How to get doxxed: be handsome, successful, well-liked, entrepreneurial

This morning, professional hall monitor Jason Wilson revealed the identity of well-known Twitter anon Lomez in The Guardian.

It turns out, Lomez is a former college athlete, beloved literature professor (whose student reviews on RateMyProfessor.com are unanimously positive and horny), and now successful entrepreneur with a beautiful wife and family.

The contrast between Lomez and the CIA-funded fungus attempting to destroy his life could not be more stark.

This article is not intended to be salacious clickbait, because “popular outrage” is not the point — in fact, as Will Stancil recently learned, it can be profoundly counterproductive.

There are no images of Lomez’s handsome face, and despite the obvious newsworthiness of Lomez’s naughty writings, Wilson makes them deliberately difficult to access. The article has the feeling of a technical report or dossier — which, of course, it is.

Journalistic doxxing in its purest form is a kind of “dead drop” — the delivery of a bland intelligence product from one organ of state security to another.

The only reason to broadcast this intelligence product on a public media outlet is:

1. To create the legal pretext for an enforcement action by Lomez’s EEOC-accountable employers, investors, etc.

2. To suggest the threat of violence by regime irregulars (mentally ill antifa goons).

3. To activate whatever social consequences can be created for Lomez and his family

Mostly, this episode reveals how far we have come in preparing ourselves against the first category of attack.

Owning his own explicitly “dissident” business means that Lomez can really only benefit professionally from mainstream media persecution.

If you make yourself a target for someone like Jason Wilson, you can’t afford to be dependent on any EEOC-accountable institution. If you want a big anon account, you need parallel income streams. If you want or need to stay in corporate employment, you do not have speech rights, and you need to fly low.

Of course, in Lomez’s case, and mine, we were able to become Professionally Extremely Online — but you shouldn’t have to take that route to be outspoken and financially secure. That’s one of the reasons I started EXIT.

The more individual control you have over the process of value generation, the more free you are from this type of bureaucratic control.

That can mean owning your own publishing business like Lomez, but you can have this kind of freedom to varying degrees in sales (where you control your book of clients), or software development (where the only capital requirement is knowhow and a laptop), or skilled trades (if you own both your tools and your lead-generation process).

The second category of attack is more challenging:

For most Americans, especially in urban jurisdictions, the only physical security is in obscurity. Even a few weeks in antifa’s crosshairs can be a harrowing experience, especially for members of your family who didn’t sign up for it.

In the short run, all that can really be done about schizo harassment and violence is to take personal responsibility for your family’s security, and limit your exposure to hostile jurisdictions.

Fortunately, most of our enemies are genuine psychological invalids and are unlikely to seek out a physical confrontation.

The third category of attack is the most difficult, because the consequences fall (by design) on your friends and family.

I don’t know how this situation lands for Lomez’s social circle, but in my general experience, the guys who have weathered doxxing best had already spent many years speaking forthrightly about their opinions with the people they cared about — especially their wives.

By the time they were doxxed, they had already burned most of the professional and social bridges that could be burnt. This isn’t possible in every case — and people should of course have the freedom to separate their political advocacy from their social affairs — but there is power in making your life as internally harmonious and integrated as possible.

For a few weeks in 2017 I made the rash decision to facedoxx to my ~250 followers, and then quickly reversed course. That’s how Jason and his friends doxxed me back in 2021.

It was a dumb move — but it's possible that if I had not done that, I might still be driving 90 minutes into a windowless cubicle farm, delivering meaningless compliance products, having my salary inflated away, and becoming an ever more specialized, narrow, insectoid component in a collapsing machine.

Now I spend all my time building things I care about. I don’t have to work with anyone I do not admire. I have learned skills that generalize to all kinds of projects — which means that even if this thing doesn’t work out, I know that I can find a way to make money.

None of that would have happened without Jason Wilson.

Lomez has been preparing wisely for this for years, so hopefully today he is just riding the wave and counting his money. All the same, go buy a book.

EXIT News

• On tonight’s full-group call, we will have an AI startup founder in the hot seat. He is looking for some marketing and user experience feedback as his team prepares to take their product to market.

• On last week’s marketing call, we addressed two cases:

  • Lead generation for a high-end educational product. How do you get someone from seeing your Google ad to sending you $8,000?

  • Building a brand as a solo bookkeeper. How can a business like that differentiate itself in terms of offerings, customer niches, aesthetics?

• Side Hustle Summer begins in 2 1/2 weeks. Start thinking of how you might bring in a dollar outside your 9-5. DB is hosting twice-weekly planning calls if you are still drawing a blank. Reach out to DB or check the #entrepreneurship channel for details.

• Cocktail hour RSVP links for New York City (6/21) and Columbus (7/19) below the fold for paid subscribers. These are a great opportunity to meet your local guys, and see if the full group is a good fit for you. Invites to the members-only portion of the meetup will be sent via email.