A Few Thoughts on Doxxing

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, enjoying a nice summer day here in upstate New York. You can see it is beautiful. I got my rocks behind me and my trees, and this is actually in my yard.

My yard's basically a hill, and it's a beautiful hill, though, so I get to rest in the shade. And most of what I've been doing hasn't been resting, so I just wanna say, first of all, thank you to everyone who, some of you, for so long, have been following my wife and I, and you've been supportive of our efforts to have a child, and, of course, we want children, but last week, the Lord was so gracious to us in providing the little, precious life of Anna Elizabeth Harris, and she's cute, and her face changes every day, and we're just enjoying those changes and watching her discover things for the first time in the world around her, and she's just, she's healthy.

We couldn't ask for a more beautiful, healthy daughter. We have family coming over just about every day since the birth, and that's continuing, so I've been doing my wife's work, I've been entertaining family, I've been doing my stuff, so I've been busy, but I've also taken somewhat of a reprieve, a break from some of the normal things that I would normally be addressing on the podcast, and I think that's important.

I need my own maternity leave, I guess. That's what we're told, right? That men also have maternity leaves. I thought it was the funniest thing when I first heard that, but obviously, you can't take care of your family in the ways that you should and work full-time.

That becomes difficult, and so that does eat into some of what I've been doing, but it's all good stuff, and I just wanted to thank everyone. Thank you for your prayers, for those who are patrons, who contributed.

It's just amazing to see, and the Lord's done so much in even healing my wife after the death of her mother last October. Her mother's birthday was also in June, and so that's been kind of a blessing to have a girl born in June, and obviously naming her Anna, which is a tribute to her mother, Diana.

So there you go. That's a little bit of my life. We're gonna talk about doxing, though, today, and like I said, because of the lack of time I have, these are shorter podcasts, but hopefully very helpful podcasts, and they're also podcasts I've wanted to do.

I've wanted to talk about some of these things and just haven't had a chance to do it, and so this provides me that opportunity to focus on one specific topic, and so today, that's the topic. We're gonna talk about doxing a little bit, and we've all been forced to consider this because it's either happened to us or it's happened to friends of ours.

It's a very real threat, especially if you're on the right politically, and there's a lot of thoughts about this, and whether there should be regulations, whether there should be laws, private companies, but also public laws against doxing or regulating doxing or bringing some mechanism in place to shame or prevent doxing from having the effects, the negative effect it is having because many people, and I even have friends who have lost everything.

Their life seemed to be going on a decent track, and now they're unemployable. I remember there was someone who got doxed, and they had an anon account that was revealed, and they had said things they shouldn't have said, and long story short, they were told that, well, maybe it's better that you're driving a truck or doing some kind of a blue-collar job, but the fact is this person can't even seem to get a blue-collar job.

They can't even drive a truck. It's almost impossible to get any kind of job, and that's the real situation we're in. I mean, people who have said things that are bad, so I mean, there's different categories here that are wrong, but they really shouldn't have been punished in such a way that they're not allowed to now provide for their families are being punished.

You also have people who have said things that aren't wrong at all. They're just the truth, but they conflict with the leftist hierarchy of goods and leftist ideas about what right and wrong are, and they've been punished in the same exact ways.

You have people who have been immature, especially in their teenage years or something, and maybe something was put on social media that is not really, it's not horrible, but it's also not good, and they were in ignorance when they put it out there, but now they're in the same boat.

They can't employ, they're unemployable, and they can't support their own families, and what are we supposed to do about this? I mean, this is a real problem. So I think for those of us who are, who have been political and online for a longer period of time, we recognize some of the changes that have happened really since just before Trump became president.

You think of the Charlottesville rally, which I have a great podcast on that with Ann Wilson. She wrote a book on what really happened at Charlottesville, and it's not what we've been led to think, but what's taken place is the people who showed up there, even with good intentions, they weren't neo-Nazis or anything like that.

They were just there because they wanted to support statues to Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jefferson and that kind of thing. They were doxed, many of them. They lost their livelihoods. They're living in fear.

They don't have the resources to combat what's coming against them. You have the same thing happen on January 6th. You have the right, the neo-liberal right, I guess, trying to do something similar with the anti-Israeli protesters right now.

They'd like to try to dox some of the professors who are fomenting this and protesters. And it doesn't work out the same way because the left owns the hammer. And the left's hammer is, let's just admit what the left does and how they operate.

They have an evil, evil moral system and their hammer operates on that moral system. So you might say, well, at least they don't like Nazis or something like that. Well, this is the same hammer that comes down on parents who wanna prevent their kids from being trans.

It's the same hammer that comes down on you if you oppose unlimited abortion. It's the same hammer that comes down on you if you complain that illegal migrants are changing your country or there's crimes being committed by them that were unnecessary.

I mean, this is the hammer we're talking about. It's an evil, evil hammer. It doesn't value the interests of the American people. And it's certainly not in keeping with Christian morals. And that's the hammer that you're exposed to that really makes, that works in tandem with doxing to create what we call cancel culture.

Doxing and cancel culture are part of the same discussion, essentially. So there's left-wingers who complain about doxing, but what they're complaining about doesn't usually amount to much. It's not like people are getting fired en masse because of sympathies with BLM or Planned Parenthood.

It doesn't really happen. They're getting fired because they're right-wing on some issue or level. So that's the context of this whole thing. Now, doxing itself, it's a bit nebulous, but I do think there is a common thread running through all the different ideas and definitions of it.

And it's like a lot of definitions that in the internet age, they don't cement before they gain legs and go all sorts of different places and people start using them as pejoratives. So doxers, I would say, are viewed in a negative way.

And I think that's actually appropriate. But it's like the term woke. And as we're seeing right now, there's a debate over right-wing woke or woke right, which is, it's so silly. It's so ridiculous. And how can someone on the right be woke?

That's one of the questions. But because the term doesn't really cement and it's kind of elastic, it's very similar to doxing. People have different ideas of what woke is. People have different ideas about what doxing is.

So really briefly, I would say this about doxing. So if I wanted to try to define it, doxing is revealing information that was intended to be kept secret for the purpose, and this is key, of harming someone in a political situation, in a political context.

And I do think doxing could probably be done by both sides, but it's pretty, in our current situation, it is unique to the left, I would say. When the right does it, when the right reveals, like let's say Libs of TikTok, that's an information website or social media account that reveals information about the left-wing actors.

But I think it's different in the sense, and we don't think about it as doxing. This proves it to some extent, because it's not after bringing the left's hammer down, and the left is the one that owns the hammer.

The managerial elites in every institution, they're the leftists. It doesn't bring their hammer down. It doesn't make people unemployable. It doesn't cancel them from existence. And it also is more about protecting kids from those who would corrupt them than it is about destroying the lives of political enemies and making them unemployable so they can't feed their kids themselves.

So just even on that, there's a difference, it seems like. But I would say that I think doxing is, there's this understanding that it also tends to be weaponized against common ordinary citizens. It's not something that is weaponized.

It can be, but you saw this with, I guess, the governor of Virginia from a right-leaning, right-wingers found that he had dressed up with blackface or something back in his college days. And I guess you could sort of consider that a doxing, but that's a very rare situation compared to the people who aren't political, who don't want to be political, but end up in these political fights because maybe they took one stand on one thing, and all of a sudden, stuff that they said years ago is being brought up, whether private or not, but it was not intended to be brought up in those conditions.

Or it's someone who had an anonymous account where they operated politically because they had fear of retribution, and it was discovered that that was them. In fact, I know someone who, they didn't reveal it to anyone, but someone working at a social media website.

So one of the employees had access to that information and brought it up, and tried to subject this person to public scrutiny based on that. So you do have people that want to operate politically, but they're kind of ordinary citizens, and there's people who don't really.

And those are the typical cases we think about when we think about doxing. It's not usually someone in the public eye. And I think one of the big things, there's two things to realize, first of all. One of the big things is that we have this understanding in Americans' culture that you're not supposed to subject private citizens to the same criticism that you would subject public figures to, especially political figures.

So public figures are inbounds. You can criticize them, but not everyone is a public figure. That's an understanding we've had. Of course, the internet now and social media does make everyone somewhat of a public figure.

And that's something we are grappling with. And as a millennial, this is something that I didn't realize fully until much later, but I was posting things on social media and on websites for archival purposes often that were then used against me, cherry-picked and so forth, because they were politically incorrect, but they served a purpose in a current political fight.

If I criticize critical race theory, I can't be a person who supposedly defends slavery, which is what some of these people say ignorantly, because if you read what I've written, it's not a defense of slavery per se.

It's a defense of the Bible's teaching on subjects like slavery. But this, of course, is confused and cartoonized and then weaponized in a situation where I'm talking about something else down the pike, and it's now reason to make me unemployable, right?

Many people have gone through this kind of thing, but I'm a millennial. The internet wasn't real to me. It wasn't something that, you know, employers weren't looking through your social media. Well, now they are.

Sometimes it's even on your applications. And I think Zoomers understand this a lot better and have lived in a world where, a world that's coming to terms with these things. So that's the first thing to understand is that if you're on social media, you're unfortunately going to be subjected to scrutiny that you wouldn't have before, and you're treated as a public person, even if you're not, or don't have the intention to be.

So just realize that. You don't have to be on social media. The other thing is that there's a rift in the values between elites, and I mentioned this already, but leftists who control so many cultural institutions, so employers would be in this, and then common people.

And the common people will do things they don't think are a big deal that shouldn't get you unemployed. You're not hurting anyone. You're not doing anything really wrong, but it's wrong to the elites.

And because they have a different hierarchy of values, like you can rip up babies and you can mutilate kids, but you can't, for some reason, pose with a Confederate flag, or you can't be at January 6th in MAGA attire, or you can't be outside an abortion clinic protesting it, or the list just goes on and on.

You can't have those things. And so their standards are so wackadoodle, but they impose their insane notions of right and wrong on the rest of us. And so they actually do, they do influence our behavior.

And it's kind of like the situation for East Germans under the Stasi. Like your neighbors could be spying on you. You gotta be careful what you say. You have to engage in an act now. You can't be who you really are, and it destroys a high-trust society.

And now you don't know who to trust. And that's the world that we're ever increasingly living in, and it's not good. And this is where doxing is also, it's like your neighbor who's watching you to report to the Stasi.

It just creates a situation where you don't trust anyone. How do you know they're not recording you? How do you know they won't dox you? So anyway, those two things I think should be understood initially.

And I think a lot of people, millennials on up to boomers have a hard time with this, that there is this rift between the elites and common people and that does change the scenario, that this is a weaponized system of reporting people's thought crimes to a elite capable of punishing the people who are in violation.

And then of course, as I said, the fact that you're now subjected to the scrutiny that only public figures would have been subjected to in ages past. So the first thing I wanna say, because there's so many questions with this, including personal behavior and should we have laws and what should public policy be?

But the wisdom that I wanna share personally is don't share stuff on the internet that you don't mind being doxed for. And I'm not saying not to have an anonymous account. There's times for that, I think.

But just don't be surprised if you are doxed, if that information is somehow revealed, whether it's through someone who works for those social media companies sharing it, or whether it's someone who figures it out because of parallels that exist between your real world life, if you wanna call it that, and some of the hints that you put out there online.

It is hard to maintain an anonymous account sometimes. There are clever ways people have of figuring out who you are. So that's the wisdom. I think that Luke 18, or rather Luke 8, 17 comes into play here.

For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be made known or come to light. Realize if you are doing something wrong, because there are bad reasons to be an anon, right?

You really are harassing people for no reason. You really are posting things that are inappropriate. If that's the case, then know that God's watching, first of all. And secondly, Proverbs 28, 13 says, "'Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, "'but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.'".

If you're doing transgressions, if you're doing bad things, legitimately bad, sinful things, under the guise of anonymity, and then you wanna claim, oh, I'm doxed, this is terrible, it may be. And it may be the left's hammer's coming down on you.

And it may be unjustified. And we should not give the left's hammer any legitimacy. The people that the left is hammering are far more moral than the left, than the elites. But at the same time, if you are doing wrong things, because there are some things like stealing and lying, that they're still considered wrong by the general public.

There is this standard that still, it's fading, but there is this vestiges of a Christian standard out there that people still honor. And if you're violating that, you're not gonna prosper, even if you're concealing those transgressions.

So just a warning, if you're using anonymity to try to conceal some evil things. However, many people who are doxed, I think the vast majority, it's not that they're doing evil things. And even if they are doing wrong things, it's not to the level they're being punished.

The punishment does not fit the crime. And so that's more often the case. And so I think the wisdom that comes to play here is more from just war theory and the ethics of war. Think of Joshua 2 .3. Then the King of Jericho sent to Rahab saying, bring out the men who have come to you, who've entered your house, for they have come to search out all the land.

So spies come to Jericho from Israel, and Rahab is commended in Hebrews for her faith that she did not reveal who they were. She didn't dox them, okay? She decided to keep their secret hidden. And why was that appropriate?

Because this was a wartime scenario and she was protecting them in that context. Daniel is similar. It's not technically war, but it is, well, it's a personal war. It's the officials that were jealous of Daniel wanted to dox him.

So they did. They revealed private information. Hey, he prays. This isn't a public thing. It's public in the sense, I guess, that he has his window open so people can see, but it's a private thing that he's doing.

And they let someone know in power who had a hammer to punish Daniel,.

Who wouldn't have known.

So they kind of doxed him. And he gets punished. And of course, God protects him. Both of these being negative examples of doxers. You can think of Jesus even. How did the chief priest know that Jesus was at Gethsemane?

Because Judas, he revealed, he doxed. He revealed information that wasn't public information. The character of a doxer, I think Proverbs 11, 13 describes, whoever goes about slandering reveals secrets, but he who is trustworthy in spirit keeps a thing covered.

So doxers are really slanderers.

That's key.

There's a motive there. And they reveal secrets. They reveal things that aren't meant for public consumption.

To hurt someone.

That's the whole point is to hurt someone. That's different than libs of TikTok. That's different than let's expose the person who is convicted of a sex crime because we don't want them serving in a church nursery.

That's trying to protect people. That's using information, and in that case publicly available information, to protect. And it's not about destroying someone's life so they can't operate in the economy and they can't feed their family and because we somehow hate them and wanna just knock them down and bring ourselves up.

Doxers are slanderers. And that's just part of who they are. And so that goes for wartime or peacetime. But in wartime, you have this element of spying and espionage and I think that probably suits more the context we're in now.

We're in a situation where we have an ideological war going on in our country. Many think that it may end up being more than ideological at some point. And so you have a hammer from the left and from the central government coming down on anyone who would violate their ethics.

And what are we to do about that? There's no, like you can try to publicly shame a doxer and some of them might be slightly ashamed but there's no consequence. Elon Musk tried to bring in a consequence a little bit.

He doesn't, it's not applied across the board in an even way, but he wanted to get rid of accounts. And I know he did get rid of some that were accounts on X that were just for the purpose of doxing. And I think that's good.

We need more of that. There needs to be a social stigma connected to doxers that when you dox someone, you should have to pay a cost for that. If you're slandering someone, you're revealing things about them because you want to hurt them by way of bringing the left's hammer down on them, bringing the, reinforcing the moral framework and the authority of absolute perverts who are evil.

And you want to reinforce their position while diminishing the influence of common ordinary folks who are much more moral and are evil elites.

You should be shamed.

You should be absolutely ashamed of yourself for doing such a thing. You should be ashamed of yourself when people who are repentant or who said things in their worst moments in years past are now punished for the rest of their lives to the point they can't hardly feed their families.

You should be ashamed. There should be a public cost. And so I think, I think anon culture, there's a blessing in the sense that, yeah, you can get truth out there, just like the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalists, they were publishing in a tense situation politically things that needed to be debated, but you would take a risk if you debated them.

Anons are doing that. Anonymous figures online sometimes are doing those kinds of thing, those things. But it's wisdom to not share stuff that you don't mind being doxxed for. And there's a curse to this as well, because you end up creating and reinforcing this idea that there are all these opinions that you could be in such trouble for, and it just diminishes that high-trust society.

And when that hammer is hanging over all of us so that we are forced to operate with anonymous names and act like spies, it doesn't make for high trust. So, you know, my personal, my druthers would be to not, as much as possible, don't operate like an anon.

That's my, like, you're taking a risk doing it. You could be doxxed anyway, but as much as possible, and it's not always possible. If you want to go into the academic field, I wrote a book years ago and I used an anon, or it wasn't even an anon.

It was actually, it wasn't even a pseudonymous. It was an actual name, but it just wasn't, it was a name I was going by. It was a family name. But anyway, I did it because people advised me, if you want to go into academia, you can't publish these things because academia is far left.

And there are situations for that. But I think in general, as much as possible, we want to try to say the truth and stand by it. And this is going to take a lot of wisdom and risk calculation and all of that.

But I think that's the goal to shoot for. That's how we rebuild a high trust society as much as possible. But we have to somehow, we have to stare down the doxxers. We have to make sure that they don't get their way, that when they try to punish someone, that person is not punished.

We have to make sure that there is a social stigma attached to them when they do these kinds of things. So I'm all for regulations on social media against it. I'm all for laws regulating it. And it's because of the context we live in.

We live in a specific context where it's being weaponized against people who are much more moral than our perverted elites and the nefarious intentions that they have for us. And that's my two cents, navigating this whole question of doxxing.

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