Berkeley College Republicans received a crash course in the politics of personal destruction this week when their private information was leaked over a planned event with Breitbart News’ Milo Yiannopoulos.
At least five current and former members of the University of California Berkeley’s College Republicans had private information posted online Jan. 5 by a group called “Northern California Anti-Racist Action.” A workplace address and telephone number, partial information from a driver’s license and email addresses were uploaded to itsgoingdown.org for a post titled “The Kids are Alt-Right: The UC Berkeley Republican Students Behind the Milo Event.”
The doxxing — a practice of intimidating individuals by dumping personal information into the public domain — left students shaken.
“The article is wrong in the moral sense and in the factual sense,” Matt Ronnau told The Daily Californian on Wednesday. “When I didn’t know [that I was named], I thought it would be interesting but then seeing my information on there was … a little scary.”
Northern California Anti-Racist Action defended its actions by claiming it was necessary to inform “the university and greater Berkeley and Bay Area community about the white supremacist and fascist students using the guise of ’free speech’ to encourage hate and violence against those already marginalized and oppressed.”
BCR blasted the “malicious attack” on Facebook and added that doxxing “is illegal under U.S. law.”
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“My friend Angelo’s place of work was published, which is awful,” Mr. Ronnau added Wednesday in an interview with The College Fix, an education watchdog. “Are the writers intending for people to show up and intimidate him or send the rest of us threatening Facebook messages? It’s really sad to see something like this happen.”
Campus spokesman Dan Mogulof told The Daily Californian that “personal attacks have no legitimate place in this conversation or at this university — before, during, or after the [February] event — and we urge everyone, no matter their perspectives, to refrain from engaging in them.”
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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