In Defense of Doxing Nazis

If you’re uncomfortable with the title of this essay, join the club.

Despite my intention to defend it over the next thousand or so words, I am, too.

My discomfort stems not from any particular concerns I have for the feelings of Nazis. Rest assured, I possess no such concerns.

That said, I still feel conflicted about the title.

I know of the potential abuses of doxing — releasing personal information about people online, like their places of employment, addresses, or phone numbers — because it’s happened to me many times.

As it turns out, though, it is precisely that experience and the consequences of it that have converted me into a believer in doxing when it comes to these people: Nazis, white nationalists, and fascists of all flavors.

Especially those who plot violence from behind the safety of anonymous social media avatars or streaming platform personas, as so many of these cowards do.

Three weeks ago, I discovered I had been one of several dozen people on the hit list of the Terrorgram Collective, a white supremacist terror cell whose two leaders were arrested and indicted in September.

The group’s plans involved assassinating public officials and others deemed “enemies of the white race,” including antiracist activists and writers like myself.

To this end, they offered video and written murder instructions along with encouragement and veritable sainthood to anyone willing to kill one of us for the cause. They did all this on Telegram, a platform favored by extremists and child porn aficionados (or both).

Thus, the group’s name was born: a combo of terror and gram.

Because Nazis are both horribly racist and terribly unoriginal.

I knew the group had been busted because it made the news at the time. I also knew, as far back as three years ago, that my life was being actively threatened because, on two occasions, FBI agents came to the home where I lived with my family (at that time) for duty-to-warn visits.

They couldn’t tell me who the threats were from because, at that point, their investigation was ongoing (and to tell me might have compromised their efforts), but they did let me know the threats were real and gave me their cards so we could remain in touch.

I only learned that Terrorgram was behind the threats a bit before Christmas, when I received a call from an attorney with the Department of Justice and an FBI investigator who filled me in as a named victim — luckily only a planned victim — of their murderous plot.

The leaders’ trial is set for 2025, and even with the new administration coming in, and despite their lack of commitment to stopping domestic right-wing and racist terrorism, there is simply no way they would drop the charges post-indictment.

Bad optics, if nothing else.

But here’s the thing.

The only reason the group was stopped and no one was hurt or killed despite their clear intentions — each target had a kill card with their address and pictures of their faces and homes — is because the FBI was actively monitoring them. Without that, someone likely dies.

Maybe me.

And there is little chance that a Kash Patel-led FBI, in particular, is going to continue prioritizing such infiltrations of right-wing, racist terror groups, despite the fact that most terror attacks in the past twenty years have been committed by precisely these types of groups and individuals.

This means that if the government is not going to step up and disrupt these networks, private actors will have to do it.

With a MAGA-fied FBI, the government simply cannot be counted on to do the heavy lifting. As such, we must support the efforts of Antifa researchers to expose, unmask, name, shame, and ruin these terrorists.

If they don’t fear the FBI, let them at least fear exposure and the loss of jobs and income.

About 90 percent of what Antifa activists do, in fact, in various anti-fascist networks, is precisely this: research, monitoring, and exposing racists in the hopes it will stop them from doing harm and deter others from joining forces with such groups in the first place.

Only about 10 percent of their activity is the street-level confrontation with Nazis which gets most of the attention and sometimes draws criticism as a tactic for “blurring the lines” between good guys and bad. Although I can make a case for the street confrontation, I won’t bother doing that here.

I’ll just leave it at this: if you care about stopping fascists and their terror networks, you must accept the importance of doxing and publicly ruining the professional and personal lives of Nazis.

There is no other way to stop them with MAGA federal law enforcement in power.

And I know the rejoinder.

Some will say, “But Tim, if we do that, they’ll just dox us too.”

But here’s the thing: they’ll already dox you simply for challenging them.

How do you think I “earned” my kill card? Or the two weeks of phone threats I received aimed at me and my family as far back as 2018?

Or the visit to our prior neighborhood we received from another racist in 2012, during which hate fliers and an implied death threat against me were passed out to all my neighbors? That didn’t happen because I had called for doxing anyone. At the time I actually didn’t support the tactic.

But they did it anyway, simply because I condemn white supremacists and racism. Politically opposing them, if you draw attention, will get you doxed.

So now what? Do we remain silent? Do we not condemn Nazis for fear they’ll do Nazi things?

Tell me historically how that works out.

The only remaining non-violent option to stop these people is doxing, at least until an administration comes to power that is serious about ending them as a threat, by using the legal system to arrest, imprison, and bankrupt these networks.

If you oppose doxing “on principle,” I get it. In principle, so do I, because I prefer that people have a modicum of privacy when it comes to their beliefs, however shitty. But when those beliefs become linked to active terror networks with violent designs, all bets are off.

And I’m not saying that once doxed, people should target the homes of fascists.

Although I know there are folks who might do that, I’m not endorsing it. I don’t want people to be violently attacked and I detest the idea of anyone being swatted: a practice where police are called and told there’s a crime in progress at a person’s home, in the hopes police will then bust down the door of the person targeted and maybe shoot them.

Such tactics are simply indefensible and would risk harm to the children or other family members of any Nazi who was swatted — people who are presumptively innocent and can’t help who their parents or loser incel kids might be.

Not to mention, going to someone’s house to confront them is a good way to get shot. Trust me. And getting shot by a fascist who will then be able to use “stand your ground” laws to avoid prosecution isn’t exactly a way to help the cause.

But short of house calls, I very much like the thought of Nazis and other white supremacists fearing public exposure, loss of employment, the loss of family and friends, and the lifelong ignominy that will come from being unmasked as the moral cretins they are.

And if they have to spend some emotional energy worrying that maybe, just maybe, someone might pay them a visit? Well, that’s OK by me too, even if I’d prefer such a visit remain unpaid.

I want the cost of being a Nazi or any kind of white supremacist to be so high that no one is willing to pay it any longer.

I want fascists to be afraid.

As afraid as my kids were when Nazis exposed the school they attended and the house in which they lived at the time, necessitating special security measures to keep them, and our entire family, safe.

Simply put, to foreclose doxing and exposure as a weapon against fascism, even as the government moves to likely disband any efforts to stop such fascists from engaging in violence, is to unilaterally disarm in the face of danger.

We cannot do that.

The idea that we can simply fight Nazis with better arguments or reason is the way of fools or people with a death wish.

And people who have never studied history.

They must be infiltrated, exposed, and stopped.

And if the state won’t do it. We must.