In August of last year, a man named Andrew Dodson took part in the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. There are videos of him marching toward Emancipation Park, along with hundreds of neo-Nazis, fascists, skinheads, alt-righters, white supremacists, neo-Confederates, and garden-variety racists. I remember seeing Dodson in Charlottesville, looking out of place in a sea of khakis and army boots, of black uniforms and lacrosse helmets and homespun shields. He wore a red Revolutionary War–style tricorne hat and a white linen suit that made his bushy red beard all the more conspicuous.



Initially, amateur investigators wrongly identified Dodson as Kyle Quinn, an engineer in Arkansas who was quickly subjected to a torrent of online abuse. Then, a week after the Unite the Right rally, the Tumblr account Yes, You’re Racist identified Dodson, or doxxed him. The account published a picture of Dodson taken during the march, identifying him by name and listing a place of employment and the town where he lived. Logan Smith, who operates the Twitter account @YesYoureRacist, exposed the identity of several other participants of the rally and sent out a call to identify Dodson. His aim was to communicate that attending white supremacist marches came at a price. “If these people are so proud to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with white supremacists and neo-Nazis, then I think that their communities need to know who these people are,” Smith told MSNBC.*

After the doxx, Dodson was reportedly let go from his job in Massachusetts. Then, on March 9, he died. For more than two months, his death went largely unnoticed, with the exception of a March 14 obituary in a local paper in South Carolina, where he was born.

In May, however, white supremacists began claiming that Dodson was a martyr to their cause. Richard Spencer called his death an act of war. RedIce TV, a Swedish far-right outlet, created a hagiographic video in Dodson’s memory, replete with throbbing hearts, dramatic black-and-white images, and somber music. The mourners asserted that Dodson had killed himself following a massive campaign of harassment, designed to isolate him from his family, friends, and employer. In a video posted to Reddit, Dodson can be seen insisting that, after the doxx, his opponents were “trying to make me lose my job, trying to threaten my family.” The actual extent of the harassment is unclear, and there is no evidence so far that his death was a suicide. (His family declined to comment for this article, as did his coroner and funeral home.) But that hardly mattered to the alt-right: The point they wanted to make, facts notwithstanding, was that Dodson’s doxxing was proof that there was no low to which the left, in its rabid thirst for blood, would not stoop.

As Laura Loomer, a former activist with the conservative group Project Veritas, famous for its misleading “sting” operations against liberal organizations like Planned Parenthood, tweeted, “Left wing insanity is killing people. This is so SAD!” In their outrage, the far right conveniently left out their own long history of doxxing. Chat logs obtained by the alternative media collective Unicorn Riot showed a concerted effort by members of the far right to release identities not only of antifa members and other left-wing activists, but also of journalists, “Marxist professors,” and “liberal teachers.”