Andrew Anglin

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 2017, the site ranked 13,137th globally and 5,597th within the United States, according to Alexa.

In his own words

“Fear. Now is the time for it … We want these people to feel unwanted. We want them to feel that everything around them is against them. And we want them to be afraid.”
—“Female Hajis Fear to Wear the Headtowel in Public After Trump Win—You Should Yell at Them”

“The fact is, when you give women rights, they destroy absolutely everything around them, no matter what other variable is involved … Even if you become the ultimate alpha male, some stupid bitch will still ruin your life.”
—“Brad Pitt Losing Weight and His Mind After Whore Wife Ruins His Life”

“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

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 arriving 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.)

An investigative piece published in February 2017 by Columbus Alive, a weekly newspaper from Anglin’s hometown, revealed a less polished ideological journey. Former classmates recalled an outspoken liberal and vegan who sported dreadlocks and JNCO pants. Anglin, who was once known to speak out against racism and homophobia, was also prone to violent tantrums including one alleged incident  during a party in high school where he repeatedly bashed his head on a sidewalk outside. Former classmates also recalled Anglin’s bedroom walls being dented from other tantrums involving head slamming.

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.

In December of 2016 Anglin joined Richard Spencer and Mike "Enoch" Peinovich on a radio show in which they referred to their tripartite group as “The First Triumvirate.” The move was a bid for unity between three leaders of the fractious “alt-right.” Following the high profile doxing of several hosts from The Daily Shoah, one of the alt-right’s most popular radio programs, Anglin took to the Daily Stormer to take up for Mike Peinovich after it was revealed that his wife is Jewish. “As most of you probably already know, we’ve had a minor crisis in the Alt-Right. As the kike dox squad continues their rampage, Mike Peinovich of the Right Stuff was doxed” Anglin wrote in a post titled “Here’s the thing.” “And here’s the thing: Jew wife.” Anglin continued, “As far as if he actually did betray anyone—no. He was obviously dishonest on some level, but if we look at his contribution, and ask ourselves ‘did this forward the 14 words?’ we will see that it did, and the weirdness in his personal life doesn’t change that.” Anglin, compensating for his own history of dating women of color, took a tellingly pragmatic approach to the revelations about Peinovich.

An imageboard known for its lack of censorship, 4chan, 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 Stormer was formed from the ashes of Total Fascism. The site, 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 emblazing 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 Stormer from 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.”

Despite “Operation: Kikebart,” Breitbart rose to be one of the most consistently cited websites on the Daily Stormer beginning in July of 2015, the same month that Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign. In November of 2016, Anglin lauded the site, particularly its former executive and current White House Chief Strategist Stephen Bannon, for making the site “hardcore.” During an appearance on Nordfront Radio, a Swedish neo-Nazi radio program, Anglin described Breitbart’s content as “basically stuff that you would read on the Daily Stormer.”

The Stormer Troll Army began organizing in small groups across the United States in late 2016, after Anglin published an article encouraging his readers to “prepare for the coming race war.” “[I]t’s a bit like Fight Club,” Anglin wrote, encouraging his audience to meet up in coffee shops, engage in firearms training, work out together, take part in political activism, meet women, and more. The Southern Poverty Law Center documented 31 active “book clubs” in 2016.

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’s 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 flyer for Daily Stormer that 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.”

In December of 2016, Anglin decided to target Tanya Gersh, a Jewish realtor from Montana. Sherry Spencer, the mother of Richard Spencer, had asked the realtor to help her sell a commercial property in an effort to tamp down community discontent related to Richard’s ideology, But Sherry Spencer subsequently posted a blog post on Medium, that she purportedly had authored, that falsely accused Gersh of extortion in connection with the sale of building. The very next day, Anglin published the first in a series of articles urging his followers to intimidate and harass the realtor, her family and associates.

The first of this 30-article series was titled “Jews Targeting Richard Spencer’s Mother for Harassment and Extortion – TAKE ACTION!” In the piece, Anglin claimed “This is the Jews for you, people. They are a vicious, evil race of hate-filled psychopaths. When you do something they don’t like, they will use the power of the media to come down on you, assassinate your character. They will call you names and accuse you of all sorts of things. They will go after your money. If all of that fails, they will attack your mother.”

In subsequent articles, Anglin exhorted his followers continually to harass Gersh, as well as members of the Whitefish Jewish community, and local business owners. Anglin’s articles even attacked the realtor’s 12-year old son, including photo-shopped images of the realtor and her son on the entry gate to Auschwitz, and an image of her son being crushed by a Nazi tank. As a result of Anglin’s call to arms, the realtor and her family received over 700 threatening and intimidating anti-Semitic phone calls, voicemails, emails, text messages, social media posts and even harassing Christmas cards, causing the family to consider fleeing Whitefish for their safety and causing significant psychological harm to the realtor.

In a dramatic escalation of events, Anglin threatened an armed march on the city, going as far as obtaining a permit for January 15, Martin Luther King Jr Day, naming the march for King’s assassin. Anglin indicated that “We will be busing in skinheads from the Bay Area … I have already worked out most of the details with the leaders of the local groups. Several of our top supporters from Silicon Valley have offered to provide significant support for the march, but we may need to solicit donations to pay for gas/food for the skinheads.”

In spite of Anglin’s claim that the Daily Stormer has supporters in the Silicon Valley, neither the skinheads nor the march materialized, perhaps signaling a weakness in Anglin’s abilities beyond self-starting “book clubs”.

Despite Anglin’s nominal ban on inciting violence in the comment section of Daily Stormer, at least one mass murderer and another man accused of murder as a hate crime and terrorism have 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 on the 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 later merged coverage of Roof’s sentencing with the media hype around the abduction and torture, broadcasted on Facebook Live, of a mentally challenged white man by four black youths in Chicago. Referring to Roof as DyRo, Anglin claimed in “As the Final Stage of DyRo’s Trial Begins, Chicago Torture-Kidnapping Highlights Why He Did It” that “…[Roof] did understand the concept of the media covering up black crime, however, so you have to wonder why he didn’t foresee that this act would not prove anything, but simply further the narrative of evil whites oppressing innocent brown people. Whatever the Case, DyRo is the Victim”

In March 2017, another reader of the Daily Stormer, James Harris Jackson, allegedly murdered Timothy Caughman, a 66-year-old black man, in Manhattan with a 26-inch sword. During an interview from the Rikers Island jail complex, Jackson told the New York Daily News that he spent time on the Daily Stormer interacting with “like-minded people.” He has been charged with murder as a hate crime and terrorism. Before it was revealed that Jackson was a frequenter of the Daily Stormer, Anglin published an article titled, “After White-on-Black Murder in NYC, It’s Time to Rally Around White Supremacists,” where he wrote, “It’s time for society to rally around White Supremacists, and show that we don’t blame them for a single act of someone who wrongly used their beliefs for evi. … It’s really encouraging to see people banding together like this, showing White Supremacists that they don’t have to be ashamed, because they’ve done nothing wrong.” After Jackson’s connection to the Daily Stormer came to light, Anglin penned another article in which he stated, “I’m not going to go out of my way to condemn this guy. Why should I? Black people are killing us “randomly” every single day—except it isn’t actually random, it is the exact same thing as here—these are attacks because of our race.” He followed the statement with dozens of photos of alleged victims of “black-on-white” crime, a longtime propaganda tool of white supremacists that seeks to illustrate an embattled white majority under siege by supposedly violent people of color.

Anglin was an adamant supporter of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. The Daily Stormer 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.

The day after Donald Trump won the presidential election, in a post simply titled, “We Won.” Anglin wrote: “Our Glorious Leader has ascended to God Emperor. Make no mistake about it: we did this. If it were not for us, it wouldn’t have been possible.” That same day, Anglin encouraged his followers to harass Muslims and make them feel unwelcome.

Despite its relative youth, Daily Stormer has 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, 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 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, 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 whom Anglin describes as Jews, Zionists, Judeo-Bolsheviks, Third Worlders, Negroes, Moslem Pigs, Trannies and Hebes, maligning them daily in his headlines.