The Undercover Anti-fascists
Meet the Undercover Anti-Fascists
Embedded with the team of anti-fascist researchers and activists who infiltrate and expose Proud Boys, neo-Nazis, militias, and other members of the violent far right
Rolling Stone | February 14, 2021
On the morning of Wednesday, January 6th, as supporters of Donald Trump gathered near the White House for a last stand to “Save America,” Molly Conger said goodbye to her two dachshunds, Otto and Buck, tossed a wig into her car, and began the two-hour drive from her home in Charlottesville, Virginia, to Washington, D.C. A journalist and online researcher, Conger specializes in infiltrating and exposing the violent far right. Using dummy accounts and pseudonyms, she lurks in private chat rooms and invitation-only forums used by neo-Nazis, militias, Proud Boys, and other right-wing extremists. When she sees someone make threats or plan for violence, she screenshots the person’s messages, digs up the person’s real identity and employer, and publishes her findings on her Twitter account, @SocialistDogMom, where she has more than 110,000 followers.
Because of her work, Conger is well known among the people she tracks. Members of the online far right have made grotesque sexual comments about her and expressed a desire to physically harm or kill her. She knows this because, in some cases, she’s observed them saying these things without them realizing it. She anticipated some of those people being in the crowd on January 6th, and with her buzz-cut blond hair and slight build, Conger feared she would be easily recognizable. When she got to Washington, she put on the wig and a pair of sunglasses and met up with a friend who is a trained medic.
“The Proud Boys had instructed their members to beat me to death on sight,” she told me. “I traveled with a medic in case I got stabbed.” She planned to take as many photos and videos as she could, gathering evidence for future investigations.
The crowd was larger than she’d expected — she saw enough people to fill a professional football stadium. Some ate from cans of tuna as they listened to Donald Trump Jr. (“The people who did nothing to stop the steal, this gathering should send a message to them”), Rudy Giuliani (“Let’s have trial by combat!”), and other Trump allies rail against the “stolen” election. When Trump addressed the crowd around midday, people climbed into trees to try to catch a glimpse of him. As Trump egged on his supporters — “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore” — Conger watched the people around her, masked guys in tactical gear next to dads with kids and senior citizens with Trump flags, whip one another into a frenzy. “There was this crusade mentality,” she says.
Since the 2020 election, Conger had monitored a variety of social-media platforms, including Facebook; Parler, the Twitter-like platform funded by at least one member of the conservative Mercer family; and Telegram, an app favored by white supremacists, racists, and anti-Semites. She was disturbed by what she saw. In Facebook groups filled with MAGA fans, the tenor of the conversation was moving toward the language she saw in the more hardcore groups. “These suburban dads are talking about murdering journalists, murdering Nancy Pelosi, hanging Chuck Schumer,” she told me. “Their rhetoric was starting to sound like the race-war guys’.”
She followed the MAGA march as it marched to the Capitol, and was struck by how light the police presence was in the heart of America’s capital. As her Twitter handle would suggest, Conger identifies as a socialist and an anti-fascist. She’s marched for racial justice and against police violence in dozens of cities. “I’ve been pushed down, beaten, choked, and gassed by a variety of cops,” she says. Now, as the pro-Trump crowd reached the outer security perimeter of the Capitol, she braced for the police to use force on the marchers. “My body is reacting based on past experience: This is where it gets ugly. And then it just … didn’t happen.”
At the base of the Capitol, she finally peeled away from the crowd and watched as the mob fought past the outnumbered police force and ransacked the seat of American democracy. She struggled to process what she was seeing. For years, researchers and journalists like her had warned about the thin line between online hate and real-world violence, and about “stochastic terrorism,” the idea that a drumbeat of hateful rhetoric and political demagoguery leads to unpredictable acts of violence. Still, she had never imagined this.
It was “a logical end point for something I’ve been watching for a long time,” she told me a few days later. “But it’s still a hard thing to absorb watching a group of MAGA dads beat a cop.”
“Seeing it coming and seeing it happen,” she said, “are two very different things.”