Data scientist tracked down US White Supremacists, hosted website

Who knew Roger Stone was a proud boy?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/01/white-supremacist-protest-activism-emily-gorcenski

The far-right Proud Boys group, whom Donald Trump refused to denounce this week, have been linked to assaults on protesters, white supremacist organizing, the spread of Covid misinformation and other threats against Americans.

Emily Gorcenski has been tracking them every step of the way.

Since 2018, the 38-year-old data scientist has been exposing members of the far right and cataloguing white supremacist violence across the US through her site, First Vigil. The project grew out of the attack on her Charlottesville, Virginia, community the year prior – the deadly Unite the Right rally, which brought Gorcenski face to face with neo-Nazis bearing torches and swastikas, shouting racist and transphobic vitriol at her. One of her attackers was later revealed to be an active US marine.

Using court files and other public records, the anti-fascist researcher has catalogued hundreds of criminal cases, connected the dots of dangerous neo-Nazi networks, and revealed links that journalists and authorities have missed. These days, it can be difficult to keep up. Far-right violence has escalated dramatically under Trump, who has ignored his own government’s domestic terrorism warnings and encouraged vigilante violence against leftists.

For her safety, Gorcenski has relocated to Berlin, where she has some distance from the US white supremacist threats and the groups she investigates.

In the latest installment of the Guardian’s series on trans activists at the forefront of protest movements, we talked to Gorcenski via Zoom about her predictions of increasing violence, the best 2020 tactics for fighting neo-Nazis, and the links between anti-trans movements and white supremacist groups.

Let’s start with Trump’s refusal at the debate to condemn the Proud Boys. What do you see as the potential consequences of his “stand by” remark?

This is explicit approval of violent white nationalism from the highest reaches of the government. What this says is the president does not care about the idea of an equitable legal foundation for our country. And these groups see this as tacit permission to not only keep doing what they’re doing, but to ramp it up. After Charlottesville, Trump was asked if he was going to tone down the rhetoric, and he said, no, I’m going to “tone it up”. And then in the 18 months after Unite the Right, we saw a stunning amount of white supremacist violence across the US, including mass shootings and terrorism. Now, I expect we will see an uptick in the coming weeks and months.

Can you tell me a bit about why you decided to start tracking neo-Nazis on First Vigil?

If we aren’t actively trying to maintain these histories and stories, we’re not going to get the true and complete picture of what’s going on. That’s what First Vigil is about – making sure we don’t forget and lose the details between court appearances. Like others involved in the sort of counter-white-supremacy game, I was tweeting about these cases and making connections, and eventually decided we can do better than Twitter. So I started a spreadsheet, which turned into First Vigil. I pull court records, and now every weekend, I sit down and go through these cases. At this point, I have a six-month backlog of information to add. And I’ve given up with some protests, because I can’t keep up with every case of some ****ing white supremacist who drives his car into a crowd or beats up a Black Lives Matter protester.

There are a number of activists and researchers who do this kind of tracking. What’s the impact of putting this information out there?

It’s led to the exposure of white supremacists in the military. It’s revealed networks and connections of people. It has also empowered people in communities to form coalitions and organize against white supremacists recruiting in their midst. My hope is that by combating these farthest fringe movements, we can build the momentum to start attacking more mainstream ones. If we can rally around kicking a Nazi out of the police as something that is necessary in civil society, maybe we can also say, it’s not just the Nazis in the police. It’s the way the police operate.

I’ve followed several recent examples where it seems police are allowing these groups to engage in violence. Do you think local and federal law enforcement have also emboldened the far right?

It’s clear that the police take a side. You see it in the protest dynamics for years and years. Specifically with Kenosha and some other recent events, the police were openly permissive of the far right, saying, “Why don’t you guys stand over there? Why don’t you do this?” I don’t necessarily believe they were trying to give tactical deployment orders. They were probably saying: “Here’s how to stay out of trouble.” Still, it shows this level of congeniality with these groups that is not afforded to the left. The police work with these groups or tacitly accept them, and then it snowballs and spreads and gets bigger and bigger until it eventually hits a boiling point, which is what happened in Kenosha [where the alleged rightwing vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse was charged with killing two protesters]. The facts are the police are deeply infiltrated by white supremacists. The FBI knows it. Police are part of this problem in both a participatory way and by permitting this to happen.​