Stop Outing Nazis. Your Rights Depend On Theirs, by Bethany Mandel.

Americans don’t like Nazis; as a viral internet meme reminded us, we fought a war about this; the whole world was involved.

Now, others are gathering up those white faces lined up with their tiki torches held high and using the Internet to sleuth out their names, as well as their academic and employment specifics. You can guess where the story goes from there. Their lives are about to be publicly decimated. …

There’s lots of online approval for doxxing these guys and ruining their lives. … There’s an understandable righteous feeling that accompanies these kinds of witch-hunts. This is especially the case when it comes to what feels like morally justified witch-hunts, like the ones where people try to identify the perpetrators of crimes. ,,,

But this is a terrible, terrible idea. …

And even if these white nationalists are being properly identified, firing individuals based on their political beliefs, no matter how repugnant, creates an incredibly slippery slope.

Writing about hate speech on Twitter, the ACLU warned, “Restricting any group or individual’s speech jeopardizes everyone’s rights. The same laws used to silence bigots can be used to silence you.” …

This has become all too common a practice – one that internet vigilantees take up with glee, and to much fanfare. Already in this country, it’s acceptable to hound individuals out of jobs for holding certain political beliefs; just ask Google engineer James Damore or Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich. …

There’s a dangerous slippage that’s entered the mainstream discourse surrounding conservatism and Republicans, one that fails to distinguish between the alt right and more mainstream figures. … Bannon and Sessions are entirely different animals; by equating them, Reid highlights why conservatives are wary of the thought police going after people’s jobs. …

But firing individuals based on their personally held beliefs not only creates a slippery slope, but also as one of my Twitter followers half-joked, “an outcast class of bright, reactionary, but unemployable young men with little to lose. What. Could. Possibly. Go. Wrong?”