Before that August, Stout, a 24-year veteran of the Gainesville police force, had
never heard of Richard Spencer and knew next to nothing about his self-declared
alt-right movement, or of their “anti–fascist” archnemesis known as Antifa. Then,
on the Monday after deadly violence in Charlottesville, in which a protester was
killed when a driver plowed his car into the crowd, Stout learned to his horror that
Spencer was planning a speech at the University of Florida. He spent weeks
frantically trying to get up to speed, scouring far-right and anti-fascist websites and
videos, each click driving him further into despair. Aside from the few white
nationalists who had been identified by the media or on Twitter, Stout had no clue
who most of these people were, and neither, it seemed, did anyone else in law
enforcement.
There were no current intelligence reports he could find on the alt-right, the
sometimes-violent fringe movement that embraces white nationalism and a range
of racist positions. The state police couldn’t offer much insight. Things were
equally bleak at the federal level. Whatever the F.B.I. knew (which wasn’t a lot,
Stout suspected), they weren’t sharing. The Department of Homeland Security,
which produced regular intelligence and threat assessments for local law
enforcement, had only scant material on white supremacists, all of it vague and
ultimately not much help. Local politicians, including the governor, were also in
the dark. This is like a Bermuda Triangle of intelligence, Stout thought,
incredulous. He reached out to their state partners. “So you’re telling us that there’s
nothing? No names we can plug into the automatic license-plate readers? No
players with a propensity for violence? No one you have in the system? Nothing?’’
One of those coming to Gainesville was William Fears, a 31-year-old from
Houston. Fears, who online went by variations of the handle Antagonizer, was one
of the most dedicated foot soldiers of the alt-right. Countless YouTube videos had
captured his progress over the past year as he made his way from protest to protest
across several states, flinging Nazi salutes, setting off smoke bombs and, from time
to time, attacking people. Fears was also a felon. He had spent six years in prison
for aggravated kidnapping in a case involving his ex-girlfriend, and now he had an
active warrant for his arrest, after his new girlfriend accused him of assault less
than two weeks earlier. On Oct. 18, the night before the event, Fears and a few
others from Houston’s white–nationalist scene got in Fears’s silver Jeep Patriot for
the 14-hour drive. Fears’s friend Tyler TenBrink, who pleaded guilty to assault in