Gwen Snyder is uncivil

Now, someone did send me Tom's full name and address. Someone else sent me several photos of him from Facebook. I'm grateful; I'll use that information when I file a police report today. But I didn't doxx Tom.

Instead, I tried to understand where he was coming from as a human being. I wrote a thread about how you could see his journey of white supremacist radicalization by looking at his public Facebook likes. It seems to have resonated with a lot of people.https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1133057510292824065 …

But Tom-- the person who said he would kill a loved one of mine if I doxxed him-- thinks he's been doxxed. And in this FB post, he lets the world know he has my home address. And what does the mayoral nominee of one of the most populous cities in America do? He eggs him on.

This GOP mayoral nominee also attended and was slated to speak at a Proud Boys-organized rally last August. At that same rally, his campaign manager gave community service awards to Philly Proud Boy leaders Sonny Sullivan and Zach Rehl.https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1107036240392654848 …

This is very real, folks. This is the official Republican party nominee in a major US city supportively commenting on a post where a white supremacist reveals that the conditions for his death threats have been met, and that he knows where his target lives.

And btw, the ward leader who says I'm "mentally unstable"? That's the same Democratic ward leader who sat me down to tell me that this research doesn't matter, that Proud Boys and identity Europa aren't "real" nazis, that she's tired of getting their calls complaining about me.

That ward leader told me I was wasting my time with this research, that it made our ward look bad, that I should stop and focus my energy on the Democratic primary.

Honestly, I was more sad than angry, because it was so clear that she believed it. It was so clear that in her mind, these folks could never come to power. No one would ever listen to them. That researching and calling them out was a fixation & symptom of mental illness.

And guys? Before Charlottesville, I felt kind of the same way, minus the mental illness part. Folks would invite me to local demonstrations against skinhead events, and I'd think, 'there are so few of them, why give them the attention?'

What I've only recently realized is that they don't just go away if you ignore them. They recruit. They infiltrate. They multiply. Only in sunlight do they scatter. That's why this work and this research matters.

Because if we're quiet, if we pretend they aren't "real" nazis, if we ignore the disconcerting realities of this movement by pretending they have no power... We're giving them the darkness they need to actively recruit and radicalize our neighbors. Our friends. Our family.