Livestream Series

[Livestream Starts]

Eric Laursen: Hello and welcome to Finding Agency livestream and the first segment of our new livestream series. Finding Agency is a new series that features conversations between activists, organizers, scholars, journalists, and writers to illuminate and amplify anarchist and anti-authoritarian perspectives on current events as well as grassroots organizing and political education, strategy, and tactics. It’s brought to you by the team behind Agency, an anarchist PR project.

Tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia which resulted in the death of one anti-fascist activist and the injury of 35 people. Since then the racist right in the United States has not only grown more powerful; it’s mainstreaming itself within the Republican Party.

I’m Eric Laursen. Our guest today is Daryle Lamont Jenkins, who will be a familiar name to many of you. But if you haven’t encountered him yet,he’s one of the most effective anti-fascist activists in the United States today.

Before we get started I wanted to take a 30-second moment of silence to remember Heather Heyer who was murdered during the Unite the Right rally. Heather D. Heyer was a young woman with a big heart and a passion for equality and equity for all. Her life was taken on August 12, 2017 when a fascist drove a car into a crowd of peaceful counter-demonstrators protesting a rally of neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan, and other white nationalist groups.

[30 second silence]
Rest in Power, Heather Heyer.

Thank you again Daryle for being here for this conversation.

Daryle Lamont Jenkins: Thank you for having me.

Eric: Daryle’s been studying, ID’ing, calling out, and bird dogging the authoritarian racist right for 35 years now, back to when few people had heard of the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and the rest of the mob that launched an insurrection on January 6, 2021. Daryle may know more about who they are, what they stand for, and the threat they pose than almost anyone else in this country today. Home-grown fascism has been an increasingly powerful force in the U.S. for generations now, but in the Trump era it’s quickly going mainstream. What once was creepy, racist, and plain wacko in U.S. politics is now a viable platform for conservative politicians. So the work that activists like Daryle are doing to expose racism and fascism in U.S. political culture is more critical than ever.

Thanks for joining us, Daryle. I wanted to start with today. We just saw one very encouraging event happen a little over a week ago. Kansas voters overwhelmingly rejected a cunningly worded anti-abortion amendment to the state constitution. On the other hand, last month neo-Nazis were present for the conservative Turning Point USA conference in Florida with no pushback from Donald Trump, Ron DesSantis, and the other right-wing politicians in attendance. What should we make of this moment and what should we be looking out for in the coming months?

Daryle: First of all, again, thank you for having me here today. I’m very happy to be here on this particular day being that this is the beginning of the fifth anniversary of what happened in Charlottesville. What I would say about that—First let’s first talk about the series of conferences that have been going on. I mean, it’s not just the Turning Point USA conference where even the head of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, has been making some overtures towards that particular crowd, but there’s a ton of other conferences that will be going on in the future as well as most recently. And all of them are really curious to me, because years ago there was a guy named William Pierce and William Pierce founded the National Alliance. He’s also best known for writing The Turner Diaries. His vision for a future America was to have his people in the streets, in power, in office, running commerce or doing what have you. Everything that’s going on right now is what William Pierce envisioned, and William Pierce was a hardcore neo-Nazi.

And then we have Kansas. Now remember when I said that William Pierce wrote The Turner Diaries. Every time somebody tries to reenact The Turner Diaries, they go to jail, they get in trouble, you know. So if we’re living in a time when people are trying to realize William Pierce’s dream, that means that people are going to push back and push back hard. And that’s what happened in Kansas. It was supposed to be closer than that. The anti-choice effort cratered, because people do value their liberties—they value their freedoms. It’s not just some talking point that the right uses to pretend that they’re fighting for it, and they showed that last week. That was a shot across the bow. We’re going to fight you. And we are going to beat you. Do not threaten the security that we have spent 50 to 200 years trying to create—trying to build—otherwise I’m coming for you. That’s regardless of if you’re foreign or domestic and that’s the best message you can bring. You can try to advance some sort of white supremacist doctrine all you want. You can call for a civil war all you want. You can even try to apply a civil war to today’s society. You will lose it, because this is not what we want. It’s that simple.

Eric: Talk a little bit more about the conferences coming up, because I want to get an idea of how that balances out versus what we just saw happen in Kansas. Are you optimistic that we’re going to see a lot more pushback against events like that?

Daryle: Well at the very least you don’t see a lot of pushback to all of these conferences. I mean, there are some people who come out to demonstrate against them, but I think it is time to start noticing if this is what we’re going to see, if this is what we’re going to have to put up with, if these are the kinds of people that are going to CPAC for example. That was another conference that just came about, and there’s going to be another CPAC of course in February. If this is the kind of people that are going to come to these conferences to try to network, we got to be out there and remind them exactly what I just said a couple of minutes ago. I mean, I’m looking at…Atlanta has a Values Voter Summit that’s supposed to be happening in the middle of September sometime around the 13th to the 15th, something to that effect. I have to actually look back and check. But the one that we are really concerned about is the American Renaissance Conference.

Eric: Right.

Daryle: The American Renaissance Conference is a white supremacist conference that has been taking place at the Montgomery Bell State Park in Burns, Tennessee, just 45 minutes outside of Nashville. And it’s a white supremacist conference. It was a conference that used to be held regularly in D.C. and was even seen on C-Span a couple of times. People started complaining, including myself, and the hotels that they used to go to started shutting their doors, and then they had to cancel in 2010.

Then in 2011, they tried to have the same conference in Charlotte, North Carolina and the same thing happened. They found a safe haven in this park in Tennessee, and they’ve been there for almost 10 years now. On November 18th to the 20th, they’re gonna have their conference and they’re so comfortable there, now we’re getting former congressmen to show up. Steve King is gonna be one of the speakers at this next conference. They also like to invite foreign hate mongers who happen to be politicians to come to speak as well. That means they’re coming into the country to speak to our fascists here. We don’t need any more fascists coming into the country, and we should also start letting our State Department know to be on the lookout for these characters. There’s an Estonian, his name is Ruuben Kaalep, he’s on the bill. So just let people know that we do have some bad characters.

And to give you an idea of how bad this conference is— in 2017 when they held their conference, the organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville networked there. They spoke there. They actually said that Charlottesville would be traumatic to the liberals in Charlottesville. That was two weeks before the rally actually happened, and they used footage from that conference to secure a judgment against them. Last year, if you remember in Idaho just two months from today, there was a Pride Fest that was being threatened by militia types, white supremacists, and a particular group called Patriot Front had gotten arrested there.

Eric: Yes.

Daryle: Those members of Patriot Front were at the American Renaissance Conference, and I saw one of them that was arrested. They actually came up to us, which by the way is curious because they have been doing everything they could ever since 2017 to prevent us from having any kind of access to not only the conference but the building itself, which is supposed to be a public building open to everyone who comes to the park. That was the attraction for American Renaissance when they first started going there. Once we started showing that we will come out too, all of a sudden we have protest pits, we have attempts to make regulations saying you’re not allowed to protest in parks, and this year they put us behind the building. But they were allowed to come to us. We weren’t allowed to go to them. So now we also have a problem with the State of Tennessee.

So I know I’ve talked a lot about this particular conference, but it is a concern because they don’t get a lot of opposition and it is time that they do. Very much time that they do.

Eric: They don’t get a lot of opposition, they get a lot of sort of official tacit acceptance it seems as well.

Daryle: Exactly.

Eric: I was reading about the CPAC conference, which was just held, and it seems like the rhetoric and the kind of arguments you hear being made, are getting more and more violent and more and more overly fascist. At least that’s the way I’ve been viewing it. What does all this tell us about the profile of the racist right, how it may be changing or evolving? Is it really bigger and more extreme than it was five years ago in Charlottesville, or is that just something that I am intuiting somehow? What does your research tell you about the evolution of this thing?

Daryle: The first thing I will say is that finding white supremacists in CPAC is nothing new. I have gone to several conferences in the D.C. area, and basically CPAC was my hunting grounds for a very long time. So that’s nothing new. But what is new, especially after Andrew Breitbart started going to CPAC and causing all kinds of drama and basically upsetting, I guess, the aesthetic of CPAC–CPAC used to be buttoned down and quite proper, and things have changed. And it really did start with Andrew Breitbart just 10 years ago.

Eric: It used to be the Mitch Mcconnells not the Andrew Breitbarts.

Daryle: Right, right, right. Correct. I mean they actually had a foundation. They actually had real standing. Now it’s crackpot central. And what Andrew Breitbart set in motion—when Donald Trump came onto the scene—it just took it up over the edge. The CPAC after Trump went to the White House, February 2017, Richard Spencer was there. And now Richard Spencer was always there. Richard Spencer always seemed to find a way to get to CPAC, but he actually got thrown out by Matt Schlapp and Ian Waters because, hell, I was there too and I whispered in their ears and told him, “Get him out of here, because he’s gonna hold court.” And, of course, they went up on stage and said some left-wing activists came and infiltrated them. How left-wing can you be when you used to raise money for Ron Paul? CPAC had definitely devolved since the first time I went to a CPAC conference in 2000 to now. And I think, really, it got worse after Trump was kicked out of office. I think that they are desperate now. They are more frustrated now because, per my remarks about Kansas, they really do know that we are going to fight them. And they don’t know what to do because they’re, kind of, over a barrel when we fight back. And the only thing that they can do is just lash out, and that’s really what you’re seeing at these conferences. Now I will preface what I’m saying about Kansas and about how we have the upper hand over them by saying that doesn’t mean people can’t get hurt.

Eric: Right, right.

Daryle: We had the upper hand in Charlottesville. Somebody died you know. We really did have the upper hand on January 6. We didn’t even have to show up. Some folks felt they didn’t have to show up. Five people died, you know. There is that concern. So lashing out is a big deal. I mean, we just had somebody trying to shoot up a FBI office in Cincinnati, and that comes from the right just basically ginning up anti-FBI sentiment after Mar-a-Lago got raided. So while we may be in the position to handle this as it comes our way, it could cause a lot of damage. The less we handle it, the more damage it can be. So I would definitely have to add that disclaimer to everything here.

Eric: By the way, you corrected me on one thing. I said how has the racist right evolved and you corrected me as “devolved”. That’s really much more like it, thank you.

Daryle: Well yeah, I’m glad you pointed that out because normally whenever we talk about the rise on the right and how they’re getting stronger and how they’re getting more organized— it’s like, no they’re not. They’re pissed, and they’re pissed because they’re losing. Everything is just being thrown against the wall now. Really that’s what’s going on right now. I mean, we could talk about Idaho in a little bit, but the fact of the matter is that there was a Pride Fest in the town that used to be the headquarters of Aryan Nations and they routed the Nazis.

Eric: Right, right.

Daryle: That’s a telling thing!

Eric: That’s a great example actually of how people can push back really effectively in one of these situations, it would seem to me. That’s a great example—what happened in Idaho.

Daryle: For those who don’t know, everybody has seen how Patriot Front, the white supremacist group, got arrested out there. It was really comical to see, honestly. We have video here today from that day, and it was actually shocking but it was also concerning, and I’ll tell you why. The main reason why there was a concern among progressives and folks on the left about this particular Pride Fest was because the militia groups in the Idaho panhandle were basically threatening. It was in a place called Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. That’s the name of the town. They wanted to oppose the Pride Fest with something that they decided to call “Gun d’Alene.” So they were basically threatening violence, and a lot of us felt like we needed to come out and be there should things pop off. Like I said, a lot of people know that Patriot Front had showed up in that van—in that U-Haul truck—and got stopped and got arrested. What a lot of folks don’t know was what was going on just before that. There were a lot of people on the fascist side that were armed. Some of us were armed, of course, but a lot of them on the fascist side were armed and were standing in the park. There was a march of some of the folks who weren’t part of Patriot Front, but were fascists nonetheless, from another part of the park coming into our area. And as they were marching in, they were stopped by the police. Okay. But then they stopped Patriot Front. Now Patriot Front doesn’t carry firearms, but they do provoke. If the cops had stopped the first crew, they probably would have stopped Patriot Front anyway, but if they were to march through the park and through the Pride Fest that would have been a provocation. People would have reacted, and the slightest reaction would have been an excuse for self-defense and it would have gotten nasty. They would not have fired a shot and they would have been able to just [claim] plausible deniability. But their friends would have. That’s what I think that they were trying to pull.

Eric: Yeah they were creating a literally explosive situation there.

Daryle: Exactly.

Eric: Now I wanted to shift gears a little bit because much of your activism has been centered on the internet, which has been a fertile recruiting ground for the racist far right. Are they becoming more sensitive to the existence of investigators like yourself online? Has that made it more difficult to do your work or have you adapted? How has the dynamic changed in terms of using the internet as a tool for you?

Daryle: Well personally, for me, I was kind of like an OG in all of this. I was one of the first people to actually go out and and do this, even though Anti-Racist Action had been really doing it for maybe 10-15 years prior. But they weren’t using the internet as much as I was. I mean everything was still analog. I mean it was still the ’90s. One People’s Project got started in 2000. A lot of what people were doing was still, you know, offline and in print. When One People’s Project came along, we were basically just a daily thing—a news aggregate in many respects—just showing people what was going on in real time. It then became, “We’re going to try to look for this information ourselves” and all of that. So after a while they pretty much knew we were coming. I mean they know that we’re looking at them. For a long time, in addition, they also knew what they could put online and keep offline. This is where the footwork comes in, and you have to actually go find certain things offline. So they’ve always been aware that this presence was there. Since 2016, but especially since Charlottesville, the doxxing game stepped up a lot and it expanded way beyond anything I could do.

I think in this day and age, there’s a lot of groups out there that are a lot more proficient than even One People’s Project is right now. Unicorn Riot, Atlanta Anti-Fascists, It’s Going Down, Rose City Antifa—all of these are groups that have been really kicking ass out there, and they have a lot of good information that people can use. You can see a lot of it on Twitter, too: people who use Twitter to show people who’s who and what’s what. In this day and age, yeah, they are concerned about that because one of the things that they really can’t do is stop people from finding the information that they need. They can scrub everything off the internet all they want, but we will still find information that will lead us to where we can find the rest of it. I mean that’s just the way it goes. So, yeah, they’re aware but there’s nothing they can really do about it.

Eric: How about the dark web? It seems like a lot of these groups just burrow deeper and deeper into the dark web. Is that a rabbit hole you can follow them down and are you keeping pace with them?

Daryle: Well, yeah, because no matter how dark their web might get, antifa got flashlights! Simply put, we know where to find them. We simply just know who’s who and what’s what enough to find them in the dark web.

Eric: One thing I was curious about—and this is getting down to the rhetoric and just the kind of advocacy that they’re doing, it seems, and you’ve pointed this out already to some extent—is that since Trump was elected in 2016, much of what used to be considered extreme, even on the right, is now getting normalized and mainstreamed. Trump has had pretty good success in getting some of his people elected over the last couple of weeks of primaries and it would seem to me that whether the numbers are growing or not, what they’re saying and what they’re advocating has become more disturbing. Have you noticed a kind of a progression that way and what do we do with that?

Daryle: When you talk about those that are winning the elections, their primaries and stuff like that, they haven’t faced the greater populace out there. They’re gonna do that in November. Now anything can happen, anything can happen. They can still take over Congress. I mean, they can still take over the governorships and everything. They can still have a pretty good day in November on election day. But I would say that that’s one of the reasons why you have to try to build institutions outside of the political process.

I would say to that, we just simply have to be aware of when they’re talking like this and just document. A lot of the things that we have from January 6, a lot of things that we have from Charlottesville, are based on prior doxxing and based on prior investigating and watching these characters before they engaged in the acts. Right now there’s a whole bunch of people threatening civil war. Save every last video you see of people doing that. Simply put. And if something blows up then we’re just there for it.

Eric: Let me repeat for everybody that one piece of advice you just gave – save every bit of imagery, audio, whatever, of these people. It’s going to be useful later on because they will pop up again. I think that’s really great advice for anybody who’s an activist out there.

Let me get back a little bit to our old friend the State, their response to all this. I noticed this a little bit when you were discussing what happened in Idaho is that there’s still this tendency by the authorities to play nice with the far right, to play much rougher with activists who oppose them, and to slow walk it even when a threat is becoming really really obvious, when it’s threatening them even. Do you see any of that changing? I mean there’s been a lot of tough talk from the Justice Department since Biden took office about this, but do you see anything actually happening?

Daryle: A lot of tough talk. Talking loud and doing nothing, as James Brown would say. One of the biggest pet peeves that I’ve had in regards to Charlottesville and January 6 is that you let them go home. We would not have ever been allowed to go home if we popped off the way they did, especially not January 6. I mean if we even got that close we would have been shot. Not just one person, pretty much a good number of us would be in jail. There would have been more cops, there would have been more National Guard. They would have never let us get away with that. The right always talks about why aren’t everybody so proactive against rioting when you’re talking about what happened in the summer of 2020. 14,000 people got arrested in the first month alone in 2020 during everything that happened that summer. So you really don’t want to compare those notes, come on now.

I mean, it was pretty interesting in Idaho. I have a video that I found online, it was a city council meeting in Coeur d’Alene not long after that. There’s a guy named Ben Cooper and he was speaking to the City Council, defending Patriot Front, who had gotten arrested. It’s just a two-minute video and it’s really interesting what he had to say about this group and I’m gonna tell you a little bit more about Ben Cooper in a minute, but if you want to show that video feel free.

[Timestamp 33:33: Video from Idaho city council meeting starts playing]

Ben Cooper: Later in the day Patriot Front was arrested before even assembling for conspiracy to riot. Conspiracy to riot is a pre-crime charge, which is notorious for being challenged on constitutional grounds and is never applied to the left. Antifa and BLM [Black Lives Matter] are allowed to burn down city blocks, destroy property and commit violence without ever incurring a conspiracy charge despite having a history of violence.

In contrast, Patriot Front has a history of dozens of demonstrations in which no violence or destruction of property ever takes place. Every time they have a plan where they wave flags, give a speech and then withdraw as soon as opposition is encountered. The one time they were detained during a demonstration was when attacked by antifa and BLM in Philadelphia, and even in that case, law enforcement determined they could not be held, as they had broken no laws. So why were Christian preachers in Patriot Front arrested for conspiracy to exercise their First Amendment rights in one of the most conservative counties in the country, when the Constitution was better defended in Democrat-dominated Philadelphia?

I can’t speak for Chief White, but I do know Sheriff Norris, once an L.A. lieutenant, was funded by the leftist ADL to train in Israel with Mossad. But unlike Palestinians, Americans have a right to be protected by the Constitution. When the police start arresting citizens for exercising those rights while at the same time zealously protecting the degenerate left, we have arrived at a state of anarcho-tyranny. Free citizens cannot and should not be arrested for their politics in order to protect the religion of liberalism and that is what happened at the Pride event.

In the future I would ask that law enforcement enforce the rights and freedoms of all law-abiding citizens and refrain from the political persecution of the right. Thank you.

[Applause]
[End of video]

Daryle: Now that guy is Ben Cooper and he lives in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho and he’s a member of a group called the Asatru Folk Assembly and Wikipedia writes them up as a white supremacist organization that’s based around a religion called Asatru and they’ve been around since about 1994. Its racist doctrines are based on ethnicity. They’re based out of Grass Valley, California, and he lives in Coeur d’Alene. And by the way, there’s another video that we have at the meeting about Pride Fest where he’s complaining about how Jews control the media. If you can, I’d like to show the video from Charlottesville. He spoke of Patriot Front. Now, Patriot Front is a neo-fascist organization that’s run by a kid named Thomas Rousseau, and during Charlottesville he speaks of how they’re not violent. But Thomas Rousseau was in Charlottesville organizing for a group called Vanguard America. This is the group that he broke away from to start Patriot Front. It’s going to be real interesting when you see this video because James Fields is in it. James Fields murdered Heather Heyer. He’s one of the people that he is organizing in this particular video.

[Timestamp 37:21: Video from Charlottesville starts playing]

[Inaudible talking from multiple people]
Person in video: Along this side, along the front sidewalk. Shields, along the sidewalk right here.

[Inaudible talking] [Jangling noises]
[End of video]

Daryle: Now, Thomas Rousseau was the one with the black ball cap and mirror sunglasses–I should have pointed that out before. But 40 seconds in, James Fields–he had his back to the camera, but you could see he turns around and starts walking, as Rousseau was saying, Line up over here. And that was five years ago tomorrow. When you talk about the violence that happened, while Mr. Cooper could sit and talk about how Patriot Front wasn’t violent and never has been violent, Thomas Rousseau has been responsible for some violence. Thomas Rousseau has blood on his hands, and a lot of people who were in Vanguard America joined him in Patriot Front, so the same rule applies. We can’t keep ignoring how dangerous this right-wing crowd is. Like I said, we may be strong against them, but they can still hurt and kill people, and that’s the reason why we went to Idaho. It’s important to point that out.

Eric: That first clip drives home the point that if we go and if we oppose them, they will spin it any which way they can to make it seem like the other side are the violent ones. They’re going to do that. What do we do when they start to try and play with the message that way? Are there smart ways for us to push back against that, because it seems these people are very savvy when it comes to PR at times?

Daryle: Well that’s the thing, they hope that we’re not, and we are. We’re a lot better at it. All we got to do is make sure that we have all the facts at the ready. I mean that’s the one thing that really saves the right in that regard, is the fact that if we cannot counter them, if we cannot answer what it is that they say, they will definitely use that opening as a way to advance everything, use that to just get everything through the door. Once you start exposing them and showing who they are in real time, people get it. People get it quick. And that’s one of the reasons why I go to these things.

That’s one of the reasons why a couple of months before Charlottesville, when they had an anti-Sharia law march in New York City – I think they had them all around the country at that time – the one in New York City featured Identity Evropa, who you saw in the last clip by the way. They were in New York City with the Oath Keepers, trying to promote their anti-Muslim stuff. In this clip that you’re gonna see, there was somebody else that you’re going to see, a kid named Gabriel Brown. Gabriel Brown is now one of the January 6 defendants and he’s a big time conspiracy theorist. We talk every now and again, but he was not happy to see me when I had my video camera going. So I had to share that clip with you.

Eric: How do we ID Gabriel Brown while we’re watching?

Daryle: Gabriel Brown, incidentally, I’m glad you asked that question. He’s a short kid, long hair, and he’s wearing a green t-shirt that says, I think it was “Anti-communist action” or something like that. But the picture on it is somebody throwing someone out of a helicopter, which was a regular thing for a Chilean dictator by the name of Augusto Pinochet, who killed men, women and children that way.

[Timestamp 42:37: Video from anti-Sharia law march starts playing]

Gabriel Brown: [Yelling] Show me your motherfucking ass.

Daryle: There goes Gabriel Brown talking trash. He was just over here earlier, but he didn’t feel like he needed to say anything until after he got safely on the other side. Oh, and he’s over there with Lauren Southern.

Please don’t ever challenge me to come over there because I will do that.

Gabriel: Why don’t you tell them the truth Daryle!

Daryle: I got to deal with him right quick, hold on.

Gabriel: You want to fucking threaten me motherfucker on your website, then fucking do something.

Daryle: Who threatened you?

Gabriel: You fucking threatened me.

Daryle: When did I threaten you?

Gabriel: On your fucking website.

Daryle: Saying what?

Gabriel: You know where it fucking is.

Daryle: You mean to tell me I threatened you? I challenge you to tell me and you don’t…

Gabriel: You wrote this shit since you…

Daryle: Well what did I say? What did I say?

Gabriel: You said you’re gonna come to New York and fucking threaten her.

Daryle: No, no he ain’t gonna do anything. He’s just gonna sit there and wish he could.

Gabriel: No, I ain’t a fucking Nazi, you fucking scumbag Ford Foundation sponsored fucking piece of shit. I don’t even believe you had a fucking friend that was murdered. I don’t believe that shit.

Daryle: What the fuck is he talking about now?

Gabriel: Then why’d you get involved with fucking ruining people’s lives?

Daryle: Yeah, because your life ain’t shit anyway, so why not just defend…

Gabriel: Who the fuck am I?

Daryle: That’s a very good fucking question. Who the fuck are you? I mean you don’t have much of a life so why are you worried about me ruining it?

Gabriel: Then why are you spying on me for fucking all these years? What have I done that even remotely fucking even speaks to the bullshit you fucking…

Daryle: Well the fact that you’re with the National Anarchist Tribal Alliance that starts with that…

Gabriel: I created that shit on the basis of fucking…

Daryle: Phoniness…and this is where we have to take my leave. See you later.

[Police moving people on]
Gabriel: You’re the fucking police informant.

[Cut to talking to an Identity Evropa member]
Daryle: We got more I.E. cats here.

I.E. Member: Hell yeah we got Gen ID, Action Française, the royalist movement…

Daryle: What the hell is Action Française?

I.E. Member: Action Française, we’re trying to restore the monarchy in France.

Daryle: You want a monarchy!?

I.E. Member: Hell yeah! Bring back…

Daryle: We saw what happened to the last one right?

I.E. Member: Yeah, Louis the 16th?

Daryle: Yeah!

I.E. Member: Because he was disobedient.

Daryle: Yeah he lost his head over being disobedient. All right listen, I gotta catch up to some folks. I’ll see you all around. What’s up I.E.? I.E., what’s up?

Person: Not too much.

Daryle: Hey what’s going on man, what’s going on? How y’all doing today? Having a good time?

Speaker:…under Sharia law, female rulers are prohibited. So guess what? You can’t vote for Hillary Clinton in Saudi Arabia. She may take their money, but they don’t want any female leaders…

[Inaudible voices]
Daryle: I got a question man, why are you defending Nazis? if you’re true to the oath why are you defending Nazis?

Oath Keeper: Are you listening to these individuals, huh? Are you listening to these individuals?

Daryle: I know who these people are.

Oath Keeper: They haven’t said anything that even sounds remotely…

Daryle: I know who these people are. That crew over there, there’s a crew right behind you calling themselves Identity Evropa. They’re a neo-fascist organization, everybody knows that.

Oath Keeper: I haven’t seen anybody with a sign that says Identity Evropa.

Daryle: They’re wearing the lapels with the symbol. That triangle, the triangle thing that you see..

Oath Keeper: Thank you for educating me.

Daryle: All right man, fair enough. Fair enough.

Oath Keeper: These people that are talking on stage, nobody said anything even close to Nazi…

Daryle: Case in point. Identity Evropa.

Oath Keeper: Okay, thank you for educating me, I appreciate that.

Daryle: Stay true to the oath man, stay true to the oath. I actually got to find some folks…

[End of video]

Daryle: I do have to stress something here. When you see me being jovial and all of that with him, that’s a defense mechanism. I try to de-escalate whenever I’m there, and my form of de-escalation is always going to be “happy warrior”. When it’s time to dance, I dance, you know. I mean, sometimes I ridicule them like I did with Gabriel Brown. By the way, Lauren Southern is a Canadian neo-fascist, who calls herself a reporter. Other times, I’m with the guy who wants to bring a monarchy back to France [Laughter].

Incidentally, one of the guys from Identity Evropa walked past. His name is Ian Hoffman. He got arrested in Charlottesville. There was a few other folks I can’t recall, who was in the video that I saw, but then again you saw how I was talking with the Oath Keeper. At the time, Oath Keepers wasn’t really a concern aside from being a right-wing militia. So I told them, “Look, if you’re not about fascism, you shouldn’t want to have Identity Evropa in the crowd.” Earlier, there were some folks that was trying to tell me I cannot go into that area. He said, “you’re not allowed here.” “I’m going to go through anyway. You want to call the cops, and make me leave? You go ahead and do that.” And they never did, so I just stayed in that park and videotaped everybody.

Eric: What impressed me is that you’ve really figured out how to interact with these people enough that you can get into one of these rallies and do a lot of IDing, do a lot of research, really, on what they’re up to without getting kicked out. You’ve found a way to go in there without a lot of people to support you, and yet you’re able to be very effective at these kinds of rallies.

Daryle: And the cool thing about it is the fact that when you’re trying to gather information, as you notice, they want to talk. A lot of the people that were calling me out by name I didn’t really know. To this day I still don’t know a lot of these folks, but they wanted to have conversations, so I gave it to them. Even Gabriel Brown, not long after that little exchange that we had, we sat and had a conversation for about 45 minutes, and it was a good conversation. So, when I saw him in Charlottesville, I left him alone. I told him I would leave him alone from now on, and then he started talking trash on me on a podcast. So that is now rescinded. But make no bones about it, I may come across as cordial and nice to you in that field, it can always go sideways.

Eric: Well with that in mind, and noting that Gabriel Brown was there on January 6th, I have to bring this up. When you look at what happened on January 6, with this enormous pro-Trump crowd, armed and primed to attack the capital, is there anything that any part of the left, the anarchist movement, anything we could have done on that day? Should we have been there in numbers?

Daryle: Yes, really. Yeah.

Eric: What was missing on January 6th? Could we have had a better impact there?

Daryle: I’m gonna tell you right now, everybody was saying that it was smart not to be there. All the people trying to discourage folks from showing up to try to oppose it. No. That was the biggest mistake we could have ever made. First of all, us not being there means that we had to rely on their footage to identify and to find them, and there are some people out there, if we had our own footage, they wouldn’t be as anonymous as they are now. I mean some folks haven’t been popped for January 6. Not that I wanted to help law enforcement or anything like that. But still, we would at least know who they are, when they don’t want us to.

Secondly, this is a very effective deterrent if you show up, and no better example of that was July 6, 2019. I mean, we’re talking about how the Proud Boys stormed the capital and wrecked havoc and all that. On July 6, 2019 they kept their behinds on Freedom Plaza because we were there. We were there in mass.

A thing that really irked me about January 6th, and people discouraging folks from coming out, is the fact that they were telling people to stay home ever since Election Dy. When the same crowd said that they were going to march on November 14th, the liberals and such was telling people to stay home. “We won, they lost. They’re just blowing off some steam, we don’t have to worry about them, we can ignore them.” And there was a lot of people saying, “No, you can’t.” And on November 14th, what happened? Proud Boys were stabbing people, the rest of the crowd were attacking the Black Lives Matter mural, and brothers and sisters who were in those streets were asking “where are our white allies?”

So, here comes December 12th, and again they were saying “Ignore it,” and “W won, they lost,” yada, yada, yada. December 12, 2020, they did the same thing, only a few more of us showed up, and they also got stabbed. There was some back and forth. The cops were a little bit more active against the Proud Boys, even though the Proud Boys attacked churches, attacked Black churches, taking down their Black Lives Matter banners and setting them on fire. Even though Enrique Tarrio, the head of the Proud Boys, got arrested for that, there were other people in that video that haven’t been.

And that’s an insult. That shows you how little law enforcement really wants to do their job in regards to the right. So, on January 6, when you’re telling people to stay home, unfortunately even I had to stay home because I had an appointment, but we shouldn’t have. We should have been out there. If we were out there in mass the way we were on July 6th, they wouldn’t have made moves like that. They never do, when you’re ready to play with them. And when you are ready to play with them, like Charlottesville or something like that, and they still pop off, things happen after. Things did happen after January 6th as well, but the fact of the matter is you don’t want anything to happen first. So, be out there for everything.

That’s why I’m trying to encourage people to be a little bit more proactive about the American Renaissance Conference in November. It really is something that people in the State of Tennessee have been trying to deal with for years. They really need your help, they really need your support. Please give it to them.

Eric: Yeah, that’s something I hope everybody’s going to be putting on their calendar, and either being there or supporting somebody who’s going there, because these really are focal point events. I have to bring this up, though, before I get on to a little bit more optimistic question, which is, the way you’re analyzing January 6th, there’s this serial failure of the state, the authorities, whatever you want to call them, to take this seriously. To understand how these people operate, and to take it seriously. Why don’t they listen? Why don’t they listen to what you’re saying, for example?

Daryle: Well, I will tell you flat out that I think they don’t take it seriously because a lot of times politicians feel they can use it for fundraising. It’s just that simple. I really do think that it’s been that shallow. I really do. I don’t think that they feel that they are the threat that they have become. I mean, it’s like I said before, we do have the upper hand, and we have a lot of folks in power right now that feel that they can basically just sit on their laurels and do nothing, and just reap the benefits out of scaring people and promising that they’ll do something. But the thing is you do have to be prepared for what kind of damage they can do.

We’ll be able to deal with what happened regarding Roe v Wade, as Kansas showed us, but it should not have happened in the first place. They should have been more proactive defending Roe v. Wade. They should have codified Roe v. Wade into law. They should have fought a little harder against Mitch McConnell’s efforts to take a Supreme Court justice appointment away from Obama. They didn’t do that. They weren’t as proactive as they should have been against Kavanaugh, or Gorsuch for that matter, since he was the one that stole the seat. If you’re not going to really get into the fight, then what are you doing? Why are you there? Because the thing about this is, even though we have the upper hand now, the more and more the right is able to chip away, the more we lose that upper hand. And that’s what we’re really afraid of, and that’s why we’re trying to be proactive now. But we also cannot let those that we elect to do that think that they can rely on our efforts to do their job. So we’re gonna have to hold them accountable at some point.

Eric: Well, yeah, it’s called fascism, and it’s becoming more and more obviously fascism as it goes along. On that note, I wanted to ask you something a little bit unfair, but maybe a little more optimistic, which is, on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest, what’s your level of hope today in the midst of all this?

Daryle: 10.

Eric: Higher or lower than it was five years ago?

Daryle: I mean it’s frustrating, but I’m ever the optimist. I don’t see any reason why I can’t be, you know? I think I’m very high up because we do fight back, we do fight for what we want and we appreciate. We always do take the time to appreciate that which we fight for. And if you’re not doing that, take the time to appreciate that which we fight for, because the truth of the matter is, the more you do that, the harder you fight, you’ll reap the benefits of that fight even more so afterwards. We’ve seen that over and over again. We’ve seen us fight back after Charlottesville, we’ve seen this fight-back after January 6th. They try to pull some stunts in the wake of the FBI raid. You’re going to see it again. We’re not putting up with it as a people, and that’s what’s important.

Eric: And the more we get out in the streets, the more we put that message across and the more effective we are, presumably.

Daryle: Yes.

Eric: Daryle, we’re running out of time, and I wanted to give you a second, or maybe more than a second, to cover any bases we haven’t covered. Anything we haven’t talked about that you feel is urgent? Any last points you want to make?

Daryle: Well, only thing I would say in this time that we have, we only have but a few minutes, I’ll just say if anybody’s trying to reach me you can go to Onepeoplesproject.com or Idavox.com. You can find me on Twitter at @dlamontjenkins, especially if you’re trying to get more information about the American Renaissance Conference and how you can be involved in fighting against that. Also, AK Press is putting out a book called No Pasaran. It’s basically an anthology of anti-fascist writing that talks about how we fight write supremacy. I’m in the book and it’s put together by Shane Burley, and you can pre-order it at AK Press.

I got a few documentaries out there, if you want to look for me. I have Alt-Right Age of Rage that’s been out for two years, which shows both the American Renaissance and Charlottesville. There’s movies out there like Skin. Skin was about a white supremacist that I helped get out of the white power scene. Mike Coulter, who played Luke Cage and currently stars in Evil, plays me. There’s also a short film called Skin that was directed by the same guy, and it actually won an Oscar in 2019. You’ll find me [laughs], I’m all over the place.

Eric: Yeah, and keep it up. I can say, personally, both the short and the long version of Skin are well worth seeing.

Daryle: And there’s other documentaries. There’s also something that just came out called Civil War 2.0. It’s a short film, 10 minutes long. We Don’t Walk In Fear, that’s the latest documentary about my work that has just come out. We’re waiting to see how we can distribute it to the masses.

Eric: We Don’t Walk in Fear.

Daryle: Yes. Thanks to my mother for that, who got interviewed for the documentary, and they said, “oh okay, she just came up with the title in her interview.”

Eric: Inspiration. Daryle, thanks again for taking the time to be with us and for bringing along those amazing clips as well.

Daryle: You are very welcome.

Eric: Daryle Lamont Jenkins is doing brave and critical work opposing some of the most brutal and insidious forces in our society: the kind of work all of us should be doing. We’re glad to have him on today’s livestream. Thanks Daryle for taking the time, again. Thank you to everyone who’s logged in. Remember, when you join the struggle against the State, you’re not just fighting for a better non-authoritarian future. You’re fighting for your life. And remember to follow Agency at Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Thanks everybody.

[Livestream Ends]