- Whether it's threats of violence, harassment, or stalking, or also bogus legal threats, journalists are facing increasing levels of threats.

- But the threats are not only against journalists.

Threats against judges, elected officials, activists, immigrants, and LGBTQ folks.

- It's no longer a live streamer like Nick Fuentes ranting about me for five minutes straight.

It's the former campaign manager for Trump 2024.

- Coming up on "Laura Flanders & Friends", the place where the people who say it can't be done take a back seat to the people who are doing it.

Welcome.

(gentle music) Without wanting to sound glib, it has to be said that these are good days for violent extremists.

President Trump pardoned militant January 6th rioters on day one in office and fired most of those who had tried to prosecute them.

His Justice Department has quietly removed research documenting the outsized threat posed by the extreme Right in comparison to the Left in this country, and redirected funds and agents away from tracking domestic terror to ICE and anti-immigration duty.

"The Federal Government is effectively gone," experts in counter-terrorism now say, leaving states alone to cope, crimes unsolved, and the journalists who have exposed extremists hanging out there, themselves exposed in a country that's increasingly authoritarian.

So what is life like for those journalists, and why do the threats facing them matter so much?

Today we're going to hear from three reporters on this anti-hate beat.

One covered a story very close to our hearts, the attack on two power stations in Moore County, North Carolina.

We've covered that story from December 2022 extensively here.

The sabotage at the stations cut off power to tens of thousands of residents for days and led to the death of one 87-year-old, ruled a homicide.

Sheriff Ronnie Fields, Southern Pines former mayor, immediately declared it an act of vandalism.

But by the next day, that was upgraded to sabotage, the FBI were involved, and by the end of the week, the governor was offering a $75,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.

- To the perpetrators out there, we will find you.

- [Laura] Attorney General, now Governor, Josh Stein assured us years ago that the investigation was top priority.

- But I can tell you that we're all taking it exceptionally seriously.

- But no one's been charged and the crime remains unsolved.

Reporter Jordan Green dug deeply into that story, and it led him, as it led us, to several likely suspects, including a group of neo-Nazi extremists.

It also changed his life, as you'll hear shortly.

Green is an investigative reporter for Raw Story whose feature for the news platform Assembly, which was titled, "I've Seen How the Neo-Nazi Movement is Escalating.

You Should Worry" recently won a top journalism award.

In Texas, investigative journalist Steven Monacelli has been tracking extremism, disinformation, social movements, and the influence of dark money in politics.

Like Green, he's won awards for his work, which has appeared in places like Rolling Stone, the Dallas Observer, and on The Real News, but it's cost him.

And likewise, freelance journalist Amanda Moore, who embedded with the far Right back in 2020, has faced backlash from far Right groups for her reporting for The Nation, Politico, and The Intercept, among others.

One of the people who stalks her is about to be released from prison.

So I got to start by thanking you all for your work, which is urgently important in these times, and thanking you also for being willing to talk about it when what you are facing as a consequence is serious and threatening to your lives.

So let me start with you, Jordan.

Why do you think it's important to talk about the situation that journalists are facing right now?

Why is the tactics that the Right is using against journalists so important for the rest of us to know about?

- I think it's important to be open and forthright when people try to bully you in life and in journalism.

And I don't think we should hide the fact that there is a toll and that neo-Nazis, in particular, and authoritarians, generally, want to silence journalists.

And we as a society need to be aware of that.

And we need to speak up as journalists who've experienced this so that our peers don't feel alone when they face similar challenges.

- Steven, you're nodding.

What would you say to that question?

- I think that's right.

I think that journalists are facing increasing levels of threats, whether it's threats of violence, it's harassment, or stalking, or also bogus legal threats.

And I think this is in incredibly important if you believe, like I do, that democracy requires journalism to function and that journalism is an essential aspect of a free society.

And so when we're seeing an escalation in these sorts of threats, I think we should be worried, given that journalism is one of the last institutions that can help shine a light on abuses of power or the growing threat of extremism.

- Coming to you, Amanda, we've got kind of a spectrum here on this panel.

Each of you looking at different parts of this story.

And you made the point very strongly in one of the articles that I read, that there is a lot that the kind of political mainstream Centrist and Leftists get wrong about this Right-wing ecosystem, I think that you called it.

What are we not understanding?

- People kind of lump every group together.

They don't understand what they're up against, what they're fighting against.

And to not understand what is going on makes it impossible to fix it.

- I mean, to give a sense of what you're each up against, I'd love you, Jordan, to talk about Kai Nix, 21-year-old soldier at Fort Bragg, who recently pled guilty to a gun charge.

- Sure.

Kai Nix, as you mentioned, is a former U.S.

soldier at Fort Liberty, now Fort Bragg, former member of Patriot Front.

He denies operating a channel called "Appalachian Archives" on Telegram, but I and other researchers have concluded that it was him based on the content that he posted.

It included my dox, it included some propaganda produced by a group called Terrorgram that included a kill list that has been cited by the Department of Justice and Prosecutions.

Mr.

Nix was outside of my door when a bogus pizza delivery was targeted at me.

One of my security cameras captured the license plate and it traced back to him.

So he took a photograph of me when I was responding to this bogus pizza delivery.

And about a month later, he was documenting a neo-Nazi flash rally in front of my house.

He's recently pled guilty to selling illegal firearms to an FBI informant and is awaiting sentencing.

- I mean, you've had your own bogus pizza experience, Steven.

What was yours?

- Well, I got a call from Domino's telling me that I had ordered a pizza that I did not order.

I never ordered a pizza from Domino's to my house.

And this occurred around a time when I was finishing up some reporting that unmasked the identities of four major neo-Nazi accounts on X, formerly known as Twitter.

And the pizza delivery was relatively innocuous in my view.

What was more concerning and which happened around that same time was that someone made a false police report that resulted in two police officers showing up to my door on Thanksgiving last year.

And the more I dug into it, the more confusing and bizarre it became in that the police officers, the Dallas police officers that were at my door, told me they had gotten a tip from the FBI that I was beating my wife, which is not true.

And they spoke to her and they went home.

I eventually was able to get the incident report and a report from the FBI as of yesterday that showed that no such tip was ever received or sent by the FBI, the National Threat Operations Center, which led me and the FBI agent that I spoke to about this last year to conclude that someone successfully impersonated the FBI National Threat Operations Center to make this bogus call.

And in my instance, you know, my door was not knocked down, but it was very concerning nonetheless.

- No kidding.

And coming to you, Amanda, you describe in one of your articles coming back from attending some of these far-Right events, undercover as it were, to find your information, your photographs, your actual information all over the internet.

- They were tracking my gym schedule, they were tracking kind of everything about me.

It's been circulated multiple times, and nobody will take it down.

Meta will never remove it from Facebook or Instagram.

I've messaged like C-suites on LinkedIn and I still can't get any movement on that.

And I have my stalker.

He goes in front of the address on my dox and does live streams about me sometimes.

And then, unfortunately, my little sister was doxed.

Not doxed, she was swatted.

And I assume it's because they couldn't find me, because obviously the information in my five-year-old dox is a little outdated at this point.

- When we say dox, what do we mean?

And when we say swat, what do we mean?

- Yeah, so doxing was taking my home address, my cell phone number, my gym schedule, my photographs, my full name, the names of my family members, and posting it on every single platform hundreds and hundreds of times.

And then swatting was, they called the police and, I think it was a suicide threat, and so officers showed up at four in the morning to keep my sister from killing herself.

But of course she had not actually called in, and they explained the situation to the police officers, and then I went and asked for my entire family to be put on a swat with caution list in the various counties that they live in.

- Coming back to you for a second, Jordan, I can't help thinking that, you know, it's media coverage that develop, that sort of builds the public pressure for there to be real answers to some of these unsolved crimes.

And by attacking the journalists who might cover the situation, we're actually kind of suppressing the noise that could be coming from the public.

Is that what's happened in North Carolina or are those tens of thousands of people that were out of power for all those days in the winter loudly calling for accountability?

- Unfortunately, the Moore County attack has kind of fallen off of the radar, you know, with... Hurricane Helene has happened here since then, and now, just in the past week, ICE raids.

So unfortunately, I don't know that there is a public clamor for accountability.

Those, as you have reported, one woman died because she was denied her connection to her oxygen tank.

- Karin Zoanelli.

- Yes, ma'am.

More broadly, I mean, I would just say from my reporting, like, I don't know that it necessarily makes a lot of ripples in the quarters of power in the administration.

I hope that it kind of creates a record so that law enforcement is not let off the hook in investigating actual threats as opposed to the kind of politicized threats that the Trump administration conjures up.

- Well, there's hoping, but then there's documenting.

I mean, we just saw a story from Baltimore and a front page piece in the New York Times recently about how thousands of federal agents who might otherwise have been tracking some of this, might have been, have been redirected to work for ICE.

So is anyone minding the store, Jordan?

- That is, you know, something I am interested in, in documenting further too.

I'm actually kind of reaching out to other FBI offices discreetly.

You know, it's a real concern that when people are diverted, FBI agents are diverted to immigration support or politicized investigations against Trump's enemies, there are Right-wing terrorist groups who are planning violence and have a sense of impunity that they can, there's a permissive environment for harassment and threats and violence against their supposed enemies.

- Amanda, have you seen an acceleration in backlash from these groups you've been reporting on?

- The people who are backlashing against me have changed, right?

It's no longer a live streamer like Nick Fuentes ranting about me for five minutes straight.

It's the former campaign manager for Trump 2024 calling me and threatening me with a lawsuit.

And so, yeah, it's changed.

It's more, it's worse, because the people are more powerful.

I'm being, you know, shot at with pepper balls by border patrol agents now if I try to cover what they're doing.

So it's different, but yeah, I think it's personally worse.

- What about you, Steven?

- I think it's changing.

I think for those of us that have been reporting on this for some time, we've already experienced threats in the past.

Now I think the nature of the threats is, as Amanda said, more concerning.

And then to piggyback off of what you were talking about with Jordan, I do worry that there is a level of impunity here in which the people who are perpetrating these feel they can get away with it.

In my instance of being swatted and having police officers show up at my door, a light swatting, one might say, it's been really impossible to get the local police to take the issue seriously.

And then I also want to add that, you know, when I have found the presence of extremists in the government, such as a prosecutor for ICE who was working in the immigration courts in Dallas, when we found that he was running a White nationalist Twitter account, the government has not provided any updates about his ongoing employment or whether he's been investigated despite the fact that three congressmen have sent letters demanding answers.

And so I do worry that as extremism is embedded into the government, that folks like Amanda or Jordan may be at increasing threat.

- One example, if I could add, I reported on a neo-Nazi podcaster in Pittsburgh who actually made threats against the Secretary of Defense.

Veiled, you could say, but he said that Pete Hegseth deserves six bullets.

After the reporting, my X account got swarmed by neo-Nazi commenters.

They were saying, accusing me of being a Jew, which of course there's nothing wrong with being a Jew, but that to them, to Nazis, is obviously means that your life is worthless.

I had somebody comment, saying, "Your phenotype does not deserve to exist in 10 years.

Your people will be in camps."

- I'm assuming there's a level of misogyny in the attacks coming your way, Amanda?

Hatred of women, especially?

- I am the ugliest woman that any Nazi online has ever seen in his life.

And they tell me that every day.

Nothing, not even creative, you know?

Nothing specific.

Yes, it is bad.

- So how should the public think about this now?

I mean, there is, on the one hand, this kind of sense of everything's terrible and getting worse, and on the other hand, the sense of, "Well, I'm glad that some people out there tracking this."

How are you handling the threats against you?

How much security have you actually had to add to your routines?

Who wants to share?

Steven?

- Sure.

I can speak to this a little bit.

So after I was first doxed, had my home address published by a cyber stalker, you know, after I've received threats online, directed at me or my family, you know, I've taken precautionary measures.

So I think any journalist that's facing these sorts of threats, first, does need to take a hard look at what their security setup is in their home and whether they need to add things like cameras or even, you know, consider some form of self-defense.

And then I would also say that what you said is correct.

People need to not be intimidated by these bullies.

People need to face it with bravery.

And if that involves making others aware that this is happening, I think that's a part of it.

And continuing to do the work, the whole point of these sorts of threats is to stop journalists from doing the important work they're doing.

And so lean into your support networks.

And when you see it happening to somebody else, express solidarity and find ways to help lift them up.

Because at the end of the day, what people want when they're making these threats is for you to feel isolated and alone and unsafe and to stop doing what you're doing.

- Amanda?

- I am not a registered voter.

My legal address is a P.O.

box.

I do not have any bills in my name, and I never will.

So that might be a little extreme for a lot of people, but it's something that works.

You know, there's programs you can use that help keep your information off of the internet.

You don't really need your Facebook account from 15 years ago.

Get rid of it.

Get rid of everything as much as you can and make sure your family members all understand what they're signing up for.

- Sobering.

What about you, Jordan?

You have kids, right?

- Yes, I have two daughters, and... Family is definitely a leverage point that extremists and people targeting you will use.

It's really hard.

I mean, I can't gloss over it.

It's taken a toll on my wife and both of my kids.

One is an adolescent and another is, I'll just say around five-ish.

And it has been very stressful for them.

And we had to move around a little bit when the threats were pretty intense.

But the threats are not only against journalists, I mean there's a broad range of threats against judges, elected officials, activists, of course immigrants, and LGBTQ folks.

- Well, before we go, I want to give each of you a chance to update us on some of the important stories that you've been covering.

You are working on a book, Jordan, about accelerationists, a term that a lot of people might not be familiar with.

Can you give us a sense of what an accelerationist is?

- Accelerationism is the idea that from white supremacist perspective, these folks believe that there's not a political or electoral solution and the only way to achieve their objective of a white ethnostate is through terrorism and collapsing society.

So I feel like it's important for the public to understand this phenomenon, which has grown since around 2017 and has remained a persistent threat.

- I've done some stories about, I mean, basically corruption within the administration and the transition team.

And so there was someone who was on the inaugural committee who the Attorney General in Ohio said that the charity that he was running, he described as a sham charity.

And now that person is no longer allowed to ever be on the board or involved with a nonprofit in the state of Ohio for the rest of his life.

And he worked with the Trump, you know, campaign extensively.

I've also covered some of the, you know, corruption within the America 250 celebration happening next year and the military parade and the show of might.

And now I am primarily focused on border patrol and the roving circus of violence that's coming to a city near you if it hasn't already come to your town.

So that is how things have shifted.

It's now state violence instead of random people.

- Thanks, Amanda.

And you, Steven, you've been looking at that dark money trail.

What's on your agenda going forward?

More of that?

- A little bit more of that.

I'm also working on wrapping up an investigation into a network of businesses run by Patriot Front members here in Texas and how they have all collaborated together in some disaster relief efforts, their latest propaganda effort to put their good name out there and, you know, curry favor with locals.

And I will also be continuing an investigation that I don't know if I can say too much about, but it is into the spread of surveillance technologies in the state of Texas, in law enforcement agencies, that are a little known and have not really ever been investigated.

- Thank you all for your work.

I believe it will change history, and our history may be less bleak than we might be fearing at this moment thanks to what you're doing.

- Thank you.

- Thanks for having us.

- Thank you.

(Cymbal crash) - It's not often that our guests say they wish their job was easier, but that's more or less what today's guests said before our conversation was done.

By easier, they meant they wish they had more company.

More people doing the work they're doing would make it easier to confirm the facts and mean that fewer reporters were out there working in danger alone.

Still, in an atmosphere where you have the most powerful man on the planet calling reporters names in public, you can see why some in the profession prefer to stay out of the fray.

In just the last two weeks, Donald Trump has called four reporters, all of them women, ugly, stupid, terrible, and piggy.

And that's in public where he knows his mighty megaphone sends a message down below to places where the violence behind his rhetoric gets very real.

In the incidents in question, our most important professional organizations have spoken up in defense of the reporters and the work they do.

But that's in Washington.

History's shown that it's not the most powerful media that have often moved this country's history forward.

No, it's been independence and mavericks working at the margins.

People like our reporters today.

Or Ida B. Wells reporting on lynching when no one else would.

It cost to her her office, her home, and almost, more than once, her life.

Still, she carried on, and when the story got big enough, the money media swooped in.

So if there's an independent reporter out there doing work that you think matters, find a way to thank them.

And if you want to hear all the chilling outtakes from today's conversation, you can, through subscribing to our free podcast or our newsletter or my new Substack.

'Til the next time, stay kind, stay curious.

For "Laura Flanders & friends," I'm Laura.

Thanks for joining us.

For more on this episode and other forward-thinking content, subscribe to our free newsletter for updates, my commentaries, and our full uncut conversations.

We also have a podcast, it's all at lauraflanders.org.

(gentle music) (bright music)