A letter sent to households in an affluent, most-white development outside Dallas threatened to dox people who refused to pledge not to send their kids to an Ivy League school, claiming the admission spots were needed by minority students. But research done by the Dallas Observer points to a Utah-based conservative PR firm as the source of the threats.
The story made it all the way to Tucker Carlson’s timeslot, where substitute host Mark Stein ranted about it Tuesday night. The flyer, supposedly sent by a group called Dallas Justice Now, was everything conservatives hate: racial, a social justice plea and an example of how dastardly liberals are. And given the amount of time spent on the story by conservative media like The Daily Caller and PJ Media, it stoked a lot of anger.
But after scratching the surface, the story seems to fall apart. The coding used for the website of Dallas Justice Now appears to have been coded by people at the right-wing firm, Arena, based near Salt Lake City: the developers who loaded the code up to Github, a code sharing service, identify the origin as the firm.
Other things came up bogus: blog posts on the site were backdated to make it seem like the recently-created website had been active for months. And the letter and threat had been uploaded to PR Newswire, a pay-for-play media release service favored by PR firms looking for exposure.
A Texas-based researcher who specialized in anti-fascist research found an earlier version of the Dallas Justice Now website in an internet archive. The same server used to test the DJN site, along with the coding, were used on other conservative-spinning websites like the anti-BLM Keep Dallas Safe.
The story was immediately picked up by the right-wing website Dallas City Wire, a website owned by conservative businessman and former journalist Brian Timpone. The reporter who wrote about it, Juilette Fairley, has a history of writing for Newsmax.
A 2020 profile by the New York Times on the local news site run by Timpone shows that the names on the bylines don’t match real people. The stories were “directed by political groups and corporate PR firms to promote a Republican candidate or a company, or to smear their rivals.”
One of the people targeted by the doxxing threat, Casie Tomlin, had her personal information distributed on right-wing websites when she started pushing for information about the group. “This is a major alt-right extremist production designed to get people to do things they aren’t even doing so you will vote Republican,” Tomlin wrote in a public post on Reddit, noting that she was likely doxxed because she was getting close to exposing the group.