Isolated Incidents

  • Roberts, Zach D
  • Year Grant Awarded: 2022

Isolated Incidents is a multi-year ongoing project that has and will continue to document the far right as it evolves through American politics. Within the limits of the current project I am the only creator involved.

While I have been working on this project for around 10 years now it only has been recently that the different fields of journalism that I cover have truly come together.
1. Right-wing political figures
2. Voting Rights/Civil Rights
3. COVID
4. And more recently white domestic extremism.

Over the years before the Trump administration, the far right of American politics kept its distance from actual domestic extremism in the forms that we see now – people like Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes, militia groups etc. Now they regularly appear on stage with them, share each others social media messages and even defend their rights in Congress. Just recently Sen. Ted Cruz groveled to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson for daring to say that the people that broke into the Capitol on Jan 6th were terrorists. Right-wing extremism has reached the mainstream – and it’s not even hiding now. The parallels to the KKK’s “Invisible Empire” of the 20’s and 30’s are incredible.

I’ll be collaborating with educational institutions that are open to having me speak and show my photos and video to them as I have throughout this ongoing project. I’ve already spoken to a high school class in Upstate NY and to a college class (two different semesters) in Tennessee. I also share my work with activist groups that work to uncover nazis and other people that are dangerous to the community via my website ZDRoberts.com. My work will also be published in non-profit publications such as The Progressive, NationofChange.org and through the Palast Investigative Fund.

The pandemic has only worked to force a mutation into the far-right and has in many ways helped them grow new members, especially after Jan 6th where much of the leadership has been either indicted to jailed.

The end of the project, if there is one (this isn’t a problem that’s going away) will be the far-rights work to absorb the anti-vaxx movement into their own. We are already seeing this happen at many marches where fascist groups work to co-opt antivaxxers, such as in NYC when Nick Fuentes’ Groypers joined “anti-mandate” rallies.