The pseudonymous Twitter account that’s gone viral in recent days for helping to reveal the identities of white supremacists involved in Saturday’s deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville is based in North Carolina, BuzzFeed reports.
The user, who goes by the handle @YesYoureRacist, has been calling out racists online for nearly five years. When he saw the photos from the protest in Charlottesville begin to emerge, he began to share images of white nationalists involved in the rally in hopes that Twitter users could identify and ultimately get them fired from their jobs. (At least nineteen people were injured on Saturday, and thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer was killed when a car driven by neo-Nazi James Fields Jr. rammed into a crowd of counterprotesters.)
“I live in North Carolina and am pretty active in political activism here,” he told BuzzFeed. “I have friends who went to Charlottesville to counterprotest the Nazis, and once I saw the news of the car incident it was very worrying until I was able to get in touch with them and confirm they were safe. I’m a white guy, but I feel very strongly that white people have a responsibility to fight racism and all bigotry whenever they see it. Otherwise, they are passively supporting white supremacy by doing nothing.”
So far, the account has identified Peter Cvjetanovic, a student at the University of Nevada, Reno, and an employee at Top Dog in Berkeley, who has been fired.
Cvjetanovic told a local TV news station in Nevada that he wasn’t the “angry racist they see in that photo. … I came to this march for the message that white European culture has a right to be here just like every other culture. It is not perfect; there are flaws to it, of course.
I do believe that the replacement of the statue will be the slow replacement of white heritage within the United States and the people who fought and defended and built their homeland. Robert E Lee is a great example of that. He wasn’t a perfect man, but I want to honor and respect what he stood for during his time.”
@YesYoureRacist has not responded to our request for comment. This afternoon, however, The News & Observerreported that he is none other than Logan Smith, communications director for Progress NC.
“I have been receiving death threats for the past 20 hours or so,” Smith, told the N&O. “They have been threatening my family, too. The overall response of course has been 99 percent positive, but there’s always that extremely small but extremely loud and extremely angry minority that bites back.”