I am a Jew with dual careers in academia and the media.

It's unfortunate that I need to open an editorial with that statement, but in this Age of the Alt-Right, it is also necessary. After all, to the type of person who marched in Charlottesville and trolls on Reddit and the message boards of political websites, long-discredited-but-still-popular anti-Semitic conspiracy theories would tell them that my Jewishness is directly responsible for both of these careers. As the argument goes, Jews conspire with other Jews to help each other out in fields like these, with the ultimate goal being to consolidate power and impose some type of Jewish agenda.

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I could tell them that this isn't true, of course. At no point in either of my careers has any Jewish person offered to help me because I happen to also be Jewish. This is also true for my many Jewish family members and friends, some of whom are far more successful than myself.

Yet these truths won't matter. The mind of a bigot is already closed to facts, so attempting to persuade them with my personal experiences (which, after all, they can easily dismiss as lies) isn't likely to change their worldview.

Then again, the fact that the white supremacists of the world tend to think in terms of conspiracies does offer remarkable insights — into their own actions, that is.

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I refer to this passage from a piece by Seattle historian David Lewis, who pretended to be a neo-Nazi film editor and book critic in order to attend a closed-door white nationalist convention called Northwest Forum. His paragraph about a speech by the forum's organizer, Dr. George Johnson, is so chilling that it deserves to be republished in full.

Much bleaker is Dr. Johnson’s Seattle-suitable, “secret agent” racism plan. Basically, white nationalists meet in secret at conventions like Northwest Forum while paying “lip service to diversity” at their day jobs. They move into positions of power where they can hire other racists and keep non-whites from getting into the company. Two years ago, this method would have seemed like a total joke, but these guys really do mostly work in tech, and they were doing a lot of networking. When talking about the people he has counseled on the “secret agent” method, Dr. Johnson has written that they include “college professors, writers, artists, designers, publishers, creative people working in the film industry, businessmen, and professionals, some of them quite prominent in their fields.” When I told Dr. Johnson I was reluctant to use my super film editing skills (I can’t even work iMovie) for the movement because I was afraid I would be outed in Hollywood he said, “You know, you can always be a secret agent, there's no shame in that.”

Three thoughts come to mind here.

First, this anecdote demonstrates that the so-called "Paranoid Style of American Politics" is as potent today as it was when historian Richard Hofstadter coined the term in 1964. As Hofstadter observed at the time, individuals who subscribe to paranoid political philosophies — in this case, that racial and religious minorities are taking over the country and thereby endangering the prerogatives of white, straight, Christian men — frequently adopt the very strategies that they claim to deplore when supposedly used by the people they hate.

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It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.

It seems that white nationalists, many of whom I am sure believe in such nonsense as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, have no qualms about employing the very techniques they wrongly perceive as being used by Jews like myself.

The next important observation is the fact that so many of these people work in the technology sector. As Lewis wrote elsewhere in his article, "According to my observations, the standard Seattle Nazi is a white male under 30 who either works in the tech industry or is going to school to work in the tech industry."

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This won't come as a surprise to any woman, Jew, Muslim, African American, Latinx or LGBTQ person who either works in technology or uses technology in their spare time. From the misogynistic crusade known as Gamergate and the rise of right-wing YouTube to the symbiotic relationship between President Donald Trump and right-wing Internet trolls, it is clear that the Internet has been a boon for individuals trying to spread hate-filled agendas.

Similarly, even before erstwhile Google employee James Damore became an alt right martyr by getting fired for writing a memo that oozed with sexist stereotypes, the tech industry has become notorious as a place filled with sexism, racism and a downright bullying mentality. It is hardly surprising that former Breitbart tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos — who, though disavowing the alt-right himself, is undeniably popular among many in the alt-right and shares many of their views on issues like gender and Donald Trump — reportedly has a devoted following within certain tech circles.

In other words: Tech has a major bigotry problem, and it isn't by accident.

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As I've argued in the past on several occasions — while purveyors of hatred have a right to free speech, they should not be allowed to engage in such speech anonymously. The problem with arguing that anonymity is somehow an integral part of free speech, at least when dealing with white nationalists and the alt-right in general, is that they weaponize free speech to inflict real harm on other people. The example that receives the most attention (and rightly so) is that they frequently harass, humiliate and otherwise bully various targets online. What Lewis' anecdote demonstrates, however, is that they also use what power is given to them to actively discriminate against innocent people based on their race, religion, gender identity and other aspects of their background.

They do not have the right to do this — indeed, the civil rights legislation of the 1960s makes it illegal for them to conspire to professionally discriminate on the basis of race — and their First Amendment rights end where the basic welfare of innocent human beings begins.

I can't deny that part of the reason that I feel so strongly about this subject is that I am a Jewish American who has experienced violent anti-Semitism firsthand. That said, I would hope that I'd hold these same views even if I didn't have this specific background. I'm encouraged by the fact that I know hundreds of people — many of them white, Christian, heterosexual men of the type that the alt-right targets and deems superior — who share my revulsion at prejudice and would likewise want no part of it.

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These individuals give me hope. They are the future, while their counterparts on the far-right represent a political perspective that has been rightly consigned to the ashes of history.