Ann Coulter Retweets White Nationalist Charlotesville Leader Who Attacked Trump With Syria Conspiracy Theory
Ann Coulter, a conservative author and political commentator with a substantial social media following, has long been accused of harboring white nationalist sympathies for her repeated use of hard-line anti-immigrant rhetoric.
On Friday, Coulter gave a little more credence to those accusations by exposing her Twitter following of just under 2 million users to Mike “Enoch” Peinovich, an overt white nationalist who has spoken at neo-Nazi events and has been credited by the Southern Poverty Law Center for creating an infamous anti-Semitic meme.
Related: Syria Gas Attack Conspiracy Theories Fueled by Tucker Carlson and Far-Right Fringe
Coulter retweeted Peinovich's criticism of President Donald Trump over his involvement in the bombing of three government sites in Syria in the early hours of Saturday. The United States was joined by the United Kingdom and France in what Trump called a series of "precision strikes."
Peinovich criticized Trump’s response to a “fake gas attack,” regurgitating a conspiracy that has percolated on the far right since President Bashar al-Assad’s government’s apparent use of chemical weapons to attack his own people in the suburb of Douma earlier this month.
In other news that's surprising even though it shouldn't be, @AnnCoulter retweets white supremacist Mike Enoch. pic.twitter.com/iZi28F0Kbd
— Crisis Actors Guild (@EyesOnTheRight) April 14, 2018
“I specifically requested the opposite of this,” Peinovich posted, referring to his support of Trump in the context of America’s involvement in Syria.
“Trump had a way out. Don’t react hysterically to the media reports of a fake gas attack,” he wrote of the apparent chemical attack that took place in Douma.
Newsweek reached out to Coulter for a comment on the retweets but did not immediately receive a reply. It’s unclear whether she knows who Peinovich is or if she simply was responding to what he was saying.
Peinovich, who co-hosts an explicitly racist and anti-Semitic podcast called The Daily Shoah, was instrumental in planning the deadly white nationalist rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.
Peinovich, like Spencer, was active for months on Twitter despite that platform’s promise in December 2017 to remove users like him. Twitter suspended his account after Newsweek reached out for a request for comment.
But he is hardly the only far-right voice to appear on Coulter's timeline in recent days. She also retweeted Faith Goldy, a Canadian YouTube performer who on her channel recited the “14 words,” a popular white supremacist slogan. Coulter has also frequently retweeted the VDARE Foundation, an English anti-immigration website that sometimes publishes white nationalist commentary.
The recent conflict over Syria provoked a glut of conspiracies on the far right by pundits that sometimes view military conflicts exclusively through the lens of an anti-Semitic conspiracy. Those sentiments have meant that populist, conservative voices like Coulter and Fox News’s Tucker Carlson have engaged in rhetorical overlap with the sophomoric neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer and the likes of Peinovich.
Peinovich, who was once a staunch ally of white supremacist Richard Spencer, was named as a defendant in an ongoing lawsuit over Charlottesville that claims he and others were legally responsible for the death of counterprotester Heather Heyer and the injuries of 30 others.
Related: White Supremacist, Neo-Nazi Accounts Still Active on Twitter After a So-Called Purge
“Bring whatever you need [to Charlottesville], that you feel you need for your self-defense,” Peinovich told his audience ahead of the rally. “Do what you need to do for security of your own person, at this point… We don’t want [counterprotesters] to have the impression—that we are going to be showing up there, unarmed…that is not the case.”
