When a team of researchers in Alabama published a blog last week, they effectively ousted a veteran attorney working for the City of Baltimore.
On Wednesday, team leader Heidi Beirich wrote online that Glen Keith Allen had been a dues-paying member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance. On Thursday, the city severed its one-year contract with him. On Friday, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake announced that City Solicitor George Nilson, too, would be following him out the door.
The response was swift and decisive. But why do 15 researchers in Montgomery, Ala., care about Baltimore?
Beirich, head of the intelligence unit at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said they've watched Allen "like a hawk."
The team has amassed files on more than 3,000 people they say are connected to hate groups. When someone surfaces in a public position, they take quick action on their blog, Hatewatch.
"Our concerns are about democracy being polluted by white supremacy," said Beirich, 49. "Our goal, not that we always achieve it, is to stop these things from leaching into the mainstream. So when we see someone like Glen Allen working for the City of Baltimore, it's horrifying for us."
Allen said their blog exaggerated a casual connection he had years ago to the neo-Nazi National Alliance.
"It was hardly anything," he said. "I disagreed with them [the National Alliance] on several things, and I just stopped giving them money."
He blamed a disgruntled alliance member for providing records with his name to the researchers.
Beirich said the source didn't matter.
"Disgruntled or not, that issue is kind of irrelevant," Beirich said. "The truth is, people in the alliance have given us documents."
The team received a tip that Allen was working for the city, and posted a story on Hatewatch within 24 hours. It's a routine operation for a unit with two decades of research.
Allen isn't the first Marylander the team has focused on.
The Hatewatch blog has reported Anne Arundel County Councilman Michael Peroutka's ties to the neo-Confederate League of the South. In October 2014, Peroutka said he had quit the league. Some members' statements against interracial marriage were contrary to his beliefs, he said.
Hatewatch has tracked Matthew Heimbach, who started a "White Student Union" while attending Towson University in 2013.
Heimbach said he's been watched for years. They're diligent, he said, but it amounts to "economic terrorism."
"There are people who they attack to try and make them unemployable," he said.
The unit started investigating cases of hate crimes for the legal department of the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1991.
Today, Beirich says, its mission is to root out white supremacy and hate from government.
"When that stuff breaches into the mainstream, it affects politics and it affects policy," she said. "It's scary."
She hopes Hatewatch won't be needed forever.
"I'd seriously like to be unemployed."