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while i am glad to see tanya gersh won her lawsuit against anglin, i fail to see how this in any way prevents this from happening to others. anglin is missing, broke, and the subject of more than a few other lawsuits he'll never be able to pay the damages in.
this lawsuit proves that a perfect victim with access to immense institutional resources can win a symbolic victory against a missing nazi who didn't defend himself. it doesn't show any willingness by the establishment to go after the people who actually made the threats.
what happened to her was disgusting, no doubt. she did not deserve to have a constant barrage of abuse and harassment directed at her and her family. she was traumatized by the threats of violence. but what happened to tanya gersh was not unique or rare.
what was unique is that gersh was a good candidate for this kind of symbolic lawsuit because she was a good victim. she was not, to my knowledge, involved in radical politics on any side. she was just a real estate agent who in the course of her business upset a nazi's mom.
she deserves this victory. i don't mean to detract from the validity of her suffering or the good work that was done in winning the suit. but i would like to counter the narrative that this win in any way demonstrates that there are broader consequences for this behavior.
i have been very open and public about the threats and abuse i receive because i think it's important for people to see. what you may not realize is how not special or unique the stuff i get is. so many people suffer in silence and anonymity from this kind of harassment.
because talking about it often makes it worse! no one wants to make themselves a bigger target. many people who get death threats are, understandably, afraid. when speaking out earns you death threats, it disincentivizes speaking out about them. that's the point of the threats.
many people who are the recipients of this kind of abuse are also not perfect victims. people like me who engage in any kind of political activity left of center may be deemed to have brought it on themselves. maybe i deserve to be threatened because i kicked the hornets' nest.
if every woman i know who has been relentlessly harassed by a nazi filed a lawsuit like gersh's, it would take a small army of lawyers tying up courthouses nationwide to work though. it. is. EVERYWHERE.
if every woman i know who has been relentlessly harassed by just ONE SINGLE NAZI, christopher cantwell, filed a lawsuit like gersh's, he'd be buried in a mountain of paperwork you'd have to deliver to him in a goddamn dump truck.
cantwell threatens women like @lilsarg who don’t even write about the far right. i can’t even remember what got her on his radar but he was obsessed with fantasies of her rape and murder for a while. 
christopher cantwell has spent the last year and a half REPEATEDLY, regularly, and relentlessly trying to incite his followers to rape and murder me. for the majority of that time, he has been on good behavior in albemarle county as part of a plea agreement.
i have no faith that state intervention is the solution to this problem, but would it not be a better allocation of resources for these large nonprofits to work for better laws against this kind of behavior instead of litigating a small number of high profile civil suits?
this isn’t about free speech or even hate speech. it’s about incitement to violence. it’s about terrorizing people.
a regular listener to cantwell’s show used to call in every few weeks with a new elaborate and grotesque fantasy about murdering and dismembering my dogs. then he sent me some photoshopped images of my own decapitated body.
on an episode last may, chris spent fifteen minutes trying to convince a developmentally disabled man, another regular listener to his show, that he should come to my home and rape me until i’m straight. he, too, later contacted me directly.
days after the christchurch mosque shooting, after he was banned from gab for saying white nationalists should be killing leftists and journalists instead of muslims, he told his telegram group that if anybody is gonna murder someone, it should be me, specifically.
he honest to god just cannot stop telling people to rape me.
let me be clear, this is not a competition about who has suffered more. the point is that this is COMMON and that it is a serious problem. tanya gersh and i are both victims of the same widespread epidemic, one that current laws are not equipped to deal with.
