"Frontline," December 12, 2023: "The Discord Leaks" (The Documentary Group in association with ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the first episode of Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator, PBS re-ran a Frontline episode from December 12, 2023 called “The Discord Leaks,” dealing with the case of Jack Teixeira, who in April 2023 was arrested for leaking classified information and disseminating it via a user group called “Thug Shaker Central” on the social-media side Discord. Teixeira had been accepted into the Air National Guard in his native state, Massachusetts, despite a disturbing history of racist remarks in high school – including telling fellow students he wanted to kill Black people – and at least one occasion in which he claimed to have brought a Molotov cocktail to school and threatened to set it off. Teixeira was also heavily involved in video games – his defense when he was accused of wanting to kill Black people was to say he’d just been talking about a video game – and this led him to the Web site Discord, founded in 2015 by Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy. “We came up with this idea of what if we built from scratch an amazing voice and text chat experience for people that play multiplayer video games, and, and that's what we built, and it's called Discord,” one of the founders told Frontline. The site eventually turned into a hotbed for hate speech in general and anti-Jewish and anti-Black speech in particular. It was used to help organize the now-notorious “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, of which then-President Donald Trump said, “There were very fine people on both sides – on both sides,” thus equating neo-Nazis who marched through the streets chanting “Jews will not replace us!” with anti-racist counter-protesters.

“[T]he Unite the Right rally was a really challenging moment for Discord,” said John Redgrave, who was hired to head Discord’s “trust and safety team” in the wake of Charlottesville. “We have 150 million people using Discord every month. That's billions of interactions. So the scale of this challenge is immense.” Redgrave admitted that while the site would proceed immediately to take down images of child sex abuse, for the most part they don’t monitor the site and only respond to complaints from Discord users. Independent user groups like Thug Shaker Central (a racist, homophobic slur Teixeira appropriated from a particularly nasty sub-genre of Gay male pornography in which young white men are brutalized by far stronger, more robust, heavy-set Black “thug” types) are even freer from scrutiny than most of the content posted to Discord itself. While he was running “Thug Shaker Central” and using it as an outlet for anti-Jewish, anti-Black and anti-Queer propaganda, Teixeira was also rising through the Air National Guard hierarchy. He was working as an information technology specialist, which gave him access to quite a lot of classified information. Then he started posting it to his site, at first copying it out and reposting it to his Thug Shaker Central users and then, when the Air National Guard started getting suspicious, actually stealing the documents, photographing them at home with his smartphone, posting them to his site and then returning them the next day.

Among the people Frontline and The Washington Post, which broke the Teixeira story and four of whose reporters were featured in the Frontline show, interviewed were Teixeira’s ex-girlfriend “Crow” and his good friend “Pucki.” (The two asked to be identified only by those names.) Crow, who carried out an online relationship with Teixeira for a year even though they never physically met, said they bonded over their shared neo-Nazi views (though Crow insisted that she doesn’t believe in the neo-Nazi world view anymore) as well as their interest in dragons and dinosaurs. They also bonded during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when normal human interactions were difficult and people’s online relationships became major parts of their existences. Crow said she started to pull away from Teixeira when COVID restrictions eased and, as she put it, “A really key element was the way that the server became smaller and smaller over time. And it wasn't only that there were fewer people in it, but there were certain types of people who made the toxicity levels rise and rise. Him being the owner, he would have the final say in what happens, so people began leaving, getting banned. Jack would ban them.” The show describes Teixeira as leading a sort of double life during this time, working at an Air National Guard base by day and supposedly helping the U.S. secure its most secret information, while at night he’d disseminate America’s secrets on a Web site full of racist, sexist, homo-hating propaganda.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Teixeira began posting security information exposing Ukrainian defense secrets and built up a strong following among people who, like Teixeira himself, supported Russia’s side in the war. Frontline interviewed “Jeremiah,” one of Texiera’s users, who said that as the war between Russia and Ukraine heated up, Teixeira “started making biweekly to weekly updates when the war was more active, almost daily in some cases, especially early on, like, May and June of 2022. … [I]t was very fascinating, especially being so interested in things like that.” Jeremiah said Teixeira was in direct contact with people living in countries directly affected by the Russia-Ukraine war. “[Y]ou'd have people from all over the place being like, ‘Hey, do you know anything that was going on about this event in my country?’” Jeremiah said. “And if he had anything, he'd kind of tell them.” Another member of Teixeira’s user group, who went by the screen name “Lucca,” actually attracted U.S. government attention by reposting many of Teixeira’s papers, some of which ended up on sites like Abinavski’s Exclusion Zone and the popular white-supremacist social media site 4Chan. On April 7, Teixeira deleted the entire Thug Shaker Central page, which meant no one could recover any of the information posted on it – unless others in the meantime had reposted any of it elsewhere. On April 13, 2023, three days after Lucca had ratted him out to the government, FBI agents arrested Teixeira at the home in Dighton, Massachusetts where he lived with his mother and stepfather. On March 4, 2024, Teixeira changed his plea from not guilty to guilty on six counts of willful retention and dissemination of national security information, and he’s scheduled for sentencing in September. The Teixeira case has been called one of the most extensive and elaborate compromises of national security secrets in U.S. history, yet Teixeira’s motive doesn’t seem to have been deliberately to help a foreign adversary of the United States. Rather, he seems to have been a young wiseguy grabbing and reproducing classified information just because he could.