Our jobs as journalists can call on us to witness awful events, dwell in dangerous places and spend time with unsavory people.
Longtime Press Democrat reporter Phil Barber has delved into one of those dark corners for the past two years, tracking the activity of antisemitic and white supremacist hatemongers in the North Bay.
Those threads of American extremism are not new, but they have found a wider outlet coming out of the pandemic, when trolls turned up increasingly in the online public comment sessions at local government meetings.
Barber’s reporting has followed the tentacles of those web-based actors to our neighborhoods, where some hatemongers have plastered Bay Area streets with their neo-Nazi propaganda.
He’s also shown how incidents of antisemitic hate — on the rise in America since 2019, according to the Anti-Defamation League — have undermined a sense of well-being and safety in our houses of worship and other public places.
Of late, he’s focused on local governments’ struggle to rein in online hate speech while still affording people the chance to participate in public meetings. The upshot: Many of those hit by hatemongers have ended online public comment altogether.