Infiltrating the Far Right | The New Yorker

Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, have repeatedly claimed that the “deep state” has weaponized federal law enforcement against Trump and his supporters; this conspiracy theory has made it even more treacherous for the F.B.I. to investigate Americans on the far right. In 2022, for example, the F.B.I. ramped up its monitoring of a figure who had triggered concern: Xavier Lopez, an unemployed twenty-three-year-old who lived with his aunt outside Richmond, Virginia. As a younger man, the Bureau knew, Lopez had posted online about killing politicians. Once, while buying assault rifles, he’d been overheard talking avidly about political violence. Lopez had served a year in prison, for vandalizing a car, and prison authorities had recorded him having phone discussions about amassing weapons to kill abortion-rights advocates, L.G.B.T. people, and Jews.

Several months after his release, Lopez joined a house of worship belonging to the Society of St. Pius X, a sect that broke away from the Catholic Church in opposition to Vatican II reforms. The Anti-Defamation League, citing the sect’s long history of statements about Jews and Judaism, has called it “mired in antisemitism.” (The society’s Web page denies that it espouses “racial hatred” toward Jews.) On social media, Lopez posted that he was delighted to have found a church that wasn’t “totally kiked.”

The F.B.I. placed an informant in the church, who reported that Lopez was attempting to enlist congregants in violent schemes. That November, Lopez bought a truck, declared online that he planned to use it in an attack, and posted a photograph of a mass shooter. Only then did agents raid his bedroom. They found firearm components, a stockpile of ammunition, and eight Molotov cocktails mixed using a form of napalm. A crucifix and a rosary hung over a Nazi flag on his wall. Lopez pleaded guilty to possession of a destructive device and has been sentenced to eighteen months in prison. In all likelihood, the F.B.I. averted a massacre.

House Republicans, though, seized on an internal memo from the Richmond field office which noted that agents in Oregon and California had found other violent members of “the far-right white nationalist movement” trying to network in the Society of St. Pius X. Cultivating sources in such churches, the memo proposed, could help counter future threats. House Republicans decried the memo as evidence that the Biden Administration had weaponized the F.B.I. “against traditional Catholics,” and accused the Bureau of proposing “to infiltrate Catholic churches.”

Wray, the F.B.I. director, repudiated the memo, testifying to Congress that he’d felt “aghast” when he saw it. An internal review later concluded that the memo’s authors had failed to use proper F.B.I. terminology for discussing extremism, and had wrongly suggested that the agency might scrutinize religious beliefs. Uproars of this type have had a chastening effect on F.B.I. agents and analysts, according to Elizabeth Neumann, who was a senior Department of Homeland Security official in the George W. Bush and Trump Administrations. She told me that she has “watched people in multiple agencies with responsibility for law enforcement or intelligence gathering err on the side of not getting their hand slapped.” When it comes to First Amendment questions, she added, “there is a gray space where even the lawyers inside the agencies can’t agree what the line is. People are trying to stay away from that gray area, and, yes, that might mean that things are getting missed.”

As I sat in the F.B.I. 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 extremist attacks. Then the conversation turned scarier. The four officials described how digital technology had both further diffused and compounded the threat. In retrospect, the terrorists of the analog era—whether Al Qaeda, from abroad, or the Ku Klux Klan, at home—now looked like easy targets. These were physical organizations with leaders, hierarchies, telephone calls, face-to-face meetings. One of the F.B.I. officials told me, “The United States government got pretty good at stopping that kind of attack.” The Internet has given extremist groups new ways to recruit and organize that make it virtually impossible to contain their menace. The official told me that domestic violent extremists appeared to have learned from the success of their foreign counterparts in leveraging social media and online chats “to build a horrific lone-actor threat.” The official continued, “Someone can essentially self-radicalize ‘on their own’—‘on their own’ in quotation marks, because there’s always somebody on the other side of the keyboard.”

The F.B.I.’s achievements in thwarting these lone actors often go unnoticed. When I asked the officials to describe some of the Bureau’s recent accomplishments, they handed me a stack of press releases: a year in jail for a Michigan man who had threatened synagogues; eighty months for an incel who had obtained firearms for an intended mass shooting at an Ohio State University sorority; the arrest of three white nationalists from different parts of the country who met in Columbus, Ohio, and conspired to start a race war by shooting rifles at electrical substations. On March 3, 2022, a soldier entering Fort Liberty, in North Carolina, was caught with a 3-D-printed handgun; at his home, authorities found a short-barrelled rifle, neo-Nazi patches and flags, and notes for an “operation” to rid the area of Black, Latino, and Jewish people. (He was sentenced to eighteen months in prison.) Experts at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism say that the F.B.I. now thwarts about forty domestic extremist plots a year.

One official explained that many Americans suspected of moving toward domestic terrorism end up being arrested on other, sometimes unrelated, charges: “I’m not exaggerating when I say that every week one of our field offices briefs us that they are going to arrest someone on, you know, felon in possession of a firearm, or domestic violence—a local sheriff may even make the arrest—but in actuality we had a very meticulous investigation, starting with a lead that some source picked up, showing that this was an individual going down a pathway to shooting up a synagogue or a church or something else.” The Bureau seemed to want to have it both ways. The officials thought that they deserved credit for respecting civil liberties by waiting for clear evidence of a threat to start an investigation. But they also wanted credit for getting volatile extremists off the streets by arresting them on charges that some might call pretexts. (F.B.I. officials say that they adhere to consistent standards for both opening investigations and bringing charges.)

Cartoon by Edward Steed

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.

It seems stinting to describe Vincent Washington’s intel as “tips”; it was more of a trove. According to court records, his birth name was David Alan Capito, Jr., although in 2017, possibly in connection with his infiltration work, he renamed himself Avenir David Capito; he then became Vyacheslav Arkadyevich Arkangelskiy, and more recently he changed his name to Ryan Smith. (I attempted to reach him through multiple intermediaries, but he didn’t respond.) He belonged for a time to the Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club, which declared in a manifesto that its members “work to counter the rise of fascist and far-right groups” and “don’t rely on the state to do our work for us.” In 2019, a longtime member of the club, Willem van Spronsen, attempted to firebomb an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Tacoma; the police shot and killed him. Vincent carried a banner at a memorial march in Spronsen’s honor, and sometimes wore a bullet that once belonged to Spronsen on a necklace. Antifascist activists like Vincent take a dim view of the police, and he was not about to hand over information to the F.B.I. Instead, he transmitted the results of his sting to an online publication called Unicorn Riot.

The headquarters of Unicorn Riot is a duplex loft carved out of a former bottling plant in Fishtown, a trendy neighborhood of Philadelphia. The loft is also the home of Dan Feidt, one of Unicorn Riot’s founders, a forty-one-year-old with a boyish mane of wild curls. He got his start in journalism in Minneapolis, working for a local alternative-news Web site. During the 2008 Republican Convention, which was held in the Twin Cities, his height—he is six feet eight—helped him record unobstructed footage of a sweeping crackdown on protesters outside the event. He then worked on a film, “Terrorizing Dissent,” and helped document crackdowns on protests at the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, in 2009; Occupy Wall Street, in 2011; and a series of protests in the West over pipeline and mining projects. Among the people he worked with was Chris Schiano, a skinny thirty-four-year-old with deep-set eyes. I met with both men in the loft. Feidt, a self-described “homebody,” told me that he usually ran the video control room; Schiano, who was raised as a Quaker and graduated from Naropa University, a beatnik-Buddhist institution in Boulder, Colorado, dodged police batons in a helmet and body armor. After a while, Schiano told me, “it started to feel like ‘We work well together, let’s start something.’ ” With a handful of others, they set up a nonprofit and released a grand mission statement: to report “underrepresented stories” and illuminate “alternative perspectives.” The name Unicorn Riot, I was told, was the result of an online brainstorming session in which marijuana may have played a role.

The group’s coverage of the far right was shaped, in part, by a police killing. In November, 2015, an officer in Minneapolis fatally shot Jamar Clark, an unarmed Black man. Unicorn Riot live-streamed eighteen days of protests outside the officer’s station. During this period, Feidt and Schiano were surprised to see racist slurs surfacing in an online chat on their Web site. Many of the comments used the argot of the online far right. Schiano was at his computer one night, deleting the slurs, when two masked white men appeared in the live stream. Both wore armbands labelled “/K/”—for a gun-enthusiast forum on 4chan, a bastion of far-right extremism. A few nights later, three of the gun enthusiasts, who called themselves Kommandos, returned to the protests; this time, a handful of demonstrators began escorting them away—until one of the Kommandos pulled out a handgun and fired seven shots, severely wounding five protesters. Unicorn Riot recorded the scene.

All the victims survived, though some were permanently disabled. The shooter, Allen Scarsella, a West Point dropout, was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. On the drive to the protest, he and another Kommando had live-streamed themselves brandishing a pistol and bandying far-right memes. (A favorite was “make the fire rise,” an allusion to the catchphrase of a Batman villain.) Feidt said to himself, “Wow, this is more than just shitposting. They are coming off the Internet.” The battle lines, he realized, were no longer only between protesters and police: “People who are not the government are coming out, too.”

Unicorn Riot’s connection to undercover antifascist espionage began in 2017, shortly after Scarsella’s trial ended. Schiano got a call from an antifascist contact: a comrade in Seattle had infiltrated the online chats of people planning the Unite the Right rally, in Charlottesville, which was scheduled for the next day. Was Schiano interested?

The full ramifications of this call have only recently become clear, thanks to a series of court cases that culminated, this past July, in the federal appeals court in Richmond. The infiltrator, who asked me to withhold his name, has never before spoken publicly about his role. In a telephone interview, he told me that his politics could be fairly described as anarchist, “although I cringe at the term.” On the night of Trump’s Inauguration, he said, a friend had been shot and severely wounded during a melee around the appearance of a far-right speaker at the University of Washington. In the months that followed, the infiltrator became increasingly involved in attempts to dox members of neo-Nazi and white-nationalist groups. He took surreptitious photographs at demonstrations in the Pacific Northwest where street fighters from far-right groups such as the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer rumbled against leftists. A few times, he crawled under parked cars and planted magnetized G.P.S. devices, to track targets. He told me that he’d helped expose the identities of at least two members of the Atomwaffen Division, a particularly violent neo-Nazi group, causing one to lose his job and the other to move from Washington to Texas.