Outing and doxxing people are problematic activities most of the time. As tool used by trolls and harassers of less savory sorts, they’ve usually been used as an attempt to silence (or open up for targeting) people who get in their way.
But, like most tools and processes, a lot of their merit (or discredit) comes from how they are used. And it’s hard to feel too much sympathy for a guy who was a tiki torch-bearer and white polo shirtist protester in Charlottesville last weekend.
President Trump asserted that there were some “very good people” amongst the protesters there, just plain folk who love history and hated to see that Robert E. Lee statue go (for nostalgia’s sake).
Were there?
Quite possibly. But not after that chanting started. And that screaming. And that saluting. And that waving around of Nazi flags and white power flags and (dare I say) Confederate flags.
If you stuck around after those groups started doing their thing, if you stood by while your love of 1920s park ornamentation was hijacked by a majority crowd shouting “Blood and soil!” and “Jews will not replace us!” and giving fascist salutes and assaulting that small ring of counter-protesters about the statue in the middle of that “Unite the Right” rally — then you stopped being a “very good person.” You stopped being part of the solution. You became part of the problem.
And you should be called for it. Like Jerrod Kuhn has been.
Kuhn says he’s not a racist, but that he traveled the nearly 500 miles from Honeoye Falls to Charlottesville to protest the removal of a Confederate monument to Gen. Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville’s Emancipation Park. “It’s a piece of history, and I thought that it should remain,” Kuhn said. “It’s important to me that we preserve American history no matter how ugly the past is it’s associated with.”
“I’m not a neo-Nazi,” he insisted. “I don’t belong to a German workers’ party from 1933. I’m a moderate Republican.”
I suspect a lot of moderate Republicans would disagree. Vehemently. And, honestly, he looks like an active participant in the hate-fest that was going on Charlottesville.
One of the gravest dangers in outing and doxxing people is mistaken identity. There have been people inadvertently identified as being folk in photos and videos of Charlottesville, and that’s a tremendous injustice to them. Just as capital punishment is immoral while there is a chance of an innocent person being targeted, these sorts of tactics require the greatest of due diligence in their application.
But Mr Kuhn doesn’t dispute he was there, or that those aren’t videos of him carrying a tiki torch (snort) or dressed up in white nationalist regalia and shouting Nazi slogans. If he were a mere innocent lover of war memorials when he drove all the way from New York, he tossed that aside when he joined up with the gang of idiots. He’s made his bed, and now he gets to lie in it.
Like down with Nazis, get up with swastikas.
‘My life is over’: 21-year-old Charlottesville marcher whines over ‘outing’ by anti-fascist group