Over the weekend, unnamed leftists leaked the true identity of Mike Enoch, the pseudonymous neo-Nazi talking head behind white supremacist blog TheRightStuf.biz and co-host of its Daily Shoah podcast, on the self-publishing platform Medium.
According to the Medium post, which has since been taken down for rules violations — but is still archived online — Enoch is actually Mike Peinovich.
Peinovich lives in New York City's ritzy Upper East Side neighborhood, has a "lucrative tech job" and a "liberal family, rooted in the affluent suburb of Montclair, New Jersey." Unlike notorious white nationalist spokespersons like Richard B. Spencer of the National Policy Institute or Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin, the Medium post noted that Peinovich concealed his true identity to enjoy the trappings of his liberal city lifestyle.
As news of his true identity spread, Peinovich — whose Right Stuff site popularized (((echoes))), a technique for targeting Jews online, which Mic reported on back in June — was forced to admit to fans his true identity — and that his wife is Jewish.
According to Salon, after initially denying the report Peinovich took to the Right Stuff's password-protected forum to write, "As I am sure you all know, I was doxxed and an ill-advised attempt to fool the media about my identity led me to not talk to you people and to try to simply ride it out by being silent."
He added, "Yes my wife is who they say she is, I won't even bother denying it, I won't bother making excuses."
Other denizens of the forum saw yet another Jewish conspiracy afoot.
"It just feels like they're just more actors in the same play being orchestrated by the Jews," one user responded. "Half of my gut has also thought TRS has been controlled opposition for awhile now."
On the web communities 4chan and 8chan, both of which run far-right political forums, users responded to Peinovich's unmasking with a combination of mockery, anger and anguish. One thread asked, "Why is the Alt Right full of pathetic untermenschen?" — a reference to the German word used by Nazis to describe inferior races. Another poster suggested, "He did it to setup an online community that required people to divulge all of their personal information in order to join."
According to Salon, Peinovich's wife appeared to be aware of her husband's online identity — and even made several appearances on the podcasts. In one, according to Salon, "she read a neo-Nazi parody of The Night Before Christmas. Introducing the clip — which is also archived online — Peinovich said his wife was 'very proud of it.'"
Peinovich has since resigned, and the Right Stuff may be on the verge of collapsing entirely. The Medium post noted other members affiliated with the network were outed recently, including "Cooper 'Ghoul' Ward (also a member of the American Vanguard, another group trying its hand at a public presence), Van 'Bulbasaur' Bryant II, and Jesse 'Seventh Son' Dunstan." Ward and Bryant have since dropped off the web.
Peinovich's Daily Shoah, a play on a Hebrew term for the Holocaust, is a major player in far-right politics which claims to have roughly 100,000 subscribers. And Peinovich has attended neo-Nazi and white supremacist conferences like Spencer's NPI under his Enoch pseudonym.
Peinovich was also one of the most prominent organizers of the alt-right, the loosely affiliated online network of white nationalist and far-right activists who sprung to prominence amid Republican President-elect Donald Trump's campaign. His venture, the TRS network, appeared to be generating at least some revenue as well through merchandising and various fundraising ventures.
