Tanya Gersh, a Jewish woman in Montana—and an outspoken critic of Donald Trump and his whites-first constituents— received intimidating e-mails, such as this:
“Thanks for demonstrating why your race needs to be collectively ovened. You have no idea what you are doing, six million are only the beginning. We are going to keep track of you for the rest of your life. You will be driven to the brink of suicide & We will be there to take pleasure in your pain & eventual end.”
One message included an image of the woman being sprayed with a green gas, along with the words: “Hickory dickory dock, the kike ran up the clock. The clock struck three and the Internet Nazis trolls gassed the rest of them.”
After Trump's election, Alt-Right supporters organized a march in her town to drive Ms. Gersh and her family from their residence. See the photo above.
The ACLU has now filed a lawsuit in Montana federal district court against Andrew Anglin, the man who runs an extremist web forum called The Daily Stormer. Anglin published 30 posts urging his followers to launch a “troll storm” against Tanya Gersh, a real estate agent in Whitefish, Montana.
Similar to the approach I am working on in my current research article, the lawsuit uses anti-intimidation laws to shutdown private conspiracies that seek to deprive individuals of civil rights. What my work has in common with this lawsuit is the idea that Internet hate speech is not protected if it is so targeted and specific as to cause a person to be fearful or living in a community—or in my case, of being employed in a workplace where nooses and swastikas are brandished, and where unions seek segregation of whites and blacks (there is a pending lawsuit with this fact pattern).
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