In Loving Memory of Laura & Mike Sullivan

We lost one of the greats last month. Laura Sullivan was an antifascist researcher, a photographer, a journalist, a friend, a mother, and a mentor. She was a legend and we were lucky to have her while we did.

You can make a donation to One People's Project, the antifascist organization Laura was involved in for more than two decades, here:
https://onepeoplesproject.com/donate/

Daryle Lamont Jenkins' tribute to his longtime friends & collaborators, Laura & Mike Sullivan: https://idavox.com/index.php/2026/05/07/the-sullivans-much-love-and-rest-in-peace/

Abner Hauge's tribute to Laura & Mike: https://leftcoastrightwatch.org/articles/in-memoriam-laura-mike-sullivan/

Laura's Obituary: https://obituaries.carewellcremations.com/laura-sullivan 

Sources & Further Reading:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jeffrey-clark-dc-neo-nazi-arrested_n_5beb99ffe4b0caeec2bf24e5

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nazi-punch-antifa_n_59e13ae9e4b03a7be580ce6f 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/02/fbi-court-battle-identity-imf-protest-informants

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool zone media. There is no weird little guy today.
I don't have a new guy to tell you about.
I have something for you, some miniso type material that'll
be on your feed today too. But first, I want

(00:24):
to tell you about someone who had a profound impact
on the way I look at my weird little guys.
I want to tell you about my friend Laura. I
bitterly regret that our final goodbye last week was the
first time I'd seen her in years. I wish it
had been a proper goodbye, and not one whispered to

(00:47):
a stone and a cemetery. I guess we can chalk
that up to another lesson that Laura taught me. I
won't let that happen again. Some of you might already
know Laura or her work anyway, even if you don't
know it. She never craved the Spotlight. But if you
were active on Twitter following anti fascist news when that

(01:09):
became a popular sort of thing to follow online in
Trump's first term, you've seen her work. I know you have.
Laura Sullivan. Laura Senne isis Antifa, Jenta, the Liberty Lamp,
Saytan Worshiper. She went by many names, Say ten Sei,

(01:30):
t a n it's a funny joke. For more than
two decades, Laura worked with Darryl Lamont Jenkins at One
People's Project, an anti fascist nonprofit organization. But more than that,
more than the work she did, the photos she took
of Nazi rallies, the years of knowledge she curated and

(01:52):
made available to other researchers, more than any of that,
she was a mentor to so many of us in
this work. An example to be followed, sure, but more
than that, an incredible voice of encouragement. On Left Coast
Right Watch, my friend and colleague Abner wrote a beautiful

(02:12):
tribute to Laura and her husband Mike, who also passed
away just two years ago, crediting Laura as the first
voice of encouragement early in their career, someone without whom
they wouldn't still be doing the work that they do.
Laura had a real eye for potential. My friend Darren Gallagher,

(02:34):
a researcher in Pennsylvania, wrote on Blue Sky about meeting
Laura and Daryl more than a decade ago. Aaron was
looking for more information on some particular neo Nazis active
in her area, and Laura had photos of them. Laura
and Daryl knew all of their names. I remember feeling

(02:54):
so relieved that someone else already knew who they were
and had been keeping tabs. Aaron wrote, and that's what
I keep coming back to, what I know I will
keep coming back to for years to come. It's so
comforting to know someone is keeping track of all of this,

(03:16):
Someone knows who all these people are and what they're doing.
Someone is keeping track of it. Years ago, a lifetime.
It feels like Laura gave me an incredible gift. It
was very early on in my involvement in actively publicly

(03:37):
researching the far right. Was still new, still scary, and
I wasn't very good at it, to be honest. I'd
already gotten a fair number of threats. That's far for
the course, but I had gotten one that scared me
a little. It was pretty graphic. It included a badly
photoshop depiction of my own body, as well as my

(04:00):
two dogs, mutilated and strung up on meat hooks. It
was unsettling. I didn't like it, and I didn't have
the skills to figure out who sent it not back then,
but Laura did, and she found him. She gave me
the peace of mind of knowing not just who that

(04:21):
man was, but that he could be found, that guys
like him could be found. And when you find them,
they're not as scary as they hope you'll think they are.
Even when Laura and I weren't in touch, I felt

(04:42):
her in my life. I still do. You wouldn't believe
how often I'm digging around on the Internet for information
on some obscure white supremacist figure from a decade or
two ago. And there she is. It's a photo she
took at some tiny Nazi rally ten years ago, information
she passed to a journalist. It's an ancient website with

(05:03):
broken links and twenty ten era web design, but it's her.
It's her work, her words, her pictures, her relentless pursuit
of cataloging and tracking these men. And she was relentless.
But she was kind. God, she was kind in ways

(05:25):
I didn't entirely understand. Sometimes she understood the threat posed
by white nationalists, Neo Nazis, Confederate's bigots of all stripes.
She knew what they believed and what they were capable of,
more than most of us ever will. But she never
stopped believing in their humanity. I never understood her willingness

(05:48):
to take soup over to Richard Spencer's house when he
was sick and there was no one to take care
of him. But she would do things like that. She
would talk to people and worked. Scott Kelly Ernest, a
former white nationalist and one time forum moderator over on Stormfront,

(06:09):
credits Laura with helping pull them out of the movement,
and today Scott helps others do the same. Scott helps
other people leave the movement. On Blue Sky, Scott wrote,
rest and power, Laura and Mike, you helped make me
a real human. Her kindness did that. Back in twenty seventeen,

(06:37):
Laura told Luke O'Brien in an article on Huffington Post,
you have to choose between what makes you feel better
and what is actually right and effective. And god damn it,
she was right, wasn't she. But I rolled my eyes
at her at the idea of baking cookies for a
lonely Nazi. But sometimes sometimes it worked. Sometimes she got

(07:02):
a little bit of information. Sometimes she saved their souls,
and who knows how many lives that saves when that
change ripples out into the universe. I'm not saying you
should make a cake for your local clansmen. You almost
certainly should not, But Laura was something special. I spent

(07:26):
most of the day in the car on Friday, and
I drove to Richmond first to pick up my buddy Goad.
You heard his voice last week and that old clip
of us hollering at Thomas Rousseau. And he's another person
that Laura saw the potential in. They met all the
way back in twenty fourteen when God was just trolling
his local neo confederates, blasting rap music at them during

(07:49):
their sad little demonstrations in Richmond, and he credits Laura
with introducing him to the idea that those sad little
racists on his local street corner actually connected between much
larger movement. The funeral was brief, it was beautiful. It

(08:13):
was good to see Daryl Launt Jenkins again. It had
been years. I think the last time I saw both
Darryl and Laura together. It was a Proud Boy rally
and I think it was Philadelphia. I just remember it
being so cold and I was on my own. I
think I was roaming around trying to see things, and

(08:34):
I ran into Laura and Darryl and she made me
go inside. She took me inside and made me stay
in there till I stopped shaking, because that's just who
she was. I really would have rather been back in Philly,
freezing my ass off, waiting for somebody to do something stupid,
than standing there in the cemetery. I think we all

(08:56):
would have. Daryl's eulogy was perfect, was a beautiful recollection
of their friendship and their shared passion for the work.
There's a link in the show notes to Darrel's written
tribute to Laura and Mike posted on idavos, the news
arm of their One People's Project in Laura's memory. Please

(09:21):
consider making a donation to One People's Project. I'll leave
that link in the show notes too. Laura and Mike
are gone, but Daryl is still fighting the good fight.
We can't afford to lose decades of research, knowledge and experience.
Let's not wait until Darrel's gone too to value the

(09:44):
work the three of them did there, the work that
Daryl is still doing. So in memory of Laura, be relentless,
be kind, call an old friend more in the day,
fight like hell for the living, and don't you ever
forget that we can and we will make this world

(10:07):
a better place, even if we aren't the ones who
will love to see it. Weird Little Guys it's a

(10:28):
production of Cool Soli Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written
and recorded by me, Molly Hunger. Our executive producers are
Sophie Lectremana and Robert Evans. The show is edited by
the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed
by Brad dickerd. You can email me at Weird Little
Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it,
but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You

(10:48):
can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners
on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything
that's going to make you one of my Weird Little
Guys