Don’t Give In to the Doxers
Elon Musk’s team of young programmers at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been doxed. First, their names were exposed by Wired magazine. This once-staid tech magazine has become a fever swamp of left-wing politics in recent years.
Then, the contents of one of the DOGE employee’s deleted x.com accounts were reported in the Wall Street Journal, leading to his resignation. The doxers presumably went through these materials on an internet archive, likely using illegally leaked or hacked data to uncover the account’s identity. This has become a fairly standard practice in recent years.
This all took place after DOGE’s exposure of the USAID slush fund. USAID has become the chief funding source for a mostly unsupervised army of domestic nonprofits, foreign media, and other intelligence community assets, who together promote policies and issue propaganda to further the left’s worldview.
Notably, the first sustained resistance to Trump’s agenda only occurred when USAID was in DOGE’s crosshairs.
Doxing is a Tool of Social Control
Doxing has become a common occurrence. On an internet where we are under constant surveillance and also encouraged to share our innermost thoughts, doxing has become the tool of choice for punishing enemies of the regime. It is against the law to discriminate on the basis of race, sex, religion, and national origin, but unpopular political beliefs or expressing an unpopular opinion online (even anonymously and in jest) mean that no adverse employment action is off the table.
Libs of TikTok was doxed by the execrable Taylor Lorenz, causing real problems in the otherwise anonymous realtor’s life. Conservative commentator Lomez also had his anonymity broken, as did many people involved in the early “alt right.”
The pattern is always the same: information meant to be private—or at least anonymous—is made public. Things are taken out of context, and the words exposed are often juvenile, uncouth, semi-serious, or even offensive. Remarks may have been deleted or walked back after the author felt some regret, but no mitigation efforts accrue any goodwill.
Regardless of the victim’s background, activists demand termination from employment, social ostracism, and, often enough, violence. In spite of their formal condemnation of “cancel culture,” the official organs of conservatism and Republicans in government usually react to the pressure, even though all of the outrage is ginned up and artificial.
Privacy is Necessary for Freedom to be Meaningful
The better practice is simply to ignore doxing. After all, doxing is wrong. Thoughts are not actions. And privacy is important. It used to be a core American understanding that people are allowed to think what they want when they are not on the clock and that there is value in people letting off steam and sandboxing controversial ideas.
Sure, much of the activity exposed in these blackmail attempts is sophomoric, offensive, and would not be said under one’s actual name. That is the point. Anonymity permits experimentation, exploration, and even offensiveness. Normal people like to tell jokes, especially as a response to the conformist panopticon that has been built up around us over the last decade. No one owes random strangers on the internet an explanation or their real name, which may be used to track down family members or an employer in order to dispatch a lynch mob.
Doxing for anonymous free speech is just a tool of social control. The doxers do not really care about offensive memes and controversial thoughts. They have already said ad nauseum that they think Trump and his supporters are all racists and Nazis, who lack all moral legitimacy. In other words, they don’t just oppose those who are more direct or more impolitic than those who adhere to the conventions of polite society—they hate us all.
The left knows that by subjecting only one side—our side—to extreme scrutiny for private behavior, they discourage people who are otherwise sympathetic to the Trump program from doing anything to help. By silencing their critics through such means, they can create an illusion of inevitability and consensus supporting the left’s extreme stances on issues like transsexualism or mass immigration.
So far, the private behavior of most of the activists on the left—whether involving drugs, deviancy, or their expressions of rage on the internet—has been ignored. Oh, you’re a thief and a man that wears a dress, nothing to be ashamed of. You may even receive a high-level government post. If you committed statutory rape on a teenage boy, they might name a U.S. Navy ship after you.
But if you like the wrong meme or tell a joke with a friend at a conference, the same people demand that you be exiled and rendered penniless. The only hypocrisy they recognize among their own cohort is not being sufficiently on board with their revolutionary program.
We lack the strategic depth and institutionalized power of the left. Between media, human resources departments, government-funded non-profits, judges, and high government officials, they have more people and money in their toolkit.
Trump, of course, is trying to dismantle this. But there is a reason we all now know who is behind DOGE and hardly know a thing about who has been calling the shots in the Biden administration for the last four years. I assume some intelligence agencies are involved, and, if not them, certainly their USAID-funded cutouts.
The right also lacks the left’s puritanical concern for private behavior. This is ironic because one of the traditional and outdated criticisms of the right was its sexual puritanism. But this was an artifact of the brief and exaggerated influence of evangelicals in the 1990s.
Today, right-leaning people are a diverse collection of ordinary and flawed people, people like Donald Trump. They are concerned about intrusions into their traditional areas of autonomy, like family life, parenting, and relationships with friends and family, but are mostly live and let live.
Without privacy, these spaces for freedom and self-expression become meaningless. Understandably, the political right has become even more interested in freedom, as the left has become more intrusive, dictatorial, and censorious.
A Template for Success
Old habits die hard. For the longest time, the right lacked confidence, always trying to prove that it met the left’s au courant moral standards better than the left itself. But what if that morality is upside down, magnifying and stigmatizing what is not wrong at all—or picayune at worst—while ignoring things that are more important, like honoring our ancestors, the sanctity of the family, and respecting other people’s privacy?
Trying to hurt someone by doxing them is many times worse than the alleged offense. A bad thought in one’s head or a fleeting utterance on social media does no harm to anyone. Until the right recognizes that its critics lack moral authority and ignores their attempts to sow dissension within our ranks, the right will continue to hand over power to its enemies.
After the resignation of one DOGE staffer—outed for edgy comments and memes on x.com—Elon Musk decided to rehire him. This was brave and admirable. This took place after a campaign involving many influential voices on the right, including J.D. Vance, who articulated some of the moral considerations involved.
Taking a stand here is a useful adjunct to DOGE and Trump’s ongoing efforts to disempower the left. By showing them that we won’t be dancing their tune and canning people after purposeful invasions of privacy, the left’s information warfare will lose much of its residual power. We just needed to learn the power of saying no.
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Christopher Roach is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and an attorney in private practice based in Florida. He is a double graduate of the University of Chicago and has previously been published by The Federalist, Takimag, Chronicles, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Marine Corps Gazette, and the Orlando Sentinel. The views presented are solely his own.
