From “The Associated Press Stylebook”: “We do not use obscenities, racial epithets or other offensive slurs in stories unless they are part of direct quotations and there is a compelling reason for them.”
From “The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage”: “The Times very rarely publishes obscene words . . . sometimes at an acknowledged cost in the vividness of an article or two.”
From the Daily Stormer style guide: “While racial slurs are allowed/recommended, not every reference to non-white[s] should be a slur. . . . It should not come across as genuine raging vitriol. That is a turnoff to the overwhelming majority of people.” The guide, apparently written by the site’s founder and chief propagandist, Andrew Anglin, lists eighteen racial slurs that are “advisable” and four that are “not allowed,” and reminds writers to “follow the prime directive.” The prime directive, as stated a few paragraphs later: “All enemies should be combined into one enemy, which is the Jews.”
The Daily Stormer is a relatively popular neo-Nazi blog, although it’s impossible to know exactly how popular. (From the style guide: “The site continues to grow month by month, indicating that there is no ceiling on this.” Also from the guide: “We should always claim we are winning, and should celebrate any wins with extreme exaggeration.”) In December, a source leaked the site’s seventeen-page style guide to Ashley Feinberg, a journalist at HuffPost, along with transcripts from an online chat where aspiring propagandists asked a Daily Stormer administrator about blogging opportunities. The administrator responded, “okay basically, it works like this, you can write articles, if we dont like them you can put them on your own blog or whatever, if we accept them for publication we will pay you $14.88.” (That number, Feinberg wrote, “is a common shibboleth among white supremacists. We’re sure they find this extremely clever.”) Then he pasted a link, and wrote, “theres style guide read the site for a couple weeks, get a hang of the style and editorial tone.” When the freelancers in the chat complained about the low fee, Feinberg said recently, the administrator responded, “ ‘Neo-Nazi stuff is not that lucrative, as you can imagine,’ and ‘We’re not TMZ.’ ”
The style guide is surprisingly fastidious about formatting. Links must not “stretch into the spacing between words.” Images must be exactly three hundred and twenty pixels wide, to avoid anything “aesthetically problematic.” Each post “should be filled with as much visual stimulation as possible,” in order to “appeal to the ADHD culture”; passages from mainstream sources must be unaltered, so that “we can never be accused of ‘fake news’—or delisted by Facebook as such.”
One section is called, simply, “No Such Thing as Too Much Hyperbole.” “Even when a person can say to themselves ‘this is ridiculous,’ they are still affected by it on an emotional level,” the guide says. “Refer to teenagers who get arrested for racist Twitter posts as ‘eternally noble warriors bravely fighting for divine war to protect the blood heritage of our sacred ancestors’. . . . You and anyone reading can say omg corny lol. But it just doesn’t matter to the primitive part of the brain.”
Since the Daily Stormer was founded, in 2013, some non-Nazis have wondered how seriously to take it. Surely a site named for Der Stürmer—a Third Reich tabloid so crude that Joseph Goebbels, in his diary, called it “simple pornography”—couldn’t, in the current century, mean what it appeared to mean. Maybe it was an elaborate joke, or an attempt to test the boundaries of free speech. “The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not,” the author writes, in a section called “Lulz.” “This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. But that’s neither here nor there.” For legal reasons, the guide continues, writers shouldn’t openly incite violence; “however, whenever someone does something violent, it should be made light of.” The ultimate goal is to “dehumanize the enemy, to the point where people are ready to laugh at their deaths.” That settles that.
Feinberg, the journalist who brought the style guide to light, has carved out a beat that might be called public-interest cyber-stalking—searching publicly available data for, as she puts it, “the things conservatives do online when they don’t think anyone’s watching.” She found what appeared to be Anthony Scaramucci’s Amazon wish list (“The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials Into Triumph”); quoted from a hunting-forum account that seemed to belong to Donald Trump, Jr. (“Lie lie lie deny deny deny . . . it aint a crime if you dont get caught!!!!!!!!”); and recently pointed out that Sean Spicer, on Instagram, had referred to “A Christmas Carol” as a “book of Christmas Carols.” On Twitter, Feinberg routinely refers to Trump associates as “psychopaths,” “idiots,” and “fucking nimrods.” When it comes to literal Nazis, though, she takes a more muted approach. “There are obviously a million jokes that go through your head when you read something as terrible as this,” she said. “But I figured there’s nothing I can say that’s better than just showing how absurd and insane their thinking is.” ♦
