In some ways, the siege of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was the culmination of years of building extremism across the country, as details about many of the alleged participants have borne out. Michael Edison Hayden, Senior Investigative Reporter and Spokesperson for the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose organization tracks hate groups, says extremists have increasingly been gathering online in recent years — posing new challenges to following them.
As we speak, there's been a lot of investigation in the past few days about people who attended the siege of the Capitol on January 6 in Washington. Are you seeing a lot of crossover with groups that your organization has identified and studies and people who were at the siege of the Capitol?
Yes, absolutely. But it is a sort of complex situation when it comes to groups. You hear on mainstream media a lot of different groups that were at the Capitol. If you remember in Charlottesville during the Unite the Right rally, there were all these uniformed people with particular symbols on their shields, that type of white nationalist group presence was not there. What we saw instead was a cluster of anti-government groups, which of course have members [that] cross over into white supremacy and things like that, and who we track and consider hate groups. And also a sort of a cluster of kind of individual extremists who perhaps radicalized online but don't necessarily belong to any particular group. And that sort of makes it kind of complex to talk about, in that sense.
So if we could define some terms, first of all, what is meant by the term hate group?
Southern Poverty Law Center defines hate group as an organization that based upon its official statements or principles, or the statements of the people who lead the group or its activities, has beliefs or practices that attack or in some way malign a class of people for their immutable characteristics. We tend not to list individuals as hate groups, and we focus on organizations. So it has to have some sort of organizational structure when we do it.
When you say that the SPLC is tracking them or keeping tabs on them, how does that work proceed? I mean, what does that look like?
We have a team of researchers that divide into different subsets within the kind of parameters of hate groups that we have. Like a neo-Nazi desk, and a white nationalist desk, anti-government desk, and anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-LGBTQ, and basically throughout the course of the year, those researchers keep tabs on which groups are still active, which groups are still meeting, how they're growing, whether they're proliferating around the country, and sort of make notes of that. In my capacity as an investigative reporter, not as a spokesperson, I will report on people who fit the kind of parameters of our mission statement, which is to keep the far-right extremist movement in general and hate movements on the fringes by reporting out the details about how they organize and what they do, etc. So when we do reports, they don't only focus on just groups, but my reporting sometimes focuses on individuals who may be kind of organizing on the extreme far-right.
Is it working?
Is it working? I mean, it's a difficult question. Right now we have a situation in this country where there's been this huge kind of escalation or growth of the far-right since 2015 or 2016, right around the time that Trump announced his run for office. So it is, I think, working in the sense that certain groups are struggling to kind of organize in the way that they were doing in 2016 and 2017. I would point to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, for example. Many of the groups that were at that rally are now in much worse shape than they were then, and that has a lot to do with sort of people paying attention to who they are. I'm thinking of groups like Vanguard America, Identity Evropa, who have gone through a very difficult last few years, forced to rebrand, change names, and I've seen a lot of their members identified and so forth. But the broader problem of far-right extremism is one that I think everybody needs to have a level of concern about particularly after what we saw on January 6th.
Do any of the groups take it as a badge of honor to be so identified by the SPLC? Is there any chance that identifying a hate group and including them in a report is actually playing into their hands at all?
That’s a very good question. We frequently have to assess those questions, and repeatedly have made decisions where we choose not to publish something that we have in order to not give a group a certain amount of attention. But, what we try to publish material on is information that they don't want people to see and that tends to disrupt their ability to organize.
Has the proliferation of all these different social media platforms, people have obviously been following what's happened with the right-wing Parler site, which had been taken offline. Does that make your work easier or more difficult, given the fact that there are so many more places for these thoughts and these groups to gather now?
It's a good question. Because on one hand, I would say, you know, it's good when people are de-platformed from a particular website or something like that, but there is a lot of moving around from fringe website to fringe website that we have to maintain an eye on and pay attention to. And one thing I would like to note is, I feel like the broader discussion about how the internet is used to kind of grow far-right extremism broadly is often skewed by these discussions around fringe websites that we also participate in. For instance, I did a lot of reporting about Dlive. Part of the reason to do that report is to note how much money that they were making off of Dlive, and after that report Nick Fuentes, who appeared at the Capitol that day, but did not storm the Capitol, the flag of his group, his America First movement did fly inside the Capitol that day. But that discussion of fringe websites kind of obscures the degree to which big websites like Twitter still have such a massive presence of extremists on there who have learned to sort of operate within the terms of service and kind of exploit vulnerabilities that tech companies have, where they just don't have the kind of intelligence or they're not putting the type of material that let's say, we have to determine who's using their website and how. I mean, tracking them on fringe websites is one thing. But also this sort of bigger problem is that larger tech companies are still not doing a good job of figuring out who is using their website, and how.
Is the work that you do dangerous? I mean, obviously, these groups have certain of them have been violent.
Yeah. Well, I try not to discuss it too much. I try not to make a big thing about it, because I feel that so many people are under threat from far-right extremists in this country. And in this, globally, I don't want to inflate my own sense of threat for the purpose of, I don't know, getting attention for it or something like that. But before I came to SPLC, Committee to Protect Journalists wrote a story about my coverage of the alt-right, because I was getting a lot of death threats before I came to SPLC covering the growth of the far-right. And, yeah, it was an extraordinarily difficult time, in part because of that. So, one of the things that I think people who cover this movement closely have to reconcile with is that certain privileges that other people have like about, you know, publishing certain things online and taking for granted your online security, we don't have. We have to be very, very careful. We're at constant threat of being hacked, phishing links, beyond things like threats and so forth. But that being said, somebody has to do it.
What attracted you to this kind of work in the first place?
You know, actually, it's an interesting question. You know, I didn't immediately start working for Southern Poverty Law Center. I was working at ABC News in the newsroom in New York City on the day of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and I remember just this feeling of just being overwhelmed with sadness and anger at what I was seeing from our video monitors there. And in Heather Heyer, and her murder, I really saw something that I think that I had neglected before. I mean, my mother is an Egyptian immigrant, my father is white, but I was essentially raised white with a very white name. And Heather Heyer felt very much like the type of person that I knew and I also felt angry that I had not seen this threat in sort of a different way. That it was like, the first time that I connected with somebody that I knew the type of person who had been murdered and sort of that awakening to this everyday threat, how much it had grown, the degree to which the coverage of white supremacy had focused on like Richard Spencer, white nationalist Richard Spencer and kind of what a bad boy he was, and things like that in the lead up to Charlottesville. I really felt a range of emotions in writing up those stories. I did a story about the accused killer at the time, now convicted, murderer James Fields, who is part of Vanguard America and the attack on Heyer and just the degree to which he praised Hitler and things like that in high school. And that sort of went viral, and then I was hired away by Newsweek to cover the alt-right, and I decided I wanted to do it, because I wanted to do it in a different way than people had been covering it before. I wanted to report critically on these groups, and their movement leaders. I wanted to publish things that were not necessarily going to make them feel good. I mean, because so many of them were selectively taking press that would help promote their message. And in doing that, I learned the hard way that yes, you can obviously be targeted with threats doing this sort of work. But also I made relationships with people at the Center by reaching out for comments, and kind of getting information, and that's sort of how I built a relationship with SPLC before I started working with them.
One thing that's emerged since the Capitol siege that's been quite interesting and troubling is the ties that many law enforcement agencies members may have to some of these groups, or at least to sympathize with them, including ex-military, police officers. What do you make of that dynamic? I mean, does that surprise you? Is that something we already knew?
Well, what I would say to that is, no, it doesn't surprise me. But it's still the extent to it, the number of people who are apparently police. It honestly saddens me because I feel like it's the type of thing that's going to really deepen distrust of the police, and with good reason in this case. It’s something that police departments across the country need to look at and take seriously. Far-right groups prize military personnel, people with military experience, people with experience in police departments, in part because they have a set of skills that your average recruit, who just comes in because of issues of gun rights or issues of their racism, or anti-semitism or the degree to which they've been radicalized by propaganda. Those types of people may not have that type of skillset that a police officer, or somebody who has served in the Marines would have, in the sense that they can come in and they can size up first responders to an event unfolding like we saw on January 6th. Groups like the Oath Keepers, who were there that day, have people with that type of skill set. And to be able to advise people on the ground in in a situation unfolding like that, with that type of skill set [is] prized, and we understand why it makes them that much more dangerous and that much more able to obtain, achieve their goals.
Well, I'm speaking to you from the Northeast. And I think many of us who live here might think of extreme right-wing groups as being a problem in other parts of the country. Can you shed some light on what it looks like here in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, compared to other parts of the country? Do we have our own issue on our hands here in the Northeast?
We absolutely do. That being said, I don't think people should need to panic and start assuming that your neighbor who you don't like or somebody who voted Republican or whatever is necessarily a far-right extremist of some kind. I think the problem is that we have seen, particularly in the aftermath of the 2016 election, a proliferation of far-right groups that no longer feel like they are tethered to this kind of sort of old Confederate way of seeing things. Groups like League of the South have been heavily damaged in terms of recruitment in the aftermath of Charlottesville, it seems. But, look along the Rust Belt in the Northeast, we have seen people cropping up. A lot of people, the most active people in the so called Alt-Right movement, which was really just an internet friendly rebrand of white supremacy, had been people from the Northeast. Mike Peinovich, who is arguably for me the most influential neo-Nazi right now in the country, when he was outed or ID’d as a white nationalist for the first time in 2017 people were surprised to learn that this guy had a family that were connected to colleges and connected to Hillary Clinton's campaign, I believe someone -- his mother was bumbling for or something like that. I mean, really just a very Northeast New York type. And Peinovich has set up a place in Fishkill. His group, they used to be The Right Stuff network, and now National Justice Party, they have a lot of their members in Pennsylvania. He himself was living in Fishkill, New York for a while. I believe he still is. You know, that type of stuff is part of this new era where you can't so easily stereotype who a far-right extremist is. The nature of the internet and this propaganda around specifically white genocide, this idea that whites are being systematically replaced by elites or Jewish people, which is a conspiracy theory that they really push forward and really drive home on the internet is the kind of thing that appeals to people all over the place. Thinking of somebody in Peinovich’s group, this guy Joseph Jordan who goes by the identity Eric Striker, he lives in Queens. And when I identified him for the first time, I found out that his parents were immigrants from Latin America. I didn't know. I mean, as far as I knew, he had presented himself as having white American ancestry, and I was just completely shocked to learn that. But that is sort of the nature of the propaganda that people are taking in, how diffuse it is and the fact that it doesn't show any particular borders.
Last thing, obviously during his election and his term, President Trump did just about everything he could not to disavow extreme right wing supporters of his who, I think it's fair to say, saw an ally in the White House, you know, and they championed him. He famously in that last debate with Joe Biden said “Stand by” to the Proud Boys group, and he was criticized widely for not disavowing these extremists throughout his time in the public stage. Does it matter, in terms of the proliferation of these ideas and how they're viewed by society as a whole, what the President says? I mean, obviously, we'll get a different approach to this issue from President Joe Biden, does that really make a difference, you know, the facts on the ground?
It absolutely does. And you asked me earlier a tough question which is, “is it working?”, what we do in the Center? And I could say, yes, but my way of saying, “yes, it absolutely is working” is also based on my steadfast belief that it could be so much worse than it is right now if people were not working against it, because of the degree to which prominent politicians, people with a huge network of amplification, like the President but also his allies. Reporters for One America News Network or Tucker Carlson are promoting ideas that we as a country once shunned outright, that we once considered to be untouchable because of just their racism. So, Trump and not only his racist ideas but his unwillingness to speak out against far right extremism. I mean, who knows exactly how much damage that has done to the country. But we can all take a guess based upon some of the things we've seen over the last few years. If you think about not only the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which was so tragic and so upsetting to so many people to see in an American city and January 6th, but also far right terror attacks, including El Paso, where 2,000 people were gunned down by a man who ascribed to an ideology that is not totally dissimilar from some of the anti-immigrant nonprofits that the Republican Party uses for research, I’m thinking of Center for Immigration Studies and FAIR.
If you look at what happened at the Tree of Life terror attack in Pittsburgh and just how horrible it was, this guy comes in, radicalized, kills 11 Jewish people because he feels that Jewish people are bringing in refugees from outside the country. These things you can't attribute directly to Donald Trump, you can't attribute them directly to one person, just as you won't be able to attribute terror attacks in the future to necessarily the politicians who are under criticism right now like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and to an extent Rand Paul. But that environment that they create, that environment of amplification and unwillingness to say, as a society, no, this is not us, we don't play this, we don't do this stuff. That absolutely plays a role in making this type of violence possible. And as does the unwillingness of tech companies to look at how their products may be radicalizing people, not these individual censorships of one account or another. I'm not talking about that stuff. I'm talking about the product itself, which is, quite frankly, structured in such a way to make people addicted. That has had an untold impact on people's radicalization in this country, that product. All those factors have brought us to this type of situation we're in. And you have to hope that the Biden administration is going to be working overtime to calm these waters and hopefully look at the type of not only the politicians, but also the messaging systems they use on social media and so forth to try to rein in the spread of this stuff.
