To Catch A Fascist: An Interview with Christopher Mathias
Molly interviews Christopher Mathias about his new book, To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right. It's a rollicking tale of infiltrating nazi groups and exposing their private communications to dox them en masse. Preorder Chris' book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/To-Catch-a-Fascist/Christopher-Mathias/9781668034767 The article Chris mentioned about Spit & Dan: https://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/death-in-the-desert-2263332/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
And today we're going to be talking about something that is happening here, doxing Nazis.
Specifically, I'm talking to Chris Mathias 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 that 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 ex's 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 sleuth thing.
Which is not something I'm admitting to doing.
I am not lazy about my exes.
I'm just saying it is something many women are very good at.
Exactly.
Yes.
And they don't realize it's a transferable skill.
Yeah, exactly.
But for those who don't know, Chris or Matthias has been covering the far right for more than a decade, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You were with Huffington Post for a long time and you've been independent for a couple of years.
Yeah.
So I was at HuffPost for like almost 14 years and about 10 of those, I know it's wild.
And 10 of those years, I was covering the far right, which is how I ended up in Charlottesville in 2017 for a 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 crew 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 3rd.
Yeah, 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 listen to It Could Happen Here what Antifa is or what doxing is.
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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 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 it 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 thread because like I could give this book to my dad, right?
Right.
But I also enjoyed reading it.
Hey, good.
For the listener, you should go out and get this.
It's not just for your dads.
You will like it too.
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.
Yeah.
And the thing is, I know about Vincent Washington.
Right.
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.
Oh, yes.
For the listener, Vincent Washington is not a real person.
He really is a real person, but that's not his real name.
Yes.
Right.
He was 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 21st, 2022.
Yes.
It was the day of the March for Life.
Yes.
So Patriot Front was in Washington, D.C.
And I had a suspicion that Patriot Front would be there.
They don't announce that kind of thing ahead of time, but I was pretty sure they were going to be there.
So I went to Washington, D.C., and we were standing outside the National Archives.
And Thomas Rousseau had his little bullhorn.
He had like 20 or 30 guys and they're 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 leaked on DDoS secrets.
Unicorn Riot just dropped your rocket chat.
Everything, all your DMs.
All your DMs, the metadata attached.
Why are you having your sealed up?
The video.
No one is going to hurt you.
We're just going to make fun of you.
The videos that you send your network leaders, those all have metadata, and Unicorn Riot 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.
Cause, you know, Thomas Rousseau later was like, oh, it's like not a big deal.
He looked scared.
Oh, my God.
He looked 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: these kind of anti-fascist spies, and I feel like most Americans don't know that Antifa had so many spies over the last 10 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 pseudonymous Nazis.
So, for example, you know, and I wish I could have seen the look on Thomas' face.
I can't wait to see that video.
But yeah, I mean, like they released, I believe it was like 400 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 doxing, unmasking, I think, about 80 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 than I would argue really anyone else.
And then the subsequent work that builds off of that by civil rights groups filing these like large Klan Act lawsuits, those lawsuits don't exist without these leaks.
Sines 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 loved, 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, like most people learned about Antifa in 2017 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 2017.
And then by the end of that year, everyone had heard that word or knew that word.
It was the boogeyman.
Yeah, it was the boogeyman.
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 informal intelligence agency that like just completely fucked up so many fascist groups.
And like, you know, at the end of 2017, 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 doxing, 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 80s and 90s, 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 and 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 are mask off, quote unquote, but like not all of them.
Patriot Front still marches in masks.
ICE agents still abduct children in masks.
They are 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 administration is horrified of this tactic of identifying ICE agents and for good reason because, you know, the story I try to tell in 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 Renee Goode, the favorability for ICE has just plummeted and the support for slogans like abolish ICE have skyrocketed.
So like that societal taboo against kind of white supremacism 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 doxing or, you know, identifying members of the Klan.
There was still a social cost to being identified as a Klansman in the 1920s.
Yeah.
Like there was no social taboo against being racist in the 20s, but there was a social cost to being identified as a Klansman.
And I think 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 Klans.
Obviously, there were efforts to unmask the first Klan, but one of my favorite stories about unmasking the second Klan took place in Buffalo, New York.
And there was actually a very large Klan chapter in Buffalo.
And, you know, the second Klan 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 70s.
They had to have a big summit about it.
Yes, yeah, yeah.
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 crossburning ceremony where 800 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 Klan.
One night, the Klan's secret headquarters in Buffalo are ransacked, broken into and ransacked.
And suddenly, this list of the Klan's membership ends up in the hands of the mayor.
The mayor makes some like deft denials of any involvement, but says that he's going to post the list 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 Klan 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.
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Klansmen turn up to their jobs only to learn that they've been fired.
Good.
And before long, the Klan just completely falls apart.
And interestingly enough, Klan 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 anonymous because the stakes are lethal.
Yeah.
Right?
Like they will, 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 90s.
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.
This 4th of July weekend, right?
Yes.
We still honor them on the 4th of July.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Their names are escaping me right now.
Spit Newborn and Daniel Shirstee.
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.
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 BACE, which is like a neo-Nazi organization.
Obviously, I love that your listeners know all this, by the way.
No, but 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 two 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, if not for the FBI agent who was their friend, that couple would have been killed.
Yeah.
No, it's 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 like that's that's the important thing, right?
You know, like 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, a 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 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 20 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 Bull Patrol, which of course is this community of Nazis that praises mass shooters and tries to encourage other Nazis to commit mass shootings.
And he was eventually identified as this guy named Andrew Cassare in Sacramento, California.
I remember Vic.
Yeah, and his pseudonym was Vic Mackey.
Yeah.
And anti-fascists identified him.
I published a story at HuffPost.
It emerges later that Andrew Cassaret was already on like the no-fly list.
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 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-fascists 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 tenant 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 60s and 70s era COINTELPRO records now that do show that, you know, they had tons of FBI agents infiltrating the Klan, allegedly to disrupt the Klan, but that's not what they were doing.
They were steering the Klan into disrupting the civil rights movement.
Yes.
Yes.
But I mean, most famously, the Greensboro massacre, where, you know, the Klan and other white supremacists 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 doxing all the way back to the second Klan.
You know, this outside agitator narrative is not new.
It's something Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about.
We're seeing that now, right?
Like, oh, you know, these people protesting, they're 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 right 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 weren't 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 2017, after Charlottesville, a pseudonymous pro-Trump troll called Microchip starts a petition to declare Antifa a quote domestic terrorist organization.
This petition goes viral, gets like 300,000 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 a domestic terrorist organization.
Oops.
Oops, there's no federal domestic terrorist statute to 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 just, he just said it.
Yeah.
He just said it.
Yeah.
And it's like that he admitted it meme.
Oh my God, he admitted it.
He admitted it.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, over the next few months, every time there's a mass shooting, you have folks like Jack Pasobic 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 6th.
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 train derailments and all this crazy shit.
And then, you know, there's a little bit of a wall.
And then in 2020, 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 MAGA influencers rush to blame Antifa for fomenting these mass uprisings, which is absurd.
Yeah, sure, Antifa activists were at these uprisings, but, you know, they weren't instigating them.
Like, 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 to make these uprisings 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 2020, 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 is 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 towns, entire towns.
You know, you have 40 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 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-15s and calling them racial slurs.
Jesus Christ.
So like basically the Antifa boogeyman in 2020 is repackaged, again, not only to sow division on the left and to create this outside agitators narrative, but to create this pretext for vigilante violence.
And there was a lot of vigilante violence that occurred in 2020.
Of course, you know, now we're in 2026 and we saw last throughout last year as well, the Antifa boogeyman again is being, you know, summoned. to call whoever opposes the Trump regime's 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, we're all a bunch of soyboys who live in our mom's basements, but we are 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 roundtable at the White House with a lot of our friends, Andy No, Jack Posobiec.
But, you know, as farcical as it all is, it's also deeply dangerous and alarming.
In September, Trump designates Antifa a domestic terror group.
And then last month, they murder Renee Goode 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 and say it was them.
Yeah, exactly.
I wrote a piece for The Nation recently about how there is a tendency in response to like this escalating MAGA hysteria about Antifa.
There's a tendency among liberals and centrists to dismiss Antifa as not existing, to alternately say that it's not even a thing or to say, well, Antifa just means anti-fascist.
So we're all Antifa.
But like, to me, that entirely misses 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 danger.
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, groups of two or three or 10.
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, 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 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.
Community Solidarity Tactics00:02:17
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 were doing to Nazis in 2017, 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 grandmas get up there and say, don't you say that about Antifa.
Don't you say that about Antifa?
You know, it's 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 we protect us ethos, once you have 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 there.
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 senator, 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 as the footage coming out of Minneapolis is, especially that photo this week of the five-year-old being detained, which I can't get out of my head and which makes my blood boil thinking of it.
Moving Encounters in Portland00:03:26
I can't cry on the recording.
Yeah.
No, it makes me want to cry too.
Something really struck me reading the book.
You know, I was saying like, you know, I read Vincent Washington's leaks, but I 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 20, what year was that?
It's May 2017.
May 2017, right.
And he gets on a train at Hollywood station in Portland, goes to 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 two 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.
All right, God, we're going to get emotional on this.
But like one of the last things.
This one really, really gets to me.
I've sort of brushed up against the story in a couple of things I've written.
And I mean, 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 everyday dudes.
The everyday dudes.
didn't have anti-fascist politics, but they saw a Nazi threatening a little girl.
They saw a 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 collision, yeah, was lying, bleeding out.
He said, tell everyone on this train I love them.
So I actually flew to Portland a few days later and ended up interviewing his girlfriend.
Oh my God.
Who kept a journal of their relationship and read me passages from it and like, you know, how beautiful the 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 always really wrecks 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 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, he didn't witness this stabbing, but he was so close to it.
It felt so intimate to him.
And he felt like, well, I have to do something.
Yes, exactly.
DC's Ongoing Spy Work00:06:47
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 6th, 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 2017 first didn't exist in early 2017, but sort of as they rebranded into 2018 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 and an avatar and they can manage to do most of the espionage 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 in the Discord like database ends up identifying 100 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 Patriot Front requires you to go on missions and hikes and, you know, kind of group activities, he had to do shit in person.
So like this dude was acting, like deserves an Oscar.
You know, so he climbed Mount Rainier for two nights with 13 other Nazis.
Oh my God.
And by the way, at this point, had earned the trust of his local chapter so much that he was named the official photographer and videographer for the chapter, which is just delicious.
They're 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 had.
They take video of everything they do.
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.
Yeah, 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 Patriot Front gets to DC and goes on their march, some anti-fascists in DC know their plans and they know where they are parking their vehicles for this march.
They know where Patriot Front 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.
Patriot Front gets back to their U-Hauls first off that they used to get transported into DC 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 Vincent.
And I think they think that that's it.
Like there'll be a few doxes, 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 end up in Unicorn Riot.
You tell Thomas Rousseau the news of this.
Oh, that was such a treat.
Yeah, 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 pyre, towering pyre of this material and lights it on fire, makes a really beautiful video set to old Lang Zyne and posts it online for Patriot Front to see.
And I think kind of warning them that like, you know, there might be some more coming, some more doxes 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 spy work over the last 10 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'm very, 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 that 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 in court this week yeah, or last week.
So congratulations to the person who may or may not have been Vincent.
Yes exactly, we'll never know.
We'll never know because it didn't make it didn't make it to uh, I don't think it ever made it to a hearing.
Redbeard's Identity Crisis00:11:07
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 dox 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 I we talk about how this is.
This is work that is accessible to everyone, but it is not for everyone, and Red Beard is someone I have read so many incorrect doxes of, and that's why it's so important.
It's so important to be sure of what you're writing, because I have read a hundred failed doxes of this man yeah, and this one's real, yeah.
So Red Beard, to those who don't know again, was kind of this white whale in anti-fascist circles, white supremacist Will, basically inso much as he was one of the men filmed in Charlottesville in 2017 beating Deandre Harris.
For those that don't remember, Deandre Harris was a black counterprotester resident of the Charlottesville area.
He was a 19 year old UH 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 UH metal poles and 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.
Um, 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.
Wait, I have to go back to the footage.
Who was it that pulled the gun?
I'm not sure it over.
Were you over on the the police station side of the divider I?
I think I was running.
I have to go back and find you in the footage.
Yeah, I think the guy who pointed a gun at you is Teddy Von Newcom.
Oh my god.
Well, if we could make that idea, that'd be because he pulled, because he pulled the gun he did.
I mean, somebody else may have pulled a gun, but Teddy pulled a gun.
Okay, I need to look at a photo of Teddy Von Newcom.
It all happened.
So oh oh, it's that guy.
Yeah oh, my god, oh my god.
Okay, all right, let's talk about this later.
Sorry 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 in 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 Newcom.
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 Newcomb.
I had the image mixed up in my recollection.
Sorry about that.
Teddy Von Newcomb, as I said in the interview, is dead.
He shot himself in the chest in 2023, 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 ID on him.
Not yet anyway.
Sorry, for the listener, this is something I think Chris and I have both spent probably 100 hours looking at frame-by-frame video from 17 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 Redbeard.
There are all these, like you mentioned, kind of a million, just like every fat guy with a red beard on the East Coast has been identified as Redbeard.
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 ID this guy.
No one can find him.
A lot of people are falsely identified.
The Charlottesville Police Department can't find him.
The 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 2017.
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, a security guard in Charlottesville.
So they're doing a lot of really significant doxes like that, but they still can't find Redbeard.
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.
That 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, it's a very important and anti-fascist work.
A facial recognition hit is never 100% like you have to corroborate it.
It's not enough.
So they finally use facial recognition for Redbeard and they get a hit.
And the hit is a baby-faced, beardless, like 19-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.
He brought the war home.
And then so the anti-fascists zoom in on this photo, but the name tag is blurry.
So they can't figure out who Redbeard 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 gonna be.
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, Heilman.
Now, all we have is a 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 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's 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 circles 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 data on it.
He left the location on it, which was Charlottesville, Virginia, August 12th, 2017.
So that is how they unlock the identity of Redbeard.
You know, there's a lot more to the story in the book.
And I think I will be identifying Redbeard in a news story somewhere soon.
So look out for that.
I love to hear it.
Make Joe Plutania answer for his refusal to prosecute.
Yes, yes.
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 here first.
I was hooting and hollering when I got to that part of the book.
I can't believe it.
Cause I had heard, you know, heard through the grapevine 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 Redbeard 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 promise 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, Molly.
Thank you.
And you also have been such an important voice in these spaces and helping me out over the years.
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 Mathias.
You can pre-order it now from Simon ⁇ Schuster and it comes out February 3rd, wherever you buy your books.
Don't buy it at Amazon.
I'm going to make sure my local anarchist bookstore has put in an 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 Mathias on Blue Sky.
And I'm still on the Nazi site, but I don't really post there anymore at Let's Go Mathias as well.
Wonderful.
And like I said, make 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 you so much, Molly.
Thank you.
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