For all the obvious dangers posed by far-right extremism, the threat has not been a law enforcement priority since the ’90s, when the deadly government stand-offs at Ruby Ridge and Waco gave birth to the right-wing militia movement and inspired the Oklahoma City Bombing. Since the attacks of 9/11, which prompted a shift in resources toward radical Islamic terrorism, domestic hate groups have largely been ignored, and sometimes intentionally overlooked. In 2009, after DHS’s senior analyst produced an intelligence report warning of the growing threat posed by right-wing violence, a political firestorm prompted the Obama administration to downplay the issue. The Trump administration went even further; shortly after inauguration, it rescinded a grant that had been earmarked for a group dedicated to deradicalizing former white nationalists (reportedly because its founder had criticized the president on Twitter). In 2017, the FBI issued an intelligence report focused on the supposed threat posed by “black-identity extremism” a week before the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Around the same time, DHS appointee Katie Gorka (the wife of a former Trump advisor, Sebastian Gorka, who has been linked to fascist groups), claimed that “the actual threat” of homegrown terror was attributable to anti-fascists, after which DHS quietly disbanded an intelligence unit that had been dedicated to studying domestic terrorist activity and issuing warnings to police departments around the country.

The failures of the government’s inattention have become bitterly apparent. On July 28, a man was shot outside a Miami synagogue in what police called a possible hate crime, mere hours before a teenager armed with an assault rifle and, reportedly inspired by a century-old racist and antisemitic text, went on a killing spree at a food festival in Northern California. Then came the racially motivated August 3 slayings of 22 people at a Wal-Mart in El Paso, and the still unexplained murder of 10 others in Dayton, Ohio, on the same day.

The bloodletting prompted FBI Director Christopher Wray to order a new threat assessment, leading to a flurry of law enforcement activity. Three days later, an Ohio 18-year-old was arrested after the FBI identified him as the source of online posts musing about targeting Planned Parenthood and law enforcement officers (police found 25 guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition in his home). A few days after that, a man associated with the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement was arrested with bomb-making materials after allegedly discussing plans to attack a local synagogue and a nightclub he believed catered to an LGBTQ clientele. Weeks later, men independently suspected of planning politically motivated mass shootings were arrested in Connecticut, Florida, Ohio, and New Jersey. In all, more than two dozen people have been arrested after making terroristic threats this month.

Despite this crackdown, anti-fascists — who are acutely mistrusting of government authority — remain determined to protect their communities with or without the help of police. “To me there’s no choice,” said Spencer Sunshine, an expert in militias and other right-wing groups. “Some kind of aggressive countermeasures are absolutely necessary to contain the far right. Otherwise people die.”

The result is that anti-fascist researchers are increasingly adopting investigative techniques typically employed by law enforcement — in some cases, the techniques are deployed against law enforcement — and they are having some success. Recently, in the criminal trial of two men involved in an October 2018 brawl following a New York appearance by Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, a detective testified that information collected by Antifa researchers had been used in identifying the accused perpetrators. “After all the videos and photographs… were posted online and social media,” he said, “the doxxing immediately began and there were names then given for the individuals in the videos.”

The detective was likely referring in part to the scoop that put @AntiFashGordon on the map. It began with an October 6 rally in Providence, Rhode Island, which drew a number of alt-right groups. When the event led to a violent altercation, the team scrambled to identify the main perpetrators by examining a collection of livestreams and photos, hunting for likenesses on Facebook. “I got 6 or 7 IDs all at once, just by looking through people who liked the Pennsylvania Proud Boys Facebook page,” one of Gordon’s associates told me. “Occasionally, you just hit a goldmine.”

Shortly thereafter, McInnes posted about his upcoming appearance in New York. The team scoured the event’s RSVP list (which was public) and found several overlaps, including a man named Maxwell Hare, who had been involved in the fights in Providence. They posted his information in a Twitter thread just hours before someone resembling Hare was captured on videotape assaulting anti-fascist protesters on the Upper East Side. Following the melee, a local group, @nycantifa, published a dossier of key players and a taunting video. When police put out a call for information about three unknown persons of interest, @nycantifa promptly obliged.

In another big score, it was recently revealed that the Portland-based Patriot Prayer had been infiltrated by an anti-fascist activist, whose video evidence of the group planning a violent confrontation led to the felony indictment of several group members and may now be used in a civil trial as well. Footage of conservative media personality Andy Ngo chatting with group members also appears to have cost him his job as an editor at Quillette.

“The focus on street action has been sensationalized. There’s so much more to the movement that [people] never see.”

One might think such triumphs — and there are many others, including the enormous trove of leaked extremist chat logs published by the independent media collective Unicorn Riot — would endear Antifa to the public whose safety they’re so keen to protect. Instead, in recent months, anti-fascists have found themselves vilified by mainstream media and political figures. The latest round of scrutiny began with the June 29 Proud Boys rally in Portland, Oregon, during which black clad counter-protesters assaulted Ngo and doused him with milkshakes and Silly String. A few weeks later, 69-year-old protester Willem Van Spronsen was shot by police after apparently trying to set fire to government vehicles at an immigrant detention facility in Tacoma, Washington. While some on the left were clearly moved by Van Spronsen’s impassioned final statement (“I’m a man who loves you all and this spinning ball so much that I’m going to fulfill my childhood promise to myself to be noble… ” he wrote), it was one declarative line — “I am antifa” — that seemed to catch the attention of the media. The firestorm led Sens. Bill Cassidy and Ted Cruz to call for anti-fascism to be labeled a terrorist organization, echoing a proposal floated in a petition by Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio. President Trump embraced the idea, calling Antifa “gutless radical left wack jobs.”

A spokesperson for the Portland-based Rose City Antifa, who asked to be called David, said the criticism demonstrated that most Americans were still oblivious to the seriousness of the fascist threat. “How many murders have been perpetrated by white supremacists?” he asked rhetorically. “And how many at the hands of leftists? Zero. There it is. Anything else is propaganda, and an attempt to weaponize the government against dissent.” That said, while domestic political violence is overwhelmingly a right-wing phenomenon, it’s not exclusively so. The man who opened fire at a Congressional baseball game in June of 2017 was a progressive activist who had volunteered for the Bernie Sanders campaign. And the Dayton shooter was a registered Democrat who had expressed support online for Elizabeth Warren, though a political motivation for the attack has not been established.

Nobody in the OSINT workshop seemed eager to “bloc out,” i.e., take to the streets in the black hoodies, bandanas, and motorcycle helmets often sported by members of the anarchist “black bloc.” But then again, if their intelligence-gathering efforts are effective, they hoped, direct confrontation won’t be necessary. “The focus on street action has been sensationalized,” Gordon insisted. “There’s so much more to the movement that [people] never see.”

“Being in the streets directly confronting fascism is an extremely high barrier to entry to people who just want to live in an equitable and free world,” S., one of the cofounders of the Jewish group, pointed out, “but there are things you can do other than literally putting your life on the line. And that includes thwarting extremist organizing before it even begins, or exposing and derailing it. These are tactics that the state has used against the left, and they work.”

Moreover, independent journalist and anti-fascist researcher Molly Conger noted, they’re not especially hard to master. “I like to tell people if you’ve ever stayed up all night scouring Instagram for pictures of your ex’s wedding, you can do this. It’s the same skills.”

S.’s group is just one of three that have taken Gordon’s training program this summer, and he’s mulling over a handful of additional requests. “It’s getting so much more mainstream,” he said, with the wistfulness of an old-school punk hearing a new Offspring single.

“It used to be just us for a very long time,” recalled Daryl Lamont Jenkins, founder of the One Peoples’ Project, who began documenting the far right in 1988 and whose work helping to deradicalize white nationalists inspired the new Jamie Bell feature, Skin. “Now we have tons of groups doing it, and they’re delivering the goods.”