Antifa Spy Networks Expose the Radical Right w/ journalist Chris Mathias (G&R 461)

Summary

Green & Red Podcast: "Antifa Spy Networks Expose the Radical Right" with Chris Mathias (G&R 461)

Date: February 3, 2026
Hosts: Bob Buzzanco (BB) & Scott Parkin (SP)
Guest: Chris Mathias (CM), journalist and author of To Catch a Fascist

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Episode Overview

This timely episode delves into the world of Antifa, exploring its history, tactics, key players, and ongoing impact in the struggle against the radical right in America. Journalist Chris Mathias, whose new book To Catch a Fascist demystifies Antifa and its methods, joins Bob Buzzanco and Scott Parkin to dissect the group’s real function, successes, mythologies, and the dangerous parallels between state and far-right forces. The conversation is enriched with reporting from Charlottesville, personal stories, and fresh insights into antifascist doxxing, infiltration, and grassroots organizing.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Charlottesville Turning Point and Antifa’s Role

• Charlottesville, 2017 Experience
  • CM traveled to Charlottesville as a green reporter and witnessed firsthand the violence and the emotional aftermath:

    “I don't think there's anyone who went to Charlottesville... whose life wasn't completely changed by that day.” (01:50–03:00, CM)

  • Discusses the presence of an "antifascist spy" in the planning server before the rally, gathering intelligence on far-right intentions.
  • Introduces the recurring theme: Antifa as a Cassandra entity—accurately predicting fascist violence, yet often ignored by officials.

    "Anti fascists are so good at monitoring the far right... it's a Cassandra story, because they know this. They're warning people, but no one will listen to them." (05:00, CM)

2. What Is Antifa? Demystifying the Movement

• Myth-busting Definitions
  • Antifa is not just a general term for anti-fascists, but a specific, decentralized network with shared tactics and values:

    “Antifa is real and it refers to a specific thing. ...an underground network of radical leftists, anarchists, socialists and communists... When it comes to combating the far, they agree on some very basic tenets: confront fascists, deny them a platform, and never trust the state.” (07:00–08:00, CM)

  • Historical nod to groups like Anti Racist Action and the Baldies, whose direct action and political evolution laid groundwork for today’s activisms.
  • Antifa's composition: working and middle-class Americans from all walks of life, defending their communities.

3. The Right’s Villainization and the Battle of Narratives

• Fascist Myths & Propaganda
  • The far right has always known about Antifa and made them out to be both omnipresent threats and weak caricatures:

    “The way the far right talks about Antifa... is a dynamic you see in fascist politics — your opponents are simultaneously all powerful and everywhere and also very weak.” (11:41, CM)

  • Campaigns to label Antifa as a domestic terror group are rooted in distraction and false equivalency, not genuine fear.
  • Right-wing attacks include conspiracy theories about Soros funding, outside agitation, and scapegoating (e.g., January 6th, George Floyd protests).
  • Shifting public perceptions:

    “I don't know if they'd gone to the well too much, but it's just become this obligatory... and even, especially now with the last two Minnesota killings, that was their first...and nobody believes that anymore.” (17:26–19:47, BB & CM)

4. Antifascist Tactics: Doxxing, Infiltration, and Sabotage

• Doxxing: Historical Context & Modern Methods
  • CM reframes doxxing as unmasking fascists, akin to "ripping off the white hood":

    "Doxxing in the antifascist sense... is the modern digital equivalent of ripping the white hood off a Klansman and seeing who's underneath." (21:43, CM)

  • Grassroots research, open source investigations, strategic pressure campaigns on employers and communities.
• Infiltration: The Vincent Story
  • Details Vincent's undercover operation in Patriot Front:
    • Identified ~80 members
    • Sabotaged their marches and logistics
    • Publicly embarrassed the group with stunts (Playing "Bella Ciao" on their server, burning their uniforms)

    “He just says, you know what? I'm done talking. And he presses play and plays like this version of Bella Chow, like the anti fascist anthem.” (28:34, CM)

• Collaborations with Progressive Media
  • Antifa research quietly underpinned thousands of news stories, and was used by journalists (CM, ProPublica, BuzzFeed, etc.) despite mainstream hesitancy.

5. Law Enforcement & Far-Right Collusion

• Police and State Involvement
  • Repeated links between law enforcement and white supremacist groups, both as sympathizers and members
    • Example: Richard Spencer's bodyguard later exposed as a Massachusetts police officer
    • ICE agents displaying far-right symbols
  • Explains why Antifa does not cooperate with police:

    “They see them as law enforcement shared projects with white supremacy. ...police forces in America got their start as slave catchers and slave patrollers.” (33:34, CM)

6. Risks for Journalists and Activists

• Repercussions of Exposure
  • CM recounts targeted harassment from far-right actors after exposing neo-Nazis:
    • Doxxing threats to himself and family
    • “My mom received multiple death threats, including a phone call telling her that I had been killed and to come pick up... my body.” (36:09, CM)
  • Emphasizes why antifascists operate anonymously

7. Current Moment: Shifting Narratives and the “We Protect Us” Ethic

• Grassroots Movements against ICE and Fascism
  • Not just antifa, but broader militant tactics used in Minneapolis “bear a strong resemblance” to past antifascist uprisings:

    “It is essentially all the tactics that are being used are militant anti fascist tactics...” (18:17, CM)

  • “We Protect Us” as a living principle: communities rely on themselves, not Democratic Party or police, for defense and support

8. "The Fire Brigades" — Antifa as Front Line, Not Final Solution

• Metaphor and Mission
  • Drawing from Scott Crow, Antifa is the “fire brigade,” focused on immediate, urgent defense rather than broad social transformation:

    “Antifa's just like the front line of defense... the larger project of creating a more equitable world is a much bigger project." (43:13, CM)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Going Undercover:

  “He goes undercover into Patriot Front for about six months and basically method acts to be a Nazi and ends up... really fucking up their shit.” (25:46, CM)

• On Media Reluctance:

  “...in the month, two months after Charlottesville, those op ed sections spent more time denouncing the people punching Nazis than actually denouncing Nazis...” (31:09–32:21, CM)

• On Fascist Tactics:

  “Fascists wear masks... in hopes of creating a world in which they won't wear masks at all. Over the past 10 years, it was different fascist groups hiding behind masks. Now it's armed agents of the state.” (39:04–42:21, CM)

• Closing Reflection:

  “Part of Anti Fascism is... a politics of hope against all odds. And you are always fighting for a world... that you might not live to see, but that you will experience victories along the way that will be meaningful.” (45:13, CM)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Charlottesville & Antifa’s Rise — 01:14–06:21
• Defining Antifa & Roots — 06:21–11:26
• Far-Right Campaigns Against Antifa — 11:26–15:59
• Doxxing & Espionage (Vincent Story) — 21:43–28:34
• Media, Mainstream Collaborations — 29:17–32:21
• Law Enforcement Collusion — 32:50–36:04
• Retaliation Against Journalists/Activists — 36:04–38:13
• "We Protect Us" & Grassroots Organizing — 39:04–43:13
• "Fire Brigades" as Metaphor and Mission — 43:13–44:44

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Tone & Style

Throughout, the conversation blends sobering candor with a sense of scrappy optimism and humor. The hosts and guest speak in plain but vivid language, alternating between journalistic rigor, personal storytelling, and accessible political analysis. The tone resists sensationalism, aiming instead for clarity and demystification of Antifa while highlighting real stakes and risks within antifascist and journalistic work.

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Conclusion

Chris Mathias’s insights and his new book, To Catch a Fascist, offer a grounded, clear-eyed account of Antifa as both a tactical frontline defense against rising fascism and a lightning rod for political mythmaking. The episode emphasizes the necessity of grassroots vigilance, community self-defense, and underscores that while Antifa can disrupt and deter, broader change requires an even more expansive and unified movement.

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Listen for more:

• To Catch a Fascist available now
• Further work by Chris Mathias in The Guardian, Sato, The Nation
• Connect with Green & Red Podcast on social platforms for ongoing radical conversations

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Transcript

[Scott Parkin]

Welcome to Green and Red Scrappy Politics.

[Chris Matthias]

For Scrappy People, a regular podcast on radical environmental and anti capitalist politics.

[Scott Parkin]

Brought to you by Bob Bozanko and Scott Parkins. Welcome to the silky smooth sounds of the Green and Red podcast. I'm your co host Scott Parkin in Berkeley, California and as always I am joined by Boba Zenko. I'm in Niles, Ohio and today we are excited to have a journalist and author with us, Chris Matthias. Chris is the author of a new book called To Catch a Fascist, the Fight to Expose the Fight to Expose the Radical. Chris was formerly a reporter with HuffPo but is written in the Guardians Zatteo. MSNBC has actually a recent article in the Nation which is actually how I got turned on to Chris's work called Liberals Think Antifa Isn't Real, but it is and it knows how to win. And so we're going to talk a little bit with Chris about his book, which sort of in many ways demystifies Antifa and talks about some of the work they do behind the scenes. We'll probably also tie in with some like recent events as well, which we think are going to be important and related to this. Chris, welcome to the Green and Red podcast.

[Chris Matthias]

Thanks. Thanks so much, guys.

[Scott Parkin]

Yeah, we're in this dangerous historical moment. Your book is very timely in many ways related to what's been going on with the administration. I see a pivotal moment where we see this rise of Antifa as a very known mainstream thing. And then also the rise of the right is Charlottesville. You were in Charlottesville. You talk about it quite a bit in the book. Could you maybe talk about your experience in Charlotteville and what you learned about Antifa and why you realize what the importance of what antifa was and did in that moment?

[Chris Matthias]

Yeah, of course, Yeah. I went to Charlottesville in 2017 as a reporter for HuffPost and in a lot of ways I was still green on the like a far right beat. And obviously I think most people know what happened in Charlottesville now, but the largest white supremacist gathering in a generation obviously ends with a Nazi driving his car into a crowd of counter protesters and killing Heather Heyer. And one of the other kind of like infamous moments of violence is the beating of DeAndre Harris, who was a black counter protester, by five Nazis. And that occurred in a parking garage right after the rally. I happened to be in that parking garage. I was running towards DeAndre when a Nazi pulled a gun and the gun was pointed at me. So I ducked down and by the Time I got up, DeAndre was like stumbling away. I often tell people that I don't think there's anyone who went to Charlottesville, whether you were a protester or an attendee, like a Nazi or a journalist whose life wasn't completely changed by that day. And for me personally, it was the beginning of a decade long journey of covering the far right and of figuring out who was part of this kind of new insurgent fascist movement in America. I think we often forget the degree to which Trump's rise to the White House in 2015, 2016 corresponded with an explosion in new secretive, masked white supremacist groups. It's almost like a resurrection of the Klan's invisible empire for the digital age. There's all these new groups and they're organizing online and they're hiding behind avatars and usernames and different kinds of pseudonyms. So a big part of my task was figuring out who these people were. And I very quickly realized that there was already a network of people doing this type of work with a lot of success, even though they weren't journalists at like mainstream outlets like I was. And that network was antifa. And even before I got to Charlottesville, I didn't realize I knew very little about antifa. I think like most people at the time, I just thought they were the people that were all black and punched Nazis. You know. What I didn't realize was the degree to which they were researching, surveilling, infiltrating the far right and gathering invaluable intelligence that would eventually unmask thousands of white supremacists over the last 10 years, often revealing them to be people in positions of power, police officers, politicians, pastors, professors, and something back to Charlottesville quickly. I didn't realize that even before the rally that day, an antifascist spy had been in the planning server for Charlottesville and had a front row seat to their kind of murderous intent for that day and for how emboldened they were by the rise of Trump. They call, at the time, they called themselves the alt right and they very much believed that Trump was their success, that their propaganda had put propelled him into office, that they had memed him into the White House. And this anti fascist spy work, they collect all of this evidence of these, of the Nazis murderous intent for Charlottesville. They hand it over to local city officials and be like, you can't let these guys march here. The local officials let the rally go on. And I think that's a microcosm of what happens over the next five or 10 years, which is that anti fascists are so good at monitoring the far right and seeing how close they are to the mainstream current of American politics, how close they are to the Republican Party and how dangerous they are. And in that way, it's a Cassandra story, because they know this. They're warning people, but no one will listen to them. And they're dismissed as hysterics or radicals or extremists at the other end of the political spectrum. That was the. I set out to write this book to, like you said, demystify what ANTIFA is and basically tell the story about rising fascism in the US and about what I would argue are some actually real successes that Antifa had over the last 10 years in destroying some fascist groups.

[Bob Bozanko]

Yeah, that's the kind of positive portrayal I think is really important because you have a lot of people who aren't necessarily that supportive of Antifa, but they'll say all it means is anti fascist. Everybody's antifa. And then you have the right wing which thinks the. That everybody's a terrorist.

[Chris Matthias]

Right.

[Bob Bozanko]

Very simplistically, but I think useful. How would you describe Antifa in this perspective? What is it? Who is it? Just because there's just so many myths out there where. Like the article in the Nation where you talked about Bennie Thompson and how they really could have turned the tables on him.

[Chris Matthias]

Right? Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, what you're referring to is the he, Benny Thompson, the congressman, was grilling someone from the FBI in the Trump administration who basically said that Antifa represented the biggest domestic terror threat in the US which of course is absurd. But Benny Thompson's line of questioning was, I thought, was good in a way. It like he basically pressed this FBI agent and was like, okay, where is Antifa's headquarters? Where are they? And this guy couldn't answer. And it is true that Antifa doesn't have a headquarters, it's not an organization. And the subtext of that line of questioning was that Antifa might not exist at all. And that's like what I was trying to push back against with the Nation article, because there is a bit of a liberal misunderstanding or misapprehension or simplification where they just because Antifa is a shortening, like you said, of anti fascist, they think that it's a term that can just be applied to anybody who considers themselves antifascist. My argument in the book is that no, Antifa is real and it refers to a specific thing. And that specific thing is a subculture, a Phenomenon of this underground network of radical leftists, anarchists, socialists and communists who might disagree on like a 30,000 foot in the sky ideology, but when it comes to combating the far, they agree on some very basic tenets which include that the far right fascists need to be confronted in the streets, sometimes violently. That fascists should be given no platform to speak or organize. So that means if they turn up to hold a rally, you're going to kick them out of the park, you're going to try to get their permit revoked, you're going to try to deplatform them from social media for violating terms of service. And then finally, the last big tenant is that the state and law enforcement can't be trusted in this fight. It's basically cops, politicians, they're not going to save us from fascism because they are in many ways invested in kind of the capitalist white supremacist project that fascists also subscribe to. And Antifa in America didn't emerge out of nowhere, even if Americans only really heard the term for the first time in 2017. It emerged from this previous kind of movement to kick fascists off the street, which started in the 80s and 90s with groups like Anti Racist Action. And incidentally, that kind of got its start in Minneapolis and with a young group of multiracial punks and anti racist skinheads called the Baldies who wanted to kick the Nazis that were encroaching on the punk scene. And they did this initially by punch punching the Nazis. But then they started to read zines from anti racist activists in the UK and they got more politically sophisticated. They started identifying as anarchists and socialists and communists and they have a ton of success in kicking a lot of Nazi groups off the streets of America. One of the stories I tell in my book is the Battle of York, where some Nazis were holding a big rally in a small town in Pennsylvania and a coalition of about a hundred anti fascists, Anti racist action activists show up there to kick them out of town. And someone described it to me once as antifa kind of rises and falls with the fortunes of the far right. So the reason we all learned about Antifa in 2017 was because the fortunes of the far right were so good. And antifa kind of rose up organically as a response to that. And as for who's in antifa, something I try to get across in the book is that it's really representative of kind of everyday Americans. It's made up of working and middle class Americans who realize that it's up to them to defend their communities. A lot of them had kind of personal brushes with fascists in their communities. They identified variously as rednecks and soccer moms and Amazon warehouse work. Really just everyday people that needed a way to defend their communities and found these blueprints from a previous generation of activists.

[Scott Parkin]

Just around this myth, around the myth, around anti fascists. Sure. How does the. How did the white supremacists in the far right view them? And what myths do they perpetuate? Which is part of having seen rise all the way up to the White House?

[Chris Matthias]

Yeah, it's interesting. Even though most Americans didn't know what Antifa was in 2017, the far right knew what Antifa was, and that was because Antifa had been fucking with them for a while and really doing a good job at it. So the way the far right talks about Antifa is really interesting and I think a dynamic you see a lot in fascist politics where you depict your opponents as simultaneously all powerful and everywhere and also very weak. And in the far right depiction of Antifa, it's always a skinny, white, queer person that can't throw a punch or something like that. But yet they will still try to convince you that Antifa is this existential threat. And the way MAGA, the way Trump picks up on that in 2017 is after Charlottesville, the right is on the defensive because they realize that the violence, the racial violence that was perpetrated that day is a bad look. And there's a pseudonymous pro Trump troll named Microchip who starts a viral petition to the White House to designate Antifa domestic terror group, which is absurd on its face. And we can talk about this more later, but there is no federal statute with which to declare Antifa a domestic terror group. Moreover, Antifa is not an organization per se or a group, but Microchip is very clear that he doesn't. He's not doing this petition to actually get the White House to make this designation. He's doing it to set up Antifa as a punching bag. And he says this explicitly in this kind of remarkable interview with Politico, where he says, we're setting them up as a punching bag to distract and deflect from the violence, the very real violence of the right. And what he's doing is basically trying to create this false equivalency between the right and the left, where the left is somehow just as violent or extreme as the Nazis that marched in Charlottesville, which is absurd, but which gets a lot of traction in the mainstream press. And from there, all these MAGA influencers start churning out anti Antifa propaganda. So after every mass shooting, while it's unclear what the motives of the shooter are, these influencers rush to fill that information vacuum with lies and misinformation, accuse, saying that Antifa is responsible for the shooting. And they will blame Antifa for all kinds of things over the next couple years. They blame them for natural disasters, they blame them for train derailments. It's like upsetting.

[Scott Parkin]

January 6th.

[Chris Matthias]

January 6th, yes, exactly. And I think one of the, like, the. They're like, it's almost funny, right? Like one of the rumors was that Antifa super soldiers were going to like behead white parents or something at some point. And that was like a satirical joke that someone made on Twitter. But the Gateway pundit, the right wing website, thought it was real and ran with it and it became a thing. It reaches levels of absurdity in 2020. Antifa is blamed for the. For fomenting the mass uprisings for George Floyd, which Antifa is certainly taking part in those demonstrations, but they're not fomenting them. That's an organic grassroots uprising, black led. The reason the right does that is to delegitimize those uprisings, to say that they're inauthentic, that they were fomented by provocateurs, outside agitators and so on and so forth. And then, like you just mentioned, also equally absurd, after January 6, when what happened on January 6 was still unpopular, they rushed to blame Antifa provocateurs for the violence that day, even though we could all see with our own eyes who was doing it. And I think I have it in the book somewhere, but I believe, like, within two months after January 6th, like over half of the Republican Party believes that Antifa caused January 6th. Of course, they dispelled with that boogeyman and that conspiracy theory pretty quickly when they wanted to take credit for January 6th and celebrate it.

[Scott Parkin]

And part Trump, part is all those people.

[Chris Matthias]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I think Antifa has become this boogeyman that the right reaches for, for its own reasons. And then of course, most recently in the fall, Trump after Charlie Kirk's death. Trump claims to designate formerly Antifa domestic terror group. And then the Department of Justice and Homeland Security make big statements, I would argue pretty dangerous, menacing statements about targeting anti fascists with prosecution. So it's a. Yeah, an interesting time to have a book out coming out about Antifa.

[Scott Parkin]

The other piece, I feel like always falls into this. Their narrative around anti fascist is it's funded by Soros. And like even yesterday, Trump was talking about paid insurrectionists in Minneapolis who are disrupting ICE operations.

[Chris Matthias]

Yeah, it's. And it's, it's the same thing, right? It's this outside agitator trope. It's basically saying that people couldn't possibly can like do this out of virtue and wanting to protect their neighbors. I think sometimes the right's conspiracies about the left are actually grounded in this kind of disbelief that people have values and virtues that they want to act on and that the right can't imagine a movement that isn't structured with top down hierarchies that isn't actually funded by billionaires. And. Yeah, so it's a. Yeah, I think that's a good point.

[Bob Bozanko]

Well, they're doing that with ICE now, right? They're coming out and saying they're disrespecting ice. They're saying bad things to them, they're yelling at them. And I think in their mind they think everybody says, oh yeah, they can't do that. Whereas in fact what we're seeing now, and this is something I was going to actually ask at the end, not really, because I'm a, I was a professor of history, retired now, and so I've taught about all this stuff. Red scares and carcass, you name it. And those were, they were effective for the very same reasons you just suggested the outside agitators. That's a common trope. It's. Was that right? Am I wrong? But like, I don't think it's really sticking that much anymore. I don't know if they'd gone to the well too much, but it's just become this obligatory anti fascist, antifascist terrorist, domestic terrorists, blah, blah, blah. And even, especially now with the last two Minnesota killings, that was their first, before they knew anything, they said these people are domestic terrorists. And nobody believes that anymore. It seems like it's not sticking anymore, is it?

[Chris Matthias]

Or. Yeah, I think. No, I think you're touching on a really heartening development. Like I like to see Trump after the Alex party killing retreat for the first time in a long time to send Greg Bevino, that Nazi cosplaying commander at large out, send him packing out of Minneapolis because so many people could see that what he was saying about Alex Preddy was just so blatantly wrong, that like Alex Preddy was just filming and trying to protect a woman and wasn't trying to massacre ICE agents. His gun was holstered. And I think something I'm sure We'll get to this later too. But what I find very heartening is that the uprising in Minneapolis against ICE bears a very strong resemblance to me. It keeps reminding me of the uprising against this new generation of fascists that took to the streets in 2017 and 2018, where it is essentially all the tactics that are being used are militant anti fascist tactics. They, it's Tourette's confrontation, it's monitoring, it's surveillance, it's pre like social pressure campaigns against like hotels and venues not to host ICE or fuck with ice. So yeah, I think what you're touching on is really interesting is that like that boogeyman is maybe losing some of its valence and power because it's. They've gone to the well too much. It's like too absurd now to.

[Bob Bozanko]

Yeah, and the imagery is different because before kids dressed in black because even like good liberals would always. Oh, you know, and people who have respects at all. That's a gift to the right.

[Chris Matthias]

Right.

[Bob Bozanko]

And now it's not really that so much anymore as Renee Good or Alex Preddy or whoever, 5 year old kids are being victimized. And so now I think there's this real sense that a lot of people are just tired of abusing that as an excuse all its own.

[Chris Matthias]

Yeah, totally. It'll. And this was the intent behind my piece in the Nation was that I think fascism, fascists always go after the most marginalized groups in America. So obviously they're going after trans people, they're going after immigrants. And when it comes to their political opponents, I think they're so fixated on antifa because they in part are counting on liberals to throw antifa under the bus. And so they know antifa is like a weak link. If they can go after that and get them start using that term and targeting people as antifa for prosecution or for violence, then they can start to chip away at the rest of their opposition. So I think it's important to stand up for antifa and what it is to a degree.

[Scott Parkin]

One thing I'm curious about you talking about some of the tools that we see, like classic antifa, what I would call campaign, my day job is anti corporate campaigner. And so, you know, seeing them go after Target, seeing them go after Hilton, Home Depot, et cetera, like a tool that comes out in the book a lot and it seems to be like one of the main tools that anti fascists use. But I would also argue that fascists use. And it's also one of the things that the administration keeps saying that ICE is afraid of is doxxing. And so I'm wondering if you could actually, I want to ask some other questions about Vincent because he's a fascinating character.

[Chris Matthias]

Sure, yeah.

[Scott Parkin]

But I maybe just start off with talking a little bit about this tactic or tool of doxing, because I think it's an important thing to touch on.

[Chris Matthias]

Yeah, of course. Thank you. It is essentially a book about doxing. And when I say the word doxing, most people's association with that word correctly is posting someone's private information online as a means of inviting harassment. Posting someone's home address, their phone number, and then a lot of people will call them with threats or say, I know where you live, I'm going to threaten you. And that, that's actually a tactic the far right has used quite a bit. But when I say doxxing in the anti fascist sense, I mean unmasking a previously pseudonymous fascist or Nazi. The way I describe antifascist doxing is basically the modern digital equivalent of ripping the white hood off of a Klansman and seeing who's underneath. And this has always been a tactic in the fight against fascism and white supremacy in America, dating back to the first and second Klans. One of my favorite parts of researching the book was learning about the story of the Klan in Buffalo, New York in the 1920s. And basically the mayor hires a spy to go undercover into the Klan, gets a membership list, posts the membership list downtown. All of Buffalo comes to see who among their neighbors is in the Klan. And then they boycott and vandalize clan owned businesses. A lot of Klansmen get fired, they get exposed for all their crimes and eventually the Klan falls apart. And in the 80s and 90s, you have anti racist action, like I talked about before, do similar things where they will go dumpster diving, for example, outside a neo Nazi's house to look for discarded mail and to find the names, the real names of these Nazis. And then there'll be a pressure campaign. They'll say, they'll call this Nazi's employer and be like, did you know you have a Nazi working for you? And that Nazi might lose their job. The whole, the whole tactic is basically grounded in leveraging existing societal taboos against explicit white supremacy and fascism to create a social cost, to create a consequence. It basically says, yeah, you can join that fascist group, but we're going to figure out that you're part of that group, we're going to name you, we're going to shame you, your family's going to know you're in this group, your girlfriend's going to know you're in this group, your employer is going to know you're in this group and like your life could fall apart. And that's a way of dissuading other people from joining fascist movements. And in the digital era, anti fascists update this tactic and they, you know, post in quotes like doxes, blog posts, Twitter threads that identified previously unidentified white supremacists. And they do this through a remarkable feat, I would argue, of journalism, of open source investigations where they. I talked to one antifascist who read through 60,000 tweets, I think to identify a single Nazi. And what he was doing was basically finding little slip ups, little pieces of biographical information that he could pull out and put together and then figure out their real offline identities. But one of you mentioned Vincent and I think this is a good segue. One of the, the more remarkable aspects of this anti fascist work over the last 10 years was that Antifa had a lot of spies. They were doing espionage. They were sending people into Nazi groups to pretend to be Nazis, to gather intelligence to unmask these Nazis. And Vincent is one of the more remarkable examples of that where he goes undercover into Patriot Front for about six months and basically method acts to be a Nazi and ends up, we can talk about it in a second, but ends up really fucking up their shit.

[Scott Parkin]

Yeah, it's a heroic story, honestly.

[Chris Matthias]

Yeah.

[Scott Parkin]

If you're, if you're from the antifascist side of things. Just to talk about Vincent a little bit, that's, to spin that like reading the book, you kind of get a feel for how much he immersed himself into the group, into Patriot Front, which is, we see mainstream media with Patriot Front and like how, what kind of effect did that have on Vincent? Can you talk? I mean that. It's just like a. I would feel like mentally and emotionally that would just be like a draining, even maybe traumatizing thing.

[Chris Matthias]

Yeah, I will say I kept trying to pull that out of Vincent, but he wouldn't really give it to me. I think like he was very happy with how it all went because he essentially, the intelligence he gathers ends up being used to identify, I think maybe contributes to the unmasking of about 80 Nazis in Patriot Front. He does some other kind of incredible stuff where he tips off anti fascists in D.C. to the fact that Patriot Front is going to be holding a big march there. Antifascist saboteurs turn up and break, shatter the windshields of Patriot Front's cars, slash their tires and one of the other, there's two other remarkable moments. After Vincent's infiltration is over and they know he's the spy, they forget to remove his access to their call server, like mumble server where they have their meetings. So he goes, he joins the call, listens for a while and then speaks up and basically says, hey guys, I've been here the whole time. And he starts to like trash talk them a little bit. They're going back and forth. And then he just says, you know what? I'm done talking. And he presses play and plays like this version of Bella Chow, like the anti fascist anthem. It's a really funny moment. And then the other thing he does is he, over the course of his six months, he manages to collect all of this Patriot Front material and propaganda pamphlets, banners, the shields they use when they go on marches, uniforms, hats, so on and so forth. On New year's day in 2022, he takes all this material to a friend's house and makes a pyre of it in the woods and sets it on fire. And he does a really nice video of the fire and sets it to like an old fashioned version of Auld Lang Syne and posts it on Twitter for Patriot Front to see it. And I bring up these stories when you talk about kind of Vincent's like, headspace for this, because I think he took some delight in fucking with Patriot.

[Scott Parkin]

Front, I think seems very cathartic.

[Chris Matthias]

Yeah, very cathartic. I think that's something maybe we should indulge a little more. And I think he, by the end of the infiltration, it was hard. I think he was just exhausted because he was essentially working a second job for free. So I think he felt a lot of relief for it to be over and like a lot of excitement to watch what happened with the intelligence he gathered, which of course was this network of anti fascists across America using the intelligence he gathered for their own investigations to. To figure out who among their neighbors were part of Patriot Front and when.

[Scott Parkin]

And when they, when we, when antifascist infiltrators put out that information, part of it is that they dox these folks and just expose them on their own social media. But I've also seen a number of stories where it's in ProPublica or the Texas observer has been doing one recently about a Nazi who's an ICE prosecutor. And so we do see collaboration between what I would call progressive media and. And anti fascists as well, right?

[Chris Matthias]

Yeah, totally. That's how I ended up writing this book. So many of my biggest stories as a journalist at HuffPost were dependent on antifascist research. And I think part of a lot of mainstream papers missed a giant story, in my opinion, which was these antifascist researchers were constantly finding these remarkable stories. But a lot of times, places like the Times and other places, I think were wary of working with Antifa or using their research. That said, antifa's research was the hidden hand behind thousands of news stories over the last 10 years at the local and national level. And like you said, ProPublica, HuffPost, BuzzFeed News RIP so many places were using this research. And an argument I try to make in the book is that much of our understanding of this perilous moment in our politics, this fascist moment, comes from the research that Antifa did. Even if they're very rarely credited with it, their research ends up not only in news articles, but in congressional testimony, in academic papers, in lawsuits, in indictments. It's, it's everywhere.

[Bob Bozanko]

Have there been any kind of more mainstream progressives who've been more positive about Antifa come out and say, hey, they're doing like really important stuff?

[Chris Matthias]

Not off the top of my head. I think like the image that comes to my mind is which the far right likes to post a lot is Keith Ellison in Minnesota posing with a copy of Mark Bray's book about antifa from 2017. But they think like what we talk touched upon earlier, liberals for the most part, when asked about Antifa, will basically be say something to the effect of it's just an idea. I think Biden said that during a presidential debate and, and then in more mainstream liberal press, the most of the coverage that Antifa got in op ed pages was to denounce punching Nazis there. There's a remarkable study by Fairness and Accuracy in media. Adam Johnson, he did it after Charlottesville and it looked at all the papers, our biggest papers, op ed sections, and he found that in the month, two months after Charlottesville, that those op ed sections spent more time denouncing the people punching Nazis than actually denouncing Nazis, which is just, I don't know. It's a remarkable piece of analysis, I think.

[Bob Bozanko]

So like Antifa operates, they know that they're not going to operate at that level. So it seems like they're very good at figuring out where to direct their attention rather than. You're not going to commission the New York Times.

[Chris Matthias]

No, totally. And yeah, I think Antifa and I think a lot of other spaces in the radical left are rightly wary of the mainstream press and see them as an instrument of normalizing really bad stuff.

[Scott Parkin]

I was going to segue to something else which I think is an important thing to touch on, which is law enforcement collusion with the fascists, with the far right. And I think about everything from where the Charlottesville police chief had said to told his officers to stand down and let them fight it out before they declared it a riot. I actually living at Berkeley, I've seen that happen here as well when the. Yes, of course, before Charlottesville, I think there were like far right gatherings here in Berkeley. Wanted to come out to the liberal snowflakes here. But then there's also where we see a lot of law enforcement who are active in these groups and Nazi groups and far right groups. And I'm regularly seeing images of eyes agents with far right tattoos things.

[Chris Matthias]

Yeah, totally. It's the some of them, some of those who work forces burn crosses quote. And that is the animating reason why Antifa doesn't work with law enforcement in a lot of ways is that they see them as law enforcement shared projects with white supremacy. Obviously police forces in America got their start as slave catchers and slave patrollers. But yeah, what you're touching on, like a lot of the Nazis that Antifa unmasked worked in law enforcement. One of the bigger stories that I did during my time at HuffPost was based off antifascist research. And it was identifying a man in Charlottesville who was Richard Spencer's bodyguard. Richard Spencer of course, being like the Nazi poster boy of the alt right, best known for getting punched during Trump's inauguration. But he was seen with this guy all over Charlottesville where he was wearing a suit. Anti fascists do some pretty remarkable research and they figure out that his name is John Donnelly. And John Donnelly is a police officer in Woburn, Massachusetts outside Boston. And after Charlottesville he just goes back to be a cop. He a cop for years after that until my story. And then after my story he resigns before basically he's fired. And the district attorney's office watches an investigation to see to for all the cases he touched. But there's so many examples like that. I remember there was like you, you mentioned ice. There was a antifascist identified a guard at an ICE detention center who was a white supremacist. There was a member of Identity Europa that was a prison guard in upstate New York. There is a police officer in Tennessee. Like the list could just go on and on. And I was talking to a reporter friend of mine the other day. Who was in Minneapolis and he was taking a photo of an ice agent. And while he was taking the photo, the ice agent gave him the AOK white supremacist sign. And so, yeah, you really see it everywhere. And of course, you look at this administration and like someone like Pete Hexseth, who I guess not a cop per se, but has deus vault tattoos and this kind of very explicit white supremacist. The body art.

[Bob Bozanko]

Personally. Did you get blowback? Did you get threats when you were doing your work?

[Chris Matthias]

Yeah, I did. In 2018, I wrote a story about a guy named Alex McNabb. Alex McNabb was. Is one of the biggest neo Nazi podcasters in the country for a network called the Right Stuff. And he was a host on a show called the Daily Shoah. And Shoah, of course, is a word for Holocaust. Just a absolutely vile podcast that I had the unfortunate task of listening to hours of. But it turned out antifascists realized that he was a EMT in Virginia. He was working as a paramedic. He often alluded on his podcast to having black patients and treating black patients differently. I write a story about this. He's fired, and he and his network initiate a doxing campaign. I was caught a little flat footed and wasn't prepared for it. But my family was doxxed. My parents were doxxed. My mom received multiple death threats, including a phone call telling her that I had been killed and to come pick up her body, pick up my body. I had to file a police report. I've gotten a lot better at that now. And thankfully it doesn't happen that much anymore. But it's a. It's a jarring experience for sure. And obviously when I go to rallies and stuff now, a lot of people there know who I am. I remember once I was following a bunch of drivers at CPAC and Nick Fuentes texted them to let them or told them in their chat to let them know that I was following him, following them. So, yeah, there's real stakes to this line of work. And that is a reason a lot of antifascists remain anonymous. And there has been cases where the far right has gone after antifascists. Three men were arrested in Georgia who belonged to a neo Nazi group called the Base. And they were plotting to murder a husband and wife who they thought were in antifa.

[Scott Parkin]

I have one, one more. I have many questions to talk about this for a long time, but I have. We're kind of getting a little bit close to our time. I have One last question. I don't know if Bob has any final last questions.

[Bob Bozanko]

It's just a build up on what we talked about earlier, how this stuff isn't sticking the way it used to. Trump probably is overplayed his hand. And people know that in a larger kind of sense, though, and I'm not terribly optimistic by nature, but I think there's some sliver here in that, like people aren't just. Not only are they not buying Trump's bullshit, but they're also rejecting the Democratic Party. Yeah, the whole kind of vote blue because Walsh, who may say fuck ice, but then says Tom Holman's different and sends the police out to protect ICE agents at the local Hilton. Do you sense that that's changing as well, that people not only are starting to finally tune out Trump, but also saying, you know what? You guys aren't any different to the Democratic Party?

[Chris Matthias]

Yeah. No, I think you're touching on something really important. There is an axiom in anti fascist circles, in other leftist circles, and in black liberation spaces, which I know you guys know, which is this axiom of we protect us. And that what undergirds that axiom is this sense that the institutions that are there to purportedly protect you won't and you can't depend on them. And I think what I find, like we, we started this conversation talking about crying. And I think what the moments that have actually made me tear up are just how inspiring the uprisings are in Minneapolis. And what you're seeing there is this, that slogan, we protect us in action. They are not waiting around for their institutions to come to protect them because those institutions are nowhere to be found. The Democratic Party isn't doing shit in Minneapolis. Really. You can, I'm sure you can point to some politicians that are making good statements and stuff and supporting people by and large. It just feels like a very feckless response. Similarly, the police department in Minneapolis was the same one that killed George Floyd five years ago. And they're not necessarily going to be the ones to protect you from other, other cops. What I have found so heartening about Minneapolis and elsewhere is that you might not call it antifa per se, but it is an adaptation or a proliferation of militant antifascist tactics. It's a organic grassroots uprising. It is an understanding that in order to protect our neighbors, protect the most marginalized among us, we have to do it ourselves. We have to show up and like, it's working. Like, it's, it's like they are. Minneapolis is like a real example for the rest of the country, they are showing that it's possible to stand up to these people. And I think fascism really counts on and depends on making you feel hopeless and there's nothing that can be done and to despair. Well, I think what you're touching on is really important. The animating question of my book is Antifa unmasked an entire generation, this new generation of fascists. Like, what? The success of that work is dependent on this taboo against explicit white supremacy. But what happens when that taboo starts to disappear? And we are in this masked off moment for fascism right now, but what we're seeing in Minneapolis is pushing back against that. And I think it's very striking to me that part of what I try to get across in my book is that when fascists wear masks, they do so in hopes of creating a world in which they won't wear masks at all. Over the past 10 years, it was different fascist groups hiding behind masks. Now it's armed agents of the state. And I think it's important to reflect on the world that they want to create in which ICE agents feel comfortable not wearing masks at all. And that's the project right now, is to stop that world from being created. And I think there's some real traction.

[Scott Parkin]

Yeah, I totally agree. It's. And it's definitely not coming from a mainstream media or Democratic Party or anything like that. It's coming from. And it's also been building. Right. It's like Los Angeles to Chicago to Charlotte.

[Chris Matthias]

Yeah.

[Scott Parkin]

Minneapolis now. And I feel like ICE is also learning from all of these different experiences, but community groups and community resistance definitely is. My last question is about your last chapter, which is called the Fire Brigades, which I take from a quote from our good friend Scott Crow. Like, he's.

[Chris Matthias]

Oh, nice.

[Scott Parkin]

Good friends of Scott Crow for a long time. Both of us, very close. We've had him on the show many times as well. But it's called the Fire Brigades, and I'm just wondering if you could just talk about them, because I think that's actually a fairly important thing about Antifa, which. Which, if you could just talk about that a little bit, I think that's an important thing to close on.

[Chris Matthias]

Yeah, I love that you asked about that. You're the first person that's asked about that, and I think it's a really important point. So the Fire Brigades is the name of the last chapter, and it's taken from a Scott Crow quote about basically how militant antifascism. Antifa is, like, good at putting out, like, little Fires good at this localized, urgent community. Self defense. It is. It destroyed these fascist groups that posed an imminent threat to different communities. But the larger project of stopping more widespread fascism, of overthrowing all the politics of domination kind of integral to capitalism, is a much, much larger project and will involve a lot of different people coming together to. To make that happen. So, yeah, I think the reason I decided to go with Fire Brigades as the title of the last chapter is because you could read the book in one sense and be like, antifa didn't stop fascism from happening. But that's not really what Antifa's doing. Antifa's just like the front line of defense. They're stopping these very violent Nazis in your communities. The larger project of creating a more equitable world is a much bigger project.

[Bob Bozanko]

Not that long ago, you started seeing people posting memes of World War II vets, the original Antifa. You have these kind of like middle class people saying, I am antifa. It reminds me like the scene from Spartacus. I'm Antifa. Which I joked one time, antifa's going mainstream, which is obviously not the case. I think it's just. I think Trump's going to continue to say that, but I just think people have just said this bullshit. They're not terrorists, they're. I think that the public response to this because of the failure of these elite institutions has really been something I could have never imagined.

[Chris Matthias]

Yeah, no, it's. It's really inspiring. I think I just spend. I think I. Speaking of the end of the book, I think I. Part of Anti Fascism is it's a politics of hope against all odds. And you are always fighting for a world that. Fighting to create a world that you might not live to see, but that you will experience victories along the way that will be meaningful.

[Scott Parkin]

That's a little bit of what I thought of with the murders of Renegade and Alex Preddy. Especially Alex. Maybe that's because that's fresh in my mind, but he was definitely one of those people.

[Chris Matthias]

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

[Scott Parkin]

I'm going to. I think we can wrap it there. This has been great conversation. Fantastic having you on.

[Chris Matthias]

Yeah. Thank you for showing the book.

[Bob Bozanko]

Yeah, yeah.

[Scott Parkin]

The book is To Catch a Fascist, the fight to expose the radical. Chris, it's been great talking with you. You can also check out Chris's work in the Guardian and Sato and check out that recent Nation article. We'll put a link to that in the show Notes. If you really like what you're hearing, please check us out on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and BluesKY if you're watching this on YouTube, hit that subscribe button. If you're listening to this on audio platform, give us a rate and review. And if you really like us, go to greenradpodcast.org, hit that support button or become a [e-mail] Greenradpodcast like we said, it's been a great talk and we do have to have you back on sometime soon because this is a fantastic topic. Yeah, it's not a fantastic topic, but this is a fascinating topic.

[Chris Matthias]

Yeah. This was such a pleasure, guys. Thank you so much.

[Scott Parkin]

Yeah, everybody else out there make trouble and misbehave and we'll talk to you again soon. Sam.