of ahead of time, but I was pretty sure they were gonna be there. So I went to Washington, d C. And we were standing outside the National Archives. Thomas Rousseau had a little bullhorn. He had like twenty or thirty guys and the little matching fits, and they
were so tickled with themselves. They were so tickled. People were just falling all over themselves because these like scary Nazis were on the street. And I actually I have a video. I'll embed it in the final.
Oh my god, Molly, hey, guys, your rocket chat just got leads on DIA secrets.
Unicorn Ryan just dropped your rocket Chat everything, all your dms, all your dms, the Matadeia.
The video We're just gonna make fun of you, the videos that.
You send your network leaders. Those all have Metadeia and Unicorn Ryan is posting them right now.
Holy shit, Molly, how did I not ask you about this for the book? I could have put this in there. Oh my god.
It was incredible because, you know, Thomas Rousseau later was like, oh, it's like not a big He looked scared.
Oh my god, he looks scared.
Yeah, it's like I know about Vincent, but seeing the story from his side of things was so different. Right, Like I use these leaks all the time, but I, you know, never get to know about the leaker.
Oh my god. Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah. So again, this is kind of my goal for the book was that these kind of anti fascist spies, and I feel like most Americans don't know that Antifa had so many spies over the last ten years that were infiltrating these groups. You know, they were the hidden hand behind thousands of news stories because they collected all of this invaluable intelligence.
You know, hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of private messages that these white supremacists were sending to each other, which then were posted on a database on Unicorn Riot, which you know, wonderful researchers like yourself and other people used to mine for clues and details that they could use to identify all of these previously p sseunonymous Nazis. So for example, you know, and I wish I could have seen the look on Thomas's face. I can't wait to
see that video. But yeah, I mean, like they released I believe it was like four hundred gigabytes worth of rocket Chat messages and you know, videos and photos and.
Stuff with metadata still attached.
To them, exactly with metadata still attached to them, which we'll get to in a second. By the way, there's a good story about the metadata. But you know, ultimately that data would contribute to do saying unmasking I think about eighty members of Patriot Front, which is just remarkable, and I think, you know, part of the story I was trying to tell was that these anonymous anti fascists who are doing this work, you know, anonymously, like they're
not doing it for acclaim or glory. They're doing it because they see it as a form of community self defense. And you know what they were doing, you know, I think outstripped the efforts of major media, news organizations, you know, academic institutions, civil rights organizations, oh, no doubt, law enforcement definitely, like they were doing more work to destabilize and destroy far right groups. Then I would argue really anyone else.
And then this subsequent work that builds off of that by civil rights groups filing these like Large Clan Act lawsuits. Those lawsuits don't exist without these leaks. Siins v. Kessler doesn't exist without these leaks. The three lawsuits against Patriot Front don't exist without these.
Leaks, Yes, exactly.
And I've been thinking a lot about this this week, right because it was the anniversary of Richard Spencer getting punched in the face five years ago. Happy anniversary, Happy anniversary to those who celebrate. And that was a beautiful moment. And I think we can all agree that it's so funny to watch Richard Spencer get punched in the face. But every year you see people say and that's what stopped him, and he was never heard from again and he shut up forever after that.
Right, that's not true. That's not true at.
All, Like I love I love the guy that punched him in the face, but that didn't end.
It, Yes, exactly, an infiltrator did. An infiltrator did, and I think again, you know, kind of the goal of the book is that most Antifa in the public imagination is most often associated with Nazi punching, and you know, for good reason, Like most people learned about Antifa in twenty seventeen from videos like the video of Richard Spencer
getting punched. It's so interesting to look back and realize that no one in America knew what the fuck Antifa was before twenty seventeen, and then by the end of that year, everyone had heard that word or knew that word.
It was the boogieman.
Yeah, it was the boogiey Man, and it was added to the Webster Dictionary. Oxford Dictionary shortlisted it for word of the Year. Like it's a remarkable climb for you know,
a piece of language, a word. But the like viral videos that catapulted that word into the like lexicon kind of obscured the bulk of the work that Antifa was doing, which was espionage and intelligence gathering, and kind of like the creation of this remarkable underground in formal intelligence agency that like just completely fucked up so many fascist groups, and like, you know, at the end of twenty seventeen, Spencer famously said Antifa is winning, and he was referring
not only to getting punched everywhere he went, but to these very efforts to identify all of his followers who knew that if their Nazism was public, they wouldn't be able to like operate in public life, they wouldn't be able to hold down a job, and so on and so.
Forth, Because I guess both the Nazi punching and the Nazi docsing they are different means to a similar end, which is to enact a consequence, right, so that if you're going to be a Nazi in public, there's going to be a fucking consequence, whether that means you get decked in the jaw, or it means all of your neighbors know what you said online, your mom knows what you said online, like people know who you are.
Yes, exactly the way I always describe it is the digital equivalent of ripping the white hood off of a klansman.
You know, back in the eighties and nineties, anti racist activists like with groups like Anti Racist Action, you know, would post flyers in neighborhoods that said meet your local Nazi, right, And what they were doing was not only warning the community that that guy down the block is liable to commit violence against people you know and love, but like you were getting at, they were creating a social cost
for being a fascist. They're basically leveraging an existing societal taboo against explicit white supremacy and fascism to ensure a consequence. It basically says, it tells people, if you're going to join one of these groups, we're going to name and shame you. You're going to lose your job, your girlfriend's going to dump you, you might lose your apartment, your family, you know, might not want to talk to you anymore, like you're going to be a pariah. And I think
it was really effective. I mean, you know, obviously, the animating question of my book, of course, is what happens when that taboo starts to disappear.
But it's not gone yet.
It's not gone.
Some of the other interviews I was looking at, people are saying, well, is there value in this anymore? Because you can work for the state department and be a Nazi now, right, you can do the White House social media be a Nazi now Like, is there still any value in this? And I think the answer is obviously yes. Yeah, they wouldn't wear masks if they didn't have to wear masks, yes, right, Like some of them aren't mask off quote unquote, but
like not all of them. Patriot Front still marches in masks. Ice agents still abduct children in masks. They're covering their faces because they know what they're doing is wrong.
Yes, exactly, And I think it's also as much of a mask off moment as we might be living in in some ways. You know, this act of research and identifying the threat is still so important because it's you know,
preserving that societal taboo. It's still saying that that social cost is something we still want to preserve, and it is you know, I think very interesting that the anti fascist work now is kind of pivoting towards identifying ICE agents and MAGA, and the Trump and administration is horrified of this tactic of identifying ICE agents, and for good reason, because you know the story I try to tell my book, like, this tactic played a really big part in destroying fascist groups.
They know that it could destroy their ethnic cleansing project. And when you look at the polls like since Reine Good, the favorability for ICE is just plummeted, and the support for slogans like abolish ICE have skyrocketed. So like, that societal taboo against kind of white SUPREMACISMSM right, that's being displayed by ICE is definitely still there.
And you ground this sort of in the history too in the book, in the chapter about sort of the history of unmasking, whether that's with digital docsing or you know, identifying members of the Klan, there was still a social cost of being identified as a Klansman in the nineteen twenties. Yeah, like there was there was no social taboo against being racist in the twenties, but there was a social cost being identified as a Klansman. And I think we're we find ourselves in the same unfortunate place.
Yeah, totally, I mean, and honestly, that was one of my favorite parts about researching the book was diving into the efforts to unmask the clans. Obviously there were efforts to unmask the first Klan, but you know, one of my favorite stories about unmasking the Second Clan took place in Buffalo, New York. And there was actually a very large clan chapter in Buffalo. And you know, the Second
Clan wasn't confined to the South. It was everywhere. It was in the northeast and the midwest, right, and it was animated not only by anti black racism and anti Semitism, but also by anti Catholicism. They were really angry at this new wave of immigrants from Eastern and southern Europe.
They didn't allow Catholics in until the seventies. They had to have a big summit about it. Yes, yeah, yes, when they decided that Catholics are white, Yes exactly.
And this is I mean, it's just it's so much to unpack because like obviously, like my family's Catholic, and I enjoy all of the privilege of being white. But like you know, back then, like you know, Catholics were you know this other.
You had a dual loyalty to this mysterious king.
Yes, exactly. So at any rate, the Klan in Buffalo is really big. And you know, in one night they even have this elaborate cross burning ceremony where eight hundred people take the oath for the Klan. The mayor of Buffalo, though, is Catholic and forms a coalition with you know, Black Buffalonians and Jewish Buffalonians, and the mayor ends up enlisting
a spy to go undercover into the clan. One night, the clan's secret headquarters in Buffalo are ransacked, broken into, and ransacked, and suddenly this list of the clan's membership ends up in the hands of the mayor. The mayor has makes some like deft denials of any involvement, but
says that he's going to post the lists downtown. The list is posted downtown, so many people show up to look at the list to see who among their neighbors is in the clan that they end up having to move the list I believe, to a warehouse to fit all the people so that they could form a line. And then in the ensuing weeks and months, clan owned businesses are boycotted and vandalized. Clansmen turn up to their jobs only to learn that they've been fired, and before
long the klan just completely falls apart. And interestingly enough, clan headquarters down in Georgia heard about what was happening in Buffalo and was really alarmed by it, so they send an investigator to Buffalo to figure out who the spy is. They figure out who the spy is, and they get in a shootout and they both die. Jesus Christ, which like underscores you know, the stakes of this work sometime.
Right, which is why you know the Richard Spencer puncher and the infiltrators they do their best to stay in honan, miss because the steaks are lethal, yeah, right, like they will kill you back. Yes, these organizations can't survive sunshine and they're so aware of that that. Yeah, people have been killed for this.
Yeah, absolutely. You and I have both faced our share of harassment and stuff. But there's older tales of you know, anti racist action. Back in the nineties, two of its members, you know, anti racist skinheads, were in Nevada, lured out to the desert by Nazis under false pretenses, and executed in the desert.
It was fourth of July weekend, right, Yes, we still honor them on the fourth of July exactly.
Yeah. Their names are escaping me right.
Now, Spitting Newborn and Daniel Shrsey.
Yes, And there is a fantastic Orlando Weekly feature article about I Believe Spit that I think is one of the best pieces I've read in a long time that maybe we can put in the notes. I think people would really enjoy.
Absolutely, And you.
Know, and then there's more recent examples of that too. You know, over the last five years, there was three members of the Base, which is like a neo Nazi organization. Obviously, I love that your listeners know all this.
By the way, what they could use the recap.
Yeah, yeah, but know who these groups are at least, but they were arrested for conspiring to kidnap and murder to anti fascist activists in Georgia.
It was a couple living in a kind of remote area and they had a very detailed plan to burn down their home and like kill them in their beds and kill their pets. And I mean it was Yeah, if not for the FBI agent who was their friend, that couple would have been killed.
Yeah. No, it's it's really wild to consider.
The FBI agent was friends with the Nazis. I should clarify there is almost always an FBI agent who is friends with the Nazi. Yes, and that's that's the important thing, right, you know, the these anti fascists are infiltrating these groups, and so is the FBI right, Like a lot of these hate groups, somebody is either a paid informant, freelance informant,
or an actual undercover agent. And that's great, I guess, but a lot of times they will prioritize keeping their agent undercover, yes, over using the information to protect anyone.
Yes.
And when we do it, when anti fascists do that, we are invested in protecting our communities, not building a case.
Yes, exactly.
You don't need to take this to a grand jury. You don't need to keep a guy in there for twenty years waiting for the big fish. You're protecting a community, yes. I mean, there's an example of that in the book. There was a kind of this white whale in anti fascist circles that people were trying to identify, and he was a leader in the Ball Patrol, which of course is this community of Nazis that praises his mass shooters and tries to encourage other Nazis to commit mass shootings.
And he was eventually identified as this guy named Andrew Cassat in Sacramento, California. I remember Vic yeah, and his student his pseudonym was Vic Mackie Yeah, and anti fascist identified him.
I published a story at huff Post. It emerges later that Andrew Cassat was already on like the no.
Fly lists, yes, which means the government already knew who that fucking man was when he was he was recording a podcast about shooting me in my womb through my vagina, and the government already knew who he.
Was, yes, and which is just insane. And you know, and they'll claim it's like investigative secrecy, like it's some kind of some kind of pragmatism, but it's like for what, like they're posing an urgent threat.
For one thing. I felt safer, And I was safer once I knew who he was, once someone did the work of identifying that man, and I could say with certainty he is in California, he is not near me. I was safer, Yes, And like anti fascist gave me that the government did not give me that the government would never have given me that.
Yes, exactly. And I think it's also you know, obviously, you know, a big tenet of militant anti fascism is that you don't trust law enforcement or the state in this fight. And not only for the reasons we're describing now, but there's like this historical irony in when the FBI or law enforcement in general infiltrates white supremacist groups, they end up finding a bunch of their buddies in these white supremacist groups, like they end up identifying a lot
of police officers. And I think it just goes to show the ways in which obviously law enforcement and white supremacist groups often share similar goals.
Very much so, and sometimes once they have a guy in there. I mean, I'm sure it happens still to this day. We don't have the records of it happening now, but we have the sort of sixties and seventies era co intel pro records now that do show that. You know, they had tons of FBI agents infiltrating the Clan, allegedly to disrupt the clan, but that's not what they were doing. They were steering the Clan into disrupting the civil rights move.
Yes, yes, but I mean, most famously the Greensboro massacre, where you know, the Clan and other white supremacist murdered some anti fascist communist activists, and then it emerged afterwards that an FBI agent was in the group but didn't report kind of their plans for.
Violence over and over again. Yeah, and those five people died for it, Yeah, exactly, which is why I will always trust an anti fascist infiltrator over an FBI agent. Yes, I loved the historical parallels, right, you know, so you take dosing all the way back to the second Clan. You know, this outside agitator narrative is not new. It's something Martin Luther King Junior wrote about. You were seeing that now, right, Like, you know, these people protesting their
outside agitators. This isn't the real community. The real community wouldn't behave like this. It's the same as it ever was, right.
Yeah, yeah exactly. I mean I think you know, since Antifa kind of exploded into the American consciousness, MAGA and the rights seized on Antifa as a boogeyman, and they trusted that kind of liberals and centrists were going to throw Antifa under the bus, right, that like they were going to come to Antifa's defense necessarily or even acknowledge a lot of times that Antifa existed, And you know, that allowed them to create this boogeyman of like epic proportions.
So like in twenty seventeen, after Charlottesville, a synonymous pro Trump troll called Microchip starts a petition to declare Antifa a quote, domestic terrorist organization. This petition goes viral, gets like three hundred thousand signees, and Microchip ends up giving an interview to Politico where he's very upfront and frank about why he's doing this. And it's not because the White House is actually going to declare Antifa domestic terrorist organization.
Oops.
Oops, there's no general domestic terrorist statute even do that Antifa is not an organization. He's very explicit to say, I'm doing this to set up Antifa as a punching bag and to deflect and distract from the far right's very real violence.
Pretty wild that he said it.
He he just said it.
He yeah, said it.
Yeah, And it's like that he admitted it, meme, he admitted it. He admitted yeah. Yeah. And you know, over the next few months, every time there's a mass shooting, you have folks like Jack Pisobic and other kind of disinformation artists jumping in when you know there's not a lot of information yet to blame these mass shootings on Antifa.
I mean, there's a weird troll who still thinks I'm responsible for January.
Sixth, Yes, yes, exactly, very impressive work, by the way. You know, so they're using Antifa that way to like distract and deflect. They're blaming Antifa for wildfires and trained derailments and all this crazy shit. And then you know, there's a little bit of a wall. And then in twenty twenty, the George Floyd uprisings happen. And you know, the George Floyd uprisings are one of the biggest mass
uprisings in American history. It's completely grassroots and organic, and it is led by black protesters in their communities inspired by uprisings again in Minneapolis.
It's too soon for history to be repeating.
I know, it's really crazy. But Antifa, the Antifa boogeyman, now is repurposed as kind of this outside agitator's trope on steroids. Right, So Trump and all these maggot influencers rush to blame Antifa for fomenting these mass uprisings, which
is absurd. Yeah. Sure, and Antifa activists were at these uprisings, but you know, they weren't instigating them, nor would they have the organizing power to instigate such a massive uprising like that when the right is doing this, it's an effort you make these uprising seem artificial or you know, kind of astroturfed, something you can dismiss, something you can
dismiss as inorganic and artificial. And it's a way of like distracting from the very real grievance at the heart of these demonstrations, which is that we want cops to stop killing black people. So throughout the summer of twenty twenty, the Antifa panic reaches like absurd levels where you know, there are rumors, viral rumors of busloads of Antifa roaming the countryside looking to burn down white businesses. You know, again,
Antifa's blamed for wildfires in the West. All of a sudden, you get these paramilitary groups, militia groups out west using these Antifa rumors as a pretext to literally occupy town's entire towns. You know, you have forty white dudes in full camo and vests carrying big guns patrolling the streets
on the lookout for this Antifa menace. You know, there's like a story about in a Sandpoint, Idaho, which is this gorgeous town in the Panhandle, and these like group of like high school kids go on a Black Lives Matter march across a bridge, and all of a sudden, they're being followed by these like middle aged white dudes carrying AR fifteen's and calling them racial slurs Jesus Christ.
So like, basically, the Antifa boogeyman in twenty twenty is repackaged again not only to sew division on the left and to create this outside agitator's narrative, but to create this pretext for vigilante violence. And there was a lot
of vigilante violence that occurred in twenty twenty. Of course, you know, now we're in twenty twenty six, and we saw last throughout last year as well, the Antifa boogeyman again is being you know, summoned to call whoever is the Trump regimes effort to ethnically cleanse the United States, you know, domestic terrorists.
Right.
The enemy is simultaneously very weak and very strong in their minds, right, like, yeah, we're all a bunch of soy boys who live in our mom's basements, but we were also a massive, networked, armed organization with unlimited funding.
Yes, exactly, exactly, And you know, obviously Trump claimed to formally designate Antifa a domestic terror group in September.
Doesn't mean anything. He did say it.
He did say it, and then he held a Antifa round table at the White House with a lot of our friends, Andy No Jack Pisovic. But you know, as farcical as it all is, it's also deeply dangerous and alarming. In September, Trump designates Antifa domestic terror group. And then last month they murder Renee Good in cold blood and what do they do They call her domestic terrorists after the fact.
Exactly, it's pretext.
It's all pretext, because if you.
Create this sort of shadowy network of unidentified agitators who are responsible for unspecified but very bad crimes, you can kill anyone.
Say it with them, Yeah, exactly. I wrote a piece for The Nation recently about how there's a tendency in
response to like this escalating mega hysteria about Antifa. There's a tendency among liberals and centrists to dismiss Antifa as not existing, to altimately say that it's not even a thing, or to say, well, antifa just means anti fascists, so we're all antifa, but like, to me that entirely and this is the point, like a like antifa is real and it refers to like a very real subculture and a very real tradition, militant tradition of anti fascist organizing.
And if liberals and centrists can't acknowledge that antifa is real and come to their defense, then you know, the people doing this work might be in some dang and I think it's important to show them some solidarity. Right now.
It's such a complicated reality, right because it's not a group, yeah, but it is. It's also it's a thousand different groups of two or three or ten. It's not like a nationwide membership organization. You know, it is just an idea, but it's also a history, a set of tactics. Yes, it's all of those things, and it's none of those things. And it's different depending on who you ask and why you're asking.
Yeah, exactly. And like anyone can do it, you know, like right, like anyone can take up the mantle of like militant anti fascist work.
A lot of people are doing it on their own.
Yeah, And I think like that's what's been so kind of inspiring to me about Minneapolis and the uprisings, right is, you know, everything that community is doing right now is a grassroots, organic response, and they're doing it because no one else is going to do it for them. Yeah, there's this axiom that we talk about a lot in anti fascist spaces and anarchist spaces and black liberation movements.
You know, this axiom of we protect us, And you know that is on very big display right now in Minneapolis, where you have people doing what anti fascist activists we're doing to Nazis in twenty seventeen, which is monitoring them, following them, disrupting them. They are figuring out where they are staying, where they're eating, and pressuring those businesses and those hotels not to serve them. They are showing up outside their hotels doing noise demos, they are identifying them. Yeah.
Yeah, And I think, you know, we protect us is such a you know, it's such a short, pithy phrase, but you don't know what it means until you feel it. Yeah, right, Like I think in Minneapolis people are feeling it. They're protecting each other, right. You know, here in Charlottesville after Unite the Right, you know, when local authority figures were saying things about Antifa, you would have you know, white grandma's get up there and say, don't you say that
about antifa, right, don't you say that about antique? You know it is a word I didn't know a month ago, but they saved my life. Yes, right that Once you have experienced that kind of community solidarity, that that we protect us ethos, once you've seen it, you know what it means, yes, exactly, and nobody's going to tell you different.
Yeah, And like you know, it's also it's just so clear in Minneapolis that like the Democratic Party and you know, law enforcement, the local police are not doing anything, you know, like they're they're not They're the.
People that are supposed to protect you, aren't going to aren't going to The police will watch you get beaten in the street.
Yes, yes, exactly, and your.
Center, your senator will say nothing when the president calls you a terrorist.
Yes, And so you know, I think it just kind of goes to show that this kind of militant anti fascist tradition is it's an organic response to conditions. It is like an insurgent form of community self defense. As horrifying the footage coming out of Minneapolis is, especially that photo this week of the five year old god being detained, which I can't get out of my head, and which makes my blood boil thinking of it.
I can't cry on the recording.
Yeah, no, it makes me want to cry too.
Something that really struck me reading the book. You know, I was saying, like, you know, I read Vincent Washington's leaks, but he didn't know anything about Vincent. You said that he told you he was moved to start taking this kind of militant action by the Portland Max train stabbing. Yeah, I mean that stopped me in my tracks.
Yeah, you know, And I think one of the more moving parts of researching this book was realizing that all of the anti fascists doing this work had brushes with fascist violence in their communities, and that's what inspired them
to do it. You know, Vincent was in Portland in twenty what year was that was seventeen May twenty seventeen, right, and he gets on a train at Hollywood Station in Portland, goes through a friend's place, has a good time, and then later reads the news and realizes that had he taken one train before his that left about a minute before, he could have been in this car where this white supremacist named Jeremy Christian started harassing to black Muslim girls.
He is haranguing them, telling them to get out of America. When three men intervene, Jeremy Christian slashes the throats of the three men and two of them die. Right, God, we're gonna get emotional on this, but like one of the last.
Times, this one really really gets to me. I've sort of brushed up against the story and a couple of things I've written, and I mean, it's it's one of the most moving encounters of you know, of all of these sort of moving pieces, right, A Nazi committing violence against a Somali immigrant. Right, that's so relevant today, ordinary people intervening. Only one of them was sort of an active anti fascist in his community, the young man that survived,
Micah Fletcher. The other two were just every day dudes, everyday dudes. They didn't have anti fascist politics. But they saw a Nazi threatening a little girl.
Is they saw Nazi threatening a little girl and they lost their lives. And as one of them, and I'm blanking on his name right now, it's a Talisian. Yeah, was lying bleeding out. He said, tell everyone on this train, I love them. So I actually flew to Portland's a few days later, and ended up interviewing his girlfriend. Oh my god, you kept a journal of their relationship and read me passages from it, and like, you know, how
beautiful their relationship was. They had just moved in together, they were growing a garden together, and before he left that morning to get on that train, he said something really wonderful just about how much he loved her. So you know, basically his day started and ended with these expressions of.
Love that would always really rex me.
Yeah, yeah, me too.
But seeing that that was sort of you know, as someone who got into this work after seeing what happened where I live, Yes, exactly, it was. It was very striking to me that you know, it was the same for Vincent. It was something that he was not involved in. He didn't witness this stabbing, but he was so close to it. It felt so intimate to him, and he felt like, we'll have to do something.
Yes, exactly. And there were so many other examples that I name in the book of these really horrendous hate crimes taking place in Portland and Seattle and across the Pacific Northwest, which you know, historically has been a hub for white supremacist organizing. So you know, for Vincent if the threat felt very real to people he knew and loved, which is why he decided to go undercover into Patriot
Front and to fuck up Patriot Front. He had done some other anti fascist work before that, like kind of monitoring the Proud Boys, but then, you know, I think when the Proud Boys were on a bit of a decline after January sixth, he started to look at groups that operated more in the dark and were more secretive, and he decided to focus on Patriot Front.
And how prescient at that time. I mean, Patriot Front in twenty seventeen didn't exist in early twenty seventeen, but sort of as they rebranded into twenty eighteen from Vanguard America. I mean, how prescient of him to know that that would be the place to go.
Yeah, No, totally like that. That's where I think the energy was and like kind of the anonymous organizing was going, and you know, and what he did was really remarkable. I think a lot a lot of anti fascist infiltrations and spy work is done online. You know, people just creating a username in an avatar and they can manage to do most of the spa from behind a computer screen.
You know, one of the more significant acts of espionage during this era is a guy that goes undercover into Identity Europa and again manages to get reams and reams of their private messages which end up on Unicorn.
Riot and that destroyed them too.
Destroyed them and you know those messages, the panic and the discord like database ends up identifying one hundred Nazis in Identity Europa, which is just remarkable. The anti fascist spy that did this I talked to and he just had to do an interview with an Identity Europa leader to get into the group and I got to listen to that recording and it's remarkable. But you know, after that, he didn't have to do that much in person, you know,
method acting to pretend to be a Nazi vincent. However, did he you know, for five months he was going hiking. He was going hiking, man like, because Patriotfront requires you to go on missions and hikes and you know kind of group activities. He had to do shit in per so like this dude was acting like deserves an oscar, you know. So he climbed Mount Raynier for two nights
with thirteen other Nazis, Oh my god. And by the way, at this point had earned the trust of his local chapters so much that he was named the official photographer and videographer for the chapter, which is just delicious.
They're so smart, smart, so smart. I mean, it's like it's like that Simpsons bit, right, Like, videotaping this crime spree was the best idea we ever heard. Take video of everything they do. Yes, and then because of these leaks we see that in several lawsuits against Patriot Front, right, like they are recording video as they you know, vandalize civil rights monuments and things like that. And then they got sued in three places.
Yes, and it's it's basically the stringer bell like, are you taking notes on a criminal conspiracy? You know me? They are, and they are, so you know, eventually all this data that Vincent collects. And by the way, so he's in the group for about five months, He's scheduled to go to their big march in DC, but at the last minute claims he can't because the FBI knocks on his door. That's a lie. He's just doing that to scare Patriot Front. When Patriotfront gets to DC and
goes on their march. So anti fascists in DC know their plans and they know where they are parking their vehicles for this march. They know where patriofront is going to march. And let's just say, some Nazi cars get redecorated.
Some tires did not make it out of DC that night.
Tires did not make it out of DC, some windshields did not survive. There is some graffiti. Patriotfront gets back to their U hauls first off that they used to get transported into d C from suburban Maryland. Their U hauls are fucked up. They get back to Maryland finally and to see all their cars fucked up, so you know, there is an act of sabotage. They realize they have
an infiltrator. Before long they realize that it's the man they know is and I think they think that that's it, like there'll be a few doses, but you know, that's it. It didn't seem like he hacked their server. But then, of course a month later, all of their messages end up, everything end up on Unicorn. Riot You tell Thomas Rousseau the news of this.
Oh that was such a treat.
Yeah, I can't. I can't believe we've never talked about this. And over the course of the next few months years, so many Patriot Front members are identified, and there's also some other delicious details, like Vincent, after his infiltration is over, he has all this Patriot Front propaganda material that he
kind of took along the way, banners, pamphlets, shields. So what he does on New Year's is he makes a pire, towering pire of this material and lights it on fire, makes a really beautiful video set to old lang Syne, and post it online Patriot Front to see, and I think kind of warning them that, like, you know, there might be some more coming, some more docs is coming,
some more stuff coming. And the thing is is, like Vincent's story is just one story, one kind of remarkable story of anti fascist spywork over the last ten years. There are so many other stories that I heard about that, for various reasons, I couldn't put in the book, or there wasn't room for in the book. But it's just, yeah, I feel very privileged that I got to tell this story that not many people know.
It was such a great framework for the book because it's not just about that particular infiltration, but it sort of provides this, this running framework, this sort of introduction to the concept. I thought it was very nicely done. I was excited to learn about Vincent because I have only, like I said, read his leaks, and then the lawsuits that it inspired, and then the lawsuit against him, right, yeah, which was dismissed last week. Yes, it was congratulations Vincent, Yes it was.
Yes. The book gets into this a little bit, but Patriot Front does end up ascertaining what it believes is Vincent's real identity, and they file a lawsuit in federal court in Washington, and it had been ongoing for the last year or two, but was finally dismissed in court this week. Yeah, or last week.
So congratulations to the person who may or may not have been Vincent. I'll never know. It didn't make it, didn't make it to a how they get ever made it to a hearing?
No? Yeah, yeah, I know.
I said I wouldn't take up a ton of your time, but I can't let you go without talking about red Beard.
Oh my god, this is.
The first concrete, confirmed published docs of red Beard.
Oh my god. Yeah, I can't believe it's taken us this long to talk about it. Thank you for reminding me.
So for the listener. You know, we talked about how this is this is worth that is accessible to everyone, but it is not for everyone. In Red Beard to someone I have read so many incorrect doxes of And that's why it is so important. It's so important to be sure of what you're writing, because I have read one hundred failed oxes of this man.
Yeah this, yeah, So Redbeard to those who don't know, again, was kind of this white whale in anti fascist circles, white supremacist will basically insomuch as he was one of the men filmed in Charlottesville in twenty seventeen beating DeAndre Harris. For those that don't remember, DeAndre Harris was a black
counterprotester resident of the Charlottesville area. He was a nineteen year old teacher for special ed students and he ends up in a scuffle with Nazis that are leaving Charlottesville, leaving the rally, and they end up in a parking garage where five of them beat him while he's on the pavement with metal poles and other weapons, and it's captured on camera. I think it's, you know, one of the more distressing things to watch from Charlottesville. I actually
happened to be in the garage at the time. Was running towards DeAndre when one of the Nazis pulled a gun and started waving it around, so I ducked behind a car. By the time I got up, DeAndre was stumbling away. There was a pool of blood on the pavement.
We I have to go back to the footage. Who was it that pulled the gun.
I'm not sure it is.
Oh, were you over on the police station side of the divider.
I think I was running.
I had to go back and find you in the footage. Yeah, I think the guy who pointed a gun at you was Teddy von Nucomb.
Oh my god. Well, if we could make that idea, that be.
Because he pulled because he pulled the gun he did. I mean, somebody else may have pulled the gun, but Teddy pulled a gun.
Okay, I need to look at a photo of Teddy van Nucam it all happened so fad Oh, oh it's that guy. Yeah, Oh my god, Oh my god. Okay, all right, let's talk about this way.
Molly here recording. After the interview was over, I went back and reviewed that footage and my memory did fail me a little bit here. I was thinking about the right moment right after the victim and that beating has sort of broken away from the main portion of the assault, and he's running away. The video taken by Unicorn Riot hands over to follow him, and as the camera sweeps across the area on the other side of the parking garage, you can see a Nazi named Teddy von Nucom that's
his real name, he changed it. He takes a swing at the victim with what looks like a baton, and at the same moment somebody does pull a handgun, but it's an unidentified man standing right behind Teddy von Nukum. I had the image mixed up in my recollection. Sorry about that. Teddy von Nucum, as I said in the interview, is dead. He shot himself in the chest in twenty twenty three, the morning he was supposed to go on
trial for fentanyl trafficking. I wish I could tell you who the little Nazi with the gun is, but it looks like there's no idea on him, not yet anyway. Sorry for the listener. This is something I think Chris and I have both spent probably one hundred hours looking at frame by frame video from seventeen angles of this
particular assault for a variety of reasons. Right, right, So it was this brutal gang assault on this young black man, and four people went to prison for it, yes, and some people didn't.
Some people didn't. And one of them was a you know, kind of a bigger white dude with a big red beard wearing a baseball cap, who from then on earned the nickname red Beard. There are all these like you mentioned, kind.
Of a million, just like every fat guy with a red beard on the East Post has been identified as red Beard.
Yes, exactly. And it was like all these like kind of amateur online sleuths. I think Sean King was in the mix for this back in the day, you know, trying to idea this guy. No one can find him. A lot of people are fossily identified. The Charlottesville Police Department can't find him. A detective puts out like a
call for help, but nothing comes in eventually. And where my book kicks off in this story is there's a group of anti fascist researchers called Ignite the Right that is dedicated to identifying every Nazi that turned up in Charlottesville in twenty seventeen, and they create a database of all these photos and videos and a list of all the people that have been identified, and the list of names that they are identifying keeps on growing and growing,
and they're identifying some like really crazy names. Like one of the stories I ended up doing was about a police officer who was working as Richard Spencer's personal John Donnelly security guard in Charlottesville. So they're doing a lot of really significant docs is like that, but they still can't find Red Beard. Eventually, they decide to use facial recognition, which is interesting. You know, obviously I think anti fascists
out of principle are opposed to facial recognition software. But I think, you know, you kind of can't show up to a gunfight with a knife kind of situation.
What that's still I think is not enough in this case, right, because the commercially available facial recognition software that you know, the average non law enforcement person would have access to really struggles with round faces like his and big beards. So he's got a big beard and a hat and his face is very round, and so it's going to pull a lot of just sort of round faced redheads.
Yes exactly, and so like either you know, there's a it's a very important and anti fascist work. A facial recognition hit is never one hundred percent. You have to corroborate it.
It's not enough.
So they finally use facial recognition for Red Beard and they get a hit. And the hit is a baby faced, beardless like nineteen year old white dude in a army uniform at a at a base in Georgia and he's about to shake the hand of President George W. Bush. And the reason he's photographed for this is because Bush is making a visit to this military base. I believe it's Fort Benning to announce his troop surge in Iraq, so a lot of these people are about to be sent off to his war.
And then he brought the war home.
And then he brought the war. Oh man, Yeah, brought the war home. And then so the anti fascist zoom in on this photo, but the name tag is Blori, so they can't figure out who Red Beard is yet. To make a long story short, I end up filing a public information request to the George W. Bush Library in Texas, right.
Because they would have had to vet everyone who was there, Yes, exactly, and if the president's yeah.
And you know, my angle on it is that I ask for higher resolution photos, we get the higher resolution photos and zoom in and sure enough there is his last name, Hilman. Now all we have is the last name. So there's a lot more work to do. These anti fascists go through military yearbooks, they don't find anything. They go through so many social media accounts until eventually, one day they see a Facebook account that belongs to a man named Jay Heilman.
It's crazy he still had Facebook all these years later.
Oh, it's it's wild. And there are photos of him in the military being sent overseas somewhere. And then they take notice of this one particular detail, which is that there is this meme he posts of fucking Tom Hardy from The Dark Knight and he's saying the fire rises, right, it's that meme of him saying the fire rises, which, of course, in like The Dark Knight is supposed to mean like all this, like death and destruction is about to commence. Like it's a phrase you hear in fascist
circle sometimes kind of as like a half joke. But what was interesting about the meme wasn't so much the meme itself, but where and when Facebook said it was posted.
He left the location Deptha on it.
He left the location on it, which was Charlottesville, Virginia, August twelfth, twenty seventeen. So that is how they unlock the identity of Red Beard. You know, there's a lot more to the story in the book, and I think I will be identifying Red Beard in a news story somewhere soon, so we'll look out for that.
I love to hear it make Joe Platania answer for his refusal to process.
Yes, yes, yea.
And it's not enough to say the victim doesn't want to cooperate, because you don't need victim cooperation to prosecute malicious wounding in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Sorry, Joe, you heard it.
Hear first.
I was hooting and hollering when I got to that part.
Of the book.
I can't believe it because I had heard he had heard through the grape vine that the prosecutor was aware of his identity and had chosen not to prosecute. But I didn't know his identity. So what a thrill?
Yeah? Yeah, it was a real journey. My ex at the time joked that there was a third person in our relationship, and that person was red Beard, because I was so obsessed with trying to find him.
I mean, truly, truly a white whale. Yeah, in I guess several senses of the word.
Yeah exactly.
But like I said, I promised I wouldn't take up a ton of your time. I'm just so excited about this book, about this story. It's not just for your dad who doesn't know what antiva is. Yes, I thought it was thrilling. I learned a lot about some guys I've been thinking about for years.
Right. Yeah, that means the world to me, MOLLI thank you. And you also have been such an important voice in these spaces in helping me out over the year, so I appreciate it.
I'm so thrilled. Thank you so much for coming on. People can pre order the book To Catch a Fascist The Fight to Expose the Radical Right by Christopher Matthias. You can pre order it now from Simon and Schuster and it comes out February third, wherever you buy your books. Don't buy it at Amazon. I'm going to make sure my local anarchist bookstore has put it in order for it. You should all do the same. What else do you want to plug? Where can people find you online?
Yeah? So I'm freelancing these days for different places. Guardian MS now the Nation Slate, so look out for me there, but you can mostly just find me on Let's Go Matthias on Blue Sky, and I'm still on the Nazi site but don't really post there anymore at Let's Go Matthias as well.
Wonderful And like I said, sure you pre order that book. It is a fun read. Buy a copy for your dad who's scared of Antifa.
Yes, please, thank thank you so much, Molly, thank you.
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