I perched over a narrow desk looking down on McGee Street, but my attention was focused on my cell phone, where I toggled between apps for our two separate security systems. It seemed as though the afternoon might pass without incident.
Then, just before 5 p.m., the cameras registered something. At first, it looked like shadows flitting behind the leaves of the large magnolia tree in our front yard. Then six human figures came into focus.
A minute later, the deer cam we’d fastened to a tree registered the five men standing shoulder to shoulder. I recognized the man in the middle: Sean Kauffmann, a notorious neo-Nazi leader from Tennessee.
Kauffman held a placard, though I couldn’t read what it said from that angle. Three of the men grasped lit emergency flares in their left hands, while extending their right arms in Hitler salutes.
Another angle showed one of them was wearing a black long-sleeve shirt with a Totenkopf skull and the words “Support your local Einsatz Kommando,” a reference to Nazi Germany death squads.
I recognized him, too: Jarrett William Smith, a former U.S. soldier who had served roughly two years in federal prison for distributing bomb-making instructions on the internet and suggesting to a contact who turned out to be an FBI informant that he should car-bomb a congressman.
Three months earlier, I reported that Smith was part of a squad of masked Nazis who’d tried to intimidate patrons at a drag show in Sanford.
I recognized two of the other men as well. David William Fair had attended the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol with his mother and founded the Southern Sons Active Club, a white nationalist group that openly endorses violence.
Dressed in a T-shirt and black balaclava and carrying a camera was Kai Nix, then an enlisted soldier at Fort Bragg and active Patriot Front member. Nix was the apparent operator of an encrypted Telegram channel called Appalachian Archives that doxxed journalists and other perceived enemies.
About 15 minutes after they showed up on my security camera, the Appalachian Archives account posted a photo of Kauffmann, Smith, Fair, and the two other men giving Hitler salutes on my lawn.
“Opposition move Freely when they feel immune,” read the caption. “Remove That Privilege.”
Kauffmann’s sign, now visible, bore a similar message: “Freedom of press ≠ freedom of consequence.”
They had gone to some trouble to organize this photo op. Kauffmann lived eight and a half hours away in southwestern Tennessee; Smith, three hours and 15 minutes near Myrtle Beach; Fair, two hours and 20 minutes from the Midlands region of South Carolina; and Nix from West End, about an hour away.
According to their postings, they then made a pilgrimage to the historic marker commemorating the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, in which Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis fatally gunned down five members of the Communist Workers Party who had been building a multiracial movement to organize textile workers in the city.
A photo published on the Appalachian Archives shows Fair in a skull mask and two of the other men grasping the sign pole in a celebratory pose. The caption for the photo highlights the body count and the fact that the Nazi and KKK defendants successfully claimed self-defense to beat their charges in both state and federal trials.
The message was unmistakable: They believed they could silence critical reporting—through violence, if necessary—with impunity.
‘A beautiful escalation’
The avalanche of events that had culminated in this display are the result of my singular, obsessive quest to uncover who was responsible for shooting two electrical substations in Moore County in December 2022. I’m a reporter who covers right-wing extremism, particularly the most violent segment of the white power movement, across the United States, and here was an incident making national headlines right in my home state.
The attack shut off power for 40,000 customers across most of the county for five days. An 87-year-old woman who depended on an oxygen machine died. The medical examiner ruled her death a homicide, and logic dictates that if the perpetrator(s) are caught, they will be charged with murder.
The attack took place amid protests of a drag show at a historic theater in downtown Southern Pines that was attended by members of the Proud Boys, the fascist street gang that led the siege on the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
This attack had the hallmarks of a strain of white power violence known as “militant accelerationism.” Its adherents promote a militant vanguard committed to terrorism and insurrection as a means of bringing about a white ethno-state.
Examples of neo-Nazis targeting the power grid are plentiful: In October 2020, the FBI disrupted a terror plot involving two former Marines assigned to Camp Lejeune who officials said intended to cause widespread blackouts and then carry out an assassination campaign in hopes of sparking a race war. And only two months after the Moore County substation attack, the cofounder of the neo-Nazi terror group Atomwaffen was arrested and later found guilty of plotting to carry out a series of coordinated strikes against substations in Maryland to “lay waste to the city of Baltimore.”
Illustration of attack on electrical grid (Roxanne Cooper/MidJourney)
After the Moore County attack, the Australia-based antifascist research outfit White Rose Society reached out to me to flag two Telegram channels as potentially of interest in my pursuit.
A Telegram user nicknamed “BTC” had forwarded a post from one channel to another celebrating the power outage.
“Last night’s magnificent sabotage attack on Moore County’s electrical grid marks a beautiful escalation,” the post read, adding that it sent “a terrifyingly clear message to the LGBTQ+ community.
“The consequences will vary, but they will be severe,” the post warned.
BTC posted what appeared to be a damage assessment: “The area is experiencing increased emergency calls due to the lack of power,” adding that “auto accidents have occurred because traffic lights are out. People who rely on oxygen have placed emergency calls. … ”
BTC also posted a PDF of Militant Accelerationism, a publication from the neo-Nazi propaganda outfit known as the Terrorgram Collective that provided tutorials for carrying out mass shootings.
I later learned “BTC” was Matthew Robert Allison, a 36-year-old disc jockey from Boise, Idaho and one of the Terrorgram Collective’s two U.S. leaders. In September 2024, he was indicted on multiple felony charges, including solicitation of hate crimes, solicitation of murder of federal officials, and distribution of information relating to explosives and destructive devices. The U.S. State Department now designates Terrorgram as a global terrorist organization.
Allison’s lawyer declined to make his client available for comment.
On Telegram, speculation immediately erupted about who was responsible for the Moore County attack.
One user mentioned that the National Socialist Resistance Front had a presence in North Carolina. Less than two weeks after the attack, someone hung a banner off a Moore County highway overpass advertising the group’s Telegram address and slogan, “Bring it all down.”
About a week before Christmas, I reported for Raw Story, where I have been a staff writer since 2021, that the National Socialist Resistance Front was seeking to exploit the Moore County attack for propaganda purposes. The group mocked the story in its Telegram channel without exactly denying involvement in the attack, writing, “Just one banner drop, and we’re blamed for all sorts of misdeeds. The next time that we do one, they’ll probably blame us for the OKC bombing.”
No specific evidence has emerged to tie any members to the attack, though my attempt to sift through the Telegram chatter yielded a tip that would forever change my life.
As a result of my reporting, an antifascist researcher known as “Chirp” alerted me about Kauffmann’s interest in accelerationism and harassment tactics. (I know Chirp’s real identity, but have pledged to maintain their anonymity. Like a handful of other sources, Chirp scours digital communications of violent extremists, and sometimes infiltrates chats with pseudonymous accounts.)
Kauffmann was the leader of the Tennessee Active Club and the most prominent figure in the Tennessee neo-Nazi scene. He also has a history of domestic violence. In 2020, he and three other neo-Nazis were charged with disorderly conduct for attempting to assault Black Lives Matter protesters. The charge was ultimately dismissed. Kauffmann responded to a request for comment for this story by saying, “Go f--- your mother, before I do.”
Around the time of the Moore County attack, the Tennessee Active Club Telegram channel featured a video of Kauffmann burning a BIPOC trans flag as someone offscreen screamed, “Fuck you, tranny fucks. Get super-AIDS and fucking die.”
In late November 2022, Kauffmann appeared at a Christmas toy drive outside of Knoxville hosted by an LGBTQ+ group and screamed in the faces of local antifascists who’d come to protect attendees, according to a video I reviewed.
In January 2023, Kauffmann protested a drag show at a brewpub in Cookeville, Tennessee, throwing a Hitler salute as he arrived and unfurling a swastika flag, which both his group and antifascist activists documented online.
After leaving the protest, the Cookeville police stopped Kauffmann’s Honda Civic because the front-seat passenger, a Proud Boy-turned-Nazi named Robert Bray, threw a stink bomb. The officers let the men go with a warning. Body-camera video captured the officers telling the men they could have been charged with aggravated assault, a Class D felony. One of the officers expressed concern that enforcing the law would only turn the neo-Nazis “hostile” and “make them want to retaliate and make it even bigger.”
Kauffmann later told a friendly interviewer that he decided to display the swastika flag in Cookeville because “the point of us being there was essentially to intimidate them.” “Them” being “the antifascists, the child groomers, the homosexuals.”
That summer, I started trying to conceive a project that would take bits and pieces of information I’d gathered in the aftermath of the Moore County substation attack to reveal connections between the disparate groups and figures in the white power movement.
One name kept coming up time and again: Blood and Soil Crew, better known online as 2-1-19— the alphanumeric code for its acronym—and also by the name Revolutionary White Brotherhood, which it briefly rebranded as in 2023. The group had first caught my attention around the time of the Moore County attack through posts in the Telegram chats celebrating the blackout. I kept coming across the group in graffiti shown in news reports and online boasts.
In early August 2023, local news outlets in Pensacola, Florida described a 17-day vandalism spree that targeted two synagogues and a mosque, among other locations. Four teenagers were arrested. Some of the graffiti included the initials “RWB.” The group later claimed responsibility for antisemitic graffiti in New Hampshire and vandalism of a Martin Luther King Jr. monument in Concord, North Carolina.
At that point, I had yet to contact any of the group’s members. But I had written about Kauffmann’s run-in with the police and his friends’ efforts to instigate conflict at drag shows.
Shots fired
The Appalachian Archives Telegram channel appeared on August 13, 2023. One of its first moves was to dox me: my professional headshot, bio, street address, and photos of my house, as well as my wife’s name and our phone numbers.
Another early post provided a mission statement for the channel: “To provide Tools of Privacy, Safety and Knowledge to the Activists and Operator. To expose those that attack our people from the Dark, bring them Forth to the Light. We will make it Dangerous for the Reporter to Report Freely.”
The following month, the channel also posted the Terrorgram Collective’s list of “high-value targets” for assassination, which includes a U.S. senator, a federal judge, a U.S. attorney, mayors, and scientists involved in vaccine research.
At the end of August, my wife and I celebrated our anniversary in Asheville. We had a lovely lunch at a café, floated down the French Broad River in a kayak, and checked into our Airbnb in a mountainside neighborhood of winding streets.
The next morning, we were headed out for a day of exploring chocolatiers and bookshops when I got a frantic phone call from another trusted antifascist researcher, “Arel.”
Arel had received an email from an anonymous source who purported to be attempting to infiltrate Nazi circles, but whom they suspected was an actual Nazi playing double agent to expose antifascist researchers.
Sean Kauffmann, who leads the Tennessee Active Club, in a booking photograph from Perry County Jail. Courtesy Perry County Sheriff's Office
Arel’s source, whose email username was “Just1onKali,” wrote that Tennessee Active Club was “currently under federal investigation due to the leader ‘Boog’ [one of Kauffmann’s nicknames] ordering a younger member, youth, to commit a drive-by on a reporter’s house that was investigating them.”
Four months earlier, there had been a drive-by-shooting committed at the home of a Tennessee journalist. Kauffmann had posted the names of the journalist and his wife, along with their home address just two days later in yet another neo-Nazi Telegram chat.
And while Just1onKali’s motives might be dubious, I believe the tip about a federal investigation was accurate, though no one from Tennessee Active Club, including Kauffmann, has been charged. Months later, I received a copy of a federal grand jury subpoena from the same email account that supported the claim. The FBI Nashville Field Office declined to confirm or deny the existence of any investigation to The Assembly.
But Arel had more: Just1onKali claimed Kauffmann had also attempted to persuade a North Carolina associate to kill me, but the associate declined. (Kauffman called the allegation “unsubstantiated rumors with zero validity” in response to a request for comment.)
I probably should have been more alarmed. But my way of dealing with such threats is to keep digging.
‘I’m with the FBI’
One week before Thanksgiving 2023, I was pulling into my driveway with my daughters in the car and spotted a woman sitting in a parked car across the street. She opened the door and walked toward my driver’s side window. I assumed she was having car trouble, but as soon as I stopped the car, I chided myself for compromising our safety by engaging with a stranger.
“I’m with the FBI,” the agent said, giving me her card. She told me that she was obligated under “duty to warn” to inform me that I had been doxxed. She confirmed to me that the dox had been issued by Appalachian Archives.
My older daughter seemed shaken. Why was the FBI at our house? Was I in trouble?
No, I tried to reassure her, the agent is here to make sure we’re safe.
I harbored strong reservations about talking to the FBI beyond seeking information in my capacity as a reporter. I was not ignorant of the history of the agency looking the other way when vigilante violence was perpetrated against Black civil rights activists and leftists.
But at that point, I didn’t think I had much choice but to hear the agent out and take in any information that might help keep my family safe.
Four days after the FBI agent’s visit, a new dox targeting me appeared on the Appalachian Archives channel. The more recent Appalachian Archives dox had been posted the day before, and this one included screenshots of reporting inquiries I had sent to Jarrett William Smith and David William Fair.
“Jordan Green has recently gone on a harassment campaign where he’s harassed individuals’ families and personal friends, either via telephone or confronting them at their occupations,” the post said. “The harassment of our people will not go unnoticed.”
The 2119 channel—the group I’d gotten interested in because of its prominence in neo-Nazi graffiti—reposted the dox with an administrator’s appreciation: “The bastard above has been found out to be harassing our boys. 2119 will not stand for this system proxy to go unnamed.”
As my reporting project intensified in the following weeks, our family began an episodic peregrination, staying in one hotel for a couple days, and then relocating to another, or staying a couple nights with family members. We might book a hotel for a day or two when I planned to contact hostile sources or publish a story, while other times the decision would be prompted by a threatening voicemail message or online chatter. My editors and Raw Story leaders never hesitated when I asked for reimbursement.
On one such night, I picked my 10-year-old up from after-school and informed her that we would be staying at a hotel again. As we drove home to pack our bags, she burst into tears: “Why do you have to write these stories that make Nazis want to kill us?”
I believed both then and now that it’s important to set an example of courage and integrity for our children. That meant doing the right thing—in this case telling the truth—even when it’s hard. The obvious trauma my daughter was going through as a direct result of my vocation tested that conviction.
She was starting middle school the next year, and the acceptance of her peers was becoming increasingly important to her. Being a target of violent Nazis was not a positive mark of distinction. I sensed that the aggression directed at us was degrading her sense of self-worth.
But my belief that we were onto bigger connections between these online groups and their offline activities continued to grow. Over the summer of 2023, Chirp began comparing notes with another group of antifascist researchers known as the “Appalachia Research Club.” The group had helped me identify a handful of local 2119 members, including Noah Houran, a 17-year-old who lived with his parents in coastal North Carolina and claimed to have been a Nazi since age 13.
Houran had started his own Telegram channel, where he circulated terrorist manifestos and military tactical manuals, including Terrorgram publications. BTC even made an appearance.
At that point, BTC’s identity was still unknown, though I wasn’t the only one trying to figure out who he was. ProPublica’s James Bandler described BTC as “the white whale of the Terrorgram Collective.” Pierre Vaux, an investigator in London, described him as “a superspreader” of white power propaganda. The U.S. Department of Justice was also tracking the man they’d later describe as the co-leader of “a transnational terrorist group.”
‘Get somewhere safe’
After church on the first Sunday of 2024, I heard a knock at the front door. Odd, I thought, because we don’t get a lot of visitors, and my wife had been planning to go grocery shopping.
A smiling man dressed in a Domino’s uniform held out a box. We hadn’t ordered pizza. I told him there must be a mistake. He pulled out the receipt and read my name. I reiterated that we hadn’t ordered it and weren’t going to accept the delivery.
My wife came to see what was going on.
“You shouldn’t have opened the door,” she said, panic rising in her voice.
“Get a picture of the car,” she added.
Twenty minutes later, I received an email from Just1onKali, the same source who’d warned that Kauffman had tried to put a hit out on me: “I did hear that 2119 just sent a pizza to your house.”
I made a note in my security log and transferred the photo of the delivery driver to a folder on my laptop. Then my phone rang. The voice on the other end, muffled and strange, identified herself as the FBI agent I’d met in my driveway. She asked me if I was at home.
After everything that had happened, I was becoming deeply distrustful of everyone. I asked her to tell me something that would prove that it was actually her and not someone spoofing her number. She texted a photo of her badge, and explained she was recovering from a case of laryngitis.
She had an update for me: Appalachian Archives was circulating a photo of my license plate on Telegram.
“We hope it’s just chatter,” she said, “but these guys have done drive-bys before.”
A couple minutes later, the agent called back and asked if a pizza had been delivered to my house that I didn’t order.
Yes, I confirmed.
“Get somewhere safe,” she said.
My wife was at the grocery store by then, and she’d driven my car. I called her and told her not to come home; meet us at the American Airlines counter at Piedmont Triad International Airport instead. We weren’t planning to leave town; I chose the airport because it was a well-lit public place with surveillance cameras in the event that someone tried to follow us.
The girls and I threw on winter coats, but I can’t remember if we had the time or presence of mind to grab toothbrushes or clothes. I double-filled the dogs’ food and water bowls, not sure when we’d come home. My older daughter cried as we walked out the backdoor. Would we be safe? she asked. What about the dogs?
We booked a room at a boutique hotel that pays homage to Greensboro’s textile legacy, and got takeout from Outback Steakhouse.
The next day, a 2119 member known as Saint posted a photo of me peering warily from the front door on Telegram.
I could tell from the angle that the photographer had been staking out our house from about two doors down the street.
My security footage showed a black Toyota Tacoma pickup parked in that location for 20 minutes that departed just before the delivery driver returned to his car. Antifascist researchers helped trace the license plate to Nix, the soldier at Fort Bragg.
It was clear that the young man driving the black pickup was someone who carried a camera with a zoom lens. Whoever had been operating the Appalachian Archives channel—since renamed “American Archives”—had previously posted photos from one of Kauffmann’s marches in Nashville, and a self-defense training that Fair’s group hosted in South Carolina. Each of the photo collections included captions stating that Appalachian Archives “was invited to document” the events, establishing that the operator of the account was not just a doxxer, but also a documentarian for the movement. (Reached by phone for comment, Fair said: “Not today. I do not believe in talking to journalists. I wish the best for you.”)
Roughly a month after the pizza stunt came the photo-op on my front lawn. That photo was taken at 4:59 p.m. Minutes later, it appeared on the American Archives channel. All of this circumstantial evidence convinced me and the other researchers that Nix was running American Archives.
Nix was arrested in August 2024 on federal charges unrelated to trying to intimidate me. Nix is currently confined to home detention while awaiting trial on charges of allegedly selling stolen weapons to an FBI informant and lying on his armed services application by failing to disclose his membership in “a group dedicated to the use of violence or force to overthrow the United States government.”
Last month, Judge Terrence Boyle agreed to continue the case into the August term as Nix and the government negotiate a possible resolution before trial. (Neither Nix nor his lawyer responded to requests for comment for this story.)
‘It is a big danger for them’
In early 2024, a Telegram user named Unitate, who had come up in my research into 2119 and appeared to be an American teenager living abroad, attempted to communicate with me—or what he thought was me.
Chirp often used pseudonymous accounts to join semi-private Nazi chats. The 2119 members had become suspicious that the account was me, and kicked it out. Then, they started sending direct messages to the account. Despite Chirp insisting that they were not me, the Nazis refused to believe it.
“Hello journo faggot, please kill yourself,” Unitate messaged on January 26, 2024.
“I’m sorry, who are you again?” Chirp asked.
“Agent Hitler, FBI,” Unitate replied. He asked how my wife was doing, using her first name.
“I’m heading to Greensboro soon and we planned a girls night together,” he taunted.
It was ugly, and I figured my wife was already traumatized enough, so I didn’t tell her. I filed it in a folder on my laptop among a bulging collection of digital threats, and didn’t give it any more thought for more than a year.
Then, on March 28, 2024, my editor alerted me to a threatening message received at Raw Story’s email inbox for corrections.
The anonymous sender said they were delivering “a warning for the workers of the Raw Story,” and that they belonged to “another group with an international team.” Thanks to 2119’s efforts, they had my personal information.
“We live in a time when it is easy to obtain documents online for the creation of devices that cause harm,” the sender wrote. “We however do not want to hurt the family of Jordan Green as they have no part in his work. Therefor we consider as something that we would like passed on to him. If you have your family in your house from this point on it is a big danger for them.”
The message continued: “The groups that you have undermined in the past are just young people who are bored. We are different. Thanks to the wars happening, many of us, including those in our North America division, are war trained and know how to use weapons.”
The emailer signed off with four letters: AAST.
I didn’t know what that meant. But months later, Tina-Desiree Berg, an extremism reporter in Los Angeles, reached out to let me know my personal information was circulating in a Telegram chat.
Outside of management at Raw Story, few people knew about the threat email. But as we compared notes on the shadowy users in neo-Nazi Telegram chats, Berg reminded me about some of her previous reporting on online child exploitation networks. Some of the teenagers involved in the child exploitation network had splintered into smaller groups that embraced militant accelerationism, taking cues from Terrorgram. One of these groups was called AAST.
I scoured my archives of chats frequented by 2119 members and their associates for references to AAST.
The group came up in a June 2024 chat called Esoteric Frog Bunker, when the chat’s owner disclosed that Unitate was also in the AAST general chat.
As to Unitate’s actual involvement in AAST, it’s hard to say whether it was real or just a posture. There was little reporting or academic research on the group, beyond Berg’s previous story.
But AAST came up again later that year, when the Italian National Police announced that they’d placed two young men, ages 18 and 20, under house arrest. They were accused of being part of the Russian accelerationist network known as AAST. They were accused of recruiting others to harass Muslims and other targeted groups by slashing their tires and promoting the use of homemade explosives.
A glimpse into what might lie ahead
Why am I telling this story? If personal considerations were the only imperative for committing the story to posterity, I wouldn’t be telling it. Revealing my vulnerability or giving the Nazis the satisfaction of knowing the toll that this has taken on our family would hardly be worth it.
Here’s the reason: Ultimately, whatever the cost, I believe with all my being that the world needs to understand the threat of militant accelerationism.
Just from the breadth of people who have harassed my family—not all of them are even captured in this account—and their associates who have been implicated in various crimes, it should be clear by now that teenage boys and young men don’t wake up one day on their own and decide to hurl a brick through a synagogue window or menace people at a drag show. And there’s plenty of evidence it can get far worse: The Terrorgram Collective has claimed credit for a mass shooting at a gay bar in Slovakia in October 2022.
None of these actions take place in a vacuum. Nazis with accelerationist tendencies are part of a larger community of people with shared beliefs and goals who are goading each other to commit ever more brazen acts of intimidation. They are part of a transnational community linked through the internet whose members exchange racist jokes and gore videos as part of a program of a sustained desensitization effort to lower their inhibitions toward violence.
Militant accelerationists instinctively distrust the political process, and for the most part seem wary of Trump (who, after all, is an ardent supporter of Israel and whose daughter is married to a Jew). But now their movement is taking place alongside a more mainstream drift toward fascism in the United States as media figures like Tucker Carlson endorse the white supremacist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, and Elon Musk and Steve Bannon give Hitler salutes, and Vice President JD Vance embraces Germany’s “extremist” Alternative for Deutschland party. At the very least, militant accelerationists are now operating in a more permissive environment.
“We have seen a clear and intentional obfuscation of the nature of the domestic terrorism threat from the administration,” Jon Lewis, a senior researcher at George Washington University’s Project on Extremism, told me. “That does not make us safer.”
Lewis pointed to similarities in language between a recent Truth Social post by President Trump and the manifesto of Payton Gendron, the white supremacist mass shooter who deliberately targeted and fatally shot 10 African Americans in a Buffalo, New York grocery store in 2022.
Payton Gendron, seen in court. Fox News/screen grab
Here’s Trump: “Biden let 21 million unvetted, illegal aliens flood into the country from some of the most dangerous and dysfunctional nations on earth—many of them rapists, murderers, and terrorists. The tsunami of illegals has destroyed Americans’ public schools, hospitals, parks, community resources, and living conditions. They have stolen American jobs, consumed billions of dollars in free welfare, and turned once idyllic communities, like Springfield, Ohio, into Third World nightmares. … Polling shows overwhelming public support for getting the illegals out, and that is exactly what we will do.”
Here’s Gendron: “Mass immigration will disenfranchise us, subvert our nations, destroy our communities, destroy our ethnic ties, destroy our cultures, destroy our peoples. … We must crush immigration and deport those invaders already living on our soil.”
Language emanating from the White House “would not be out of place in a mass shooter manifesto,” Lewis said. “These things matter. The weight that is given by the media to an official press release that is openly white supremacist, all of that creates a permissive environment. All of that is the thing that eventually pushes another person to carry out an act of targeted violence.”
Meanwhile, the militant accelerationist threat is rapidly evolving, with a dizzying array of new groups popping up along a spectrum from nihilism to national socialism. It’s urgent that we understand the threats to date, simply to have a workable baseline to assess what might unfold tomorrow.
The events of this story largely transpired before Donald Trump won the 2024 election and returned to the White House. I worry that the months of harassment and fear my family and I endured are a glimpse into what might lie ahead for others.
Transients, like us
After we had cycled through a series of hotels in February 2024, my bosses concluded that it wasn’t a sustainable path and found an apartment for us on the northwest outskirts of Greensboro through a corporate housing service where we ended up staying for three months.
It felt oddly comforting to be in a place where we lived among strangers. The apartment complex sat in the flight path of the airport, and I enjoyed watching the planes as they began their descent to the runway. Many of the vehicles in the parking lot bore out-of-state plates, and I suspected many were recent arrivals seeking temporary lodging or people on extended stays for business. Transients, like us.
On the last Sunday of May, the girls and I took advantage of the apartment complex pool.
As the warm glow of late-afternoon sunlight bathed the pool, I felt like I could finally exhale. Both of my daughters have always loved the water, and it felt good to give them an hour or two of carefree release.
Despite the fact that she hadn’t learned to swim, my youngest daughter bounded toward the pool. I scrambled to pull my shoes off as I watched her step into the deep end and sink beneath the surface. I dashed into the water and lifted her by her torso into the air. She grinned, completely unfazed. She was delighted as I bounced her up and down.
My older daughter bobbed in the water, pushing her toes off the bottom of the pool and propelling herself forward, gliding through the water graceful as a seahorse.
It seemed that we might be free, if only for a fleeting moment.
