O Doxx, Where Art Thou Sting?

It's been a year now since I was doxxed...

The one-year anniversary of my doxxing passed last week without fanfare or ceremony. I completely missed it, which rather belies the importance of that event to my career and life, I must say. I thought I’d been doxxed in July 2024; but no, Hope Not Hate released their charmingly titled “eggsposé” on me on 20 June, 2024; although I didn’t actually find out, and things didn’t really kick off, until the following day, which I remember was a Friday. It was an interesting weekend, to say the least.

If you want to read about the particular circumstances of my doxxing—from the funny business at my local farm shop to why I thought (and still think) state intelligence might have been involved—read this long essay I wrote for American Mind, “Disrupting the Right.” While that essay was written before Donald Trump’s re-election, which has taken a lot of pressure off right-wingers in the US, I think most of the points I made still stand.

Anyway, I wanted to mark the occasion, even if I missed the exact date. I’ve thought for quite some time about putting together a kind of “How to survive doxxing 101” package to help people learn from my experience and mistakes, so they can be a little bit better prepared than I was. That’s not exactly what this bit of writing is, but we’ll continue.

Of course, I knew I was likely to be doxxed—Hope Note Hate had already included me in their 2023 “State of Hate” report and said my days as an anonymous poster were numbered—but I can’t say I was expecting it to happen on that Friday, when I woke up, logged on to Twitter and was promptly commiserated by a friend in a group chat. “Really sorry about the doxxing, REN!”

I didn’t have a plan. I just continued as I was and made things up on the fly. In the end, everything was okay. In fact, it turned out to be great: My profile has been raised significantly, and I’ve been able to do things I’d never have been able to do while maintaining my cover, like hosting a panel on the subversive nature of beauty with Italian male model Pietro Boselli at Hereticon II in Miami.

One of the things that wasn’t so great, initially, was learning who really was and wasn’t on my side. On certain days, depending on mood, I think it’s a mistake to believe anybody you’ve met on the internet is really your friend. At the very least, you shouldn’t believe someone is your friend just because you follow each other and talk in group chats, and that they owe you anything that might look like loyalty or support. They don’t, trust me. When I was doxxed, people I had been pretty kind to and helped were nowhere to be seen—not even a private message of support—and then people I had openly clashed with were wonderfully magnanimous. It’s not something I would have predicted.

In truth, I’m not really sure how typical my case is and how much others can learn from it. I was in a position most anonymous Twitter posters are unlikely ever to be in. I already had hundreds of thousands of followers and multiple income streams that were totally insulated from any traditional attempt at cancellation. I didn’t face financial ruin or social ostracism any more than I’d chosen already to separate myself from my peers, former friends and society more broadly. Things just continued as they were, except I got to make in-person appearances and educate the Twittersphere about the presence in the British Isles, since the Neolithic, of people with a darker complexion like my own. I’d consider that a pretty valuable service, actually. Being revealed as a graduate of Cambridge and Oxford scarcely damaged my credibility, nor did being free to post videos of myself performing easy 420-pound snatch-grip deadlifts at a bodyweight of 175 pounds.

Which isn’t to say bad things didn’t happen—or rather, that they couldn’t have happened. They still could. I live in the UK, of course, which has become a sinister, increasingly unfree little place, and there’s no reason to believe I couldn’t face the kind of rough treatment faced in recent years by other dissidents (although I hesitate, for various reasons, to use that weighty epithet to describe myself). De-platforming, de-banking, other forms of official and quasi-official harassment, prosecution and prison—all of these things remain possible.

The day after I was doxxed, for the first time ever, a policeman knocked at my front door. Fearing the worst, I was relieved to discover he only wanted to alert me to an Amazon package that had been left out in the road by a careless delivery driver.