This singular focus on street violence and deplatforming derailed meaningful discussion about the more common, day-to-day efforts of anti-fascists. This work is at the heart of To Catch a Fascist. From the outset, Mathias introduces the reader to the anti-fascists clandestinely infiltrating the American neo-Nazis and white nationalists riding the wave of racist resentment during the early Trump years. Trump’s rise from reality TV star and casino owner to the Oval Office touched off a years-long series of far-right protests and anti-fascist counterprotests from New York City to Portland, Oregon. Cable news continued to play scenes of violent dustups, but less visible was the coterie of anti-fascists hard at work behind the scenes, documenting and identifying the perpetrators of racist and otherwise bigoted violence.
These activists — socialists, communists, anarchists, a mix of the three — were keeping alive a long American tradition by infiltrating far-right groups and gangs. In the 1930s, Dr. Joseph Westbrook, a light-skinned Black dentist, infiltrated a Ku Klux Klan chapter in Denver, Colorado, to gather intelligence on the group’s plans. Around the same time, the Jewish attorney, World War I veteran, and Anti-Defamation League representative Leon Lewis created an undercover ring that sent spies into Nazi cells in Los Angeles. During and after World War II, the author Stetson Kennedy infiltrated a slate of hate groups, later publishing landmark books including The Klan Unmasked and the Jim Crow Guide to the USA.
The anti-fascists in Mathias’s story undertake these risky incursions into the heart of white supremacy for neither acclaim nor reward. For the most part, these secretive anti-fascists don’t write books, cash in on personal brands, or appear on television to discuss their undercover operations. Nor do they collaborate with law enforcement. In fact, many do this dangerous work with the full knowledge that it could attract backlash from the state.
Not collaborating with authorities, of course, is a position rooted in historical awareness. Modern American policing was born from the so-called slave patrols that put down rebellions and hunted down people who escaped from slavery. Many times in the 19th and 20th centuries, police officers either joined lynch mobs or stood by idly as they carried out grotesque and often lethal violence against people of color. Since 2000, white supremacists and militiamen have joined and built ties with law enforcement at an alarming rate. Refusing to work with authorities is also a position that has proven wise a year into Trump’s second administration. Since the president returned to the White House last January, he has also handed many of the country’s levers of power to committed far-rightists.
Vincent, an anti-fascist infiltrator whom Mathias profiles, used a pseudonym and provided little detail about his own life beyond confessing that he grew up religious and eventually drifted from standard liberal politics toward anarchism. In 2021, in Mathias’s telling, Vincent went through the laborious recruitment process to join a Pacific Northwest chapter of Patriot Front, a white nationalist group known for defacing progressive murals, putting up racist flyers and banners, and holding masked marches. With time, Patriot Front admitted Vincent into their ranks and made him a cameraman for the chapter’s propaganda output. Though they did not trust him to hang onto the memory card in the camera, Vincent deftly used a camera that holds two memory cards, saving copies of photos and videos.
For months, Vincent bit his tongue as the Patriot Front members used racist slurs, slavered at the idea of ethnically cleaning the country, and tacked up banners that read “Conquered, Not Stolen” and “America for Americans.” His goal was to document and learn their identities, a task he succeeded at thanks to both the access he secured and their lack of discipline. Once he gained enough trust, he learned about an upcoming Patriot Front in Washington, DC. As everyone geared up to travel, Vincent sent the group a panicked message about police at his door, logged off, and then shared the plans, photos, and identities of everyone he had identified who was attending the rally with anti-fascists in the capital.
On the day of the march and on the other end of the country, anti-fascists located the U-Haul trucks Patriot Front members used to get to the rally. The leftists stabbed the tires and took hammers to the windshields. The few Patriot Front members who stayed back to watch the vehicles now fled in the face of a direct confrontation. When police arrived at the scene, the fascists identified themselves before realizing that anti-fascists and journalists alike would be able to obtain the body camera footage through public records requests.
The far-right group soon realized Vincent was the infiltrator, but he was already gone by then. The group’s leader, a Texan named Thomas Rousseau, vowed to introduce stricter initiation rules and promised his worried followers that the doxxing would blow over. Months would pass before they’d learn that Vincent’s comrades had hacked their RocketChat server, downloading hundreds of gigabytes worth of messages, photos, and videos.
American anti-fascism, of course, long predates the Trump era. As far back as the 1930s, before the US government formally opposed Nazi Germany, communists and other leftists led anti-fascist cultural campaigns, advocated for boycotts of antisemites and hard-right bigots, and put forward a popular front strategy to unite the broader left against the fascist threat. The Communist Party USA even smuggled American volunteers into Spain to help Republican forces resist General Francisco Franco’s ultra-right forces during the country’s brutal civil war, though (as writers including George Orwell and William Herrick, both of whom volunteered and were shot in Spain, would later write about) the party’s Stalinist allegiances led its fighters to target anarchists and Trotskyists as much as they went after fascists.
Though the term Antifa, a loanword taken from the German abbreviation for antifaschistische, wouldn’t become popular in North America until much later, left-wing anti-racist groups often evoked the specter of fascism in their activism. Starting in the mid-1960s, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense organized under the banner of anti-fascism and conducted armed patrols to deter police brutality and Klan violence. More recently, in the late 1970s and 1980s, the hardline leftist John Brown Anti-Klan Committee organized against, documented, and traded blows with the KKK. The group’s newspaper, originally Death to the Klan but later changed to No KKK, No Fascist USA!, advocated for Black liberation, supported anti-imperialist causes, and raised awareness about growing fascist threats in communities the country over. This tradition continued in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, when Anti-Racist Action and Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARP) were born from the anti-fascist battles inside the countercultural punk and skinhead scenes.
At that time, anti-racist skinheads and militant leftist punks hardly attracted a fraction of the media attention that contemporary anti-fascists have. In hindsight, that may have been a blessing. In recent years, the American hard right has cynically exploited the anonymity most anti-fascists insist on in order to blame Antifa for innumerable tragedies and injustices. The shooter behind the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas that killed 59 people? In the far right’s telling, Antifa. Wildfires on the West Coast in 2020? Yes, Antifa lit the match. The pro-Trump Jan. 6 insurrection itself? Believe it or not, Antifa again. (The last one raises an interesting question: If anti-fascists were behind the Capitol riot, why did Trump pardon the hundreds of people convicted on charges related to the incident?)
Conspiracy theories or not, anti-fascists have kept at it all these years. You might ask whether militant anti-fascism works. Looking at the state of America and much of the world today, we might be better suited asking whether liberal democracy as we know it, its institutions so imbued with white supremacy, truly works. Outright fascists can partake in and exploit the democratic process with the goal of ultimately abolishing electoral politics. But the durability of fascism partly depends on the ability to project and maintain an image of unshakeable strength. It’s no surprise neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and others on the far right so often retreat when confronted with public exposure, defeat, and humiliation.
In 2018, I interviewed a man named Christos Rigas, a former member of the now-banned neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, in Greece. He had left Golden Dawn and founded a new, smaller ultranationalist party, most often referred to by the acronym LEPEN — a nod to the French Holocaust denier and far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen — and opened an office in central Athens. When word spread that the party had set up shop in the neighborhood, anti-fascists blockaded the building, took sledgehammers to the door, and confronted members whenever they came and went. Soon, Rigas admitted, he decided it wasn’t worth the trouble and closed the office altogether. Closer to home, the intense campaign for accountability in the wake of the Charlottesville violence in 2017 resulted in many far-right groups disbanding.
And so it goes in Mathias’s accounting, with many of the Patriot Front members that Vincent and his fellow anti-fascists doxxed and exposed. Masked fascists on the march may feel emboldened by both their numbers and their anonymity, but can all that patriotic bluster survive when their names, addresses, and places of employment seep into the public sphere? Alongside the details of their private lives were records of their antisemitic, racist, and genocidal views. Worse yet for the far right, Vincent’s infiltration led to suspicion and infighting within Patriot Front: Fearing more spies in their ranks, the leadership decided to “revet” other new members. With their names out in the world, some doubled down on their commitment to fascism, but several skipped town and others quit the movement altogether.
Mathias’s book shines because he lets anti-fascists speak for themselves. His aim is rarely off, and he knifes through misinformed punditry while never discounting how grave a threat fascism poses. His sojourn into history draws a neat line from the Buffalo, New York, residents who turned on their neighbors that were exposed as Klansmen a century ago to the anti-fascist researchers outing neo-Nazis today. The American far right has been on the march across the last decade. Yet, a fact that acted as a check on its growth, as Mathias argues, was that white supremacists could rarely insulate themselves from the risk of exposure.
Since Trump returned to office in January 2025, it is unclear whether naming and shaming neo-Nazis and white nationalists will continue to be effective. The president’s team has worked hard to entrench authoritarianism within the country’s most powerful institutions. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and transformation of the site into X has also helped normalize the far-right conspiracy theories that would have loitered on the periphery a decade ago. As masked federal agents run roughshod over protesters in Minneapolis, ICE is reportedly recruiting from right-wing groups and gun organizations.
What will anti-fascism look like in an age when naked racism and white nationalism are, at least as far as the ruling party is concerned, closer to selling points than they are cause for shame and embarrassment? The answer is on the news every day. Activists have turned up to disrupt and document immigration raids. Demonstrators have taken to the streets to push back against the militarization of American cities. Communities have come together to provide mutual aid and support for those in the administration’s sights. And anti-fascist researchers have continued to expose fascists hiding in plain sight. The people who populate the current administration, after all, will not control the country forever.
For years, liberal pundits have quipped that Antifa doesn’t really exist. That refrain has become even more common since Trump issued a legally questionable executive order designating Antifa a terrorist organization in September. Just scan the internet and you will find well-meaning social media users riffing, “Is Antifa in the room with us now?” In a culture fixated on the idea of leadership, it is perhaps understandable that so many struggle to believe a genuine movement could exist without hierarchy. Antifa does exist, though, and Mathias gets it right by pointing out that the movement is “largely a reflection of America itself.” It is, he writes, “a network of everyday people from different walks of life, with perhaps a couple demographics overrated, who [have] all found themselves radicalized by current events, mistrustful of the country’s institutions in which they’d once invested their faith.”
Christopher Mathias’s To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right will be released by Atria Books on Feb. 3, 2026.
