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The simple answer is a journalist, and to be fair that has happened, albeit typically with different political valences and, probably more critically, at much more personal scales. And there's a fair cynical analysis that scale matters, and it shouldn't.
The more morbid answer is that it's literally anyone with a social media account. We had discussions here where posters -- well-respected ones! -- thought some level of political engagement put people beyond questions of doxxing or targeting, and pointed to someone who could e-mail and call state politicians, and motioned about how great power came with great responsibility. Before today, you could imagine a world where that had limits, not just ones that the person drew for themselves, but that applied across their political alliance, and 'responsibility' meant nothing more and nothing less than being set right when wrong. I can hope that's what the posters here meant, back then.
Even if we turn down the violence, and I'm not certain that's even possible, at the end of the day there's no going back to that. This is not someone getting kicked out of college, and it's only deniable in the sense that people will deny it.
Because there are countless ways to say Kirk wasn't harmless; my tumblr and bluesky and discord feed has no small number of them, and I can't even log into an MMO without seeing it (thank you Star Citizen's chat being broken like everyfuckingthingelse). He was impactful, and it doesn't take much impact at a national level to change tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives, and even if you think it was for the better not everyone's going to agree with you. And then you remember Joe The Plumber or Ken Bone, and weep.
We've seen variants of this before -- the doxxing tit-for-tat back in the CCW days cut my teeth and a few others -- but they depended on certain very specific tools, which could be shut off. Now, the only necessary tool is a network account.
From Matthew Dowd on MSNBC:
(Though, apparently MSBC is firing Dowd for this, which I, for one, find rather surprising.)
he also said, "We don't know what happened yet, it could of been one of his pro-gun followers popping off a round in celebration."
not only was it crass, it was so incredibly dumb. He deserved to be fired and shunned.
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