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Last Thanksgiving, Steven Monacelli was awoken early in the morning by the sound of police officers knocking on the door of his Dallas home. Someone had called the cops to report that Monacelli, a freelance investigative correspondent for the Texas Observer, was abusing his girlfriend. Monacelli’s girlfriend—who has since become his fiancée—came to the door to demonstrate that the abuse claims were false.
Monacelli was disturbed—but not particularly shocked. “I pretty much immediately knew why they were there,” he said. For more than four years, he’s been covering the rise of far-right extremism across the state of Texas, including stories about right-wing influence in Texas schools and a so-called “white nationalist fight club.” The work brought with it regular harassment, in the form of doxings and frequent threats against Monacelli and his family. At the time of the police visit, he was finalizing an article in which he would reveal the identities of the individuals running four major neo-Nazi accounts on X. Extremism reporters simply understand, Monacelli said, that “eventually they will become a target.”
Attacks and threats against reporters—including incidents of “swatting,” when police are summoned to someone’s home under bogus pretenses—are nothing new. But as the views of some extremist groups go increasingly mainstream—“a lot of extremism is just political reporting right now,” notes Idaho-based extremism reporter Heath Druzin—and the new administration steps back from federal oversight of extremist groups, local journalists say they feel left behind and exposed on the front lines. Extremism “is fundamentally a local problem, magnified nationwide,” said Dana Coester, a journalism professor at West Virginia University and the founder of the nonprofit newsroom 100 Days in Appalachia, which frequently reports on regional extremism. “There’s more risk at the local level. You are accessible, you are visible, you are part of the community that you’re covering, and you don’t leave.” (After a series of conservative writers and influencers had their homes swatted earlier this year, FBI director Kash Patel said his office would look into and prosecute whoever was behind the incidents.)
Living under the threat of retaliation or harassment can take an emotional toll on reporters, even after the dangers abate. Last year, Jordan Green, a North Carolina–based reporter for Raw Story, experienced an extensive harassment campaign backed by a neo-Nazi group he was investigating, which culminated in six white supremacists standing in front of his home holding burning traffic flares and making the Nazi salute. One held a sign warning Green of “consequences.” Green changed his phone number and says the threats he faces today are limited to online harassment, but the incident lingers. “The experience definitely left a lasting psychological impact of anxiety and a constant sense of looking over our shoulders,” he said. He worries about the safety of his wife and their children, but he adds, “I’m too invested in this work to stop doing it.”
Many journalists who focus on extremism as a local beat agree that the topic is too important to stop covering. “It could put me at more risk to be reporting on people who could drive to where I live,” said Monacelli. “But we can’t allow those sorts of fears to stop us from reporting on things. Otherwise, we might never report on anything.” Daniel Walters, who covers extremism for the Pacific Northwest–focused nonprofit InvestigateWest, argues that “ideally, extremism reporters would all be local.” That’s in part because extremism comes in multiple local variants, and coverage that engages with how these groups interact with their communities is more meaningful, Walters says. The alternative is, as he puts it, “car-crash, here’s-a-weirdo-who’s-really-gross” coverage—which misses a lot of the nuance.
For Amanda Moore, a freelance journalist in Washington, DC, the dangers are so omnipresent that they sometimes slip her mind. “Oh, I have a stalker!” she remarked, in the middle of a recent conversation about the risks of her reporting. “He’s in jail right now, so I kind of forgot about him,” she said. “It’s been a beautiful couple of weeks.”
Moore got her start reporting undercover on far-right extremism in 2020, and her work now appears in outlets like Mother Jones and Politico. Besides ethical concerns, she says, she has become too well-known in certain far-right circles to go undercover anymore. On Inauguration Day this year, the neo-Nazi Ryan Sanchez stood outside the DC jail where participants in the January 6 riot were being held, shouting, “Where’s Amanda Moore?”
“I am a celebrity at right-wing events, but a celebrity everybody hates,” Moore said. “It’s a very bizarre relationship I have with these people.” In an attempt to protect herself from would-be perpetrators, she uses a PO box as her primary address, pays a service to scrub her personal information from the internet, and doesn’t even register to vote. “I’m kind of a ghost,” she said.
But in January, she learned the hard way that even a ghost has vulnerabilities. Her sister was swatted by an unknown perpetrator who falsely claimed she was going to commit suicide, after they apparently couldn’t find an address for Moore. The reporter immediately blamed herself. “I was so mad,” she said. “This is all my fault.”
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