Inside the secret operation to stop fascism in its tracks

At a restaurant next to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, five men took turns loudly saying a racial slur to demonstrate that they are genuine members of the Patriot Front, a white nationalist organization.

Some time later, one of them returned with only a $300 tip and a message to their waitress, a woman of color: “Those guys aren’t my friends.”

The man, “Vincent,” was one of several “antifa” spies across the country who had worked undercover in fascist groups. For several months, he exercised, hiked, and camped with a group of committed white nationalists. He joined them as they threw up propaganda banners and vandalized public artwork depicting people of color.

Months later, in the middle of a national Patriot Front video call, Vincent began playing a recording of “Bella Ciao,” the Italian anti-fascist anthem. “Did they really forget to remove the Antifa spy’s access?” he mocked them.

While embedded with the Patriot Front, Vincent expropriated a large amount of previously unknown membership data and logistical information that allowed other antifascists, in anonymous collectives across the country, to “dox” or publicly identify members of the group. These groups vandalized the extremists’ vehicles, alerted their neighbors and employers, and, step by step, worked to reduce their influence on American public life. Similar infiltrations have hit various white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups across the country over the years.

For years, journalist (and former longtime News themezone reporter) Christopher Mathias chronicled these efforts, cultivating sources from antifa groups across the country, fact-checking the information they gathered, and publicly exposing police officers, teachers, and members of the military who led secret double lives as neo-Nazis and white power activists. (Mathias and I reported on several stories together for News themezone, including one about Donald Trump’s fascism.)

Mathias’ new book, “To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right,” takes readers behind the scenes of the fight to confront the rising tide of fascism since Trump entered the political sphere more than a decade ago.

Some may think the Antifa movement is simply about beating up Nazis in the street, but, as Mathias’s book explores, it is about much more than that. It draws on generations of activists fighting for civil rights and fighting racial domination in the U.S. “To Catch a Fascist” traces this long history to the present day, as Trump’s second term sends armed and masked federal agents into communities across the country, detaining people at random because of their skin color and accent.

“Throughout history, when fascists wear masks, they do so in hopes of creating a world where they don’t need them at all,” Mathias told me this week. “I think it is an alarming and terrifying prospect to consider a world in which [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] “The officers are comfortable not wearing masks.”

More observers than ever seem to say, “Yes, it’s fascism.” But Mathias and many others have been saying it for a long time. He spoke to News themezone about Antifa’s “fundamentally hopeful fight…against impossible odds,” modern fascism, and what connects Minneapolis and Charlottesville, Virginia.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you think of the interaction between fascist street thugs committing violent acts and what it means for the most powerful government in history to be a fascist government?

Reporting and researching this book made me completely rethink what fascism is and the way we talk about it. Much of the punditry over the last 10 years, during the Trump era, has revolved around this question: “Is it fascism? Could it happen here? Is it happening here?” And there was always the impulse to suggest that “once we get to a certain point, it’s fascism.” Once it is analogous to Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany, then we can call it fascism.

What’s really interesting from the militant anti-fascist perspective is that there isn’t a certain threshold that we cross before things become fascist. Throughout American history, fascism has been a reality for many people.

There is a mythology that we tell ourselves as Americans: we defeated fascism in World War II. And obviously, yes, the American military (my grandfather was part of it) defeated the Nazis. But the American military was also a segregated army. It was a colonial army. And when black soldiers fighting in segregated units returned to the United States, they returned to Jim Crow and, later, mass incarceration. If you were, for example, a black man caught in mass incarceration, unjustly imprisoned for years and years of your life, what is the material difference between that experience and the experience of living in a fascist state as we talk about it, in Europe? I would say that it is something insignificant: it is a fascist experience.

This is basically my way of saying: I’m glad people are calling what’s happening now fascist. And I think what’s happening now is an intensification of these underlying social arrangements, these underlying dynamics of domination, and an intensification of those dynamics becoming more explicit.

One of the leading scholars of fascism, Robert Paxton, initially decided not to call Trump a fascist when he came to power in 2016. After January 6, 2021, he revised that assessment and declared Trump a fascist. Obviously we are at a point where there are many elements that point to calling Trump a fascist. I mean, he’s threatening to invade Greenland and has a secret police force raiding people’s homes. [without warrants]. So at this point it’s pretty obvious.

Much of his book is a corrective to the use of the term “antifa” and particularly how it has become a versatile boogeyman for Trump and the right. For them, “antifa” is an “outside agitator,” but they are also destroying their own communities. They are “super soldiers,” but they are also blue-haired, female transgender socialists. Let’s talk about that “antifa” label and how it became so useful for right-wing propaganda. Is it to create a pretext to confront racial justice activists while they are armed?

Completely. The really important context is that no one in America knew what the fuck Antifa was before 2017.

And suddenly, with Trump’s inauguration, Richard Spencer gets punched in Washington, DC. And then, as the far right becomes emboldened and mobilizes around the country—in places like Berkeley, Gainesville, Lansing, and Charlottesville, where the Nazis felt they could go out on the streets and make their presence known—suddenly there are these leftists, radical leftists, sometimes dressed all in black, beating up these Nazis. And these videos obviously go viral, and there are thousands of explanations in the media about who these Nazi beaters are and if they are Antifa.

[After the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville,] Merriam-Webster adds “antifa” to its dictionary, Oxford Dictionary shortlists “antifa” as its “word of the year.” This is how, suddenly, the word became part of our lexicon, through this militancy. So most of the public associates Antifa simply with bashing Nazis. But in reality, that tactic (physical confrontation) represents a really small percentage of the work Antifa does.

Then, in 2017, suddenly everyone knows who Antifa is. And something really interesting happens after Charlottesville: when the right and MAGA find themselves on the defensive. [because] Trump has called them “very fine people” and it has become obvious that this MAGA coalition includes Nazis, that these Nazis are very violent, and that they just killed someone in Charlottesville.

There’s a pseudonymous pro-Trump troll named Microchip starting a viral petition to the White House to designate Antifa as a domestic terrorist group. And Microchip offers this fascinating interview to Politico that is incredibly frank and direct about why it’s doing this. He knows that the White House cannot designate Antifa as a terrorist group because there is no statute for that. That’s not the point. The point, as he says, is to turn Antifa into a punching bag, and to distract and deflect the very real violence from the right, and create this false equivalence where: “Yes, we have our extremists, but look, the left has its extremists too!” Which is an absurd equivalence, of course. The far right has killed hundreds of people in the last two decades, and Antifa, at this point, has not killed anyone.

And what happens throughout 2017, 2018, 2019 is that we have these far-right and MAGA influencers (guys like Jack Posobiec, Mike Cernovich, Andy Ngo, and many other people) creating conspiracy theories about Antifa.

After almost every mass shooting in America (even before America knew who the shooter was or what his motives were), they were quick to fill that information gap with baseless claims that the shooter was antifa. Although it was later proven that the shooter was actually a white supremacist, by now the waters were already murky and people are confused.

Antifa is blamed for natural disasters and wildfires. There is a rumor that Antifa “super soldiers” are going to behead white parents. It is absurd and, once again, all of this is intended to distract and divert attention from the escalation of right-wing violence in the United States.

[Eventually,] There is a slight lull in how the Antifa boogeyman is used, but then in 2020, it is reintroduced as a response to the George Floyd uprisings. MAGA, Trump: They blame Antifa for fomenting these massive, historic uprisings, which, again, is absurd. Yes, its practitioners participated in the uprisings, but their numbers are so small that they would never have the power or organizational capacity to foment uprisings like that.

Furthermore, those uprisings, as we know, were created and led by the communities they were in, and they were black-led uprisings. And that’s why MAGA and Trump largely blamed Antifa for these uprisings: to distract from the very real grievance at the center of the protest, which was for police to stop murdering black people.

It was also a tactic to sow division on the left, entangling the left in debates about tactics and so on. The way they handle that label, they eventually start calling whoever they want antifa. And that’s just one way of designating someone outside the realm of political respectability. When you do that, you’re creating a pretext for that person to be targeted, whether by state prosecution or vigilante violence, something we saw a lot of in 2020.

Fast forward to 2025, and Trump claims to designate Antifa as a domestic terrorist group, which, again, is an effort to label this burgeoning uprising against his agenda as outside the realm of political respectability and worthy of repression.

Talk about the difference between “antifa” as a term and antifascist as an ideology or description.

When I say “antifa,” there is an important distinction to make. Antifa, yes, is just short for the word “anti-fascist.” Many liberals and centrists will point to that fact as a way of saying, “Well, aren’t we all antifa?” It’s a kind of way of saying: “Antifa doesn’t exist” or that it doesn’t exist. tea. But that’s not true. Antifa, as a word, refers to a very specific type of radical militant tradition of combating the far right “by any means necessary.”

And when I talk about Antifa, these are activists who practice a political tradition that believes in some basic principles: First, that yes, sometimes it is necessary to confront fascists in the streets, sometimes violently. Fascists should not be given any platform to speak or organize. That means revoking their permission to speak in cities or parks, or removing them from social media platforms.

Another important principle is that the State or the authorities cannot be trusted in this fight. And that essentially means that they view government and law enforcement as inherently white institutions that will collaborate with and support fascists.

Antifa didn’t come out of nowhere. It emerged from pre-existing networks of anarchists, socialists and communists, largely from a tradition born in the ’80s and ’90s to expel Nazis from the punk scene, and formed actions of groups like Antiracist Action and Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, and basically developed those principles that we talked about, those points of unity in combating the far right.

You mentioned that there’s a tendency to say, “Well, I’m anti-fascist and my grandfather was anti-fascist in World War II.” But if we go into the history of anti-fascists, of doxist fascists, in the book, the history goes back long before any of those words existed: before doxing existed, before the word fascist existed. Return to investigative journalist Ida B. Wells. We go back to Walter White, who investigated lynchings in the early 20th century for the NAACP. We go back to Frank Schwab, the mayor of Buffalo who revealed the identities of 18,500 people who were members of the KKK in the area, posting their names at the city’s police headquarters, and to the undercover detectives who infiltrated the Klan. Why was it so important for you to delve into that very specialized history of resistance to racial domination?

So Langston Hughes raised this point. [“Negroes in America do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us,” Hughes said in 1937, at the Second International Writers Congress in Paris.]

What I find frustrating about the discourse on fascism in America, again, is this mythology where we tell ourselves that we are the good guys who defeated fascism. Robert Paxton, the scholar of fascism I mentioned, has described the Klan as he proto-fascist organization, right? Nazi Germany turned to Jim Crow laws in the United States for inspiration for its own racial laws in Germany. America, in many ways, was fascist before the word fascist existed.

“Throughout American history, fascism has been a reality for many people… America, in many ways, was fascist before the word fascist existed.”

– Cristobal Matías

What I found so compelling about the efforts to unmask the First and Second Klan was, first of all, how incredibly brave that work was: people really put their bodies on the line.

Edward Obertean, an undercover police officer who infiltrated the Klan in Buffalo, was later murdered by a Klansman.

The history of white supremacy in the United States is marked by periods when its most ardent practitioners wore masks and periods when it was not necessary.

The First Klan is born to destroy Reconstruction. There is an astonishing effort to unmask them, and it succeeds in many ways in destroying the Klan. But part of the reason the Klan disbanded is also because they were successful. They could exchange the anonymity of the hooded man for the anonymity of the lynch mob.

The Second Klan, same kind of thing: an astonishing effort to unmask them that goes a long way toward destroying the Second Klan. But then again, they also disbanded, in a way, because they were successful. The immigration law of 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act, was passed (and Johnson, the congressman, by the way, was in the Klan) and these immigration quotas were created, which, by the way, are the quotas that restrict immigration to Northern Europe, and it’s something that the modern far right, including Stephen Miller, wants to go back to.

For me, it was really important to tell those stories because I actually find them really inspiring. The people who did this work did not wait for anyone to save them. They understood that we have to save ourselves and they did not always get to see the fruit of their work. The work they did would contribute to later victories.

You talk a lot about Antifa’s work as modern journalists. In my opinion, the anonymous collectives that make up your depiction of Antifa are some of the most skilled journalists working in the country today. This might come as a surprise to readers, but for people who have covered “extremism,” they know it. I mean, how many of your own stories published on News themezone came from that kind of work? When reading your book, I was struck by how many projects like “Panic! in the discord” either “Turn on the right“sounds like”The Panama Papers“, meaning collectives of journalists working together on a big project. Talk about these people’s skills as journalists and whether you think they get their fair share.

No, I don’t think they get what’s coming to them. There is still this prevailing snobbery in journalism that says you have to write for this or that outlet to be considered a journalist. There is also what I would consider an outdated notion of objectivity around journalism that says people who do the kind of research that Antifa does couldn’t be journalists. I object to that in the book and am candid in the introduction about the fact that I myself subscribe to militant anti-fascism.

I don’t believe there is objectivity or a “view from nowhere” to report on masked secret police kidnapping my neighbors. And that is the perspective that Antifa also takes. And if we are to consider journalism, first and foremost, to be in the public interest and for the public good, then I think journalism should be explicitly anti-fascist. The investigations Antifa conducted over the past 10 years were at times absolutely remarkable. I spoke to an anti-fascist who read 60,000 tweets to collect enough bits, clues and breadcrumbs to unravel the identity of a Nazi.

You compared the Nazi chat message leaks to the Panama Papers, which is a really apt description. It is hugely underrated that Unicorn Riot, the independent news outlet, created an absolutely remarkable database of leaked white supremacist chat messages: millions and millions of these messages were open source material that anti-fascist researchers across the country could mine and sift through to discover who among their neighbors is a Nazi. And that is a remarkable story and a remarkable feat of journalism.

Talk about the original relationships you have with anti-fascists. I’m guessing he’s been talking to some of these people, anonymous sources of his, for a decade, or at least many years. How have those relationships with sources developed over the years and how have they changed you as a reporter?

It took a long time to gain the trust of anti-fascist sources. It is understandable that they distrust the press. And furthermore, I take your trust in me very seriously, because there are fascists who want to harm you. That’s why it’s important to me to protect their identities. And, of course, the State also wants to attack Antifa, so it adds an extra layer. [of concern].

But yeah, I’ve been talking to a lot of people for over a decade. For the book, I ended up talking to about 60 people. What strikes me most is that almost everyone involved in this work began doing it after personal run-ins with fascists in their communities.

An antifascist I talked to a lot, her friend lost someone in the Walmart massacre in El Paso, which inspired her to start doing this work.

One of the things that prompted me to write this book was seeing them do that work (not for glory or acclaim) and also seeing diminishing returns when doing the doxes; For a while there, they got the Nazis fired from their jobs and there was real accountability. But then, something began to change, and occasionally there were cities where they didn’t mind having a Nazi as a neighbor. And so I started talking to antifascists about what that meant for American politics in general.

You talked about inciting incidents to get people involved in this work. You were at “Unite The Right” in Charlottesville in 2017. You saw DeAndre Harris being hit. Can you talk about it as an incident that incited many far-right journalists and the effect it had on you?

Anyone who was in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017 saw their lives changed irrevocably in the aftermath. For me, it was the beginning of this long journalistic journey into this new insurgent fascist movement and then, eventually, into the anti-fascist opposition. But more generally (on a visceral and emotional level), when you see up close the kind of vile racism and bigotry that you feel so comfortable with in public, you begin to realize how urgent it is to fight it.

Especially in reporting on this, I had a front-row seat to see how what we considered marginal in our politics actually wasn’t marginal at all, and that the Republican Party was becoming the party of the Nazis who marched in Charlottesville. So, it’s just a process of radicalization. There is no way around it.

What would you say to the people of Minneapolis today, who, I think you would say, are seeing a different form of fascist violence, a traumatic type of street violence, except this time it’s carried out by the federal government?

I can’t help but think of the similarities between the uprising against ICE in Minneapolis and the uprising against all fascists that took to the streets between 2017 and 2020. They are adopting the same organic, grassroots tactics that are not dependent on law enforcement or the government, which, in Minneapolis, has abandoned them. They have to do it alone.

And they are doing everything that anti-fascists were doing to the Nazis a few years ago: following them, monitoring them, identifying them, deceiving them, pressuring companies and hotels not to take them in. They are doing noise demonstrations outside the hotels. They are creating a social cost for being in ICE, for being part of the secret police, for being part of the migration, which is really encouraging, really remarkable and really brave, and the similarities are really striking.

You spoke to a former member of the Patriot Front in the last chapter of this book and he essentially laid out the argument. for doxxing. He explained that when people think of the Patriot Front, “the first thing they think is, ‘If I join the Patriot Front, they will trick me.’” On the other hand, he noted, once unmasked, fascists sometimes dive deeper into those communities as a support network.

There is also the question of what will happen when the social stigma around white supremacy disappears? Given the strength of fascism in America today, given its position within the American government, if Antifa 10 years ago had seen what was going to happen, do you think there would have been a change in tactics? How are these tactics changing now?

There is debate over whether Antifa was successful. Because, obviously, they destroyed all these fascist groups. But of course we now have a much broader mass fascist movement, MAGA. It’s an interesting question and I don’t have an answer. It’s clear.

But what Antifa does at the local level is an insurgent form of community self-defense, and it was an urgent and compelling political tactic (or style of politics) that prevented the Nazis from feeling comfortable in specific places, the streets. And in that way, it was really successful.

But you also have to remember that Antifa is an incredibly small subculture, a small phenomenon or movement. I would never have had the limbs to stop what is happening now. That said, as I was saying with Minneapolis, we are seeing an adaptation of militant anti-fascist tactics on a larger scale.

I personally think those types of tactics, if replicated on a large enough scale, could be really effective. And I will say there is a reason MAGA (Kristi Noem, Trump) is so afraid of efforts to fool ICE agents. And that’s partly because MAGA saw what doxing did to the far right. And doxing, once again, depends on taking advantage of a social taboo against explicit white supremacy. And I think doxing, identifying ICE agents, for example, is an important part of creating and maintaining a taboo against being in ICE.

I think it will now be important for the ICE people to know that they are the Nazis in this movie and that, within a generation, they will be portrayed as villains in the movies their children watch. We are already seeing public opinion turn against ICE. [A YouGov poll taken the day immigration agents fatally shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis showed 19% of Republicans and 46% of American adults overall indicating support for abolishing ICE.] That’s remarkable.

I quote an anti-fascist in the book as saying that anti-fascism is fundamentally hopeful, that it is a fight against impossible odds. And I find that example of the anti-fascists of recent years, in fact, very inspiring for this fascist moment that we find ourselves in now.