- Hello. I'm Mandy Patinkin.
Nearly 250 years ago,
a new kind of government was born.
To many, this upstart seemed unpredictable, even dangerous.
The United States of America's democracy
has been the envy of the world,
a free society of can-do optimists
who seem to think anything was possible,
but we were and are far from perfect.
And today, pessimism stalks our land.
The gap between the haves and have-nots only grows wider,
but what worries so many people,
myself included,
is that we haven't come together
to tackle our problems.
Instead of conversation, we scream at each other
about things like race,
immigration, abortion, and guns.
Even inside families, there are enemy camps.
On January 6th, the depth of the anger,
these fierce divisions,
shook the conscience of this nation
to its core.
Tens of thousands of people marched to the Capitol
to protest an election that they believed was stolen.
Embedded in the large and mostly peaceful crowd
were hardcore far-right extremists bent on violence.
It was a grand stage for a show of force
that had been fermenting for years.
The most important questions. How does the healing begin?
How do we learn to listen? How do we move on?
Now, in the first part of a six-part series,
we search for answers.
-My first target is a Jewish synagogue.
I'm going to firebomb it with Molotov cocktail.
Destroy a window first and then throw the Molotov
cocktail in for maximum damage.
I will film it for your viewing enjoyment,
my kindred.
White power.
- It's a story decades in the making.
[overlapping voices]
Desperate. Angry.
Destructive.
The nation stopped in its tracks.
- Angry mob of supporters--
- The most sacred symbol
of America's democracy attacked.
- Let's burn this shit down.
- A nation already deeply divided
over politics, race,
and economic inequality.
And now the claim of a stolen election,
extremists inciting rage,
some using violence.
How did we get here?
What fuels their fury?
How grave is the threat to democracy?
- Indivisible, with liberty...
- How do we heal the hate?
- This is an Iron Cross, and instead of filling it
in black or filling it in different colors,
I wanted to do-- we ran out of ink
and it's been faded as well from the laser.
But basically, I was doing red or keeping my skin for white
and the black because red, white,
and black are actually National Socialist colors.
You know, the Nazi flag has red, white,
and black on it.
I have on my calf here what's known as the gauntlet
or the white power fist.
This is the remnants of the swastika tattoo that I had.
- Sean Gillespie was not at the Capitol,
but once, like some who were there,
he believed in white supremacy.
His personal journey is one that will help us understand
how radicalization can happen.
- 20 years ago, I would have been--
I probably would've been one of those people in Washington,
and probably would've been even more radical with it.
Probably would've brought weapons or bombs
and stuff like that.
These two right here are articles about me
from "The Spokesman." September 12th, 2004.
Spokane man sentenced for temple attack.
One time Aryan-nation member receives 39 years in prison.
The rabbi said there was little physical damage
to the building,
but there was clear psychological damage.
And it's true.
- Sean was convicted of firebombing that synagogue
in Oklahoma City in 2005.
He served most of his sentence
in America's most secure federal prison
alongside the country's most dangerous killers
and domestic terrorists.
It was not what he had envisioned for himself.
[somber music]
- That's actually me swearing into the U.S. Army
at the MEP station.
Military Entrance and Processing Station.
What's crazy is, had I stayed in the military,
I would have been retired this year.
That day, I was proud.
You know, I mean, I was 17 years old.
I had the whole world ahead of me at that point.
If I could go back to this minute right here,
I would, you know?
Life would have been a lot better.
- But how did Sean take such a radical turn?
- My family believes that I was born addicted to drugs.
Ronsonol lighter fluid.
Bic lighter.
[laughter]
I used to act out in school. I used to get into fights.
I used to cuss at teachers.
I had a lot of behavioral issues.
♪
When I was 15, I stole a bicycle from Spokane
and rode it from downtown Spokane to here.
♪
They used to have an Aryan Nation sign
somewhere in the middle, off where those trees are,
and this was the compound.
♪
- The fiery cross came down to us
from thousands of years of use.
- I read about Aryan Nations and the compound.
I didn't know anything about anti-Semitism
or white supremacists or any of that.
I think I just didn't understand the consequences
in life when I was a kid.
Here we go.
- Attention.
Let us tell you what Aryan Nations is.
The Aryan nationalist understands
that he lives in an age
that the final battles are being waged
for the mastery of this Earth.
- And, you know, it did say they were white militants
and I was, like, "Well I'm white.
I don't fit in with the Black and Hispanic gangs.
It's perfect for me."
- Can you turn it around?
- March.
Slowly, inexorably...
- I'm just wanting to believe in something,
and it just--I grasped right to it.
- Life goes on.
No end to time, no end to life,
for those who have chosen to live forever.
- Feeling superiority over people,
feeling that people are afraid of you...
'Cause, kindred, if you are a friend,
then you will fight with me.
Gives you a sense of euphoria.
You feel, like, I could walk into a room with a swastika
and you're either gonna have people
who are gonna be angry at you
or you're gonna have people that are afraid of you.
White power. Sieg Heil.
Having that really made me feel good just like--
I mean, just, like, I'm assuming,
a junkie would feel with heroin.
You know, they get that rush, and they're like--
they're on top of the world.
Stand, my kindred, now, before it's too late.
Because if you're not with us, you are against us.
[explosion]
- It wasn't the only time during a huge Occupy
demonstration in Oakland this week
that protesters found themselves on opposite sides.
- The extreme right believes we are in an unfolding state
of civil war.
- You're looking at live pictures
out of Charlottesville, Virginia.
This is where violent clashes have broken out
between white nationalists and counter-protests there.
- This has been declared a riot.
- The extreme left is equally determined...
Ready to meet violence with violence.
In cities across the country,
there have been scenes of disorder and anarchy.
- If you would've told me 32 years ago,
when I was in police academy, that I would have created
so many PowerPoints, done so many presentations,
town halls, in multiple states concerning extremism,
I would have laughed at you.
[soft music]
When you look at Spokane,
I have the extremes in the left.
I have the extremes in the right in our community.
'Cause Spokane's a microcosm of America.
We have a massive social justice movement
trying to take hold and everything else.
We're just it. We are America
and you watched from 2016 just radicalization on the left
pushing against the hate on the right and did culminate.
It culminated on January 6th.
♪
Folks, we saw that coming.
- This is 2021, y'all. This is insanity.
- Extremism is the idea
that you're in-group's success and very survival
can never be separated from the need
for hostile action against some out-group.
- Our country has been usurped by a foreign tribe
called the Jews.
- Extremism is defined by the hostile out-group
that I believe
poses an imminent existential threat to me.
- Let's talk about decent, clean-cut, all-American youth
that want to take back Atlanta from the minorities,
that want to take back San Antonio from the Mexicans,
that wanna take back
San Francisco from the homosexuals
and have a America for Americans.
- Extremism also means that I must take hostile action
against that threatening out-group
in order to ensure my survival.
- As long as they're not using violence
to forward their belief system,
their conspiracy theory, that's not an issue
that the FBI should or does pay attention to.
They can't because it's First Amendment protected.
- [indistinct] in a racist system!
- It is illegal to use violence
to forward your extremist viewpoints
which are politically affiliated.
It's the use of force or violence
that the FBI is able to use to open cases,
to work investigations, and to put people in jail.
- Nobody denies that what happened on January 6th, 2021,
was, in fact, illegal.
A mob disobeying police orders,
attacking officers,
and breaking into the Capitol.
- Angry. Depressed. Sad.
I mean, you had the whole gamut of emotions going through.
You never think your own citizens
would do this.
You see this stuff on television
in Third World countries
where the people try to overthrow an evil government.
You've got bad people out there, and unfortunately,
that's what happened that day.
The morning started off as a normal day
on January 6th.
It was chilly. I do remember that.
As the morning progressed, we noticed a flow of people
coming down the sidewalks, heading towards the Capitol.
My post assignment that day was the First Street garage
in the Rayburn Building.
Soon as I walked out the garage,
and looked over at the west front of the Capitol,
I just saw this mass of humanity
amassed on the west front.
And they were just chanting, waving American flags.
- Some of them were climbing on the scaffolding
that was set up there for the inauguration.
all: USA. USA. USA. USA. USA.
- We're gonna walk down to the Capitol.
- President Trump! all: Four more years.
- Because you'll never take back our country with weakness.
You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.
- You're going in?
- Holy shit. Those are so many people.
- At first, the mob entering the Capitol seemed
to be a spontaneous surge of angry Trump supporters,
but it was more than that.
There were voices. Extreme voices.
- Don't act tough now!
We are your fucking boss.
[all shouting]
- You have the Three Percenters,
that believe that 3% of the population were really--
really went against the British occupation of the United States
prior to the American Revolution.
But the identification here
is that we're going against an occupying force,
the occupying force being the federal government.
The Oath Keepers, who are more explicit
in their anti-federal government ideology
and more intentional on engaging in violent behavior.
- This is what we [bleep] for.
Everything we [bleep] trained for.
- Overran the Capitol.
- We're in the [bleep] Capitol, bro.
- And here we have the association with QAnon.
This was the QAnon statement. "Trust the plan."
And notice the plan is--
the plan is the secret of Q ANON.
Nobody knows what the plan is, but we know there is a plan,
and if I'm in QAnon, I'm gonna trust that plan.
I think the Proud Boys are there for the brawl.
♪
They like to street fight.
I call them the ideologically motivated fight club.
- The Proud Boys have harnessed the spirit
of the 1776 revolution.
George Washington was a Proud Boy.
John Adams was a Proud Boy.
We are Proud Boys because we will not sit idly by
and let our country be destroyed.
If we would have had more George Washingtons
in January 6th,
you wouldn't have the little party they had.
No, there would be no Capitol left.
- Open this door now!
- You could smell the OC spray.
♪
And there were some fists thrown.
There were fists thrown. There were batons waved.
I got clocked a couple times.
I don't have the greatest knees,
but they--they felt it that day.
Unfortunately, we did take some losses.
We took not only a loss of life with some of our officers,
but a lot of guys got hurt.
Some are still hurt today.
- We literally were taking desks and furniture
and pressing them up against the doorways to keep them out.
- [screaming] Ow!
- It was chaotic.
It was embarrassing
to think this was actually happening.
In the same breath, I'm thinking,
"Why couldn't we have prepared ourselves better?"
- They're climbing up. They're climbing up the wall.
- Whoo! - [chanting] USA!
- This is a surreal scene. Holy shit.
What reality is this?
Oh, my God. We did this shit.
- I never saw this coming.
- There's this notion of
"the first people to be executed
are gonna be the traitors."
- And then, of course, we saw that at January 6th,
when we had people calling
for the hanging of Mike Pence.
- Nothing like an execution to focus the mind.
♪
- The belief that the federal government
is controlled by traitors
is common among far-right-wing extremist groups.
Some also share what historians call
the world's oldest hatred:
anti-Semitism.
- Here is the both sad and stunning
anti-Semitic reference
that we see on the sweatshirt of this man
that says, "Camp Auschwitz: work brings freedom."
If you peel back the onion on some of these groups,
oftentimes one of the clearest layers is--is anti-Semitism.
- Who makes public policy in this country?
The Jews, the Anti-Christ, Jews, the Jew money power,
and the Jew television.
- The Jews--they claim, yes, they are of another race.
They claim to be a race, and they are not of us.
- Butler's 20-acre compound in northern Idaho
is headquarters for the Aryan Nations,
the high-profile white supremacy group Butler leads.
It's here his followers gather under swastikas
and guard towers and rail against the enemy.
- They have rings in their noses,
and the Jew pulls that ring.
- Sean Gillespie remembers
when he saw Richard Butler as his leader,
a man who he respected as a founding father
of the white supremacy movement.
- And they said that more violent racist modern acts
of terror have come through the Aryan Nations' gates
than any other hate group.
- Butler's organization, Aryan Nations,
was once the most prominent
neo-Nazi organization in America.
[disquieting music]
♪
- Somewhere up ahead is where the guard shacks were.
Yeah, 20-some-odd years since I've been out here.
I wanna say it was roughly in this vicinity here
is where the guard shacks were.
- For Sean Gillespie,
Aryan Nations became a surrogate family,
a place where he and other members
could vent their anger at a society
that offered them limited opportunities to get work,
education, and health care.
- I mean, they basically were like, "Oh yeah,
you're a runaway kid," and so he took me in.
- You, move. - Yes, sir.
- That way. We told you before.
- They shaved my head and made me a fresh-cut skinhead.
I was, like, "I wanna know more about Aryan Nations,"
and they just came in and gave me packets of literature.
So I just read and read and read.
And a lot of it made sense, you know,
because they were like-- you know I--
I didn't know any Jews, so you know it was, like,
I began to be told that, okay, all Jews are bad,
and they're descended from Cain.
So Pastor Butler's house was over here.
Wow, I mean, there is nothing left.
There's the foundations.
That's from his house right there.
It's crazy.
He was actually really nice.
He had that old grandpa, nice grandpa kind of thing
going on to him if you were white.
- I came to the United States.
- Somewhere over here, there was, like, a swing set
somewhere back here for the kids, you know?
'Cause every child Nazi needs a playground, I guess.
- Richard Butler was one of the most important thinkers
of the--of the Christian Identity Movement.
- Hitler's the second most hated man on Earth,
Jesus Christ being the first, by the Jews.
So there you are.
- Richard Butler was very effective
because they were charismatic
but also because he was able to create this merge
of traditional Christian identity ideas and neo-Nazism.
- Religion is deeply tied into the Aryan Nations' philosophy.
They proclaim that they, the Aryans,
are the true Israelites.
- And almost anyone who is something
in the far-right movement
spent some time with Butler in his compound in Idaho.
- All I condone is this,
is my race to wake up and get off their hind ends
and stand up to live.
I am fighting for the life of the white race.
- Richard Butler was a former employee of an aircraft company
and had a patent on some type of device
they put on airplane tires to keep them from exploding
when the airplane landed. So he had some money.
He thought that Jews were taking over the banks
in America, the companies in America,
and were brainwashing children in this United States
that they had to love people of color,
people who were different.
And he all said this was a massive Jewish conspiracy.
- Hail victory.
Hail victory.
- Sean Gillespie admits he didn't know
any Jews personally,
but they were a convenient scapegoat for his anger.
- I was abused several times by several people.
I had a lot of behavioral issues
related to my abuse.
[melancholy music]
♪
It caused a lot of-- a lot of trauma.
I mean, it was not a pleasant experience as a child,
but, you know, it happened, off and on, for two years.
I quickly began to distrust authority.
I became very, like, anti-social,
and I was in these group homes
with older kids, which didn't help.
You know, these 17-year-old runaway kids
who were doing drugs and living on the streets.
In 2002, I was here in Spokane,
and I was again on the streets
because my family didn't--even though I was in the army
and I was getting ready to go
to basic training in the spring,
they did not let me stay with them.
Was discharged from the army
for violating the army's equal opportunity program
because I was very vocal about being racist.
I didn't hide it.
I just had so much anger.
It wasn't even about the message.
It was about me finding an outlet for my anger,
and hate was that.
I ended up deciding to go around the country
doing hate crimes.
There was a skinhead band called Midtown Boot Boys,
and they have a song called "Road Nazis."
And it's all about using your vehicle
to kill Jews and Blacks and Mexicans.
And so I was incredibly intoxicated,
listening to this violent song over and over again on repeat.
I hit one lady with my truck,
and I ran over two African-American teenagers.
It's beautiful.
Look at those. Look at that, man.
I made a video, basically, where I climbed up a mountain
to create a dramatic effect.
From this time on, I am dedicating myself
to smashing out the Zionist pigs
that are ruling this country...
I filmed myself basically making a declaration of war.
By eliminating the mongrel horde
and smashing the Jewish synagogues
that teach hate--hatred of the white race.
I was gonna just sacrifice my life for the movement.
People like Robert Mathews.
People like Eric Rudolph, Timothy McVeigh,
who are not afraid to be the lone wolfs of this country
to go out there and smash the Zionist system.
By smashing out the illegal immigrants
that are slowly but surely taking over our country.
- Sean venerated what he considered to be
the heroes of the radical right:
terrorists like Eric Rudolph,
the bomber of the Olympic Park in Atlanta,
where one human being was killed,
and most of all,
fellow army veteran Timothy McVeigh,
who bombed the Federal Building
in Oklahoma City, killing 168.
- I was thinking about Tim McVeigh.
He kind of inspired me to do a crime in Oklahoma City.
I scouted out the target before I decided to do it.
I drove by, and I filmed it.
My first target is a Jewish synagogue.
Some fucking Yiddish kike, fucking...
hatred-of-the-white-race- teaching synagogue.
I'm gonna firebomb it with Molotov cocktail.
Destroy a window first
and then throw the Molotov cocktail in for maximum damage.
See the damage.
I lit the Molotov cocktail
and threw it at the door alcove.
I didn't realize at the time it was the entrance
to the day care center.
I was arrested,
and I was extradited back to Oklahoma City.
♪
I go to sentencing a few months later.
I had written a threatening letter
to the synagogue in the meantime.
I signed it "6 million more," and I signed it
in--in Aryan blood and Aryan honor.
So I was eventually sentenced to 39 years in federal prison.
I stood up, and I gave
a white supremacist Nazi salute.
So I'm at USP Coleman.
I'm respected amongst the inmates
because of my crime.
In 2008 I stabbed a--a guy who was a child molester.
I was sent to the ADX Federal Super Max in Colorado,
which is the most maximum-security prison
in the United States, where I ended up
spending 8 1/2 years in solitary confinement there.
I'm alone for the first time,
and all I have is just time
to ruminate, to think,
and to just do a lot of introspection.
And that's what I did. I just started thinking.
I'm like, "What the hell have I done with my life?"
♪
I was, like, "I missed out on my career
in the U.S. Army that I loved."
There was time that I could honestly say
I probably lost my mind for a while.
I--I tried to kill myself.
I have a extensive scar here
where--you can see right here
I cut my--my arm open, took a overdose of lithium,
and I've put a bag over my head,
been carried out of the cell unconscious.
I just didn't want to live.
You know, I was--there was a lot of guilt.
I was serving 39 years for something
I didn't even believe in anymore.
- After serving 16 years of his 39-year sentence,
Sean's conviction was overturned
because of a change in the law,
and on his 36th birthday, he was a free man.
- Today is one week and two days
since I got out of prison. Fuck prison.
Fuck not following the laws. Fuck just being an idiot.
If people don't like that, they can kiss my ass.
I just think those people are a joke.
I mean, the January 6th people--
like, what did you do?
You defecated in Nancy Pelosi's office
and sat at her desk?
It's like, you're not taking over the government.
You weren't even close.
So I just had my second laser tattoo removal.
As you can see, my face is swollen.
And this time, we actually hit some of my arm as well.
Hit the swastika there.
It's a good thing that I did get caught,
honestly,
because I probably would have just kept doing stuff
and probably ended up killing somebody.
These people are--are snakes. They're fake, you know,
and they'll tell that to your face, that,
"Oh, yeah you know we--we don't believe illegal action.
"Illegal action's wrong.
Aryan Nations doesn't do illegal actions,"
And then you look at their track record, you know?
All these white supremacist attacks
coming from the Aryan Nations compound.
- Free speech ends when opinions cross the line
into illegal acts.
And that is exactly how Aryan Nations was undone
after a violent chance encounter
with a mother and son who were passing by.
- I didn't realize at the time
that compound was out here.
Then when we realized the Doc Martens, swastikas,
and armbands, we realized that we were under attack.
- Keenans happened to simply just be driving
by the rural compound,
stopped in front of it to pick up something
that came out of the window of their car,
and when they did, the guards of the Aryan Nation saw them,
and got in a pickup truck,
two in the back with assault rifles,
and started chasing them down the road.
- They proceeded to open fire.
We had careened down into the ditch.
My mom pushed me down to the floorboards
and told me to get down, and she had looked at me
and said, you know, "I--I love you,
I've loved being your mom," and that this is the end.
[dramatic music]
- A farmer happened to be watching this on the porch
of his house.
And so he got a shotgun out and ran out
and told him to get away, and so they all left.
- There's never been anybody who's ever really stood up
and said, "Okay, enough is enough"
and that this can't go on anymore.
And so after talking with Mom,
we both kinda felt, like, hey, it's--it's time
and something needs to be done and that, you know,
these people need to be dealt with.
- Attorney Morris Dees
has been fighting hate groups for half a century.
- We got involved in the case then at the request of a lawyer
out there that represented the Keenan family.
And that led to a lawsuit against the Aryan Nations.
- Dees, who fights racism
through the Southern Poverty Law Center,
launched a civil suit against Butler
seeking more than $10 million in damages
for Victoria Keenan and her son Jason.
- The streets were filled with these people
who loved the Aryan Nations with their signs.
And finally, we put on some witnesses.
A couple of them who had been involved
in assaulting our clients testified for us.
And we put Richard Butler on the witness stand,
who had to basically say
that he thought that Hitler didn't kill enough Jews.
The jury returned a major verdict against them.
- A member of the Idaho jury that hit the Aryan Nations
with a multi-million-dollar damage award
ordered late yesterday
to pay more than $6 million to a mother and son
who were assaulted by its security guards two years ago.
- Which meant that we seized the property.
It was sold.
- After losing the lawsuit in 2000,
and Butler's death four years later,
Aryan Nations disintegrated.
But for Morris Dees,
it was just one battle
in a war he is still fighting.
- Well, nothing really changed.
You still have individuals who do not like people of color.
And they may not have a landed facility where they go out
and train people to shoot guns and other things,
but in many ways, they're just as dangerous
and in fact, probably more dangerous,
because they can wrap themselves
around a political agenda,
which was sp--phoned
and actually encouraged by the president of the United States,
who came and spoke to them on January 6th,
and says, "Go down to the Capitol
and you know basically what to do."
- How significant a role White supremacists played
in the attack on the Capitol
remains open for debate,
but there is no doubt about what happened
four years earlier in Charlottesville.
all: Jews will not replace us. Jews will not replace us.
You will not replace us.
- Richard Spencer was one
of the organizers of that rally.
He wears well-cut suits
and presents his race-centered views
as policy alternatives.
Spencer has a home in Whitefish, Montana,
a region of the country where white supremacists
have been known to make their presence felt.
Whitefish resident Tanya Gersh watched the violence unfold
at the Capitol on January 6th
and knew all too well how far that rage could reach.
[soft music]
♪
- I'm Tanya Gersh.
I'm a real estate agent. I'm a mom.
I'm a victim of doxing from a neo-Nazi website
called "The Daily Stormer."
It wasn't really until I married my husband,
who grew up very conservative Jewish,
that I really started paying attention to my faith
and really embracing it.
So here I was living my dream.
You know, very successful real estate agent
and perfect children, perfect husband.
I really felt for so many years
how blessed I was,
and sadly,
that positivity was because of a lot of my naivete.
- Race is real, race matters,
and race is the foundation of identity.
And that holds for white people.
That holds for all human beings.
- This whole thing started with--Richard Spencer
stood up right after the election
in Washington, D.C.,
in a crowd full of people at a conference and said--
- Hail Trump! Hail our people!
Hail victory!
[cheers and applause]
- So Richard Spencer is--he's a white nationalist.
He's--he's a Nazi in a business suit.
And he lived in our town, and he wanted
to let everyone know he lived in Whitefish, Montana,
because it was white and he could be white here,
and Whitefish hated that.
We did not accept that, and we didn't accept him.
I shouldn't even say "we."
It's just, everyone left him alone forever
and let them do their thing.
- Absolutely, I'm not a White supremacist.
I've answered that question probably a thou--
literally a thousand times at this point.
I've always said no.
- Richard Spencer is credited
with creating the term "alt-right,"
although I don't think there's anything alternative about it.
I think that the alt-right, while it's newly packaged,
is scavenging and recycling ideas
that have been around for a long time
in the extreme right.
- Richard Spencer, I think,
tried to do what many of the Klan leaders
tried to do in the '80s,
when they came up with the idea
of the clean Klan.
Trying to create a more dignified,
more visible, more legitimate version
of the American far right.
- Effectively everyone in the alt-right agrees
with the notion that a racially or ethnically defined state,
a nation-state, is justified,
that it doesn't need to apologize for itself,
that it has the right to be.
- Richard Spencer
and his mother, Sherri Spencer,
own a commercial building downtown Whitefish.
Sherri Spencer called me
to sell her commercial building.
I answered the phone,
and we actually had a very nice conversation.
She said to me, "Tanya,
"my heart is breaking for Whitefish.
"My heart is breaking in general
"because I don't believe in the ideologies of my son
"and I don't know what to do.
"I think that I should probably just sell this building.
Can you help me?" And I was so honored.
I don't wanna take a commission off this sale.
And next thing I knew,
there was an article in the "Medium"
accusing me of extorting the mother of Richard Spencer.
And the shock,
the absolute blindsided shock,
of that was crazy.
So we held our breath for a little moment
after that "Medium" article came out,
but then, bam,
a Nazi named Andrew Anglin took notice of this article.
I showed up on "The Daily Stormer" website,
my face with a Jewish star on my forehead
and a call of action to attack my family.
He essentially said, "Okay, Family"--
is what he calls his 300,000 followers--
"Let's show this Jewish real estate agent
what we think of her."
And within an hour of that going live,
we were bombarded with the most vile hate
you can ever imagine rolling into somebody's life.
When I say text messages, I don't mean a couple a day.
I mean hundreds a day.
- The phone calls flooded into my husband's law office.
- They stole my pictures, and then they manipulated them,
and they put daggers through my neck
and put my son and I
superimposed on the gates to Auschwitz.
My son was 12.
Their intention was to drive me to the brink of suicide.
That's what a lot of their messages said.
"We don't have to--we don't even have to be there.
We don't even have to touch you to kill you."
♪
My husband said, "We've gotta go.
"We've gotta-- we've got to pack.
We gotta go," and I said, "Where are we going?
What do we do?" Like, where--where do we go?
And he--all he could say is, "I don't know.
I don't know, I don't know."
To every question I asked--
I'm like, "What is this?"
"I don't know."
"Should--should I-- should I wake the kids?"
"I don't know."
"Are we packing for a long time or a short time?"
"I don't know." "Where are we going?"
"I don't know." And I--I finally said,
"Am I--should I wake the kids right now?
"Like, are we running in the middle of the night
"because we're Jewish?
"I mean, is this really happening?
"Like--like, tell me this isn't happening.
"Is this really happening?
"Are we really waking the kids in the middle of the night
and packing these bags and running for our lives?"
And we just cried.
We just cried out of just complete fear and shock
over all of these messages.
And just seeing my face with a Jewish star
on a neo-Nazi website saying go get her.
We had no idea if they were literally on our way--
on their way to our house right then.
We just didn't know, and it was late at night,
and we eventually just, like, out of shock and fear,
just cried
and fell asleep for about an hour,
and then the phone started ringing and ringing.
And, like, in the middle of the night,
we answered the phone, and it was--
we were being doxed.
- After receiving more than 700 threats,
Tanya and her husband were contacted by Morris Dees,
who wanted to help them fight back.
- When Southern Poverty Law Center
sat down with my husband and I and--and said
"If you want to be our plaintiff, we can win,"
And I said, "Sign me up."
- Tanya Gersh filed a federal lawsuit
in April of 2017,
claiming Andrew Anglin had used his site
to launch a troll storm against her.
- We were able just to send an incredibly loud message
to his followers that this would not be tolerated.
- We need more free speech. We need robust platforms.
[soft music]
♪
Sometimes that speech is gonna be trolling.
Sometimes that speech might get a little mean or nasty.
That's okay.
We can deal with it. It's just words.
But the fact is, I'm willing to put up
with all of those bad things
so that we can have a public platform for ideas.
♪
- Today federal magistrate Jeremiah Lynch
ruled in favor of Gersh,
saying Anglin must pay $14 million
for Gersh's lost wages, damages, pain, and suffering.
- The Southern Poverty Law Center
says the ruling shows
that this type of conduct is intolerable in a civil society.
- These aren't schoolboys that are bullying me.
These are Nazis that I didn't even know existed
in our country.
I had no clue that people actually still felt like this.
I thought we had so won this war.
- When you think about much of the extreme right,
anti-Semitism is at its core.
If you know the anti-Semitic themes,
you can recognize them in many conspiracy theories.
QAnon, 5G, the COVID vaccine.
All of these have veins running through them
about a secret cabal
looking to take over the world and run people's lives.
- Give me an ideology, and I will tell you
how I can subvert it
and I can use it as a weapon to influence people
and do it under the guise of something
that is generally great philosophies.
Christianity, peace, love, all great things.
Then you throw these ideologies into it and twist it a little,
and suddenly, well, you know, Jews are evil.
[dramatic music]
♪
[crowd cheering]
The shame of it is,
there were enough good people at that event
that they could have said, "No, you're not doing this."
- It's my house!
all: USA! USA! USA!
- But that's what happens when the mob mentality takes hold.
♪
I will always count that day
as one of the lowest points in our nation's history.
♪
- On the next episode
of "Indivisible: Healing Hate."
- Randy Weaver has been holed up
in this remote mountain cabin in Idaho.
- A deadly standoff
becomes a rallying cry for the far right.
- You are his enemy and you will never receive us
in your hands again,
- If you were anti-government, it was all the confirmation
you needed that the militarized police force
of the federal super state was coming for you.
- You're gonna burn in hell.