On a warm October day, a series of cars pulled into a gas station in De Kalb, a town two hours to the east of Dallas, to ask for directions. But they weren’t lost travelers. They’d been told to meet there as a waypoint for their real destination: a conference organized by the Aryan Freedom Network (AFN), a neo-Nazi organization based in Texas.
The conference’s location wasn’t particularly inconspicuous. Around four dozen cars were parked at a house with a large Confederate flag flying outside just down the road from the gas station. In 2021, AFN held a similarly advertised conference in Longview. While the announcement of their plans drew condemnation from the city council and active precautions by local law enforcement in advance of the gathering, the location was never discovered. But this time, things were different.
Unbeknownst to the AFN conference organizers and attendees, members of the nonprofit Task Force Butler Institute (TFBI) had infiltrated AFN’s digital spaces by passing the neo-Nazi’s vetting procedures and were sitting nearby in an RV. They’d come prepared with an aerial drone so they could identify attendees and map out the neo-Nazi network without putting any of their members at risk.
