Bridget Todd (00:03):

You're listening to Disinformed, a miniseries from There Are No Girls on the Internet. I'm Bridget Todd. During World War II, many women did the dangerous work of resistance. Dutch sisters Freddie and Truus Oversteegen would get all dolled up to flirt with Nazi soldiers at bars before inviting them out for a romantic walk and luring them to their deaths. Dancer Josephine Baker secretly worked as a spy, passing on secrets she learned while performing to the French military. Elizabeth Gloeden hid Jews in her home in Berlin before getting them out of Germany to safety. Their work was often quiet and behind the scenes, and also very dangerous.

Bridget Todd (00:48):

Today there's still dangerous work to be done. On January 6th, we watch white supremacists breach the Capitol, and they were brazen, posting for selfies, live streaming, seemingly not caring if anyone knew who they were. I still see their smiling faces when I walk around my neighborhood in DC, on bus stop bay posters asking for the public's help with identifying them. Over 270 have already been charged.

Bridget Todd (01:12):

Now, I'm not going to lie. In the aftermath, it was kind of satisfying to watch people who were once so brazen get arrested, but I know it doesn't end there. It's important to follow up with what happens, even after the arrests are made. What were they charged with? Were they convicted? What happens next? Luckily, additional infrastructure that makes this easy for anyone to do already exists, and much of the dangerous work of building it out has been done by brave women armed with data, women like Emily Gorcenski. Emily is an activist who uses her data science background to fight Nazis and white supremacists. It's dangerous work.

Bridget Todd (01:50):

She moved to Berlin, in part just to get some space. Emily attended the deadly 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Heather Heyer was killed. There, well-known neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell assaulted Emily with pepper spray. She pressed charges, and in turn, Cantwell tried to press charges against her. When Cantwell learned that there was a warrant out for his arrest, he filmed himself sobbing, thus earning the nickname the Crying Nazi.

Bridget Todd (02:20):

Just a few moments before I spoke with Emily, news broke. Cantwell was being sentenced to 41 months in prison for trying to extort a member of a rival group of neo-Nazis who call themselves the Bowl Patrol. They wear bowl haircuts in tribute to Dylann Roof, who shot and killed nine at a Charleston church. Cantwell has been harassing Emily for years, and now he's going to prison. She sipped Blue Label whiskey as we talked, a quiet celebration.

Bridget Todd (02:49):

Usually I start these interviews asking about people's backgrounds and where they came from and all of that, but I have to mention top of the show, white supremacist aka Crying Nazi Christopher Cantwell was just sentenced to 41 months in prison. How are you feeling?

Emily Gorcenski (03:06):

You know, I feel relieved and I feel grateful that this is something that I don't have to worry about anymore. For those who don't know, Chris Cantwell was nicknamed the Crying Nazi because in 2017 he came to the Unite the Right Rally. There was this Vice documentary that featured him very heavily. He was talking a big game about how much violence he wanted to do. He was going to kill people, like, "We're going to kill all these commies," stuff like that. He had all these guns and was talking about how many weights he lifts. It turns out that he actually assaulted me at that rally with pepper spray, during the infamous tiki torch rally at the University of Virginia.

Emily Gorcenski (03:48):

I pressed charges, and when he found out that there was a warrant for his arrest, the reason that he found out that there was a warrant for his arrest is I had purposely let it slip that I had sworn a warrant for his arrest, he recorded this really long YouTube video where he started crying about having a warrant for his arrest, and then read his phone number off on this YouTube video, his actual phone number. This was just a few days after the event in Charlottesville, so it was very much in everyone's mind. He became known as the Crying Nazi.

Emily Gorcenski (04:30):

Since that moment, his life has taken many, many, many turns for the worse. He went to jail. He pleaded guilty for assaulting me. And then he recently was in this process of extorting another fellow white nationalist, which got him in trouble with the feds. He was found guilty at trial and then just sentenced to 41 months. This is somebody that's been harassing me for a long time, and this is somebody who's been threatening me and threatening my friends and my family. Prison isn't a solution for this behavior. There needs to be a bigger fix, but by God, I'm going to be really grateful for 41 months of not having to worry about his bullshit.

Bridget Todd (05:16):

So was this how you thought you would use your data science degrees, fighting Nazis?

Emily Gorcenski (05:20):

No, not at all. In fact, I went to school, I wanted to design airplanes. I did that for a long time, until I realized that designing airplanes is boring, and data science both paid better and was more fun. But I never set out to be an activist. I always felt that I had some sort of responsibility to make the world a better place. When I was younger, there were stories about how the Klan would march through the nearby city, the city next to where I grew up, which is a small town in Connecticut. It's like, what is the Klan doing in Willimantic, Connecticut? But the Klan is everywhere, because white supremacy is everywhere.

Emily Gorcenski (06:02):

I used to joke with my friends. We used to fantasize, what would we do if the Klan came to town? Oh yeah, we'd throw smoke bombs at them and shoot paintball guns at them, or whatever. We were 13, 14 years old, and here we were conspiring to commit what would probably be federal crimes. But that was long ago. Statute of limitations has since passed. But I always felt like racism when it got to that degree was something that had to be confronted.

Emily Gorcenski (06:38):

It took me a lot longer to understand that racism wasn't just that public behavior, that it was something more deeply rooted in society. When I started to understand that, I started to become more outspoken. I guess that's the point in which I saw that I had a responsibility as a working professional, somebody who is fortunate enough to have stable housing, a loving wife, a good upbringing. It was my responsibility to say something about bigotry in the world. It was a pure coincidence that all of this shit happened in Charlottesville, where I was living. It was a matter of circumstance, a matter of weird destinies of the universe, and a matter of just always having this moral resolve that when things got really bad, I knew that I would be on the front lines.

Bridget Todd (07:35):

How did you wind up going to that Unite the Right rally? I know you lived in Charlottesville, but what made you say, "I have to go out there"?

Emily Gorcenski (07:47):

I felt a responsibility to. I was somebody that had a decent social media profile at the time, and I had spent the last couple of years speaking out about sexism in the tech industry. I was working on things like video games to help people quit smoking and video games for stroke patients and stuff like that, as part of my professional work. I watched Gamergate unfold as somebody doing this game development for people who weren't your typical gamer. I watched this whole thing unfold like, if somebody finds out what I'm doing, are they going to call me some sort of social justice warrior or whatever because I'm trying to help elderly folks who've had a stroke rehab themselves? It was really concerning, and I found it deeply baffling.

Emily Gorcenski (08:45):

I always watched that evolve, and then I watched it evolve into the Trump campaign and I watched it evolve into the neo-reactionary movement. And I watched it evolve into the culture wars with the tech industry. I just saw this happening, and watching this be dominated by these right wing, these fascistic forces, with no real pushback. I started thinking, why don't we have a better ground game when it comes to social media? As soon as everything started happening in Charlottesville, I was like, well, I need to figure out how to do this. Things in Charlottesville weren't just the one big rally. In 2017, there were at least five neo-Nazi rallies in Charlottesville.

Bridget Todd (09:37):

Charlottesville, Virginia became a hotbed of violent white supremacist activity, and I don't think I'll ever forget those chants.

Crowd (09:46):

Jews will not replace us. Jews will not replace us.

Emily Gorcenski (09:49):

Some of them were smaller, and most people forget about them. But the first one that made national news was Richard Spencer came in in mid-May, like Mother's Day in May of 2017, and that was when he held the first torch rally. It raised people's alarms, neo-Nazis with torches marching around in America? That's not cool. And this was after Richard Spencer had gotten punched, famously. He was kind of like a high profile figure.

Emily Gorcenski (10:23):

When that happened, I was actually here where I am now, in Berlin. In Berlin, I was watching how the activism here unfolds. Here, if there's an anti-Nazi demo, there's literally advertisements for it on the bus, on the trains. There's resourcing behind anti-fascism. It's very deep in the culture in Berlin. You walk down the street and you will see posters for antifa demos. It's not as secretive as a movement. And so I started to learn, and I watched, and I used these international ties that I had to try to figure out, how does activism work overseas?

Emily Gorcenski (11:07):

When things started to unfold in Charlottesville, when the big rally was announced and when the KKK rally in July was announced, so the KKK rally and Unite the Right were two different rallies, believe it or not, when these were announced, I was like, okay, well I have this platform. I've spent all of this time looking at how these European movements advertise themselves. Okay, let's see if we can change it up. I decided my best role was to use my voice, to be in the front lines, to report from the front lines what's happening, to put myself in harm's way if necessary, and just try to make the protest visible from the inside, not just as a journalist, but also as a participant. This is me. I'm actually protesting, and this is what it's about. Try to show it real and raw.

Emily Gorcenski (12:09):

So that's the mission, and when Unite the Right came around, for me it was like, okay, it's time for me to get up, grab my phone, and go. There was never a moment's hesitation. I knew exactly what my role was. I knew exactly what my job was. For me, it was just go out there and do it.

Bridget Todd (12:28):

Yeah. You talked about when you were young, what would we do if the KKK came? People say, whatever you would do in Nazi Germany, what you're doing now is what you would have done. You think about the civil rights movement. Whatever you're doing now is what you would have done. I feel like that line of thinking has really created some urgency in me to not just sit back and be like, oh, I support what they're doing, but I support it just in my heart. I'm doing nothing in terms of actually meaningfully supporting it. And it sounds like that was a motivating factor for you as well.

Emily Gorcenski (13:05):

Totally. Totally. I spent a lot of that year traveling Europe and visiting sites of horrors throughout 20th century history, memorials to the victims of the Nazis and memorials to people like Jan Palach, who was a Czech activist who self-immolated at the end of the Prague Spring in 1969 to protest the oppressive invasion of the Czechoslovakia at the time. And thinking of what must it have been like to be in that position? How must it have felt when you don't have these choices? And trying to understand, shaping my own perception, to understand that we look at history and we assume that there was clear black and white morals all throughout the time, that things were fine and then bad things were coming, and it was clear what side you should be on and it was clear what you should have done.

Emily Gorcenski (14:14):

We forget that the majority of people did not approve of Martin Luther King. We forget that the majority of people did not approve of the civil rights movement. We forget that there was massive support for Nazi Germany in the United States, for example. We forget that the Nazi Party was elected into power. So these things are not as clear. When we look at the current era, it's very easy for us to say, "Well, things are a little bit ambiguous. I don't like what's happening, but maybe there's a way out where it doesn't have to be that nasty."

Emily Gorcenski (14:55):

I don't think that's true. I think that it actually has to be nasty, and it's up to us to control how nasty it is. If we don't want it to be really, really nasty, then we have to deal with a little bit of nasty. There's no easy way out, and for me that's like, you just have to have a clear conscience about what you're going to do and what your boundary is, what your threshold is, and then make that decision and act.

Bridget Todd (15:20):

Do you think that's necessary to get to a place where we won't have Nazis marching in the streets, that we have to get comfortable with some level of personal risk? Is that what it's going to take?

Emily Gorcenski (15:30):

I think yes, but I think that the more people who are comfortable with personal risk, the less risk it is. The more people who can do what I'm doing, the better it is for all of us. This is definitely one of those things where there's a finite amount of energy that these fascists have. If we distribute that load, it becomes much easier to bear. I think that this is a cost, this is a known cost. I knew what the cost of this was going to be going in.

Emily Gorcenski (16:00):

That doesn't mean it was easy, because it's not been, and it doesn't mean I knew everything about how it would go going in. But I do think that when you speak out against hate, people who hate are going to push back against you. And I think that the harassment, the lies, the defamation, all of this, it's part of the cost. But the good news is that since those times, the amount of people who are speaking up and fighting back has gotten larger, and it's gotten easier. But if you're high profile, you're always going to get hate, and for me now, I'm just glad that I can absorb some of the hate so that it doesn't fall onto the next person.

Emily Gorcenski (16:49):

If you want to come and troll me on Twitter, I really prefer that you don't, but if I had to make a choice between me and some random more vulnerable, nervous person who's finally getting the courage to speak out, come at me with everything you've got. I can take it. That person over there is going to have a much harder time.

Bridget Todd (17:11):

Let's take a quick break. And we're back. Emily is trans, so when white supremacists and Nazis harass her, they do so by weaponizing her identity. And people, even those who are ostensibly on her side, don't always speak up about it. I mean, something else that I noticed in your situation is, you talked about assuming risk and harm, I do feel that a disproportionate amount of that risk and harm falls on people who are the most marginalized. For you, in this case with this white supremacist, both he and his lawyer continuously misgendered you. They filed a petition to use your dead name in the proceedings. I almost feel as if, even from folks on the left, we don't talk about the specific ways that people's identities are weaponized by white supremacists, bad people. And it gives the impression that people are all absorbing the same level of risk, when in your case, you clearly are not. You are absorbing more.

Emily Gorcenski (18:24):

Yeah, I think it's a shame that we fail to do that on the left. This is one of the things that I didn't really account for. I thought I would have had a little bit more support in those matters. It's frustrating at times when I see things like a right wing author writing about me, using my dead name and transphobic commentary that has nothing to do with the book, but he's doing it because he knows that he can hurt me. That's one thing, and that sucks.

Emily Gorcenski (18:53):

What really sucks is when that gets ignored. I see this all the time. I see this with trans people. People aren't calling out transphobia. People aren't understanding the ways that transphobia harms. And these are leftists who fancy themselves to be trans allies, but they still don't understand those harms. I'm sure that you know, we see this all the time. Black women get attacked, and we find the attacks reprehensible, but somehow we still separate ourselves from the anti-Blackness of it. I know it's hard to understand and to empathize, but I think we really have to do better at seeing these things and understanding what those costs are.

Emily Gorcenski (19:49):

I mean, could you imagine what would have happened if the judge allowed that petition for me to be dead named in court and misgendered in court? I didn't want to have to fight a battle over basic naming rights, and it could have been that. Thankfully, it wasn't, but those are the stakes, and that just gets swept under the rug.

Bridget Todd (20:16):

Was some part of you worried that that would be allowed, that they would officially say, "Yes, we're using your dead name"?

Emily Gorcenski (20:28):

No, because I didn't even know that it happened until after it was handled by my lawyers. I was on a work trip. I was out in Portland, Oregon. I get a call after work one day, and my lawyer is like, "Hey, Emily, I got to tell you something. Something really shitty happened, but don't worry, it's okay." I'm like, "All right, what's up?" And so she told me how she had to go and argue in front of the judge and all of that. We could have just gone in with my name change form and been like, "No, you have to do this, otherwise it's contempt of court." But we actually managed to argue it successfully without needing to go and formally do it, because I think not every trans person can afford a name change or has access to one. So it's actually an important thing to do. I'm grateful that my lawyers were so amazing and that they went to bat for me. But yeah, it's always going to be something, and it feels like it's always going to be something that follows me for the rest of my life.

Bridget Todd (21:30):

Yeah, and it's like one more thing you don't fucking need, one more thing to take you away from your work or to take up your energy or your time or your capacity, which we know are finite resources.

Emily Gorcenski (21:41):

That's part of the plan. This is a weaponized war of attrition that they do this, because if they get you spending your energy on all of these little things, ultimately if you needed to swallow it to get the job done, you would just swallow it to get the job done. But you want to fight it, so they're trying to distract you. They're trying to steal your energy fighting these pointless battles. They're not pointless battles, but they're not the main point of the battle. It's like death by a thousand paper cuts with all of this stuff.

Emily Gorcenski (22:09):

Yeah, I don't know. It just seems like that's part of this fascist strategy, is to just keep you constantly occupied so that you can never get ahead, because they know that if you had a moment of peace, imagine what we could all do, given that. The stuff that I'm accomplishing now, having moved to Germany, having gotten space between the trauma and the noise and all of that, and the healing that I've done, I'm doing the best work of my life right now, because that's the power that I have.

Emily Gorcenski (22:48):

I got that power by having to fight, by surviving all of these fights for so long, as somebody that's mixed race, as somebody that's transgender, as somebody that's queer. It's just a constant battle. Well, surviving that has given me the tools to excel, but at the same time, sometimes I wish I could just be kind of normal and just exist like everyone else and just have a normal life. Not everyone gets to make it through all of that noise, and that's the point. That's how they keep us down.

Bridget Todd (23:23):

Yeah. I even see it and I feel that a lot of the online conversation around issues impacting the trans community, bad actors and shitheads have, especially online, dominated those conversations. Every conversation is like, "Trans people in sports, bathrooms." And it's like, if folks did not have to constantly contend with these very loud people who, essentially in my opinion, have been able to really own the conversation online, could we actually have a productive conversation that moves us forward? But I feel like we can't, because the people who want to be flooding every conversation with a bunch of nonsense. They have dominated the online space, I feel.

Emily Gorcenski (24:13):

Yeah, and it's all culture war stuff. This whole thing now, it's about trans kids in sports. There's no problems with trans kids in sports. All of these things that they're talking about, there's no statistics whatsoever that suggest that this is a problem in any way, shape, or form. If a bunch of trans girls were out there winning every sports championship in high school women's sports, in college women's sports, even I would say, maybe we need to revisit this. But that's not happening. There's none. There's none. There are no trans women dominating collegiate athletics. There are no trans women dominating high school athletics. There are no trans women dominating the Olympic women's competition.

Emily Gorcenski (24:58):

There are some trans women who are successful in those competitions, but we do not see a wave of cis men trying to pretend that they're trans women so that they get a gold medal. We don't see that. We don't see trans women, trans girls joining these teams to dominate them. This is a completely fabricated issue, and the reason it has been fabricated is in order to create this polarization so that the right can stay relevant by creating this cultural division. Trans people have been historically used as scapegoats. We are just one sort of identity that has been used as scapegoats.

Emily Gorcenski (25:40):

Three, four years ago, this was all about bathroom bills. Well, there was no evidence of any trans women ever sexually assaulting anyone in a bathroom or any cis gender men trying to pretend that they were trans women to assault women in bathrooms. There were plenty of cases of cis gender men going into women's bathrooms when a cis gender women who was like a butch lesbian went in there, and then beat her up. The actual threat of men, again, man-on-woman violence in women's bathrooms was the opposite of this problem. The thing that they were saying was going to happen was the thing that they were doing.

Emily Gorcenski (26:22):

All of this is culture war stuff. All of this is designed to keep inflated this polarized version of politics and to rally people. The right knows that it is a losing cause, but they create these fake issues to mobilize people. And it works, because we're left here holding the bag, because we have to be outraged and we have to fight it, because if we don't fight it, it's a catastrophe. IF we do fight it, it becomes this polarization vector, and then all of these talking heads on social media and in The New York Times op-ed and on cable news, they're all sitting here going, "Hmm, is America so polarized? Is it really both sides that are bad?"

Emily Gorcenski (27:15):

And like, "Fuck you, buddy. You're not affected. You're not going to get beat up if you go to try to take a leak in the bathroom at a courthouse or a school." This is not an issue of people becoming polarized, this is an issue of people who have always had a right defending against lies that are being used to try to remove that right in order to further a different political agenda. We're not a football. We're people. And then us fighting to retain whatever little dignity we are granted somehow becomes a both sides issue? Fuck that.

Bridget Todd (28:00):

It's so insulting, and I think people forget that yeah, we're people. I guess I hate when I see people talking about other human beings as if it's some sort of ideological exercise or something, not someone's actual life. It's very frustrating. More after a quick break.

Bridget Todd (28:33):

Let's get right back into it. Emily lives in Berlin. After being on the receiving end of ongoing harassment campaigns and attacks, including being swatted, a terrifying harassment tactic where law enforcement is summoned to your address under bogus pretenses. She was just looking for some space and some healing. You mentioned that having moved to Berlin that you've been able to have a little bit more space, a little bit more healing, which I'm so thankful for, because Lord knows, you deserve it. But I guess one of my questions is, I read that you initially decided to leave the country after things just got so scary for you. I read that you were swatted, essentially. Can you tell me about this?

Emily Gorcenski (29:15):

Yeah, I was swatted. Lots of death threats, other threats, violence, lawsuits, all of this stuff came down on me. The swatting incident in October of 2017 was a wake up call. Thankfully, neither my wife nor I were home at the time, but it terrified the whole neighborhood. They came in, they blocked off the street, they had men running down the street with assault rifles. And I wasn't even in the state when this happened. That was a bit of a wake up call, and the next month I came here to Berlin for a month. I had to testify at Chris Cantwell's preliminary hearing for my case, and after that I was like, I need to get out, because here I am at Chris Cantwell's preliminary hearing. There's a dozen Nazis in the courtroom. They all know where I live. That's a scary thing to me.

Emily Gorcenski (30:22):

So I figure I'm going to get out of the country for a little bit, because the threat was just so prevalent. And Chris Cantwell, he's posting blog posts about me, writing in Gab about me. He's saying, "I'm going to kill you." Rallying up violence against me. People were drawing pictures of me being run down with a car, singing songs about gassing K words and trannies. And so I left in November 2017 for a month, and it was very healing. I felt really good when I was there, and I came back and I watched my mental health just go down. And then the threats were still there. And then every time I would leave Charlottesville, I would feel better, and every time I would come back, I would spiral.

Emily Gorcenski (31:21):

At some point, I was like, I need a change. My wife saw it too. She was like, "You're not going to survive if you keep doing this." My best friend had moved to Berlin at the beginning of 2017. They said, "We have a position open. Why don't you apply?" So I did. I got the job, and I said, I need a change. It's not safe for me here. I'm not healthy here. Why not? Let's make it an adventure.

Bridget Todd (31:57):

What has your healing journey looked like?

Emily Gorcenski (32:01):

Very nonlinear. Healing is very nonlinear. It's been a lot of trying to unwind, trying to let things go, knowing that I don't have to fight every fight, getting some space, some physical security, some mental security, keeping myself busy with new intellectual challenges like learning German. Not an easy language to learn. Trying to do that keeps me busy, keeps me engaged. For me, it's really just about finding the mental space and energy to feel good about myself again, to feel like I have progress to make. At some point I will speak fluent German, and I am getting closer every day.

Emily Gorcenski (32:58):

The fight against white supremacy feels like it has no end. I can doxx a hundred Nazis, I can put a hundred Nazis in jail, and there's another hundred Nazis to go. It's not like we can't win the fight, but I can't win the fight. I can learn German. I can learn a new programming language. I can learn to be a better salesperson. I can learn to lead a team better. I can travel. I can open up my mind to these experiences. And for me, that's really concrete, really tangible. Well, I guess I can't travel now because of the stupid pandemic.

Bridget Todd (33:37):

Yeah. I have to tell you, this is kind of an aside, but I'm from Virginia. I'm from Midlothian, small town right outside of Richmond. People in Virginia, there's a certain kind of southern politeness, and when you go have an interaction with a retail worker, it's got to be like, "Oh, you look just like so and so. Are you related to them?" Every interaction is 20 minutes. When I visited Berlin for the first time, it was so jarring to me how efficient every transaction was, and that was a real learning curve. I had to learn to conduct myself in retail exchanges with very efficient Germans in Berlin.

Emily Gorcenski (34:18):

Yeah. This is not a land of small talk. If you try to make small talk with someone, they're like, "What? Why are you asking me this?" So for me, coming from Virginia, it was like you ask somebody how they're doing and then they actually answer. You're like, "What?"

Bridget Todd (34:38):

It's a real particular thing. Tracking the court cases of white supremacists and Nazis is surprisingly difficult. Cases can move slowly, and sometimes our media landscape is only interested in high profile offenders, while smaller scale ones can go overlooked. With Emily's work at First Vigil, she's using data science to make it easier for journalists and activists and all of us to keep these people on our collective radars. Can you tell me about First Vigil?

Emily Gorcenski (35:04):

First Vigil is a resource for keeping track of criminal cases in the US involving white supremacists and other far right activists and hate crime committers. It's essentially a front end for a public records service. One of the things that I noticed in following up with the cases around Charlottesville and the other high profile white supremacy cases and far right cases throughout the US in 2018 was that it's really hard to keep track of all of them, because the legal process is quite slow. It typically takes a year or more for a criminal case to resolve. Chris Cantwell was arrested in January of 2020, and it's now February of 2021, he just got sentenced. That's a relatively fast case, and that's over a year.

Emily Gorcenski (36:01):

Somebody like Robert Bowers, who's accused of murdering 11 Jews in the synagogue in Pittsburgh three years ago almost, still has not gone to trial. I wanted to create a resource for activists and journalists to be able to keep up with what is happening in these cases, because if you're only writing a story when the big things happen, like the big so and so had a hearing or so and so has a trial or so and so got sentenced, that's months in between each event. It's really easy in the pace of today's world to lose the thread in that time. If you write a story about somebody getting arresting in January, and the next time anything happens is in September, you've completely lost the thread of that case.

Emily Gorcenski (36:51):

We're going to see this, by the way, with the Capitol riot cases. All of these arrests are happening now. A lot of these guys, they've already been detained pending trial. Unless they plead out, and the feds are going to be in no rush to plead them out, the next time that we're going to hear anything is probably going to be 2022. This is going to be a distant memory.

Emily Gorcenski (37:14):

So First Vigil is a resource designed to try to keep that thread together. It's essentially a court calendar, with details about what people are charged with. I try to bring the charging documents. I try to make those available when I can. I try to add context around how many years could they be looking at? What is the crime that they're associated with? It's just a way for me to track what's going on. And it's not comprehensive, because frankly, if I worked 80 hours a week on it, I couldn't keep up. That's how bad it is right now.

Bridget Todd (37:54):

Wow. You brought up the insurrection. I don't even really know how to ask this. I feel when you first started getting a high profile on social media for some of the work you were doing unmasking Nazis, obviously, I thought it was the fucking best. There were people, even people who I feel I agree with, who would say like, "Oh, you shouldn't be doxxing people," blah, blah, blah. Like I say, I don't feel like that work was necessarily well received by everybody, and I found that surprising. I think now that we've had this insurrection, I'm very grateful that you've started what seems like thankless work, not to mention dangerous work, of creating an infrastructure where we could track some of these cases, where it wouldn't just be they got arrested and charged and then you didn't follow up with what happened. I guess I wonder, do you feel as if you've seen a trajectory of people being like, oh, this work is bad, to now people being like, oh, thank God this work exists?

Emily Gorcenski (38:55):

Yeah. I wasn't the first person to out Nazis. There's a long storied history of doing this. The work I do with First Vigil is actually not about outing them, because I source all of that information from news stories. First Vigil is a journalistic resource. But before I created that, there was no real good public comprehensive database of these events, and First Vigil may not be comprehensive, but it's at least contemporary. The reporting was, there's a small handful of reporters who did a good job, but they were clearly overwhelmed.

Emily Gorcenski (39:36):

I think that in the time since I've created First Vigil, we've actually seen a lot of activity by other groups, both activists, journalists, and academics and think tanks, to make that stuff available, to make this information available. I think it's a public good to do this, and I'm just really glad that lots of people have seen that one, my resource can't be the one overriding dominant resource and they can add their own flavor, but two, that there's a need for this. One of my philosophies is, find work that needs to be done and do it. That's what First Vigil is all about. It was just like I saw a need, so I decided to create a thing.

Emily Gorcenski (40:22):

Lots of other people are doing this. They're adding their own spin to it. This is great. The world is richer when more people are taking public data, making it available, and adding their own interpretation, because we are better off when we as intelligent, thinking people, and we are all intelligent, thinking people, can see different sides of a story, different perspectives, make it their own decision. Sure, I might not agree with everything that the ADL does. I think they're overall a pretty good organization. I don't agree with all their politics. I don't agree with all of their conclusions. But if they're doing this work and I'm doing this work, great. Now you get two different perspectives on this work.

Emily Gorcenski (41:08):

And none of those perspectives have to be, oh, what if the Nazi is the good guy? None of those perspectives have to center this clear evil. To me, that's important. I think that it's good that more people are doing this, because we really need to understand this as a society. We really need to understand white supremacy.

Bridget Todd (41:30):

The business of resistance is women's work, and Emily follows the legacy of women working quietly behind the scenes to build out the infrastructure for accountability. So many of the people doing this work, yourself, Molly Conger, others, are women. How does it make you feel that this work that is so risky and sometimes thankless, so much of it is being done by women? Why do you think this is?

Emily Gorcenski (41:56):

I think because women support each other and have to support each other to get by. This is actually a way of us supporting each other. We're putting this out there to protect each other. There are men in this space, and they're doing really good work, but I think that overall there's less impetus for men to see this... They see this as work, and they see it as important, but they don't necessarily have the same experience of needing to create these support structures publicly and for strangers.

Emily Gorcenski (42:37):

Women support each other when they see each other crying in the bathroom at a club. Women support each other on the internet, on the bus. I think that a lot of the women are doing this work because they know the harassment that they've received. They know that they're not the only ones receiving the harassment. And putting that resource out there, it's like a signal. It's like a, we're fighting for you. I might not know who you are, but I'm fighting for you.

Bridget Todd (43:04):

Emily, where can people keep up with all the amazing, heroic stuff that you are up to?

Emily Gorcenski (43:10):

I don't know if I'm up to any heroic stuff, but if you want to see selfies and random tweets and probably grammatically incorrect German from time to time, the best way to keep in touch with me is @EmilyGorcenski on Twitter. That's where I'm at.

Bridget Todd (43:26):

I hope that you are out celebrating tonight, kicking back, having a good one. You deserve it.

Emily Gorcenski (43:31):

I've got a little bit of work to do, but yeah, I've got a beer here and a whiskey and I'm going to enjoy this win and look forward to the next win.

Bridget Todd (43:44):

Cheers. If you enjoyed this podcast, please help us grow by subscribing. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? We'd love to hear from you at hello@TANGOTI.com. Disinformed is brought to you by There Are No Girls on the Internet. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our supervising producer and engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. For more great podcasts, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.