American white supremacists want to move offline and out of the shadows. They're holding rallies, mounting pro-Trump counter-protests, and putting fliers up on college campuses.

But every reactionary has an equal and opposite ... re-reaction? White supremacists have met violent resistance from antifascists—a countermovement of militant leftists. If you only see antifascists going meme-for-meme with self-described "alt-right" trolls, they're easy to dismiss. But antifascists haven't only picked off easy targets like Milo Yiannopoulos' talk at UC Berkeley: They've also exposed the in-real-life identities of prominent neo-Nazi podcasters and moved to block white nationalist recruitment even in teensy towns of 6,000 people. "They can't have a book club meeting without someone kicking down their door," says James Anderson, a member of anarchist website It's Going Down's editorial collective.

That someone is often a 48-year-old Philadelphian named Daryle Lamont Jenkins, a tenacious sleuth bent on finding, exposing, and doxxing racists and fascists and other far-right agitators. Anderson calls him "the best guy to talk to," the ur-antifascist. The Daily Stormer, America's top white supremacist hate site, has devoted multiple articles to his "harassment," casting him as "a self indulgent man with secretive funding." He's a neo-Nazi bogeyman.

In Jenkins' utilitarian worldview, all's fair when you're fighting hate. But exposing people's personal information—their addresses, their places of employment, their schools—can cause real-world harm.

So, to paraphrase an internet-famous question, is it OK to dox a Nazi?

Jenkins' Guide to Extremist Hunting

Jenkins' extremism fixation started early. “As a kid, I always wanted to know where the Klan went,” Jenkins says. "I stayed curious." He credits being an Air Force police office with honing his observation skills, but the person responsible for kickstarting his extremist hunting career is pretty surprising. “Oprah had a show on skinheads,” Jenkins says. “I didn't want to lose that information, so I bought the transcript."

That very 1988 move led Jenkins to record and catalogue as many white supremacist public appearances as he could find. And by watching the tapes and combing through transcripts for patterns, he began to understand the shape of various far-right worlds—from skinheads to the Klan to neo-Nazis to the Christian terrorist group the Army of God. "If you know the buzzwords, you know what you're dealing with," Jenkins says. "Someone saying they're a 'race realist' or 'identitarian'? That's code for white supremacist." And once he'd heard the magic, racist words—which he'd often pick up while infiltrating protests—he'd find his way into meetings, membership lists, home addresses, and places of employment.

The internet made Jenkins' work a whole lot easier (and, to be honest, white nationalists,' too). After all, it's not easy for a black man to infiltrate the KKK IRL. By 2000, Jenkins realized the web could be his bullhorn and recruitment platform too, and he wanted a place to put all the information he'd gathered.

So he launched One People's Project, a far right watchdogging site he says is meant to be a resource for employers, law enforcement, and the general public. Its taglines are "Hate Has Consequences" and "Fight Racism, Fight Fascism & Have a Nice Day!" Jenkins is similarly cheerful and uncompromising.

He's also kind of sneaky. "Thank god for Facebook and Twitter," Jenkins says. "They're one of the great beauties of the world today." In addition to just searching through people's social media feeds, antifascists also create sock puppets—dummy accounts that start out with a Pepe the Frog banner and work their way up to following David Duke and tweeting about #whitegenocide, gathering new friends along the way. Then they dox the new friends.

While I was talking to Jenkins, he was looking through YouTube for signs of James Jackson, who traveled from Baltimore to New York City to kill black men. (Today, Jackson was charged with murdering Timothy Caughman, whom he stabbed with a sword.) "We know he's a member of a hate group, but we don't know which," he says, looking over one potential account. "So I'm looking through his subscribers. If this is in fact James Jackson, he likes Ramzpaul, who is tight with the alt-right crowd." After he verifies such information, he'll post it to One People's Project.

If Jenkins had been investigating this case prior to Jackson committing murder, he probably would have gone full nuclear on him: These days, Jenkins tries to only publish the addresses of people making violent threats, though he used to be a lot less discriminating. And he'll still publish people's names, schools, and place of work. "You play alt-right and parade around with Pepe the Frog, wait 20 years when you’re trying to get your job, and this comes up on a background check," Jenkins says. "It's not revenge. It's information." It's also a harsh reminder of Jenkins' catchphrase: Hate has consequences, even if you're just an idiot kid with a penchant for 4chan.

The Ethics of Doxxing Nazis

Posting someone's personal information to a relatively obscure website might not seem like it would do much good or harm. But Jenkins' work gets results. "What Daryle does—the public shaming of white supremacists—gets them to move out of their communities, and sometimes completely repudiate their association with the movement," says Stanislas Vysotsky, a sociologist and criminologist at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater who studies antifascism. Jenkins himself points out that some of the people he's doxxed are now in jail, and that people have begged him to take down their information.

Which is a bit chilling when you consider he isn't a big game hunter. He goes after the people trying to remain anonymous. "I don't care about Richard Spencer," he says. "I care about the guy shaking his hand. So I'll take his picture and figure out who he is." In the past, regular old pro-lifers have been swept up in his attempts to dox members of the Army of God. Jenkins retracted those posts, but this is the internet. The damage is done.

Antifascist doxxing is sticky: Jenkins is a sympathetic figure, and those he takes on are by-and-large terrible people, many of them inveterate doxxers themselves. For some, like Vysotsky, that moral high ground (and the fact that doxxing has been a go-to social movement weapon for decades) is a kind of justification.

But others aren't so sure. "I think for a lot of people it seems like the only response to the harassment, racism, sexism the social structure isn't protecting them from," says Jared Colton, who teaches about ethics and technology at Utah State University. "But when the ends justify all, it becomes an ideology bash."

Responding to persecution and doxxing with more of the same can't be the only way to fight them, a truth even Jenkins will acknowledge. "If you don't like doxxing, I say, please, find a new way to keep these people back," Jenkins says. "The problem is you've all been doing nothing." But when you dox a doxxer, you stoop to grab the tools he's offering you.