TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. The January 6 attack on the Capitol and the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville are examples of how the threat of domestic terrorism is rising. Toward the end of Trump's presidency, the Department of Homeland Security warned that domestic violent extremists pose the most persistent and lethal threat to the nation, more so than foreign terrorists. FBI Director Christopher Wray told a Congressional committee that the threat was largely from followers of, quote, "some kind of white supremacist-type ideology."
There are limits to what the FBI can do to infiltrate extremist groups, largely based on the First Amendment. But recently, anti-fascist vigilantes have been going undercover to become members of white nationalist groups in order to conduct surveillance and gather information. They don't inform the FBI or other law enforcement officers about potential threats. They leak the information.
Guest David Kirkpatrick recently wrote an in-depth piece in the New Yorker, investigating how these undercover vigilante spies operate, how they've crippled several white nationalist groups and led to the discharge of dozens of active duty military personnel. The story originated when Kirkpatrick was speaking with four FBI officials about the agency's approach to keeping track of the far right and trying to prevent violence and other threats. Kirkpatrick is a staff writer at the New Yorker. He has a long history of covering the right. His article is titled "Infiltrating The Far Right."
David Kirkpatrick, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Let's start with the case where an anti-fascist activist infiltrated the Patriot Front, which you describe as a white nationalist, neo-fascist, anti-government group. I want you to describe the group and its tactics.
DAVID KIRKPATRICK: So Patriot Front is an interesting group because they're somewhat theatrical. Their signature are street demonstrations, where they gather together a few hundred young, white men in identical clothes and masks. And they march through big cities around the U.S., and at the end, their leader, Thomas Rousseau, gives a speech about his cause, which is, you know, white nationalism and their fears that the demographic changes in the United States are heading in a bad direction. But along the way, they also place a big emphasis on physical training, sparring with each other and spreading propaganda, including posting their own pro-white nationalist signs and wherever possible, defacing or taking down murals and posters and signs promoting diversity or racial justice.
GROSS: They're supposed to never throw the first punch. But it seems that they egg on whoever they consider their opposition to throw the first punch so that way, the Patriot Front can fight them.
KIRKPATRICK: Yeah, they officially oppose violence. At the same time, when they conduct these marches, often through racially diverse neighborhoods of big cities, they carry tall steel shields, and they look and feel like they are spoiling for a fight. And when you listen to their private conversations with each other, they are indeed quite eager to spar against, you know, members of racial minority groups or antifa types, or what have you.
GROSS: They have a vetting process for new recruits, and one new recruit seemed like a perfect new recruit. His code name was Vincent Washington. He was actually an anti-fascist activist, posing as a white nationalist with the intent of exposing Patriot Front. What made him so convincing as a desirable recruit?
KIRKPATRICK: Well, he's a big guy. You know, he's more than six feet tall. He's quite heavily built. He's trained in martial arts, and he was very eager. You know, He had studied up on their doctrine, their manifesto. He could drop the names of all the right far-right books and online influencers. And when he got into the game, he was very eager for whatever task needed doing, you know, putting up signs, designing banners that they were going to drop off of bridges or what have you.
And he even had his own professional-quality camera. So he volunteered to take pictures of their events. And since what they're all about is spreading propaganda, you know, making it look like they're a lot of them and trying to create the appearance of a groundswell on a movement, having him to help with great pictures was really advantageous for them. So before you know it, he's rising up through the ranks.
GROSS: How did he get access to a lot of inside information, and how did he use it against Patriot Front?
KIRKPATRICK: Well, as he became more trusted, especially in his capacity as a photographer and a kind of enthusiast for their white nationalist cause, he got access to their online chat groups, which they conducted over various online platforms, Rocket.Chat and so forth, or audio meetings that they would conduct. So he was able to wear a wire when he would attend physical meetings, to record audio meetings, to participate in online chats. Somehow he even managed to get copies of chats that he wasn't a part of. So it looks a little bit like there was kind of some hacking going on as well. But one way or another, he gets all of this audio material, all of this digital material, and he leaks it. He passes it over to an online publication called Unicorn Riot that made the whole thing public in a easily searchable database.
GROSS: So what is Unicorn Riot?
KIRKPATRICK: So Unicorn Riot is an online publication that really specializes in capturing live footage of protests and crackdowns and disseminating it. Some of your listeners may be familiar with their work in Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd, during the Black Lives Matter protests when they got a lot of attention for the kind of immediacy and intimacy of their reporting from those protests in Minneapolis. But they grew out of a group of activists who were filming events like Occupy Wall Street or different ecological protests out west and the crackdowns that followed, and came together and decided they wanted to set up a nonprofit to do more of this stuff.
They enter our story because over time, while they were in this business of broadcasting footage of protests and crackdowns, they became aware that a growing number of people on the far right were taking matters into their own hands. These guys at Unicorn Riot, in the years before the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matters protests, were broadcasting footage from another protest outside a police precinct in Minneapolis. And they happened to capture images in their livestream of some far-right activists who had gotten together over the internet but then decided that they were going to show up in person at this protest to try to oppose the protesters.
And what's more, they brought guns. And in fact, one of them ended up shooting and seriously injuring five of the protesters outside this police station in Minneapolis. And so for the Unicorn Riot guys, this was a signal that it wasn't just going to be about conflicts between protesters and police anymore. There was a sort of third force emerging, which is the kind of online far right coming off the internet and getting involved in real life.
GROSS: So now, like other groups conducting anti-fascist surveillance, freelancers or vigilantes, if you want to call them that, are also giving the information they uncover to Unicorn Riot. It's been described as information laundering. What's meant by that?
KIRKPATRICK: Let's be frank. These anti-fascist activists are not police, and they're not journalists. You know, their methods involve deceit, going undercover, anonymity. They're not accountable for what they're publishing. As a journalist, I would never publish something before checking it carefully with the person I'm writing about. They don't feel that way at all. So they're - they don't produce information which is immediately publishable by a journalistic organization. They don't produce information that a lawyer can just grab and go into court with, right? It's - the sources are somewhat unsavory. They're extrajudicial, if you will. And so Unicorn Riot has come to play the role of launderer because they take that information, they edit out identifying details, and they make it available in a journalistic context, right? So they're journalists. They're not themselves hackers. They're not themselves infiltrators. They just take this information which is presented to them and they review it, and they present it to the world in a way that a civil rights advocate in court or a journalist covering the news can act on it.
GROSS: So how did Unicorn Riot become a clearinghouse for information uncovered during this kind of surveillance?
KIRKPATRICK: Well, after they decided that they were going to take it on as part of their business to keep an eye on the far right, they were contacted by someone who, on his own, had infiltrated the planning for the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. And this person, it turned out, had pretty much unfettered access to months and months of chats planning the riots. And so, with his help, they were able to copy all of that, present it all as a searchable database. And that became big news. It became big news partly because their work was the real foundation of a landmark lawsuit against many of these organizers of the Unite the Right rally.
Your listeners will probably remember that Heather Heyer, a counter-protester, was killed in a kind of car-ramming attack during that protest. And there was a lot of other violence around the campus at the University of Virginia. So there was a lawsuit afterwards against these organizers and far-right groups that won a huge, you know, multimillion dollar verdict against them, and all of that grew out of this one infiltrator and the work of Unicorn Riot in publishing those leaks.
GROSS: We should take a short break here, so let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guess is David Kirkpatrick. We're talking about his article in the New Yorker titled "Infiltrating The Far Right." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF SLOWBERN'S "WHEN WAR WAS KING")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with David Kirkpatrick, a staff writer at the New Yorker. In his latest article, titled "Infiltrating The Far Right," he reports on how vigilante anti-fascist spies are going undercover to become members of white nationalist groups in order to gather information to thwart violent actions and expose leaders and members of these far-right groups.
So after Vincent Washington, the undercover anti-fascist who infiltrated Patriot Front - after he leaked that information, other anti-fascists took action. This was on December 4, 2021, when Patriot Front had a planned rally in Washington, D.C. So what was the action?
KIRKPATRICK: So you're exactly right. He did not just collect this information and share it with the Unicorn Riot. He also shared it with a bunch of his anti-fascist vigilante friends around the country. But around Washington - so the Patriot Front group - part of their standard operating procedure is they gather at a remote location before their protest. They load all their hundreds of guys into the back of U-Hauls. They drive the U-Hauls into the city. That way, no one can see their license plate numbers or figure out who they are and so forth. So, with inside information leaked by Vincent Washington, a group of anti-fascist activists around Washington met - Washington, D.C. - met at the parking lot, where the Patriot Front guys had left their cars. They graffitied the cars, they slashed the tires, they broke the windows. They did everything they could to ruin those vehicles.
And others of their counterparts in Seattle did the same thing where they could around the homes of the individual Patriot Front members that Vincent Washington had identified. Some of them even put up signs around the neighborhoods of those Patriot Front members to try to get them ostracized from their communities. They sort of did everything they could - again, tactics which are not legal. You know, even when you've identified someone as a neo-Nazi, it is not legal to vandalize their car, but that's what these people did.
GROSS: What are other ways - the information that Vincent Washington leaked - what are other ways that that information was used to hold other people accountable under the law?
KIRKPATRICK: Well, in a couple of places, civil rights lawyers have used that information to bring charges against Patriot Front members involved in street protests or clashes or vandalism by using the Ku Klux Klan Act. If you are conspiring to deprive other people of their civil rights, that is a cause of action. And so civil rights lawyers have used this body of leaks to show the plot - a conspiracy, if you will - where they're organizing nationally in order to carry out these property crimes with the intent of intimidating racial minorities or others. And they are heading to these protests with the intent of provoking and getting into clashes with individuals who might be troubled by them.
GROSS: Did the FBI pick up on the information?
KIRKPATRICK: I haven't seen the FBI take action in those cases, but there was one instance at the end of my reporting - I followed a few of these anti-fascist activists as they were, over a period of months, gathering more and more information to try and track down a kind of online troll who went by the handle Appalachian Archives. Appalachian Archives had been doxing all kinds of people, posting some pretty scary and vicious threats against journalists around Nashville, and even, it appeared, he'd been publishing footage of neo-Nazis trying to intimidate one particular journalist who covered the far right. So these online researchers really worked hard over a period of months and months and months to try to figure out who this anonymous person, Appalachian Archives, was.
Ultimately, relying on that body of leaks, the huge database of leaks from Patriot Front that Unicorn Riot published, they were able to track this person down. And they discovered that, in fact, he was a soldier in the 82nd Airborne at Fort Liberty near Fayetteville in North Carolina, named Kai Nix. And right at the last stage of our reporting - they were about to publish our article - they were ready in cooperation with the Southern Poverty Law Center to publish their findings and expose this soldier, Kai Nix. So I flew down and tried to meet with him, you know, as a journalist does. I tried to say, look, you know, here's some information that indicates you, Kai Nix, soldier in the 82nd Airborne, may also be Appalachian Archives, a white nationalist who is a part of Patriot Front. What do you have to say? Is this correct? Or can you help me out here?
And at first, he said, oh, no, no, this is a terrible misunderstanding. And please don't publish that because I'm actually applying to become a police detective right now, and this could really be inconvenient for me. So why don't we meet tomorrow, he said, and I said, OK, great. Let's sit down at Starbucks. You can help me sort it all out. But, by the way, you know, one of the details that they use to link you to this online identity and these photographs of neo-Nazis intimidating journalists is your license plate number. So what is your license plate number? And at that point, he got a little bit fuzzy and said, you know what/ I don't remember my license plate number. And sure enough, he canceled our meeting the next day.
And a few days after that, I learned that the FBI had in fact arrested him for lying on a background check form, and also for the illegal sale of firearms. So that's an instance where the reporting that began with Vincent Washington infiltrating Patriot Front through the Unicorn Riot leaks led to this additional work by anti-fascist researchers and ultimately an arrest by the FBI.
GROSS: What role did the leaks play in the lawsuit?
KIRKPATRICK: Well, what the leaks showed was an elaborate series of very detailed conversations among these planners, where they were eager for a battle. They called it the Battle of Charlottesville. They were talking about bringing flagpoles that they could use as weapons and spears. They were talking about bringing mace that they would spray. They talked about gassing the Jews. They were very eager to provoke violence. And that's really what it was all about for them. And so the planners had even, many times, talked about the possibility of using a vehicle to ram into and kill counter-protesters.
So in the aftermath, once one of those Unite the Right protesters had actually run a car into a group of counter-protesters and killed Heather Heyer, the leaks showed that none of this was an accident. None of this was just a clash that got out of hand. In fact, this was a deliberate attempt to provoke violence and to carry out violence just as had come to pass. And so that's why it became the foundation of this successful lawsuit against the far-right organizers.
GROSS: You actually spoke with someone who infiltrated the organizers of the Unite the Right rally. And he spoke publicly to you for the first time.
KIRKPATRICK: Yes. Like a lot of these people, he really wanted to keep his head down, but enough time had passed that he felt comfortable telling the story. He'd almost stumbled into it. You know, this was pretty early days, you know. In, you know, 2017, not that much of this kind of infiltration and leaking had been done. He saw a group around Seattle putting up flyers, calling itself anti-communist action. And he thought, oh, maybe, you know, maybe I can dox a couple of these guys.
So he cooked up a kind of online code name for himself. He used the name Einsatz, which refers to some of Hitler's paramilitary death squads. And that name, apparently, was credential enough. And the people at anti-communist action welcomed Einsatz into the fold and into all of their chat groups, which were quite vile. And from there, he found his way into the larger Discord chats planning for the Unite the Right rally.
GROSS: And like Vincent Washington, he did not tell the FBI what he found. How did he get the information out?
KIRKPATRICK: Well, so on the eve of the Unite the Right rally, he and some of his anti-fascist friends called up Airbnb to call the company's attention to the fact that many of these white nationalist organizers were booking rooms through Airbnb. So all of those rooms got canceled on the eve of the protest to the annoyance of the protest organizers. And he got introduced to Unicorn Riot. So he handed over to Unicorn Riot his credentials for accessing his online, you know, user name and password, for getting into these Discord chats. And the Unicorn Riot guys used that to hoover up, you know, months and months and months of these conversations and chats planning the protest, which they then put online in a searchable form as a kind of free-for-all database.
GROSS: OK, we have to take another break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is David Kirkpatrick, and his latest article on the New Yorker is titled "Infiltrating The Far Right." He's a staff writer at the magazine. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF WAYNE HORVITZ'S "THIS NEW GENERATION")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with David Kirkpatrick, a staff writer at The New Yorker. In his latest article titled "Infiltrating The Far Right," he reports on how vigilante anti-fascist spies are going undercover to become members of white nationalist groups in order to gather information to thwart violent actions and expose leaders and members of the group.
In your article "Infiltrating The Far Right," you also write about the FBI and what they can and cannot do to infiltrate extremist groups and to prevent future threats and crimes. So you talked to four FBI officials, who asked to remain anonymous, and talked to them about the restrictions that they face. One of those restrictions is actually the First Amendment, which we're all very happy to have in our Constitution. What are the problems the First Amendment poses for the FBI?
KIRKPATRICK: You know, this is a really interesting question that I had not focused on as carefully before I sat down at FBI headquarters with these four officials. You - as you know, we Americans are very serious about our freedom of expression, more so than a lot of other Western democracies. And the FBI, in particular, has had its hand slapped over the years, most notably in the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s. You know, prior to that, it emerged that the FBI had been spying on a number of groups - mostly on the left - because of the content of their political views, you know, for political purposes, targeting, you know, civil rights advocates or environmentalists or communists and so forth.
And so ever since then, the FBI has been really vigilant to say - about saying, look. We're about policing crime. We're not about policing ideas. We're not going to predicate an investigation on the content of someone's beliefs no matter how abhorrent those beliefs are, because we're Americans, and we have the First Amendment.
Now, this is where it gets complicated. That's what the FBI says, and they say it, you know, loudly and repeatedly. Their critics on the left say, you're taking this too far. Their left critics will say, look, we love the First Amendment, too, but these people who you're calling political groups are actually criminal organizations. You shouldn't get too hung up on the content of their beliefs, when, in fact, they are systematically defacing public property. In the case of Patriot Front, they're defacing that property in a way that is designed to systematically intimidate minority groups or gay and lesbians or others. And in some cases, most notably the Proud Boys, here's a national organization that seems to have at its core actual violence, right? They travel between states to engage in street fights against their political opponents.
So the question of where the protections of the First Amendment stop and start is really a tricky one. And I think even the FBI officials I talked to understood it that way. You know, when your job is stopping ideological crime, then avoiding policing violent ideology is going to be a very difficult, you know, wicket to get through, if you know what I mean.
GROSS: If there are groups like the Proud Boys, who are known to have engaged in violence, why can't the FBI do more?
KIRKPATRICK: Well, that's a good question. You know, I think the FBI would say, look, we try to consistently police the law in all cases without regard to ideology. If we see a person repeatedly engaging in violence, whether they're a Proud Boy or not a Proud Boy, we will try to crack down on that person. If we see individuals - whatever they call themselves - organizing to repeatedly carry out violence, we will try to go after that person. Other democracies don't feel that way. You know, Canada, New Zealand, other places treat the Proud Boys like a terrorist organization because of their pattern of instigating violence. But because of our love for the First Amendment, we don't do it that way in the United States.
GROSS: Yeah, and American intelligence agencies can track foreign terrorist groups in ways that they can't domestic groups that might come under the category of terrorist groups, and that's a good thing. You don't want those kinds of tools used against Americans. But it also thwarts the ability to find out what these extremist groups are doing and prevent violence.
KIRKPATRICK: Yeah, and I - honestly, I have a great deal of empathy for the difficult position that the FBI finds itself in, you know, especially right now. We're at a moment when a certain portion of the Republican Party is indulging in these conspiracy theories about how the deep state and law enforcement and the FBI has been weaponized against former President Donald Trump and his supporters. And we even see Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill using committee hearings to go after the FBI for what they consider to be excesses in the policing of ideology under the rubric of this kind of deep state conspiracy theory.
You know, I came across one case, where the FBI had really, I think, successfully prevented a likely mass murder. You know, they had tracked down a young man in Virginia in - around Richmond - who was stockpiling weapons clearly with the intent of carrying out some kind of mass murder, possibly against Jews or other members of a minority group. He was espousing all kinds of bigotry and advocacy of violence online. The FBI swooped in just as he appeared poised to carry out this attack and found all of his paraphernalia, including some Nazi insignia and so forth, in his bedroom, and they arrested the guy.
But afterwards, when they were taking stock of what had happened, some of the FBI agents realized that he had been recruiting in a kind of breakaway Catholic sect - kind of a far-right offshoot of the Catholic Church, the Society of Saint Pius X. And someone wrote a memo inside the FBI saying, hey. We've seen a number of these white nationalists trawling through this particular sect to try to find other recruits for their violent plots. Maybe we ought to get to know them better. Maybe we ought to see if we can cultivate some sources inside this dissident Catholic offshoot.
GROSS: Let me stop you there, 'cause that memo was leaked.
KIRKPATRICK: That memo was obtained by a House committee, which held hearings on it and denounced the FBI for targeting a religious group. And so that's a case where the FBI got their hand slapped for what others might say was a successful attempt to prevent mass murder.
GROSS: But the FBI slapped its own hand. I mean, Christopher Wray, the head of the FBI, was very critical of this memo. What was his point?
KIRKPATRICK: Yeah. I mean, he was called to testify in front of Congress. And he was eager to say that we do not police religious groups, you know, I want no part of policing religious groups. Ideology is protected by the First Amendment. Afterwards, an internal report from within the FBI found that no actual wrongdoing took place except that the memo was written poorly. The memo didn't adhere to the kind of special vocabulary that the FBI uses to discuss far-right or far-left extremism in order to avoid the impression that they are targeting a group based on its ideology.
GROSS: Yeah, you're not supposed to use the expression far-right white nationalist movement, which was a phrase that was used in that memo. What are you supposed to say?
KIRKPATRICK: So it's funny when you talk to the FBI about this stuff. For me, I had to first sort of go through a kind of vocabulary lesson. I had to learn the vocabulary that they use because they never want to say far left or far right. They never want to say left or right. They want to avoid ideology and be neutral as much as possible in their discourse.
And so they talk about domestic violent extremists - DVE - and they break those down into categories like racially or ethnically motivated extremists, most of whom we know as white nationalists. But they prefer to use the racially or ethnically motivated extremists. And they talk about anti-government extremists, most of whom we think of as kind of far-right militias but a group that could also include, you know, antifascist - or antifa - activists who are throwing bricks through windows during, you know, meetings of international financial organizations.
GROSS: You know, you write, as I sat in the FBI office, I was feeling increasingly secure in my freedom to espouse bigoted violence, were I so inclined, but less sure of my personal safety from extreme attacks. Then it got scarier. The four FBI officials described how digital technology had further diffused and compounded the threat. What did they tell you?
KIRKPATRICK: So what that means - and this is something that for law enforcement is very much old news. You know, the theme of the last 10 or 15 years for law enforcement has been radicalization online, that these far-right groups, or slightly earlier than that, some of these Islamist extremist militant types can proselytize and recruit and organize over the internet, right? So they can spread their ideology and plant the seeds for violence in ways that are very hard to police or detect.
And they're able to - you know, in the old days, if you were the Ku Klux Klan or al-Qaida, you were operating with phone calls. You were having organizational structures. You were having face-to-face meetings. In retrospect, that looks like it's pretty easy to target, identify and infiltrate. But now, when you have these message boards and online chats and everybody's anonymous and they're spreading all kinds of bigoted or hateful ideas and encouraging violence in all kinds of dangerous ways, it's very, very hard to detect in advance some lone wolf, some young man somewhere out in the country who gets it in his head that this country is being overrun by nefarious forces and he needs to get a weapon and go shoot up a church someplace.
And we've seen that, you know, again and again. We're in a situation where every two or three years, there's some kind of a mass murder motivated by this vague, you know, great replacement theory ideology, you know, whether it's in Charleston or El Paso or Pittsburgh. It happens with some regularity. And it's very, very difficult for the FBI to anticipate and prevent each of those attacks.
GROSS: My guest is David Kirkpatrick. We're talking about his article in The New Yorker titled "Infiltrating The Far Right." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE AMERICAN ANALOG SET'S "IMMACULATE HEART 2")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with David Kirkpatrick, a staff writer at The New Yorker. In his latest article, he reports on how vigilante antifascist spies are going undercover to become members of white nationalist groups in order to gather information, to thwart violent actions and expose leaders and members of the groups.
So in your article, you say that Congress passed legislation that requires the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to collect and share comprehensive data on domestic violent extremist crime. What are they doing to follow up on that?
KIRKPATRICK: Well, the FBI is continuing to use their politically neutral categories - you know, anti-government extremist, racially or ethnically motivated extremist - to the frustration of some of the people in Congress who passed that legislation. You know, what they're hoping is that greater information is kind of a way out of this dilemma the FBI finds itself in. So the FBI will say to you, yes, we see this extremist violence problem, but our hands are tied because of the First Amendment.
And what these people in Congress are hoping is that more transparent disclosure about who's committing politically motivated crimes and why they're committing them, including the ideology of the perpetrators, if that information is clearly presented then it'll be easier for the FBI and for prosecutors and for courts to look at these things as crimes rather than beliefs, you know, that you can focus - that if there was more information and more transparency about who's committing these political crimes and why, then it would be easier to go after the criminals without worrying too much about whether or not you were unfairly targeting someone on the basis of their ideology.
GROSS: The far right is using as one of its tools the Supreme Court decision Brandenburg v. Ohio, a 1969 decision. What's the case, and what's its significance? How is the far right using it?
KIRKPATRICK: So that's a case involving the Klu Klux Klan and a Klu Klux Klan leader. And the Supreme Court found that the First Amendment - yes, it protects expressing bigotry. But what's more, it also protects calling for violence, as long as it's not planning or inciting imminent violence. And that decision, I think, is really the outer edge of First Amendment jurisprudence, you know, to go beyond saying, this is a country where you can call for the overthrow of our government; this is a country where you can express any bigoted idea you want, all the way to saying, you can even call for violence in an abstract way against some minority group who you particularly detest.
That, too, is protected by the First Amendment. So that's the outer reaches of America's First Amendment jurisprudence. And so that is what lawyers for these far-right groups cite when they defend the right of people on the far-right to call for violence.
GROSS: What about shouting fire in a crowded theater? I mean, is that...
KIRKPATRICK: Well, that's imminent incitement. And that's why from the FBI's point of view, this gets very treacherous - right? - because, yes, when someone is planning a specific attack, not only are they allowed to take action, they have to take action, right? That's really important. We really rely on law enforcement for that.
And yet we have this jurisprudence that says that while it's still abstract, you know, while you're just musing aloud about how great it would be to kill large numbers of group X, Y or Z, that's fine. It's only when you start stockpiling weapons, when you start setting a particular time and place, when you begin to put a plan in motion, then we expect the FBI suddenly to get up out of his chair and swoop in and arrest that person before they can put that plan into action. It's quite a lot to ask of the FBI, not only in carrying out their role as law enforcement, but also adjudicating those legal niceties.
GROSS: And this is also where the lone wolves come in because there's a lot of impressionable people who hear these calls for violence, and even if it's not illegal to call for violence, if there's not a specific attack plan, the lone wolves can pick up on that and take on the responsibility themselves, which is what we're seeing happening.
KIRKPATRICK: Yeah, that's right. That's right. I think the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have publicly said many times over the last decade that the number one threat right now is, one, domestic extremists, but, two, individuals, not groups, individuals who pick up their ideas over the internet and decide on their own to take up arms and carry out some kind of atrocious attack. And indeed, we are seeing that every two or three years.
GROSS: My guest is David Kirkpatrick. We're talking about his article in the New Yorker, titled "Infiltrating The Far Right." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ANORAAK'S "HERE YOU GO")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with David Kirkpatrick, a staff writer at the New Yorker. In his latest article, titled "Infiltrating The Far Right," he reports on how vigilante anti-fascist spies are going undercover to become members of white nationalist groups in order to gather information to thwart violent actions and expose leaders and members of the groups.
What happened to Vincent Washington, the anti-fascist individual who infiltrated the white nationalist group Patriot Front? He was outed. Vincent Washington was just a code name. What happened to him after he was outed, and who outed him?
KIRKPATRICK: So when Unicorn Riot published all the leaks that they had obtained through the person we're calling Vincent Washington, they carefully scrubbed his voice. In the recordings Vincent obtained, when the Vincent person is speaking in the meeting, it sounds like one of the adults on the "Peanuts" cartoons. The voice is kind of obscured, and they took out all the lines of chat that were from Vincent Washington. So they did their best to protect him.
But the guys he'd infiltrated, the Patriot Front cell around Seattle, knew right away who had infiltrated them, which of their members failed to show up at the airport to fly off to their protest in Washington, D.C. And it didn't take them very long to figure out that, in fact, Vincent Washington had the same face as a pretty well-known local anti-fascist activist. So they were able to suss it out right away.
What's interesting is this particular group of white nationalists who had been exposed, some of them decided to take legal action. Some of them got in touch with a lawyer based in Baltimore named Glen Allen, who filed a lawsuit against Vincent Washington. They discovered the name he was born under. He'd changed his name several times. They learned some more about who he was. And they filed this lawsuit under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, blaming him for the fact that several of these white nationalists had been fired from their jobs after their exposure as white nationalists. So they're saying, this person fraudulently abused our computer system, stole this information, divulged it. And as a result of that, we've been exposed as white nationalists. He's caused us a lot of harm. We want to take him to court.
And that's an unusual case. That's kind of a novel use of that bit of legislation, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. And it's also kind of a new turn of the screw, if you will, where some of these white nationalists are actually using the law to go after the infiltrators. For now, it's not clear when that suit is going to be able to go forward because the person we're calling Vincent Washington has disappeared. There's no way to serve him. They haven't yet found him. He's not responding. He's gone completely underground.
GROSS: That is a very interesting turn of events. It shows how complicated this world is and how for every action, there's a reaction. So like, there's victories, which are followed by defeats.
KIRKPATRICK: Yeah. There's one other interesting thing about Vincent Washington that I learned in reporting this article. We learned that after he had exposed Patriot Front, the FBI came calling some of his friends and associates around Seattle not to try to find out information about Patriot Front but instead because they had been tipped off that the person we're calling Vincent Washington might himself be a dangerous left-wing extremist. So it looks very much like some of these Patriot Front guys who'd been exposed in his sting called up the FBI and said, hey, the person here who is really a problem is Vincent Washington. And the FBI took that seriously enough to at least make a few inquiries.
GROSS: You've covered the far right in the U.S. on and off for years, at least 20 years. When you compare what's happening now to what happened when you started covering the far right, what differences do you see?
KIRKPATRICK: That's a really good question. When I first started covering the right 20 years ago, I was covering the right of the Republican Party and its allies. And honestly, that right is really gone. You know, then we were talking about a kind of Christian conservative movement organizing around getting more religion into public life, opposing abortion, opposing same-sex marriage. You know, and that right was very, very noisily and ostentatiously eager to reach out to African Americans and Latinos.
Now what we're seeing in the right edge of the Republican Party is much more, for lack of a better word, racially or ethnically oriented. You know, what we're hearing from former President Trump and his supporters is much more xenophobia about undocumented immigrants and maybe immigrants in general. Much more talk from President Trump and his allies of a - you know, in a recent interview, he described a kind of anti-white animus in this country that he thought he was going to correct. That's certainly going to surprise a lot of people who studied American history or even lived in this country.
And what I'm writing about now is even a step beyond that. I mean, what I'm writing about now is not just the Trump movement, not just MAGA, not just the right edges of the Republican Party, but a giant step further to the right - you know, people who are unabashedly white nationalist, who are really putting a white identity and their fear of the coming day when white people are no longer a majority in this country when they're putting that anxiety and that identity at the center of their vision.
So you hear kind of faint echoes of that in the Trump movement. But what we're seeing now in these periodic mass shootings and in groups like Patriot Front is a real flourishing of that idea, a giant step beyond the Republican Party. And so, one, the right I'm covering now is further to the right. But, two, the right has changed. You know, it's not about religion in the way that it was 20 years ago, and it seems to be much more about race.
GROSS: Well, David Kirkpatrick, I want to thank you so much for your reporting and for coming back to our show.
KIRKPATRICK: It's always a pleasure, even when the subject is somewhat grim.
GROSS: David Kirkpatrick is a staff writer at the New Yorker. His latest article is titled "Infiltrating The Far Right." If you'd like to catch up on interviews you've missed, like Tonya's conversation this week with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, check out our podcast. You'll find lots of FRESH AIR interviews. And to find out what's happening behind the scenes of our show and get our producers' recommendations for what to watch, read, and listen to, subscribe to our free newsletter at whyy.org/freshair.
(SOUNDBITE OF WAYNE HORVITZ'S "IN FIELDS THEY LAY")
GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Ann Marie Baldonado, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Nyakundi and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producers are Molly Seavy-Nesper and Sabrina Siewert. Thea Chaloner directed today's show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.
(SOUNDBITE OF WAYNE HORVITZ'S "IN FIELDS THEY LAY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
