One Twitter Account's Mission To Make White Supremacists Very, Very Famous

from the should-have-worn-your-hoods dept

After the ugly stain that was this past weekend, when a group of "protestors" took to the streets of Charlottesville to "protest" the removal of a statue commemorating some loser who lost a war because he was a loser, there has been an unfortunate strain of calls to crack down on speech rights of these imbeciles. It's exactly the wrong sort of reaction for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that starting down the road to relieving the rights to speech you don't like today can come back and bite you in your ass tomorrow. Our own Tim Cushing's take on how important it is to defend the speech rights of those we dislike the most is among the best I've read, but it focuses on the need to rally support for speech rights in the face of outrage. Left unsaid is at least one potential solution to the speech polution that occurrs when a bunch of race-obsessed jackwagons decide to throw a party: more speech and expression.

To see one example of this in action, we can take a look at a delightful Twitter account, @YesYoureRacist, and its mission to make the sort of people that publicly expose themselves as racist very, very famous.

The @YesYoureRacist account began tweeting pictures of demonstrators on Saturday, asking, "If you recognize any of the Nazis marching in #Charlottesville, send me their names/profiles and I'll make them famous."

It's been credited with outing a University of Nevada student, who acknowledges attending a rally in Charlottesville Friday night but maintains he is not a racist.

That student, of course, then went on to say that he was only attending the rally to preserve a statue of Robert E. Lee because he believes "the replacement of the statue will be the slow replacement of white heritage within the United States", which, you know... racist. If you've seen the now famous photos of the white supremacists marching, this student is the one you've seen screaming while wild-eyed. That's notable for a very specific reason: the people at these types of rallies used to wear hoods over their heads. And for good reason, as they didn't want the wider public to be able to identify them alongside their detestable beliefs.

But not so in Charlottesville. Instead, the ralliers marched with their faces in full view of the public, allowing the man behind @YesYoureRacist to retweet the photos to his thousands of followers, identify them by name, find out where they go to school and/or work, and then contact those places to inform them they have a racist in their midst thus allowing them to take action if they choose. None of this, by the way, should be confused with doxxing, the process by which jerks on Twitter detail personal information from those that are trying to keep personal information secret. No, these protesters marched proudly in public, splashing their easily-identifiable faces all over the newswire. @YesYoureRacist, through speech and expression, is now simply making them even more famous.

This isn't to say that all of this will go on without a hitch. It won't. Already there have been mistakes made in identifying some involved in the white supremacist marches. One man was misidentified when followers of @YesYoureRacist decided that passing resemblances without any further checking were enough to vilify a man who was not at the rally, is not a white supremacist, and in fact runs a laboratory dedicated to helping people. Because extremism is everywhere these days, this man was threatened to the point of his deciding his home was no longer safe.

But that is a failure of a good idea gone too far, not of the idea of supercharging the fame of horrible people itself being bad. What is needed there is better speech and sleuthing, not an end to it. Free speech and expression gets the messiest in these sorts of endeavors, after all, and those mistakes don't nullify the overall good being done. As Ken "Popehat" White points out in a useful tweetstorm more speech is good, but so is a careful and proportional response:

Oh, and also this:

Now, if those currently calling for limiting the speech rights of white supremacists and Nazis had their way, how many less faces would we have in the photos of people that outed themselves? Far, far less, obviously. As I've always said, a big part of the reason I defend the rights of racists to be racists is because I want the racists to reveal themselves. And then folks like @YesYoureRacist can go about making them famous.

Filed Under: charlottesville, counter speech, free speech, racists, white supremecists, yesyourracist
Companies: twitter