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April 25, 2018
1. Andrew Anglin runs the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer.
Anglin launched The Daily Stormer on July 4, 2013. He says the site, which remains popular with white supremacists despite ongoing hosting issues, was his attempt to reach “all disenfranchised and angry White males under the age of thirty.” Anglin created The Daily Stormer after founding another neo-Nazi site, Total Fascism, in 2012. Previously, Anglin was a 9/11 “truther” and was influenced by conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones of InfoWars. Anglin was also active on the Internet on discussion sites like 4chan, parts of which are notorious for their hateful content.
Raised in Ohio, where his family still lives, Anglin claims to have lived most of his adult life abroad. He says he is currently living in Nigeria, but has offered no proof of that. In any event, he has managed to elude lawyers attempting to serve him with papers in various lawsuits.
Anglin is part of the more extreme element of the alt right, a segment of the white supremacist movement consisting of a loose network of racists and anti-Semites who reject mainstream conservatism in favor of politics that embrace implicitly or explicitly racist, anti-Semitic and white supremacist ideology. Many seek to re-inject such bigoted ideas into the conservative movement in the United States.
While Anglin is explicitly racist and anti-Semitic, he has recently tried to re-brand himself as more moderate.
Anglin did not attend the Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, but the fallout from that event—people in the movement being doxxed and websites, including The Daily Stormer being kicked off servers, among other things-- has affected his ideology. Despite a long history of exalting Hitler and neo-Nazi views, he recently began to claim he identifies as an American Nationalist.
In an effort to validate their leap from neo-Nazis to flag-waving American patriots, he and his followers equate American nationalism to white nationalism by claiming America was founded on anti-Semitic and racist principles.
Since adopting this American nationalist ideology, Anglin now says he never was a neo-Nazi and was simply trolling everyone, allowing the media and others to falsely label him. Anglin also claims that he wanted to “demystify” the concept of “evil Nazis,” and remove the stigma surrounding those words. He believes he has succeeded in promoting what he calls “ironic Naziism.”
2. Anglin’s goal is to promote hatred of Jews and to denigrate minorities.
Despite his ostensible shift away from neo-Nazi ideology, Anglin continues to attack Jews on a daily basis, using crude anti-Semitic language to describe various figures. In the “Jewish Problem” section of The Daily Stormer, he accuses Jews of all sorts of societal ills. Anglin also lauds Hitler and promotes Holocaust denial. His hatred extends to other minorities, particularly blacks, and he frequently uses news items as a launching pad for his racist tirades.
In March 2018, Anglin said his new goal was to continue “to normalize our ideas, to get to the point where you can say these things that we believe in the open, publicly, without being physically attacked, without losing your job, without getting kicked off of the internet. And that is not far out of our reach. All we have to do is hit a critical mass point where so many people agree with us that the tide turns in our favor, and someone, somewhere says “I’m not going to fire this guy for that.”
Anglin told his followers that they should stop attending public events in favor of “community-building,” and encouraged his followers to form Daily Stormer Book Clubs (SBC), where they can network in person. SBCs have conducted a number of fliering campaigns and participated in a Patriot Front rally outside an anarchist book store in Austin, Texas.
3. Anglin encourages his followers to troll and harass perceived enemies.
Anglin, who considers himself a troll, instructs his readers and followers, the “Stormer troll army,” to inundate perceived enemies (mostly Jews) with hateful messages on social media. Anglin has also posted extensive instructions on how to troll people. He has carried out these tactics against Jewish journalists and Jewish public figures, including politicians.
In December 2016, Anglin took his trolling a step further, directing his followers to launch a virtual attack on the Jewish community of Whitefish, Montana, and Tanya Gersh in particular, after Richard Spencer’s mother claimed Gersh, a Jewish realtor in Whitefish, tried to force her to sell her property in the town. As Whitefish’s Jewish residents were harassed with threatening emails, phone calls and on social media, Anglin announced his plans to bring armed racist skinheads and a Hamas representative to the town for a rally. The rally never materialized and was likely just part of his trolling plan. Since these incidents, the Southern Poverty Law Center has filed a lawsuit against Anglin for his harassment of Gersh and her family.
4. Other racists have feuded with Anglin over his tactics.
So-called “intellectual racists,” who tend to reject more blatant or shocking displays of white supremacy, do not like Anglin’s openly provocative and crude language or the Nazi imagery he uses. The intellectual racists, though bigoted and anti-Semitic themselves, fear that his “outlandish anti-Semitic bilge” and Hitler worship might dissuade “mainstream” whites from entering the white supremacist movement. In addition, intellectual racists claim Anglin is more interested in accumulating an Internet following than in spreading white supremacist ideas in the real world. Anglin, in turn, has attacked these intellectual racists for being too cerebral to appeal to the working-class whites he claims to be trying to reach.
More recently, a number of white supremacists expressed anger with Anglin after he promoted American nationalism, and argued that white supremacists should step away from street actions and public events.
5. Anglin is a controversial figure within the white supremacist movement.
Anglin, who has spent time in Asia and the Philippines, has reportedly had romantic relationships with Asian and Filipino women, something white supremacists consider traitorous to the white race. Anglin is also controversial for his views on women. He often attacks and belittles women and expresses misogynist views. Saying that the purpose of The Daily Stormer is to educate men about the white nationalist movement, Anglin has actually banned women from producing content for his site and from joining his Stormer Book Clubs. While some white supremacists are extremely misogynistic, many of them attempt to couch their biased beliefs in softer, less aggressive language and imagery.
Anglin used his website to help popularize the term “white sharia,” a reference to a virulently misogynistic vision of women as chattel whose purpose is to have babies and please men. While Anglin and others may have used the term ironically, there is no doubt that they intended to belittle women. The term “white sharia” has since gained traction among the many misogynists who populate the white supremacist movement.