As Daryle Lamont Jenkins sees it, the most surprising thing about the rise of far-right groups during the presidency of Donald Trump is how unsurprising it is. Groups like One People’s Project, which he founded, have been sounding an alarm for decades.
“The past four years have just been us and other antifascists out there, basically saying, ‘We told you so,’ ” Jenkins says in an interview. “But the past [few] weeks have been us pretty much saying, ‘Why the hell aren’t you listening?’ ”
“We’re researching some of the most terrible people on the planet. These are bad people. These are horrible people. And just to see humanity at this level of bad is very depressing.”
One People’s Project was launched in 2000 as a platform to disseminate information about fascist and white supremacist figures and groups. Jenkins became interested in the topic while serving in the U.S. Air Force after high school in the late 1980s, sparked by a now-famous 1988 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show about skinheads. Jenkins was born in Newark, New Jersey, and established One People’s Project in Philadelphia, though he now splits his time between Philly and central New Jersey.
“One People’s Project was formed because people weren’t talking about the things that we felt were important to talk about,” Jenkins says. “If you see a need that isn’t being tended to, there’s nothing stopping you from tending [to it] yourself.”
While some antifascists prefer to work anonymously or covertly to avoid harassment and targeting from white supremacists and the government alike, One People’s Project brings the heat directly to fascists by publicly exposing their names and information. One People’s Project and its media arm, Idavox, track and publicize rightwing rallies and events as well as encourage public shaming and deplatforming of those they identify.
Jenkins is mostly self-funded—as recently as 2017, he worked as a delivery driver. He runs both One People’s Project, which documents the activities of the far right while issuing calls to action, and Idavox, which publishes news articles expanding on that research.
His efforts are supported by a close-knit volunteer network of antifa organizers, researchers, and journalists, and largely reliant on crowdfunding. Jenkins routinely attends events like the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, where, as one reporter wrote of the group’s 2017 event, he “patrolled the halls like a leftist Ghostbuster, watching for any budding white-power radicals to reveal themselves.”
Jenkins has had some success prompting members of far-right groups to defect. Bryon Widner, the subject of the 2011 documentary Erasing Hate and the 2018 film Skin, was a virulent white supremacist who left the white power movement in 2006 after reaching out to Jenkins, who put him in contact with the Southern Poverty Law Center. Widner’s face was covered in tattoos of white supremacist iconography; the law center known for tracking hate groups found a donor willing to cover the cost of his tattoo removal.
Other antifascist researchers and activists have been drawn into One People’s Project. Laura Sennett, a photojournalist based in the Washington, D.C., area, first met Jenkins in 2005 while beginning to take an interest in covering rightwing activism and protests during the Bush Administration.
“I saw the way that the media was portraying the anti-war movement, and I felt that they were misquoting people and misrepresenting it,” Sennett recalls. “So I thought, what if I just started taking pictures of all these grassroots movements?”
Sennett allowed him to use some photos she took at a neo-Nazi rally in Toledo, Ohio, and the two hit it off. Jenkins invited Sennett to attend another rightwing rally, this time in upstate New York, with him, as he had a place to stay.
“I met him in Jersey City, and that was the first time I ever met him face-to-face,” Sennett says. Their initial meeting was the beginning of a decade-plus working relationship, as well as a personal one. “He didn’t really know who I was, I didn’t even know who he was, and we drove up together. We just became instant friends, and we’ve been working together since. We’re on the phone every single day. He was the best man at my wedding.”
Since joining the antifascist movement more than fifteen years ago, Sennett has staunchly committed to her values, though she knows she isn’t exactly the image everyone has in mind.
“Everyone has this stereotype of antifa,” she says, by way of explaining that she does not fit it. “I’m literally just like a suburban mom. I go to Trader Joe’s, I do the laundry three times a week, I make dinner.” But it’s a real commitment; Sennett estimates she’s spent nearly $30,000 over the years to fund her research on the right.
For most of Trump’s presidency, the media engaged in a “both sides” discourse, equating the work of antifascists in the streets or online, like Jenkins, with that of fascists and white supremacists. This discourse can be seen in both longtime groups including One People’s Project, and with antifascist journalists.
For Jenkins and Sennett, who began this work long before mainstream media took an interest in it, the fallacy inherent in such comparisons was obvious.
While watching the Capitol Hill putsch on January 6, Sennett felt that tension especially starkly. “[People] will say, ‘You’re antifa, you watch people looting all the time and it doesn’t bother you.’ Comparing a Starbucks or Wendy’s to the Capitol? Come on, really?” says Sennett. “Those windows at the Capitol that they broke were there for how many decades or generations? Some of those windows were 100 years old.”
Sennett has experienced the double standards of harsh punishments for antifa and leftists firsthand. In 2008, armed FBI agents raided her home in Arlington, Virginia, woke her son up at gunpoint, and confiscated photography equipment and computers after two informants identified Sennett to the FBI as having photographed an anti-IMF protest earlier that year. The FBI refused to reveal information about those informants, even though Sennett was wrongfully targeted for simply doing her job as a photographer.
Now Republican lawmakers across the nation are pushing anti-protest laws, ostensibly to prevent the sort of violence witnessed at the Capitol, while actively lumping leftwing protesters in with fascists. As of March 21, according to the US Protest Law Tracker run by the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, found that seventy-two anti-protest bills had been introduced in thirty-one states since January 6.
“Law enforcement is using the Capitol riot as a hook to go after people they perceive as being on the left,” Moira Meltzer-Cohen, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild, told In These Times. “There has been a flurry of visits of people perceived by the government as leftists, leftist dissidents.”
For Jenkins, the response to the death of a Capitol Police officer due to the January 6 insurrection further exposed the double standard. “If this was any other cop that was killed by any other people, whole neighborhoods would have been raided. People who weren’t even involved in any kind of criminality whatsoever would have had police barging through their door saying they’re looking for something.”
Jenkins and Sennett covered the December 12 gathering of alt-right groups in Washington, D.C.; their work may have led to the arrest of Proud Boys leader (and FBI informant) Enrique Tarrio two days before the January 6 insurrection. “The first rule of being antifa is we go where they go,” says Sennett. But in the age of COVID-19, this means putting their health at risk. As she notes, “These people do not wear masks.”
Tracking the activities of hate groups is also emotionally draining; as Sennett says, “It takes a toll on you.” Both she and Jenkins have health problems which they suspect come from the strain of the work. In the weeks following the January 6 attack, which happened so near to where she lives, Sennett suffered a fibromyalgia flareup, stemming from the trauma of the day.
“We’re researching some of the most terrible people on the planet,” Sennett says. “These are bad people. These are horrible people. And just to see humanity at this level of bad is very depressing.”
For Jenkins’s part, he’s heartened to see more people joining the ranks of antifascism. “[There are] people on Twitter [who have] just basically taken up the work that we did for a good twenty years almost exclusively,” he says. “But we still have a role to play.”
In recent weeks, Jenkins has focused heavily on the Capitol putsch. “January 6 has basically taken up a lot of our time, because we want to make sure that if people are going to be paying attention to this element yet again, and are concerned about them, yet again, we really got to make sure it’s never again,” says Jenkins. “I can understand that we are always going to be fighting this group, but we need to stop being told that we should just ignore them, or we should try to reach out to them to see if they will turn over a new leaf or something like that.”
Jenkins pauses, realizing that he may be an extra-useful voice on the issue of reforming rightwing activists. “Granted, that is something that’s in my wheelhouse. But there is a qualifier with that one, in the sense that they have to come to us, we don’t come to them trying to talk about how there’s a better way,” Jenkins clarifies. “If they don’t come to us, then they’re going to be a threat, our obligation is to the people that they hurt. So if that’s the case, then we have to stop them from hurting people.”
Many antifascists are skeptical that President Joe Biden will make much progress on undoing the rise of the far right. “Trump received the second-most votes in the history of this country,” says Jenkins’s friend Luis Enrique Marquez, an antifascist organizer based in Portland, Oregon. “There is a huge population in this country that is interested in fascism.”
Marquez suspects that rightwing groups are here to stay. “The Proud Boys might be done by name, but in no way are their thoughts or their beliefs done, and it’ll just morph again.” He cites twenty-two-year-old Nick Fuentes, who Idavox calls “a rising star in white nationalist circles,” as carrying on the torch. “They’re gonna be around, and I think the next four years are gonna be really, really rough.”
Should things get worse, Jenkins and his allies will continue to demand better of those in power. He perceives a hesitancy not just from conservatives but also “on the part of liberals who browbeat everybody to vote for Joe Biden over the past year and fight Bernie Sanders,” he says. This has led to a “tug of war within the Democratic Party between the progressives and the more mainstream, more centrist Democrats.”
But this infighting cannot be allowed to continue, in the face of a growing threat: “We’re at the point where we’re saying, look, we have got to start getting a handle on this, or you’re not going to have anything to fight for.”
Jenkins is looking ahead to the weekend of May 21 to 23, when rightwing activists will host their yearly American Renaissance conference in Montgomery Bell State Park, Tennessee. Jenkins says state park officials have contemplated creating “nonpublic” spaces—that is, spaces ineligible for protest—within Tennessee public parks to stave off counter-protesters, who typically gather outside of the conference, and make it easier for park police to target them while they protest against fascism.
“When we talk about free speech, when we talk about those kinds of double standards, we have to ask ourselves: Why now? Why does this keep happening?” Jenkins asks. “Who is it that we have in charge that is allowing this to happen? And how can we get rid of them?” He says those who apply a double standard regarding “who has freedom of speech and who does not—or rather, whose freedom of speech you’re going to defend versus whose you’re not—might need to go.”