SNEAK PEEK: New Essay
Here's the first 1800 words of a new essay I'm writing about the circumstances of my recent doxxing
In case you didn’t know, about three weeks ago I got doxxed by a British activist organisation called Hope Not Hate. I knew it was coming, although I didn’t expect it to happen that Friday morning.
Since then, I’ve been doing my best to make sense of exactly what happened and how. An examination of the circumstances suggests to me the involvement of either the British or the US government or both, rather than a personal betrayal. I’m pursuing every avenue, including legal means, to get Hope Not Hate to reveal their sources, which they’re legally obliged to do, but in the meantime I thought I’d put my thoughts about the whole affair on the page. This is just a slice of a long essay I’m preparing.
As always, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.
Two weeks before I was doxxed—before my true identity 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. After all, 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 polarising 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.
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.)
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 became the subject of an exposé by a British organisation called Hope Not Hate, which specialises in that sort of thing. They actually 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 this prediction off at the time, but in hindsight it was clearly a threat.
Like the 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. 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.
Unlike the scumbag who doxxed my good friend L0m3z—more on this shortly—Hope Not Hate did a lazy job of hiding their parallel construction. L0m3z 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?
As far as I'm concerned, all the discovery of your identity accomplished was to confirm what I for one had already guessed, from the style of your writing, and listening to your podcasts, that you're both a gentleman AND a scholar. If anything, the Oxford/Cambridge background revelation creates more of an air of authority around what you have to say. Hate Not Hope doesn't have a secret agenda to increase the Man's World readership, does it?
I'm shocked you don't have your own flock of hens supplying you fresh, delicious eggs.