It is no secret that far-right, white supremacist, neo-Nazi groups have been active on the internet, spreading propaganda, recruiting new members, and organizing people to take street actions (such as disrupting Black Lives Matter and other demonstrations) in order to spread their message. Many of these groups operate in secret. Their goal seems to be to provoke enough confrontations with their perceived opponents and the government so as to trigger a civil war. They seem to believe that if the conditions are right, a huge mass of like-minded gun-owning people will rise up to take back ‘their country’ from the usurpers who are threatening to take it away from the white Christians they see as the rightful owners. Given the massive size and strength of the US military, the idea of provoking an armed confrontation with the aim of taking over the government seems delusional but they may think that there are people in the military who will defect to their side.

Police forces, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI are aware of these efforts but are limited in how they can respond. This is because the FBI in particular has had an ugly history of infiltrating and illegally disrupting groups that were legitimately organizing for civil rights, gay rights, anti-war, and other left-wing causes. Republicans in Congress have repeatedly made the charge that there is a ‘Deep State’ that is targeting conservative groups and this has made law enforcement wary of doing anything that might give credence to that view. As a result, they now walk a fine line to show that they are are not surveilling groups based purely on their ideology but because thy pose an imminent threat of violence.

David Kirkpatrick visited the FBI and writes about how this limits the way they even talk about these groups, even as they recognize the threat posed by them.

The F.B.I., which has worked to protect Americans from extremist violence since the nineteen-twenties, when it took on the Ku Klux Klan, has warned of a resurgence of the far right. Near the end of Trump’s term in office, the Department of Homeland Security declared for the first time that domestic violent extremists, rather than foreign terrorists, were “the most persistent and lethal threat” to the nation, primarily in the form of “lone offenders and small groups.” Christopher Wray, the F.B.I.’s director, clarified to a congressional committee that the threat was largely from adherents to “some kind of white-supremacist-type ideology.” Then came the storming of the Capitol. President Joe Biden, on his first day in office, commissioned White House staff to draft the first-ever “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.” The document, issued in June, 2021, promised “a comprehensive approach to addressing the threat while safeguarding bedrock American civil rights and civil liberties.”

This past spring, I visited the headquarters of the F.B.I., a brutalist hulk of a building in Washington, D.C. Four F.B.I. officials, all of whom spoke on the condition that I not name them, joined me in a small office. I expected to hear about the Bureau’s accomplishments under that strategy, but the first thing I learned was the F.B.I.’s special vocabulary for political violence. The officials explained that the F.B.I. avoids using the term “far right.” They insisted that we instead talk about a more neutral category: “domestic violent extremism,” or D.V.E. Nor does the agency track violence by white nationalists as a category. The F.B.I. favors the broader rubric of “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism,” or remve, which can include militant chauvinists of any race. (For a time during the Trump Administration, the Bureau referred to “Black-identity extremists,” as if such militants were regularly shooting up predominantly white churches and supermarkets.) Far-right militias fall under the category of “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism,” or agaave, which could also include, for example, the leftists protesting Cop City, outside Atlanta. The officials acknowledged that their codifications could be confusing.

Liberal critics of the F.B.I. complain that its laboriously nonpartisan terminology hides the disproportionately greater size and lethality of the current threat from the right. According to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, at the University of Maryland, between 2012 and 2022 far-right extremists killed two hundred and nine people; the far left killed thirty-seven. (Most of that violence took place after Trump’s election, including a hundred and fifty of the killings by the far right.) Yet the F.B.I.’s odd taxonomy serves a purpose: it avoids any hint that the agency is basing investigative choices on an antipathy toward certain political beliefs. The officials repeatedly reminded me that the First Amendment protects even the most abhorrent bigotry. One of them noted, “We will not investigate people for being antisemitic, because it is not illegal.” And ever since the Senate’s Church Committee revealed, in 1975, that the F.B.I. had conducted politically motivated surveillance of civil-rights leaders, environmentalists, and others on the left, agency bureaucrats have feared the wrath they would face from Congress and the public if they were again caught crossing that line.

These restrictions have enabled neo-Nazi groups such as the Patriotic Front to act with greater impunity, carefully avoiding actions that might result in arrest and prosecutions.

Patriot Front’s leaders routinely summoned members to travel across the country, on short notice, for demonstrations: hundreds of young white men marched in identical uniforms, with protective helmets disguised as baseball caps, and neck gaiters pulled over their faces. At some rallies, Brown shouldered one of the tall metal shields that Patriot Front members were trained to use in street battles. The members frequently marched through racially diverse neighborhoods, almost baiting residents into fights (while maintaining that marchers would never throw a first punch).
…

The organization placed Brown in charge of a crew of a dozen men. He led them on nocturnal expeditions around Seattle, to plaster public spaces with Patriot Front propaganda. They stole Black Lives Matter and gay-pride signs, and spray-painted white-nationalist slogans and symbols over public art promoting tolerance or racial justice. His crew posed, masked, for photographs while on long hikes together, and they trained for street brawls by sparring with one another in boxing gloves. Sometimes they were invited to participate in “fight club” competitions with other white nationalists.

But now anti-fascist vigilante guerrilla groups have arisen to fill the vacuum. They have infiltrated the fascist groups, risen in the leadership, hacked into their secret chat groups, and exposed the members to employers, families, and neighbors, and also disrupted their activities. Many of these activities are illegal. Kirkpatrick describes one person who went under the pseudonym of Vincent Washington and infiltrated the Patriot Front in Seattle. Vincent learned that the members of the Seattle group were heading to Washington to take part in some action on December 4, 2021. At the last minute, he dropped out of the trip but gave the information about the plans to other anti-fascist groups in DC.

Vincent wasn’t a Fed, though. He was one of a growing number of far-left vigilantes who are infiltrating the far right. Sometimes such impostors adopt false online personas in order to gain entrance to chat groups or private servers. Others, like Vincent, go undercover in the real world, posing as white nationalists to attend meetings and demonstrations. Some even participate in low-level crimes in order to establish their credibility—almost like undercover F.B.I. agents do, though they lack any of the protections, training, or restraints that come with a badge.
…

Other than the no-show of Vincent Washington, Patriot Front’s demonstration in Washington, D.C., on December 4, 2021, started out as planned. After the Seattle crew landed, they drove to a park in suburban Maryland, where more than two hundred members of the group soon gathered. When it was time for the march, all of them squeezed into the back of several U-Haul trucks, which dropped them off in downtown D.C. Sock-puppet social-media accounts reported sightings of the Patriot Front march and posted video clips; the Rise Above Movement’s online media arm was on hand to film it. Outside the Capitol, Thomas Rousseau delivered a speech about “we the people born to a nation of the European race.”

Kevin Lowy, a Patriot Front member from New York with a short beard and glasses, stayed behind at the park in Maryland to watch over the group’s vehicles. As night fell, he later told police, he was working on his laptop inside his Dodge Ram when a masked figure splattered paint across his windshield. Lowy called the police as he drove off in a panic, but his tires had been slashed. He met a patrol car outside the parking lot. “It scared the shit out of me,” he told an officer.

By the time the U-Hauls returned and began disgorging hundreds of identically dressed men wearing Patriot Front gear, several other officers—most of them Black and Latino—were at the lot. When some of the men dissembled about their purpose, an officer told them, “We are not stupid, O.K.?” Another officer used his phone to Google “Patriot Front”: “That’s a hate—nationalist—group.” But, after consulting the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security, the police let the marchers go on their way. (One of them, Nathaniel Noyce, was later arrested for participating in the January 6th riot.)

The Patriot Front members had little to celebrate, though. Someone—presumably Vincent—had shared the location of the parking lot with allied activists in the D.C. area, who had slashed the members’ tires, smashed their windshields and mirrors, covered their windows in paint, and scrawled “patriot fail,” in bright red, across the side of a white van. Colton Brown, the Seattle-area director, later complained to Rousseau that a rental-car company had charged his credit card $1,975.54 for vehicle damage. He also lamented that his “fav flannel” had been stolen from one of the cars, in addition to a special pillow. “That’s a $100 pillow bro,” he informed Rousseau, who told him that the parking-lot damage had cost more than nineteen thousand dollars in total.

These anti-fascist groups have used a tiny organization known as Unicorn Riot to disseminate the information they have collected about the fascist groups. This site has become a clearing houses to launder information that has been obtained illegally using methods that journalists and law enforcement cannot use. But once Unicorn Riot puts it out there, they can use the same information.

Where the F.B.I. has hesitated, civilians such as “Vincent Washington”—the vigilante spy who penetrated Patriot Front—have entered the breach. Just as technology has opened new doors for extremists, it has also opened new doors for amateur surveillance and infiltration. Alarmed at what they see as the failings of law enforcement, left-leaning “antifascist researchers” have formed their own elaborate networks. They often adopt such anodyne names as the SoCal Research Club or Stumptown Research Collective, and together they form a kind of intelligence counterpart to Antifa street fighters. The vigilantes’ primary weapon is the Internet, which they deploy to track and sometimes expose the activities, identities, addresses, and employers of supporters of the far right—in other words, to dox them. The disclosures produced by amateur infiltrators have furnished evidence for civil lawsuits that have crippled several white-nationalist groups. Experts say that information from antifascists has also led to the discharge of dozens of active-duty military personnel, not to mention a handful of police and government officials. Some vigilante research has even spurred criminal prosecutions led by the F.B.I.—most notably, against participants in the Capitol attack. According to Michael Loadenthal, an expert in domestic extremism at the University of Cincinnati, the charging documents in nearly a fifth of January 6th cases explicitly acknowledge information from civilian “sedition hunters.” The four F.B.I. officials told me that they welcomed the help. “We’ll take tips from whoever gives them to us,” one said.
…

Michael Loadenthal, the University of Cincinnati scholar, who runs a project tracking prosecutions involving domestic political violence, told me that Unicorn Riot has taken on a unique role as a “data launderer.” It repackages leaks obtained by antifascist researchers—most of whom insist on anonymity and use deception, hacking, or other unsavory tactics—into forms that journalists, advocacy groups, civil-rights lawyers, and prosecutors can trust and exploit. “On-the-ground activists are delivering actionable intelligence to challenge and destabilize these networks, while law enforcement is often ineffective,” Loadenthal told me.

You can read more about Unicorn Riot here and here. Kirkpatrick was also interviewed on the NPR program Fresh Air.

This internet-based guerrilla warfare between fascist and anti-fascist groups is likely to escalate, especially as the election gets closer.