Disrupting the Right
Two weeks before I was doxxed—before my real name was revealed to the world—I got a nasty shock at a local farm shop. I arrived expecting to pick up a bit of butter and maybe some blue cheese and obviously a whole lot of free-range eggs, and be on my way, as normal. Except that day wasn’t a normal day at the farm shop. I could tell as much the moment I saw the owner’s face.
“Hey, Charlie, come here!” he said, in a loud whisper, beckoning me frantically towards the counter. The shop was empty.
“Come and look at this!”
He reached under the counter, then into my hand placed a folded piece of paper. And on that piece of paper, as he explained while I unfolded it, was an email from an American journalist. I knew what it was going to say, more or less, but I read it anyway.
These were the exact words. All I’ve done is remove the personal details.
Hello,
My name is Katherine Long. I’m a journalist for Business Insider. I’m on a reporting quest and I believe you may be able to assist me.
I have been interested for some time in an influential blogger named Raw Egg Nationalist. Though he is from the UK, he is increasingly prominent here in the US, where he has affiliations with a well-funded think tank, The Claremont Institute, and has been featured in a Fox News documentary. His primary thesis is that men should eat more raw eggs and more raw milk as part of an ethos of vigorous white, male nationalism based on what he describes as traditional values.
I’m emailing you because, based on photos he has posted on social media, I believe he does much of his grocery shopping—or, at least, he did, at one point—at X farm shop. Do you or any of your staff know of a man who regularly buys large quantities of eggs and milk? (By “large quantities,” I mean dozens of eggs a week—he claims to eat more than 10 raw eggs a day.) If so, I would be very grateful if you could pass along his name. I am happy to keep our conversation confidential, i.e. I would never tell anyone how I had learned his name.
I expect this is not a typical email for your farm shop to receive! I am happy to chat over the phone to share more about my reporting and why I think this person is of such particular interest. I am reachable on Signal at…
Warmly,
Katherine
I believe my heart rate may have been mildly elevated at this point.
“I looked this Raw Egg Nationalist chap up,” the shop owner continued. “Listened to a couple of his podcasts. It’s definitely you.”
I wasn’t going to deny it. What good would it do? So I owned it. The charming young fellow who buys copious amounts of eggs and milk at your farm shop is indeed living a secret life as the Raw Egg Nationalist. He was indeed featured in a Fox News documentary, and jolly good fun it was. I think I said something about American politics being very polarizing these days and wanting to avoid any blowback etc., and the shop owner said he understood and of course he would never dream of giving away a customer’s details—not that he actually knew my surname—so I shouldn’t worry.
And that was that. I went on my way, laden with more than my fair share of butter and cheese and eggs and questions about my personal security.
Over the next few days, I tried to make sense of the email and how I had so very nearly been found out. In the email, the journalist had cited a photo I’d posted on Twitter, so that was my first port of call. Yes, I’d done a poor job of disguising the label on a carton of raw milk from the farm shop, and to make matters worse there was a copy of the local newspaper semi-visible in the background as well. Not good, Charlie. That was surely how she’d picked up my trail, I thought. (If you’re an anonymous Twitter poster and you want to remain such, you’d do well to study my case closely. Don’t post any—and I mean ANY—personal information online. Not even a picture of a carton of milk if you’ve bought it from a local supplier. I’d actually suggest seeding the internet with false information if you can: a sprinkle here, a sprinkle there.)
At this stage, I didn’t want to give any indication that I’d almost been rumbled, so I ruled out deleting the post, even though others might use it to get a rough bead on my location and maybe, if they were as enterprising as Ms. Long, send another email to the owners of the farm shop. I also mulled over whether or not I should contact Ms. Long on the number she supplied, pretending to be an employee of the farm shop, and lead her on a merry dance—a false name, some totally made up details about a sudden posting overseas or a tragic gardening accident, something like that. But again I thought better of it.
The best thing, I decided, was simply to let it die. Let Ms Long believe her punt was a valiant miss, and then maybe she’d get bored and concentrate on other “reporting quests” like revealing the identity of Raw Milk Nationalist or Boiled Egg Nationalist.
I told nobody else about the incident and considered myself a lucky boy, until a Friday morning two weeks later, when I really was doxxed, in an exposé by a British organisation called Hope Not Hate. They called it an “eggsposé.” Cute.
Hope Not Hate had been after me for some time, I knew, because I was included in their 2023 “State of Hate” annual report in the “Nazi/Fascist” section, for my advocacy of “right-wing bodybuilding” and the consumption of raw eggs. The organisation had even predicted that I wouldn’t remain anonymous for much longer. I had laughed off this prediction at the time, but in hindsight it was clearly a promise.
The charges laid at my feet by Hope Not Hate are pretty risible. Some of my tweets are spicy—but I also use a lot of “coded language and plausible deniability” to hide my real beliefs (which of course Hope Not Hate know, despite the fact that, by their own account, I don’t ever express them)—and I’m not a great fan of journalists, even going so far as to joke they deserve to be fed into a woodchipper or other item of industrial machinery. I published a letter from the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, in my magazine MAN’S WORLD. There’s no suggestion that I’m engaged in illegal behavior, because I’m not, or that I’m anything other than genuinely right wing with a large popular following on social media, which I earned fair and square by writing stuff people find funny and informative and being featured in a Tucker Carlson documentary. I may be a little biased in my own favor, but these things hardly seem an adequate justification to reveal my true identity and my supposed address to the world. Perhaps you can agree.
When my friend Jonathan Keeperman, a.k.a. L0m3z, was doxxed by The Guardian back in May, it was clear that the real purpose of outing him was not, in any conventional sense, to make him look bad. After all, Jon is handsome and successful, with a beautiful wife and children. How do you make a handsome, successful family man look bad for being those things? Most men wish they were a Jonathan Keeperman, and most women wish they were married to one. No, the purpose was something else. The purpose was to make Jonathan feel unsafe. That’s why the piece was written by notorious Antifa mutant Jason Wilson, and why it included, for no obvious reason, photos of Jonathan’s wedding and details about his father’s recent illness and death. When I wrote about this at the time, I said the collusion between an international newspaper and a black-bloc enforcer was a clear sign that the mainstream Left endorses political violence against its opponents as surely as the gay race communists do. But now I think there’s something more to that doxx, and to mine, than merely left-wing threats. To understand what it is, we have to understand parallel construction.
Like the Business Insider doxx that almost was, Hope Not Hate’s eggsposé is an obvious parallel construction. A parallel construction, if you don’t know, is what law enforcement and journalists do when they want to hide their sources. Let’s say you’re a journalist and you obtained a crucial piece of evidence by illegal means. Perhaps you contacted a farm-shop owner and got them to break data-protection laws and reveal customer data (even trying to solicit this is a crime, I might add). So what do you do? You make up a plausible story to explain how you got that evidence legally. An anonymous tip off, a social-media post of a distinctive-looking cat you were able to trace—anything. What’s great about parallel construction is that, with a decent amount of care, nobody can gainsay you, and, for the most part, if you’re the right person exposing the wrong person, nobody who matters will gainsay you anyway, because they’re just glad that nasty person got their comeuppance and don’t care how it happened.
Unlike the scumbag who doxxed Jonathan Keeperman, Hope Not Hate did a lazy job of hiding their parallel construction. John got hundreds of words picking up his trail from company registrations to old forum posts and incidental pieces of information given away offhand in Twitter posts and podcast appearances. I just got a short paragraph detailing the “photos and biographical details that helped narrow down [my] name and whereabouts.”
These included a photograph with a copy of his local newspaper identifiable in the backdrop; a poorly-redacted screenshot of a text exchange which allowed us to guess that his name was “Charlie”, along with selfies and photos taken at his home and garden which allowed us to confirm his location for certain.
In the case of the text message and the pictures of my home and garden, I knew exactly what Hope Note Hate were referring to, without even looking, and I knew they were lying. I wanted to be sure, though. I went back and looked at the text message—actually, an exchange from the dating app Bumble in which I told a girl I consumed 126 raw eggs a week (true)—and there was no way my first name was visible. It was totally hidden by a black box I’d pasted over it in MS Paint. A tech-savvy friend of mine even played around with the image to see if he could reveal the text underneath the black box: no luck. At a stretch, you could probably guess the number of letters, but that was it, and there are plenty of seven-letter men’s names. The pictures of my “home and garden” were just a couple of pictures of exercise equipment on my patio—a space in my garden that’s totally hidden from public view and couldn’t be identified from software like Google Maps. The sky wasn’t even visible. The pictures contained no EXIF data (data that might include a location tag), because I had removed it myself before posting the images, and Twitter does that to all images that are posted on the platform anyway.
You can scroll through my timeline and find the images if you want to see for yourself. But spare yourself the trouble and believe me: It’s bullshit. All of it.
So how did Hope Not Hate find out who I am?
The thought crossed my mind, of course, that it could be some form of personal betrayal. A disgruntled ex-girlfriend—and I have one or two of those. One fairly recent girlfriend, the daughter of a baronet, had flipped her lid when finally, after weeks of incessant needling, she discovered my alter eggo. Her uncle was a former cabinet minister who was sent to prison for fraud. She was a potential candidate, for sure. Or it could be a friend from university who recognised my voice, maybe even somebody from my day-to-day life.
Then again, the eggsposé contained pretty much no real information about me, certainly nothing of any substance about my life beyond my schooling at Cambridge and Oxford and some speculations about my whereabouts. If Hope Not Hate had spoken to somebody who knows me, that person can’t know me very well at all. The only photograph that featured in the eggsposé was an ancient grainy photograph of me from 2009 when I won a national history prize for my undergraduate dissertation. The photograph was publicly available, until I had it taken down just after the incident at the farm shop. A girlfriend or a friend would have access to more recent pictures of me than that, surely? Or was that part of the parallel construction—to hide the fact that it was someone I knew? Maybe.
Maybe not.
And why would an ex-girlfriend or friend or my local butcher go to Hope Not Hate in the first place? Hope Not Hate are well known in leftist and activist circles, but not to the general public. The more I thought about it, the less plausible this answer seemed. No, it wasn’t anybody I knew.
Okay: So who else?
How about the American or British government? How about both? I’m not joking. In the days after my identity was revealed, I spoke to a number of people who said there must be an intelligence connection at work. This included people with backgrounds in the military and intelligence themselves. When I told them what happened at the farm shop, they were convinced. No way was that a coincidence. “Somebody”—meaning intelligence—must have been “shopping around” information about me, perhaps even just my name, in the weeks before I was doxxed. If that was the case, Katherine Long probably already knew who I was when she emailed the farm shop. She was just trying to get a confirmation, a non-intelligence source—for her parallel construction.
I looked a little deeper into Katherine Long. By which I mean, I went on her LinkedIn profile. Ivy League Grad. Check. Seven-month internship at the State Department. Check. USAID posting in Tajikistan. Check. Specialist in Central Asian languages (fluent in Farsi and Tajik). Check. I got no further with her than that, but it was enough to convince me that she is, at the very least, a suitable candidate for an intelligence contact in the media. Put another way, she glows. My friends agreed. It’s been known for decades that Western intelligence services, including the CIA, have intimate links to newspapers, magazines, and the media, planting stories and guiding public opinion, and that this has continued to the present day, despite high-profile disavowals like the Church Commission Report, published in 1976.
Then there’s Hope Not Hate, and again a little digging goes a long way. The group is ostensibly a charity, and therefore a non-governmental organization, but its links to the British government are no secret. Hope Note Hate receives significant amounts of money from the public purse. From 2019-2020, for example, the Hope Not Hate Charitable Trust received £141,380 of British taxpayer money. The Home Office’s Counter Extremism Unit has paid tens of thousands of pounds to Hope Not Hate in recent years, and in return the Home Office and other government departments have received detailed briefings on “extremism,” particularly in the digital sphere. In the trustees’ report for 2019, it states that in that year Hope Note Hate “briefed multiple departments in the Home Office on emerging trends in UK hate, as well as briefing the Home Affairs Committee and presented a keynote at a Home Office conference on online hate in Derby.”
The links appear to go far beyond government funding for dull Powerpoint presentations at dull conferences. Jason Reza Jorjani has alleged Hope Not Hate is a direct front for British intelligence, at home and abroad (i.e. for MI5 and MI6). In 2017, Jorjani was caught in an undercover sting, in a New York bar, by a Swedish Antifa activist working for Hope Not Hate. Jorjani lost his teaching job at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and subsequently sued the university. He maintains that the sting was at the behest of British intelligence, after he left the Alt-Right Corporation in the immediate fallout after Charlottesville. This is where things start to get murky and a bit confusing—you can listen to Jorjani explain his allegation at length in this video—but there’s other evidence that points in the same direction. First of all, Hope Not Hate is an offshoot of Searchlight, an “anti-fascist” activist organisation that has faced persistent allegations from the left-wing of ties to the government and intelligence services, including British and French intelligence but also Israel’s Mossad. Then there’s this curious fact. Ruth Smeeth, former Labour MP and now a life peer in the House of Lords, served as deputy director of Hope Not Hate from 2011 to 2015. Wikileaks revealed that in 2009, while still a prospective parliamentary candidate, she was described in a confidential American cable as “(strictly protect),” code for a protected intelligence asset.
What’s funny about this possibility—Hope Not Hate as a direct organ of the British government—is that the group is full of people who are committed to the violent overthrow of capitalism and would therefore count as “extremists” by Hope Not Hate’s own definition and that of the British intelligence services and government. In 2013, Hope Note Hate’s own “head of intelligence,” Matthew Collins, was caught on film at a British Communist Party event praising the Red Army. Nor is Hope Not Hate above criticising the government, at least the Conservative government anyway. In its most recent State of Hate report, it targeted Jacob Rees-Mogg, John Redwood, Iain Duncan Smith, Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates, all Conservative MPs, and suggested that they were “radicalizing” the Conservative government through their “opposition to ‘woke’ politics” and “a certain conception of ‘free speech’.” Hope Not Hate go even further and suggest that these MPs were actually undermining democracy. “This radical right insurgency is a dangerous challenge to Britain’s liberal democracy and is undermining the rights of minority and vulnerable communities.”
Necessity makes for strange bedfellows. A group infested with radical Marxists can just as surely, wittingly or unwittingly, carry out the bidding of the British government, or any other government for that matter. The Black Panthers did a fine job of playing useful idiots to the FBI and CIA in the 1960s and 1970s, as part of Operation CHAOS and Cointelpro. But it’s also possible for such the goals of such groups to be in direct alignment with those of official agencies. Left-wingers want to make life hard for “fascists” and “right-wing extremists” and so do Western governments, so why wouldn’t they work together? And all it would take is a little tip-off every now and again.
Parallel construction, one way or another, was almost certainly a part of the doxxing of Jonathan Keeperman, a.k.a L0m3z. Although The Guardian made no mention of it, Jonathan was aware, months before his identity was revealed, that a prominent conservative figure with—how shall we say?—a penchant for intrigue was making a great show of asking his friends for him by name. The implication was that this renowned schemer would soon release Jonathan’s name as part of one of his trademark “I’m a concerned centrist” articles he writes for online magazine, and he wanted Jonathan to know this and be afraid. The gravamen, pathetically, was an article Jonathan wrote, as L0m3z, for the Catholic journal First Things. Just as Bill Kristol was outraged that the Claremont Institute had stooped to publish an anonymous raw-egg-eating enthusiast (30 times and counting, Bill!), so our concerned centrist simply couldn’t believe that a renowned theological journal would publish an anonymously penned article—and not just that, an anonymously penned article about a concept (“the Longhouse”) taken from Bronze Age Pervert’s scandalous book, Bronze Age Mindset! This fervent pants-wetter was only dissuaded when an editor at First Things guaranteed that Jonathan would have a right of reply, and so, it appears, he decided to pass on Jonathan’s details to someone who could do the dirty for him instead—Jason Wilson.
I felt a bit grubby writing all of that, but it’s quite plausible. And if true in full, it would reveal The Guardian’s doxx as an elaborate parallel construction.
But there’s another, more disturbing, possibility—again, a parallel construction. Jason Wilson could just as easily have been told Jonathan Keeperman’s name by a government source. Wilson works for Bellingcat, a self-styled collective of “white hat citizen-journalists” that has obvious ties to Western intelligence agencies. Bellingcat uses parallel construction to hide the fact that it regularly receives tip offs and restricted data from government spies, most obviously when it’s targeting Russia and her allies. As the association between Bellingcat and Western intelligence agencies has deepened, the group has moved away from its earlier model of “open source” intelligence, where it only used publicly accessible data, to a model that acknowledges the use of the kinds of restricted data, like flight manifests and cell-phone records, that only intelligence agencies, hackers, and criminals have access to. Bellingcat assiduously deny that they work with government—but they would say that, wouldn’t they?
A staple of Bellingcat’s reporting is the “far right,” and they’ve covered everything from “active clubs”—right-wing gyms and martial-arts clubs—to right-wing publishers, politicians, music, fashion and memes, across North America, Europe, Russia, and even India. They have a dedicated project, “Bellingcat Monitoring,” for investigating networks of right-wing groups in Eastern Europe. They doxx right-wingers all the time.
Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to posit some grand conspiracy, spanning continents and involving the intelligence services of the U.S. and UK and maybe other Western nations, at the center of which sits a (formerly) anonymous author and Twitter poster who eats lots of raw eggs. I don’t think I’m that important. I’m simply suggesting that Western governments have an interest in disrupting the activities of anonymous posters, and that one method of doing so might be to provide the occasional tip-off to organizations like Hope Not Hate and Bellingcat. I don’t find that hard to believe at all, and neither should you.
I’ve already written about these attempts at disruption, including for American Mind. Back in April, I wrote a piece called “It’s Afraid” laying out the stakes of internet anonymity and why Western governments, from the U.S. to the UK and all across Europe, are doing their level best to punish people like Douglass Mackey and discourage others from following his example. Mackey has been tried and convicted under a Reconstruction-era voter-suppression law for posting satirical memes on his anonymous “Ricky Vaughn” account during the 2016 election. Prosecutors focused on one meme in particular, which urged black and Hispanic voters for Hillary Clinton to text their votes. Mackey didn’t even make the meme himself, and no evidence was presented that anybody who saw the meme was unable to cast their vote in the correct manner. Even so, Mackey was convicted by a New York judge, and now faces the prospect of seven months behind bars if his appeal against his conviction is unsuccessful.
The real “crime” here is not voter suppression. It’s helping to get Donald Trump elected, and that’s why we should include the prosecution of Mackey as payback for 2016 alongside the prosecutions of big beasts like Steve Bannon, General Michael Flynn, Alex Jones, and Peter Navarro. The regime knows that an unfiltered internet, and especially sites like 4chan and Twitter, poses a serious threat to its desire for total informational control and to keep a lid on populism. Mackey’s prosecution is a warning to anybody who posts anonymously. You’re not safe. We can find you. And if we want to, we will, even if we have to wait five years to come for you, as we did with Douglass Mackey.
Similar efforts have been underway in Britain against activists like Sam Melia, who was imprisoned for two years for the possession of stickers bearing patriotic slogans like “Love your nation.” Britain’s newly departed Conservative government was terrified of being held to account for its failures over the last 14 years, for its squandering of the necessary time and parliamentary majority to make genuine rightward change in Britain worthy of the party’s name. None of the Tories’ failures were worse than their truly dismal record on immigration. Instead of reversing the New Labour policy of mass immigration introduced in 1997 with the deliberate intention of changing the demographics of Britain permanently, successive Tory governments since 2010 intensified it, until over a million people were allowed into the country, legally, last year. The Conservatives were terrified of the emergence of a real right in Britain, and their fears were justified. It was the emergence of Reform, led by the charismatic populist Nigel Farage, that helped sweep the Tories from power this month in their most stunning electoral defeat in history.
The same is going on in Germany and France and anywhere else in Europe where the actual right isn’t in power. Right-wingers are persecuted and their networks and tools of organization and communication, including internet anonymity, are being disrupted. So no, I don’t think this is just about me.
Do I think I’ll get to the bottom of my doxxing? I’ll certainly try. I’ve already sent a data-protection request to Hope Note Hate, demanding all personally identifying information they hold or have held about me. They’re legally required to provide this information within one month, but so far I’ve had no response whatsoever, apart from an auto-generated receipt. If I receive no reply within the allotted 30 days, I can request the Information Commissioner’s Office to step in and I can take legal action, which I’m more than prepared to do.
Until I do find out for sure, I won’t discount that my doxxing was not an accident—was not the product of a few careless posts on Twitter that came back to bite me on my muscular behind, four years later. Parallel construction is real, and it can be used to hide a multitude of sins. And Western governments have a lot to hide, not least of all their fear of the new popular right, and the lengths to which they’ll go to prevent it from growing and consolidating its power.
