Andrew Anglin

In His Own Words

“Jews, Blacks and lesbians will be leaving America if Trump gets elected – and he’s happy about it. This alone is enough reason to put your entire heart and soul into supporting this man.”
—“Get Em Outta Here: Glorious Leader Calls for Kike Lena Dunham to Leave America,” April 26, 2016

“The day is coming when we’re going to tear down the hoax [Holocaust] memorial in Berlin and replace it with a statue of Hitler 1,000 feet tall.”
—“SS Auschwitz Guard Dies Days Before Scheduled Lynching by Kikes,” April 8, 2016

“I ask myself this, in all things: WWHD? (What Would Hitler Do?). To be slightly more honest/specific, I ask myself what Hitler would do if he’d been born in 1984 in America and was dealing with this situation we are currently dealing with and also really liked 4chan and Anime. Hitler was, ultimately, the symbolic (and in some ways actual real life) culmination of traditional Europeanism.
—“Andrew Anglin Exposed,” March 14, 2016

“My problem with blacks is that I have come to understand that their biological nature is incompatible with White society, and that we will never have peace as long as they are among us, given that irrational outbursts of brutal violence are a part of their nature.”
—“Blacks Loved Slavery and Regretted its End,” Feb. 20, 2014

Background

Andrew Anglin is the founder and editor of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website. Styled after popular image-heavy Internet forums like 4chan and 8chan, the Daily Stormer is dedicated to spreading anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and white nationalism, primarily through guttural hyperbole and epithet-laden stories about topics like alleged Jewish world control and black-on-white crime. As of April 2016, the site, which claims to be “The World’s Most Visited Alt-Right Web Site,” ranked 35,944th globally and 15,451th within the United States, according to Alexa.

Anglin spent his high school years dabbling in liberal politics, according to an interview he gave to Vocativ. He became a fascist after reading Noam Chomsky, exploring “all that Communist Jewish stuff,” and studying religion, including Islam and Buddhism. Eventually, he arrived at Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. In an autobiographical article entitled “Andrew Anglin Exposed,” Anglin expounded on his life’s path: “I started out with normal Alex Jones type conspiracy material, and then moved on to weirder conspiracy material, and then eventually decided Ted Kaczynski was right with regards to a coming apocalypse due to the rapidity of technological development.” (Jones is probably America’s most prolific conspiracy theorist. Kaczynski was the “Unabomber” who is now in prison.)

Anglin spent significant time living and working in Southeast Asia. “All the White people you meet are outcast sorts who you can usually connect with easily (you aren’t really spending much time with Asians),” he said of that experience. “To this day, I have little negative to say about Asians, save that I don’t think they should be immigrating into Western countries (in any kind of numbers) and I don’t think White people should be producing children with them. I will also say that Chinese people have no souls.” Despite such comments, Anglin’s travels abroad have led to repeated accusations of “race mixing” and investigations into Anglin’s ethnicity by white supremacist Internet sleuths even more intolerant than him.

4chan, a so-called imageboard known for its lack of censorship, was the key to Anglin’s dive into fascism. “I had always been into 4chan, as I am at heart a troll,” he wrote.“This is about the time /new/ [a specific 4chan board] was going full-Nazi, and so I got into Hitler, and realized that through this type of nationalist system, alienation could be replaced with community in a real sense, while the authoritarianism would allow for technology to develop in a direction that was beneficial rather than destructive to the people.” Shortly after, Anglin formed the short-lived site Total Fascism, dedicated to long-form essays on fascism.

Not long after, on July 4, 2013, The Daily Stormerwas formed from the ashes of Total Fascism.The site, which was originally registered to Andrew’s father, Greg, is named for the infamous Nazi Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic weekly newspaper, Der Stürmer, which specialized in pornographic attacks on Jews. (Streicher was hanged after being convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg.) Its headlines are almost always over the top, with titles like “All Intelligent People in History Disliked the Jews” and “Talking Monkey Harriet Tubman to Replace Indian-Killer Jackson on $20 Bill.” The articles themselves are peppered with racist images and memes.

“Using the daily news is a means to propagandize people,” Anglin explained to Vocativ in March 2014. “To get them to look at the world in a certain way.”

Ultimately, Anglin and his readership are striving to shift the needle on the status quo for public discussion by creating a kind of juvenile, repulsive humor about topics like the Holocaust. Campaigns to this end have included using Adobe Photoshop to add Nazi iconography and falsely attributed Adolf Hitler quotes, plus slogans like “Gas the Kikes, race war now,” to photos of singer Taylor Swift.

The site’s audience is highly participatory in the sections for comments on articles, which serve as a rallying point for the “Stormer Troll Army.” Known informally as the “Stormers,” the Stormer Troll Army is an ad hoc group of readers who perpetrate harassment online at the behest of Anglin. The site uses a bulletin board style system that was set up by the notorious neo-Nazi hacker Andrew Auernheimer (also known as “Weev”) following the banning of the Daily Stormerfrom Disqus, a blog comment hosting service. The ban came after the Stormers, at the urging of Anglin, swarmed the comment section of Breitbart, a right-wing news service, as part of November 2015’s “Operation: Kikebart” or “#NoHydeNoPeace.” The campaign was a result of Breitbart opening a bureau in Israel and its muted early coverage of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Less than two weeks after the campaign got under way, Disqus notified Anglin that it was discontinuing service to The Daily Stormer for being in “conflict with the values and terms of use of Disqus.”

Weev has taken an increasingly active role at The Daily Stormer since his prison sentence for identity fraud and conspiracy to access a computer without authorization was vacated. He was originally convicted after revealing a vulnerability in AT&T’s security that exposed the emails of iPad users on their network. He was released from prison following a successful appeal on the basis that the trial took place in an improper venue.

Other online campaigns launched under Anglin’s direction include “Operation: Jew Wife,” which targeted conspiracy-monger and Infowars host Alex Jones because his wife is Jewish, and “Operation: Filthy Jew Bitch,” which targeted Labour Party member of Parliament Luciana Berger for her role in the arrest of British neo-Nazi Garron Helm after he sent her anti-Semitic messages via Twitter. Anglin is also a promoter of racist hashtags including #BoycottStarWarsVII, #GasTheKikes, #RaceWarNow, #OpenBordersForIsrael and #WhiteGenocide, as well as the hijacking of hashtags used for social justice campaigns in order to spread disinformation. In the fall of 2015, for instance, in the midst of ongoing protests against racism at the University of Missouri, Anglin tweeted out false eyewitness accounts under the hashtag #PrayForMizzou claiming that the Ku Klux Klan was present at the student protests and complicit with the university police department. Anglin was banned from Twitter as a result, but the tactics persisted.

Several weeks after that campaign, Anglin spearheaded a similar disinformation campaign that involved starting fake White Student Union pages on Facebook for universities across the country. “So, guys,” he instructed his followers on The Daily Stormer. “Here’s the plan: Make more of the White Student Union pages on Facebook for various universities. You don’t have to go there. Make one for Dartmouth, Princeton, etc. If they won’t let it on Facebook, put it on tumblr or wordpress or whatever. Get it up, then forward the links to local media.” The media took the bait, and reports of racist student groups appeared in several places.

These strategies of subversion and media manipulation are at the heart of Anglin and The Daily Stormer’s plans for racially awakened minds and the start of a race war.

In March 2016, Weev took these tactics to a new height by accessing thousands of printers, many of them at universities, and causing them to print out a flier for The Daily Stormerthat read, in part: “White man are you sick and tired of the Jews destroying your country through mass immigration and degeneracy? Join us in the struggle for global white supremacy at The Daily Stormer.” Anglin was ecstatic, telling a Washington Times reporter, “Of course I endorse it. Six million [a sarcastic reference to the death toll of the Holocaust] percent, I endorse this glorious action.”

Despite Anglin’s nominal ban on inciting violence in the comment section of the Daily Stormer, at least one accused mass murderer spent time among his audience.

Passages from a manifesto written by Dylann Storm Roof, who carried out the massacre of nine black people at Charleston, S.C.’s Mother Emanuel A.M.E. church in June 2015, were found almost verbatim in comments made onThe Daily Stormer articles by a user calling himself AryanBlood1488.(The numbers 14 and 88, often used together, are well-known neo-Nazi taglines.) Anglin responded with indifference, writing a post entitled “If Dylan [sic] Roof was ‘AryanBlood1488,’ He Hadn’t Commented on the Daily Stormer in a While.” He added, “This isn’t particularly surprising, given that anyone reading about Black crime or other racial issues on the internet would necessarily have come across this site.”

Anglin is an adamant supporter of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. The Daily Stormerhas posted hundreds of articles in support of Trump, as well as articles attacking his competitors and their families. When Trump polled in first place for the first time during the Republican primary, Anglin wrote: “If the Donald gets the nomination, he will almost certainly beat Hillary, as White men such as you and I go out and vote for the first time in our lives for the one man who actually represents our interests.” Anglin and his followers alternately refer to Trump as “Glorious Leader” and “Humble Philosopher” while praising his xenophobic and racist remarks on the campaign trail. Following Trump’s announcement that he would ban all Muslim immigration into the United States, Anglin wrote, “Get all of these monkeys the hell out of our country – now! Heil Donald Trump – THE ULTIMATE SAVIOR.” On major primary days, there were typically new banners featuring Trump posted to Anglin’s site.

Despite its relative youth, The Daily Stormerhas generated a disproportionate amount of attention, both inside and outside the organized white supremacist movement. Some of this is inherently related to the site’s tactics — trolling on a large scale, often with the explicit intent of using the mainstream media to amplify its message. Internally, it also commands the attention of almost every corner of the racist world, although not always in a positive way.

In the fall of 2014, The Daily Stormer carried an article summarizing a series of squabbles within the white nationalist world entitled “Infinite DramaQuest,” in which Anglin described all of the ongoing conflicts by comparing each of the players to Dragon Ball Z characters. This sarcastic post introduced The Daily Stormer to everyone in white nationalism who wasn’t already paying attention when Colin Lidell of the blog Alternative-Right launched an attack on Anglin.

In the piece, Anglin stated plainly that, by his measure, “You cannot preserve the White race without addressing the Jews. You cannot address the Jews without addressing their [Holocaust] hoax. You cannot address their hoax without addressing Adolf Hitler.” Lidell fired back, stating: “What Anglin is unequivocally saying here is that before you can say anything at all about preserving and protecting the White race – stopping mass immigration, say, or encouraging White women to have at least 2.1 babies – you must first get everyone to love Hitler and hate the Jews, and if you can’t accomplish these supposed preconditions then you had best forget the whole shebang. So what he’s really saying is simply: ‘You cannot preserve the White race.’”

According to Lidell, Anglin’s audience is attracted to his “schtick in the same way that poor, downtrodden Whites are attracted to monster trucks and professional wrestling.”

The spat continued on for several more rounds. The only true winner was Anglin and his growing audience, which Matt Parrott of the racist Traditionalist Youth Network praised for supposedly “achiev[ing] more traffic and influence than most his critics combined.”

In January 2015, Anglin also sparred with Kyle Rogers, the then-webmaster of the Council of Conservative Citizens’ racist website. Anglin complained about a “rather rude email” from Rogers over the reprinting of Rogers’ articles on the Daily Stormer without permission. He went on to say that Rogers’ response was “deeply personally insulting, given how much I’ve supported him and his organization.”

Counter-Currents, a pseudo-intellectual white nationalist website and publishing house that caters to “academic racists,” has also described Anglin as “slumming and pandering because of mistaken ideas” and “burning through brain cells by using stimulants.”

When asked about all these feuds in early 2015, Anglin told the Southern Poverty Law center that “I try to be fair and polite to all people.” All people, that is, except for those who Anglin describes as Jews, Zionists, Judeo-Bolsheviks, Third Worlders, Negroes, Moslem Pigs, Trannies and Hebes, maligning them daily in his headlines.