Tracking extremism through data: Decoherence Media fills a void in reporting on the far-right

Tristan Lee co-founded Decoherence Media. He is a data scientist and an award-winning journalist. Prior to this new venture, Lee worked as a data scientist for Bellingcat.

Some of the people we report on are quite scary. In 2024, Steven Monacelli and I wrote an article for The Texas Observer about some members of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, whose members had assaulted people. We were looking at their rap sheets, and these were very serious, very dangerous people with documented, violent histories.”

Tristan Lee

Last October, Tristan Lee and Jennefer Harper teamed up to launch Decoherence Media, an independent, nonprofit news outlet. Lee previously worked as a data scientist at Bellingcat. Harper’s professional background is in education, and she also worked as a legal assistant and private investigator. Their research and reporting focus at Decoherence is on far-right ideology, terror groups and anti-democratic movements.

“We saw, especially at the beginning of the second Trump administration, that a lot of the outlets and organizations that had done a very good job covering the far-right beat had either closed down, were significantly downsized or changed their mission. … A lot of outlets are no longer doing the kind of reporting on the extreme right that used to be kind of a solid watchdog beat,” Lee told E&P in January.

Decoherence Media co-founder Jennefer Harper has a professional background in education and private investigation. She leverages open and closed sources for her research into far-right extremism.

“Jennefer and I, our experience is mainly in the very extreme right — not like the Proud Boys or Patriot Front, but hardcore neo-Nazis who are essentially terrorist groups that want to do terrorism against the state, instigate a race war and cause societal unrest,” Lee explained.

Their seed money came from Lee’s savings, but they are developing their longer-term fundraising and sustainability plans, including philanthropic funding and individual donors who support their mission.

“The overall state of funding journalism and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in 2026 seems to be a bit rough out there, so we’re taking an all-of-the-above strategy,” Lee said.

Their team is small — just Lee, Harper and Board Director Cooper Brinson, an attorney.

To give you a sense of their reporting, their website has a recent story about Grok — X platform’s AI chatbot — enabling neo-Nazis to create photos of public figures sporting bikinis bearing swastikas. Lee and Harper tested similar prompts in other AI chatbots, which refused to produce such images.

The team also produced a series about data found in the “Rope Culture server.” This was a digital treasure trove of emails, documents, images, visitor logs and IP addresses of people around the world who were participating in a far-right neo-fascist and neo-Nazi forum.

“We published three articles on it, as well as a guide for the interface we developed, and the video version of the guide,” Lee said. “That is a good example of the kind of investigations we are looking to do. It combines investigative reporting, a lot of open-source methods and a strong data component, with an interactive data interface — and makes it all publicly accessible. … The goal here is empower journalists and researchers to be able to build on that work and get their own scoops.”

Decoherence Media was founded in October 2025 by Tristan Lee and Jennefer Harper. They’re researching and producing data-intensive reporting about far-right extremists operating in the U.S. and abroad.

In addition to Harper’s and Lee’s reporting, Decoherence Media plans to publish reporting from other researchers in this space.

The co-founders are cognizant of the dangers of doing this type of work, which puts them on the radar of powerful interests and violent people.

“Some of the people we report on are quite scary,” he said. “In 2024, Steven Monacelli and I wrote an article for The Texas Observer about some members of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, whose members had assaulted people. We were looking at their rap sheets, and these were very serious, very dangerous people with documented, violent histories.

“I wouldn’t say it keeps us up at night, but the fact that these people pose a threat to us is even more reason why they need to be reported on,” he continued. “They want to discourage journalists from investigating them. One of the reasons that members of Atomwaffen Division were arrested was that they were threatening journalists. So, they want to intimidate us, but we can’t let that happen.”

Gretchen A. Peck is a contributing editor to Editor & Publisher. She's reported for E&P since 2010 and welcomes comments at gretchenapeck@gmail.com.