There was a significant development in the dark, deranged world of Antifa this past month when the manager of the group’s biggest website in Canada got “doxed” by conservative media. The real identity of “Nosferatu200,” aka Kurt Phillips, a history teacher at a Catholic junior high school, was inadvertently revealed in a lawsuit against the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAN), the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)’s partner-organization in Canada.

RebelNews.com, which broke the finding, described Phillips’s site as having, for over a decade, “shared the personal information, addresses, photos of homes, names, and faces of people who Phillips unilaterally determines are ‘fascists.’”

In response to Phillips’s statement following the revelation, in which he claimed to be against violence, intrepid Antifa-investigator Andy Ngo tweeted:

Extremist antifa doxer claims he has always “rejected violence” after he was named as a Catholic school teacher Kurt Phillips in a lawsuit. On his blog, he released the address and photo of opponents’ home, and defended the use of violence as recently as last week. https://t.co/0okNQtFC71 — Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) January 9, 2020

Believe it or not, Antifa is probably worse in Canada than they are here. But North or South, what both poles of the North American left have in common is their willingness to enact financial and reputational damage to punish those who think differently from them.

DOXING IS A LEFTIST PRIVILEGE

After the dox, not only did the SPLC’s partner in Canada jump to Phillips’s rescue—praising his work and calling the Antifa blog a “major inspiration”—it announced it had actually hired Phillips as one of its “anti-hate” researchers. The head of CAN, Evan Balgord, is listed as a Patreon Supporter of the site, and, unlike both the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League, he and CAN openly defend Antifa’s tactics.

CAN claimed that Phillips was “under attack” as a result of the dox and disparaged that “far-right activists are hassling his school.”

In addition to announcing the hire, CAN claimed that Phillips was “under attack” as a result of the dox and disparaged that “far-right activists are hassling his school.” This is quite rich coming from a group whose very mandate, just like the SPLC, is to dox and impugn the character of people they label as too extreme for civilized debate.

Recently, the group similarly called out the doxing of a Syrian refugee/Antifa member whose family restaurant received threatening phone calls after he was caught at a conservative event allegedly shouting “Nazi Scum” into the face of an elderly woman with a walker.

The left maintains quite the double standard when it comes to doxing. In 2018, when Berkeley police arrested 20 masked and armed Antifa members who violently tried to shut down a “No to Marxism” rally and then tweeted out their mug shots (not an unusual practice), left-wing activists condemned the move as intimidation. Their campaign led to the Tweet’s removal. “They are making it really accessible for folks who might wish these people harm to locate them,” one local professor told the Guardian.

In the same piece, the Guardian referred to doxing as an “increasingly common rightwing tactic.” The head of D.C. Legal Posse, a group which provided funding to Antifa members who were prosecuted for the violent 2017 inauguration protests in Washington, D.C., agreed. “It’s clear that the cops have chosen sides,” Sam Menefee-Libey told the reporter, “and that they think of the left as their enemies … The cops are doing something that Nazis do all the time, which is dox people.” A top official with the decades-old National Lawyers Guild, which provides free legal services to Antifa, also claimed that the police were targeting and intimidating Antifa activists. (This coming from a group whose members in the 1970s defended Philip Agee after he disclosed the identities of hundreds of undercover CIA officers working abroad, allegedly leading to the death of operative Robert Welch in Greece).

Antifa’s very existence, of course, is based on intimidation, usually, through unprovoked violence, but also through the same doxing methods its defenders publicly criticize—again, it was the very modus operandi of Phillips’s site.

The left is willing and able to use their powerful media engine to block out and intimidate those with different opinions and social concerns.

Why Antifa is willing to post online peoples’ personal details online aligns with the reasons they act so violently: to inspire terror in those who believe in free speech and association. This includes publishing peoples’ home addresses (which they’ve done to Andy Ngo’s parents), circulating photos of opponents likely to be at conservative events which they mark for violent treatment, and leafleting ‘Fascist Security Alerts’ in neighborhoods where opponents live (as was done to Gavin McInnes).

Simply posting online a write-up about a person in which “researchers” like Phillips, however loosely or unfairly, connect them to certain taboo ideas can have deleterious effects on their livelihood, reputation, and family. Not only does the internet reach the public on a wide and indiscriminate basis, it’s become in effect a database accessible to anyone with a reason to be curious about that person—e.g., human resources departments, landlords, loan officers, new boyfriends or girlfriends, etc. Especially for those too poor to fight back through the courts, it isn’t hyperbole to label doxing, at its most heinous, a form of financial and reputational terrorism.

Despite Phillips having done this for years (just like CAN and the SPLC), his Catholic school employers have apparently decided to stand by him. They’ve issued a statement to Rebel News, saying he “doesn’t bring his personal activism to the classroom.”

The lack of negative consequences for Phillips is a clear case of uneven treatment. And the uneven consequences of doxing can be explained, in part, by the left’s media monopoly can be explained, in part, by the left’s total monopolization of the cultural and media industries. The left is willing and able to use their powerful media engine to block out and intimidate those with different opinions and social concerns.

Until the Conservatives gain headway in these areas, the defaming campaigns will continue.