American white supremacists want to move offline and out of the shadows. Theyâre 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 antifascistsâa countermovement of militant leftists. If you only see antifascists going meme-for-meme with self-described âalt-rightâ trolls, theyâre easy to dismiss. But antifascists havenât only picked off easy targets like Milo Yiannopoulosâ talk at UC Berkeley: Theyâve 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. âThey canât have a book club meeting without someone kicking down their door,â says James Anderson, a member of anarchist website Itâs Going Downâs 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 âthe best guy to talk to,â the ur-antifascist. The Daily Stormer, Americaâs top white supremacist hate site, has devoted multiple articles to his âharassment,â casting him as âa self indulgent man with secretive funding.â Heâs a neo-Nazi bogeyman.
In Jenkinsâ utilitarian worldview, allâs fair when youâre fighting hate. But exposing peopleâs personal informationâtheir addresses, their places of employment, their schoolsâcan cause real-world harm.
So, to paraphrase an internet-famous question, is it OK to dox a Nazi?
Jenkinsâ extremism fixation started early. âAs a kid, I always wanted to know where the Klan went,â Jenkins says. âI stayed curious.â 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. âOprah had a show on skinheads,â Jenkins says. âI didnât want to lose that information, so I bought the transcript.â
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 worldsâfrom skinheads to the Klan to neo-Nazis to the Christian terrorist group the Army of God. âIf you know the buzzwords, you know what youâre dealing with,â Jenkins says. âSomeone saying theyâre a ârace realistâ or âidentitarianâ? Thatâs code for white supremacist.â And once heâd heard the magic, racist wordsâwhich heâd often pick up while infiltrating protestsâheâd find his way into meetings, membership lists, home addresses, and places of employment.
The internet made Jenkinsâ work a whole lot easier (and, to be honest, white nationalists,â too). After all, itâs 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 heâd gathered.
So he launched One Peopleâs 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 âHate Has Consequencesâ and âFight Racism, Fight Fascism & Have a Nice Day!â Jenkins is similarly cheerful and uncompromising.
Heâs also kind of sneaky. âThank god for Facebook and Twitter,â Jenkins says. âTheyâre one of the great beauties of the world today.â In addition to just searching through peopleâs social media feeds, antifascists also create sock puppetsâdummy 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.) âWe know heâs a member of a hate group, but we donât know which,â he says, looking over one potential account. âSo Iâm looking through his subscribers. If this is in fact James Jackson, he likes Ramzpaul, who is tight with the alt-right crowd.â After he verifies such information, heâll post it to One Peopleâs 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 heâll still publish peopleâs names, schools, and place of work. âYou play alt-right and parade around with Pepe the Frog, wait 20 years when youâre trying to get your job, and this comes up on a background check,â Jenkins says. âItâs not revenge. Itâs information.â Itâs also a harsh reminder of Jenkinsâ catchphrase: Hate has consequences, even if youâre just an idiot kid with a penchant for 4chan.
Posting someoneâs personal information to a relatively obscure website might not seem like it would do much good or harm. But Jenkinsâ work gets results. âWhat Daryle doesâthe public shaming of white supremacistsâgets them to move out of their communities, and sometimes completely repudiate their association with the movement,â 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 heâs 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 isnât a big game hunter. He goes after the people trying to remain anonymous. âI donât care about Richard Spencer,â he says. âI care about the guy shaking his hand. So Iâll take his picture and figure out who he is.â 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 arenât so sure. âI think for a lot of people it seems like the only response to the harassment, racism, sexism the social structure isnât protecting them from,â says Jared Colton, who teaches about ethics and technology at Utah State University. âBut when the ends justify all, it becomes an ideology bash.â
Responding to persecution and doxxing with more of the same canât be the only way to fight them, a truth even Jenkins will acknowledge. âIf you donât like doxxing, I say, please, find a new way to keep these people back,â Jenkins says. âThe problem is youâve all been doing nothing.â But when you dox a doxxer, you stoop to grab the tools heâs offering you.