An Elon University computer science professor has dedicated herself to doxing people she considers to be white supremacists or far-right extremists, sending their personal information to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), left-wing groups, and even antifa, it has been revealed.
Professor Megan Squire is, in fact, antifa’s new “secret weapon,” Wired recently trumpeted in a fawning profile piece.
While most of the people Squire targets appear to adhere to some form of far-right extremist ideology, many others, according to her own criteria, are guilty of nothing more than being anti-Obama, anti-SJW, against radical Islam, or against gay marriage. In other words, right-of-center citizens simply exercising their right to free speech on social media.
According to Wired, “Squire manages a set of programs that monitors 400,000 accounts” of “white nationalists” on Facebook and other online sources.
Squire, on her own blog, writes, “I have found that the Facebook social network is actually a very rich source of data about far-right extremist groups. For 500,000 members of 1,336 different far-right extremist groups and events, Facebook is the perfect place for recruitment and community-building.”
Squire works closely with the SPLC, to which she often feeds her data. SPLC analysts reportedly use the data to “provide information to police or to reveal white supremacists to their employers, seeking to get them fired.”
The punchline here, of course, is that the SPLC is considered by many to be a left-wing extremist group whose “hate group” designation of the conservative Family Research Council (FRC) triggered a domestic terror attack a few years back. (The FRC, incidentally, is listed as one of the keywords Squire uses to ferret out “far-right extremists.”)
According to Wired, Squire sent “several high-profile names” from her list to a left-wing activist she knew would take “more radical action—like posting their identities and photos online, for the public to do with what it would.”
But it gets worse. Squire claims to be peaceful herself, but considers the violent anarcho-communist goons of antifa to be “among her strongest allies,” according to Wired.
She doesn’t consider herself to be antifa and pushes digital activism instead of the group’s black-bloc tactics, in which bandanna-masked activists physically attack white supremacists.
But she is sympathetic to antifa’s goal of silencing racist extremists and is unwilling to condemn their use of violence, describing it as the last resort of a “diversity of tactics.” She’s an intelligence operative of sorts in the battle against far-right extremism, passing along information to those who might put it to real-world use. Who might weaponize it.
Squire was impressed with antifa when she first encountered them last year, telling Wired that “they were a level of mad about racism and fascism that I was glad to see. They were definitely not quiet rainbow peace people.” Soon she was feeding information to her newfound antifa friends.
The irony of partnering with a genuinely violent far-left extremist group to go after right-wing extremists seemed lost on Squire. But then, she’s pretty left-wing herself.
Wired reports that during the Bush years “she could often be spotted around town waving signs against the Iraq War, and in 2008 she went door to door campaigning for Barack Obama.” Later on she “plunged into the Occupy movement.” In December 2016, she joined the Marxist Industrial Workers of the World.
Far Left Watch describes how Squire gathers her data:
According to a recently published blog on her personal website, she uses 12 different far-right ideologies in her classification system. Included in her breakdown of each ideology are example keywords she uses to identify extremists, some of which are as vague as “anti-SJW”, “anti-Obama”, “No Sharia Law”, “rebel”, “patriot”, “kek” and others. With the inclusion of so many vague keywords I think it is fair to assume that not all 400,000 people on her list are bonafide “far-right extremists”.
In her post, Squire notes that the keywords shown in her table are actually “just a very small sampling of the words actually used in the classification scheme.” She explained, “These keywords, and others, are used by my software to identify groups of interest using Facebook’s search API. After the software identifies a possible group or event, I evaluate whether the group should be included or not.”
Squire not only sends personal data on white supremacists (real or imagined) to antifa, she also shares data with another far-left militia organization, known as Redneck Revolt, according to Wired.
The implications here are pretty terrible. To many people on the far left, ordinary Trump supporters are considered right-wing extremists deserving of a good beat-down. We’ve seen the mentality play out on the streets again and again and again.
As Far Left Watch points out, “people who are targeted and assaulted by far-left groups like antifa cover a wide political spectrum.”
Anyone framing this growing conflict as simply “antifascist vs. white supremacist” is uninformed at best and operating with malicious intent at worst. This article by Wired is a continuation of the ongoing media campaign to normalize and popularize political violence from the left.
That both the far left and the far right pose a danger to society seems lost on Squire since she has no compunction about partnering with dangerous left-wing extremists to target people on the right.
PJ Media reached out to Squire on Twitter and Facebook. She said that TCM — one of the “keywords” cited on her blog — stands for “The Creativity Movement, a neo-Nazi ‘religion.'” She had no comment on the other keywords she uses.
TCM is The Creativity Movement, a neo-Nazi "religion". I added some links to the blog so you could get educated. https://t.co/QzcplUeiuQ
— megan squire (@MeganSquire0) January 18, 2018
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