Shaming the enablers of fascism

As you’ve probably heard, Kristjen Nielson was confronted by protestors inside a Mexican restaurant in Washington yesterday, and promptly fled the scene.  This was just the most high-profile of what hopefully will be many efforts to publicly shame Trump administration officials, and their many enablers and supporters.

Here’s another such effort:

As the furor over family separations and inhumane treatment committed by ICE continues unabated, protesters are taking action into their own hands against ICE — in person and online. Yesterday, artist and academic Sam Lavigne scraped and released a database of the names of 1,595 people who list ICE as their employer on LinkedIn. “While I don’t have a precise idea of what should be done with this data set,” he wrote on Medium, “I leave it here with the hope that researchers, journalists and activists will find it useful.”

The full data dump, “including profile photos, previous employment info, schools, and more,” was uploaded to GitHub, the widely used development tool recently purchased by Microsoft for $7.5 billion. For a brief window of time yesterday, the Twitter account @iceHRgov, satirically couched as an account celebrating the hardworking employees of ICE, tweeted out names, photos, and other personal details from the data set.

@iceHRgov was suspended within minutes, while Lavigne’s post on Medium explaining the effort and the GitHub repository also vanished. Archives of the Medium post and GitHub repo are still live on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

The excuse for removing this information was that Lavigne’s project is a form of doxing.  This is completely absurd.  Lavigne gathered public information about people that these people themselves made public for self-promotional purposes.  How in the world is publishing this information doxing?

We need way more of this, in lots of different forms.  For example, if you’re a member of Turning Point USA, you work for an organization that promotes the career and fills the bank account of Ann “those crying toddlers are actually crisis actors” Coulter.  (It sure would be terrible if Coulter soon finds it impossible to street walk without risking public humiliation of various sorts).

Here’s a list of all the chapter presidents of this vile organization, which I hope will come in extra handy for admissions committees at graduate and professional schools, potential employers, people who use Tinder, human rights tribunals, etc.

So here’s a suggestion: besides giving whatever you can afford to RAICES, do what you can to publicly name and shame a fascist enabler somewhere in your social orbit today.