BROOKE GLADSTONE:  This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD:  And I'm Bob Garfield. Way back in 2014, erupted the controversy called GamerGate, an attack on women video game designers and critics of the blatant sexism, objectification and misogyny that pervades gaming culture. Mobs of gamer bros inundated Reddit, 4chan and various musty basements of the Web to denounce women in the most vile terms.

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FEMALE CORRESPONDENT:  So called “GamerGaters” harassed their critics in online posts, using language mostly too graphic to show here.

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BOB GARFIELD:  Many of the trolls searched the internet, including social media and public databases, to find personal information about the targeted women, this, to trigger still more harassment online and in the physical world. Soon, the victims, such as game designer Zoe Quinn, were under siege, thanks to that thing called doxxing.

DECCA MULDOWNEY:  Zoe Quinn found herself at the center of GamerGate.

BOB GARFIELD:  Decca Muldowney wrote recently about doxxing for ProPublica.

DECCA MULDOWNEY:  She went into hiding. She received really, really, really vicious threats, and she still does three years later.

BOB GARFIELD:  Three years later, that’s not all that’s taken place. One development is that the GamerGate troll army and various outposts of white nationalism, anti-Semitism and testosterone-fueled anarchy have coalesced into what is known as the alt-right, the basest of Donald Trump's base. They fancy themselves revolutionaries and their go-to weapon is doxxing, such as when Milo Yiannopoulos egged supporters on to report suspected undocumented immigrants to ICE or when alt-right vandal Mike Cernovich encouraged his followers to harass a CNN reporter at his home, or when Andrew Anglin, the founder of The Daily Stormer, incited fellow Nazis to terrorize a Jewish Montana woman who was in a legal dispute with the mother of white supremacist Richard Spencer.

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FEMALE CORRESPONDENT:  Anglin's website issues a so-called “call to arms,” publishing Tanya's email, cell and information about her family and children.

TANYA GERSH:  If you’ve ever experienced fear to the point where you’re frozen, and that’s a really good way to describe it.

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT:  Anglin going so far as to suggest his followers seek the Gersh family out, writing on The Daily Stormer, “If you’re in the area, maybe you should stop by and tell her in person what you think of her actions.”

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BOB GARFIELD:  That’s one development. The other development is that their weapon has been turned against them.

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PROTESTORS CHANTING:  Jews will not replace us. Jews will not replace us. Blood and soil. Blood and soil.

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BOB GARFIELD:  When Nazis in khakis marched in Charlottesville in August brandishing tiki torches and hate slogans until the whole ugly scene devolved into violence, they were, notably, not wearing white hoods or balaclavas. This made them vulnerable to identification, and identified some were.

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MALE CORRESPONDENT:  Paul White and Peter Tefft were both outed online. Since then, White left his job at a California hotdog shop and Tefft’s own father publicly disowned him, denouncing his son’s vile, hateful and racist rhetoric and actions.

BOB GARFIELD:  People lost jobs, friends and respect and the schadenfreude was palpable. The likes of actress Jennifer Lawrence encouraged fans to dox the deplorables because, as ProPublica’s Decca Muldowney observes, the targets weren’t just ideological adversaries, they were culprits.

DECCA MULDOWNEY:  Yeah, and it was done by some pretty high-profile people, Shaun King, who is now at The Intercept and is a journalist and commentator, was among those who encouraged a public doxxing via Twitter. And he, in general, had a lot of support from liberals, and a lot of people were taking part in this kind of crowd-sourced dox that he began. And the argument there was that these people actually broke the law. They committed acts of violence and we identify them and then we pass those details on to the police.

BOB GARFIELD:  Unfortunately, as they say, mistakes were made.

DECCA MULDOWNEY:  This is the high-profile example of a bad dox after Charlottesville. A man was marching in the Charlottesville rally who was wearing an Arkansas Engineering sweatshirt, so people immediately started going through the faculty list and students who attended the Engineering Department in Arkansas, and they came across this poor man, Kyle Quinn. He had a beard and he kind of resembled this guy who was in these pictures from Charlottesville, and so, they said, Kyle Quinn was in Charlottesville. He and his family had to flee. They had to go into hiding. And then later this man comes out of the woodwork called Andrew M. Dodson and it turns out he is actually the guy who was there.

BOB GARFIELD:  I just wonder about this whole double standard, that people on the left are appalled by doxxing, consider it harassment and vandalism when it’s being done by Mike Cernovich or his troll army, and are not so righteously indignant when it is aimed at right wingers. I'm thinking particularly right now about a video that showed a family all dressed up in American flag-themed clothing calling a five-year-old of Palestinian dissent a “terrorist” and having it all caught on video.

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BIANCA TURANO:  You guys are terrorists, get out of here. If you hate America so much, leave!

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YOUNG MAN:  I don’t hate America, I just hate [UINTELLIGIBLE] like you.

BIANCA TURANO:  Oh, okay.

JOHNNY TURANO:  I love my people.

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DECCA MULDOWNEY:  Yeah, this happened after Trump declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel and a lot of people were taking to the streets, and this Palestinian American family were protesting and they got into this altercation with three Trump supporters.

BOB GARFIELD:  Now, again, these people who were garishly bedecked in this jingoistic outfit and using their free speech as hate speech, calling a little girl a terrorist.

DECCA MULDOWNEY:  They also say some other incredibly unpleasant things.

BOB GARFIELD:  Which quickly went viral, as the anti-Trump protesters asked netizens to identify their antagonists and make their lives hell.

DECCA MULDOWNEY:  It actually followed very much the same formula as many right-wing doxxers of people on the left follow, so it used social media to identify the two women who were involved in the altercation. It turns out one of them is a social worker. They were writing emails to her employer. One of them is a student. They were writing emails to her university, saying, you should know that this student has said things that go against your code of conduct. Do you really want someone to be working as a social worker who would say these things to a child in the street?

BOB GARFIELD:  Yeah, wherever you stand politically, it is no fun getting doxxed. Elie Mystal is a lawyer, commentator and also legal editor for WNYC’s More Perfect. He lived it recently after publishing a blog post, inflammatory on its face, calling for black jurors to acquit all defendants when the crime victim is white. Breitbart got ahold of it and somehow managed to make Mystal’s position even more racially antagonistic, and it was game on.

ELIE MYTSTAL:  When you write that kind of piece, you expect the heat to go to 10 and then they did something that made it go to 11.

BOB GARFIELD:  And what did 11 look like?

ELIE MYTSTAL:  There’s just people screamin’ at you from every possible line of communication and getting kind of like increasingly threatening and violent. Now, I used to park at the same parking spot every day when I came in to my office. As this was happening, I went to park and some guy popped out of the parking garage, took a picture of my license plate and ran away. And, you know, that was a bit scary. [LAUGHS] I didn’t, I didn’t appreciate that at all.

BOB GARFIELD:  Yet, having himself been terrorized, Mystal is not morally opposed to doxxing, itself. The lawyer whose answer to structural racial injustice for African Americans is to inflict the same injustice upon whites, also believes that the dox mob brings a punishment for depraved behavior that the mere law cannot.

ELIE MYSTAL:  What doxxing does is bring back some mechanism of social penalty. Obviously, I’m not in favor or a fan of or condone actual violence. Obviously, I'm not in favor or a fan of or condone actual threats. Having experienced some, you don’t mean to threaten somebody's life. But what doxxing potentially does is make people think twice before they decide to act a fool in public.

BOB GARFIELD:  I asked him if he would dox, knowing full well that his racist target would be terrorized out of his very home?

ELIE MYTSTAL:  I wouldn’t do it, pull out my phone, get the YouTube video, put it on my website. You know, I’m not - it’s not -- that’s not me. If my buddy did it, right, [LAUGHS] and all I had to do was look the other way, I’m probably lookin’ the other way. I think there are a whole bunch of people who, like me, would not dox somebody but also, like me, would not lift a finger to stop it.

BOB GARFIELD:  Another proponent, one who is not a mere cheerleader, is a woman known online as “Fallon.” She’s a Tennessee mom, nonprofit healthcare administrator and Antifa militant. Fallon is an inveterate doxxer who made news when she outed the head of the Wisconsin chapter of the National Socialist movement, as in -- Nazi.

JESSICA NOCERO:  His name is Corey Klicko. He was planning a fascist barbecue. This is not your run-of-the-mill Trump supporter. This is not somebody who is just your red hat “Make America Great Again” person. This is a white nationalist. This is a neo-Nazi.

BOB GARFIELD:  What exactly did you locate about him and post to dime him out?

JESSICA NOCERO:  His employer. So we were able to derive his employer from some of his social media. A lot of times, that’s where we find a lot of this information. There is no peaceful white nationalism. It is a violent cause. They are as dangerous to a community as a sex offender. To us, this is like a sex offender registry, so what we do is we collaborate with local teams. We have them post flyers about this person, letting their community know this person is organizing on a neo-Nazi scale and that they live in your community.

And he was the head of the state chapter of Wisconsin, and I was really pleased at his response when he was outed to a community as a Nazi because he actually did the ethical thing. He dismantled his chapter, he stopped organizing and he canceled his events. So that was really satisfying --

BOB GARFIELD:  Because the scales had fallen from his eyes about the nature of --

JESSICA NOCERO:  I think it’s -- no!

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BOB GARFIELD:  -- what he was up to?

JESSICA NOCERO:  No.

BOB GARFIELD:  Or he just didn’t want to be victimized by the consequences of his own activism?

JESSICA NOCERO:  He was afraid that he was going to lose his job. He was afraid that his community was going to look at him as a threat. He wanted to minimize the damage. I don’t think it changed his mind about anything he was doing but he chose not to organize. And that was fine with me. I want you to stop being a Nazi. That’s what I want.

BOB GARFIELD:  Fallon says that doxxing is a digital brick through a window, and she should know because she, herself, has been doxxed, by her own Antifa confederates who suspected a traitor or spy in their midst. The world now knows that Fallon is Jessica Nocera.

JESSICA NOCERO:  Yes.

BOB GARFIELD:  What was that like?

JESSICA NOCERO:  Well, it was, obviously, a very scary thing and I had prepared myself to be doxxed by the far right. I was ready for that. I hadn’t anticipated that I would get doxxed by a relatively small collective of leftists. I took appropriate precautions. I did have some fallout, because, obviously, it’s not just the left who’s watching these kinds of things. It’s, it’s the right too. I was subjected to a lot of alt-right doxxing. They were placing personal ads on different media, mainly calls for [ ? ] and things like that. I’m mostly beyond the pain of that experience I’m grateful for the folks who carried me through.

I still believe in doxxing as a tool in the wheelhouse of the anti-fascists. I believe that we can use it ethically and that it’s effective and, obviously, the right’s not going to stop. They’re not going to stop doxxing leftists. They’re not going to stop doxxing people of color, people who are queer or who are from a variety of minority communities. And so, it’s a tool, I think, that we’re gonna have to continue using. I think that the people who are fascist in their organizing, they should be afraid of people like me because we mean business, and we’re not gonna allow this to happen in our country.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Anti-fascism? Well, that’s a just cause, and I suppose if ever the ends justify the means, that would be the acid test.

But, at the same time, vigilantism is antithetical to the rule of law. When is justice ever served by a mob? If your answer was never, please consider an example raised by lawyer Elie Mystal.

ELIE MYSTAL:  Yeah, look what’s happening with the Weinstein stuff, right? All these powerful men are losing their jobs, not because they’ve, in any kind of court of law, been proven to be guilty.

BOB GARFIELD:  Decades, centuries of intractable entrenched harassment, discrimination and impunity, untouched by law or due process or even the 10 Commandments, suddenly unraveling under the demands of irate citizens and the transit of property of shame. Men are losing their jobs and reputations virtually overnight, based on testimony that might not even be admissible in court. Yes, there may be some innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire but it is also, at last, a great reckoning for centuries of danger and degradation.

ELIE MYSTAL:  Is it morally defensible to trust the mob, trust the street, to figure out who gets to keep their job and who doesn’t. I’m not losing sleep over Harvey Weinstein. I’m just, I’m just not.

BOB GARFIELD:  Well, #MeNeither.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Coming up, in Hollywood sometimes the truth tellers are heroes, but sometimes it’s the liars.

BOB GARFIELD:  This is On the Media.

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