Antifascist activists claim to have “doxxed”, or umasked, the leading “alt-right” writer and podcaster Mike Enoch as part of a string of such actions that have convulsed the far-right movement.
Enoch has appeared at conferences hosted by Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute, including one in Washington in November that culminated in Roman salutes and widely reported shouts of “hail Trump”.
On Saturday, a group that called itself counter-counter signal and said it was “a small antifascist investigation team in the New York area” issued a statement and a Medium post detailing its claim that the ringleader of the Right Stuff website, hitherto known as Enoch, was in fact Mike Peinovich, a former tech worker who lives on New York’s Upper East Side.
Peinovich’s Gmail address, they said, had been attached to a PayPal account associated with the site in 2013.
The Medium post – since removed by the company in a “rules investigation” – revealed Peinovich’s address, telephone number and the identity of his wife.
Counter-counter signal claimed his wife had also contributed to a high-profile podcast hosted by Enoch, the Daily Shoah, the name of which is a pun on the Hebrew word for the Holocaust.
In heated discussion in far-right forums and on social media, most concern seemed to center on the fact that Peinovich’s wife was identified as having a Jewish background.
Contacted via email, Peinovich denied he was Enoch and said he would “try to get my Google search results cleared up”.
Asked about the association of his email address with the PayPal account, he wrote: “Well, see if you can think of any ways in which a guy’s email address could be on a website four years ago and he is not the guy in charge of the site today.”
No other figures have said Peinovich is not Enoch, however, and in a widely shared screenshot from the Right Stuff’s private forum, Enoch appears to admit to the doxxing, writing “Yes my wife is who they say she is” and “I am just a guy who puts ideas out there on the internet.”
Asked about the screenshot, Peinovich wrote: “No idea really about any of that. Sorry.”
On Monday, Spencer said on Twitter: “I respect, like, and admire Mike Enoch. He will continue to be a force on the Alt Right in the future.”
The same day, Peinovich’s podcast partners said he had quit the Right Stuff.
The Right Stuff serves as a hub for the far right and publishes podcasts including The Daily Shoah and Fash the Nation. The site claims tens of thousands of listeners. Before it was banned from Soundcloud last October, Fash the Nation was the No1 conservative podcast on the platform.
The Right Stuff has been instrumental in evolving the distinctive lexicon of the far right, notably originating the “echoes” meme in which Jewish names are enclosed in three closed parentheses. This was listed as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League last year.
In its Medium post, counter-countersignal accused the Right Stuff of taking “alt-right politics to their logical conclusion, including favorable references to the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, gaybashing, Islamophobic hate crimes, police shootings of black youth, and much more”.
The group justified the doxxing by claiming the website was “central to a hard-core, explicitly neo-Nazi tendency in the alt-right movement”.
Antifascist sources said the investigation had proceeded with online intelligence, supplemented with offline checking of Enoch’s address and his wife’s identity. Counter-countersignal said that there was “no hacking or illegal activity involved”.
In an email, the group provided its reasons for targeting Enoch.
“[The Right Stuff] posts podcasts and articles advocating for the murder of people of color, queers, leftists, and a new holocaust against Jews on a daily basis,” the email read. “For the most part they would not be saying this stuff if they had any accountability from their neighbors, friends, and family.”
Writers and podcasters at the Right Stuff usually operate under pseudonyms. In recent weeks, other doxxings have led some far-right figures to go into hiding.
A Scottish YouTube star known as Millennial Woes, who appeared at the National Policy Institute, has reportedly left the country after attracting mainstream media interest. Other figures associated with the Right Stuff have been driven off the internet. Some have been the victim of former allies on the far right.
