Exploring Alt-Right Trolling Tactics and Insincerity

This episode, Daniel tells Jack about Andrew Anglin and The Daily Stormer.  Big content warnings for this one.

Cantwell News:

"As co-defendants fight discovery, Cantwell threatens lawyer," The Daily Progress. https://www.dailyprogress.com/news/local/as-co-defendants-fight-discovery-cantwell-threatens-lawyer/article_619851ce-8ad9-599b-88fa-6f289e90d400.html

"On June 18 Cantwell posted an article about Roberta Kaplan, the lead lawyer on the case, to the messaging site Telegram, which is frequented by extremists.

“After this stupid kike whore loses this fraudulent lawsuit, we’re going to have a lot of fucking fun with her,” Cantwell wrote.

The threat was mentioned during a telephonic hearing Tuesday in federal court in Charlottesville, where lawyers discussed the snail’s pace of the discovery process in the lawsuit that alleges organizers and key participants in the Aug. 12, 2017, white supremacist rally planned and promoted violence against protected groups.

Cantwell has posted derogatory statements about Kaplan before, the plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote in a motion filed Tuesday, but his recent statement is a “thinly-veiled threat” that impairs the lawyers’ ability to carry out their work.

The lawyers asked the court to enjoin Cantwell to refrain from any future threats.

Cantwell already has been found guilty of assaulting and pepper-spraying activists on Aug. 11, 2017, and of violating conditions of his bond. He remains a defendant in another civil suit filed by people injured during the Unite the Right rally.

On Tuesday afternoon, shortly after news stories about the motion were published, Cantwell posted about Kaplan again on Telegram, calling Kaplan a “lying piece of Jewish filth."

Show Notes: The Daily Stormer: https://dailystormer.name

The Daily Stormer Style Guide: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/daily-stormer-nazi-style-guide_n_5a2ece19e4b0ce3b344492f2

"We are writing for the common man, so the language should be very simple, using a standard 8th grade vocabulary. The use of "college words" is extremely discouraged.

The only situation in which an uncommon word should be used in when it is unavoidable, such as when it is needed to describe something technical, or a situation or phenomenon that is so specific that it requires a unique description."

[...]

"As a rule, every post should be filled with as much visual stimulation as possible. Pages should look exciting and appeal to the ADHD culture. This can't really be overdone. These include: •Straight images (pictures of persons, places, events) •Meme images (that you make yourself or find on other sites - fresh memes are best but old memes are good too) •Funny gifs •Twitter embeds •YouTube videos (or other video from other sites if necessary, following the above mentioned embed protocol)."

[...]

"Profanity should be used sparingly. An overuse of profanity can come across as goofy.

"Nigger" is okay to use sometimes, but shouldn't be used constantly.

The following racial slurs are allowed and advisable:

•Negro/Negroid •Monkey •Ape •Spic •Wetback •Beaner •Beanperson •Kike •Yid •Sheeny •Christ-killer •Haji •Sandperson •Paki (can be used for non-Pakistani Moslems, especially Arabs, because that's funny) •Muzzie •Chink •Gook •Zipperhead

And others The following are not allowed: •Shitskin •Latrino •(Any others relating to poop) •Mud (I just don't really like this term, it seems too much like SF boomer talk)

While racial slurs are allowed/recommended, not every reference to non-white should not be a slur and their use should be based on the tone of the article. Generally, when using racial slurs, it should come across as half-joking - like a racist joke that everyone laughs at because it's true. This follows the generally light tone of the site."

[...]

"Prime Directive: Always Blame the Jews for Everything

As Hitler says, people will become confused and disheartened if they feel there are multiple enemies. As such, all enemies should be combined into one enemy, which is the Jews. This is pretty much objectively true anyway, but we want to leave out any and all nuance.

So no blaming Enlightenment thought, pathological altruism, technology/urbanization, etc. - just blame Jews for everything.

This basically includes blaming Jews for the behavior of other nonwhites. Of course it should not be that they are innocent, but the message should always be that if we didn't have the Jews, we could figure out how to deal with nonwhites very easily.

The same deal with women. Women should be attacked, but there should always be mention that if it wasn't for the Jews, they would be acting normally.

What should be completely avoided is the sometimes mentioned idea that "even if we got rid of the Jews we would still have all these other problems." The Jews should always be the beginning and the end of every problem, from poverty to poor family dynamics to war to the destruction of the rainforest."

[...]

"Violence

It's illegal to promote violence on the Internet. At the same time, it's totally important to normalize the acceptance of violence as an eventuality/inevitability.

I'm extremely careful about never suggesting violence. I go beyond legal requirements in America. However, whenever someone does something violent, it should be made light of, laughed at.

For example, Anders Breivik should be forever referred to as a heroic freedom fighter. This is great because people think you must be joking. But there is a part of their brain that doesn't think that.

When it comes to more immediate violent trends, I'm slightly more careful. The burnings of migrant centers is one of these things. I'm slightly hesitant to say "patriotic heroes burn another might center," given that this could be construed as calling for more arson (whereas it can't be construed that I'm calling for Breivik to kill more brats).

Dylann Roof I have labeled "DyRo," and though I offer explanations for what he did, I never condemn him. I also think it is very funny to say that he was simply defending himself when he was attacked in a church by black mamies trying to steal his iPhone. That sort of silly humor really bites at the Jew "pure evil" narrative."

"Meet The Stormer: Here Are The People Who Keep The World’s Most Popular White Power Website Afloat" https://angrywhitemen.org/2018/08/15/meet-the-stormer-here-are-the-people-who-keep-the-worlds-most-popular-white-power-website-afloat/

Anglin at the SPLC: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/andrew-anglin

Classic Anglin:

"War Machine Did Nothing Wrong." https://dailystormer.name/war-machine-did-nothing-wrong/

"I don’t usually defend deranged brown savages. But I’m going to right now.

UFC fighter War Machine has been sentenced to life in prison for assault and battery, which is insane in itself.

This is a situation where one person beat another person’s ass. Pretty badly, okay. But that was all it was – an ass beating. There was no attempted murder. Somehow there are 29 felony convictions, and I don’t even understand what that means – this was a single incident of someone getting their ass kicked.

But on top of the nuttiness of “giving someone an ass beating” resulting in life imprisonment – the bitch deserved it, and no one anywhere can make an argument that she didn’t....

"Like, he had this meme about how anyone should be able to murder anyone at any time if they were capable of it. It was his main point. He talked about “in this day and age there is laws protecting the weak” – that is a quote. That he said a lot.

Like he wanted literal Conanism.

He took the philosophical position that anyone should be able to murder anyone at any time.

He also did things like call for the assassination of Barack Obama and said that men in modern feminist societies are treated worse than Jews during the Holocaust.

He has also said many other things that some people might consider to be awesome."

"Corrective Rape Will Save Us." https://dailystormer.name/corrective-rape-will-save-us/

"There was a time where good, average men had access to women and created their own families without having to play these games. Giving women agency as if they were something other than property was a grave mistake that needs correcting. They don’t know what’s best for them and they’re incapable of appreciating the sacrifice men make for them to be safe and comfortable.

Rape is the solution. Think about it. This slut was surrounded by like 30 men that wanted to have sex with her. Those men were subjected to stupid hoops and games and ended up gaining nothing and wasting a lot of time. It would have been easier for them to rape her, be done with it and move on towards productive stuff."

"ISIS Claims Responsibility for Arianapocalypse As Police Searches Continue Across UK." https://dailystormer.name/isis-claims-responsibility-for-arianapocalypse-as-police-searches-continue-across-uk/

"I know it is the culture, and people just go along with the culture, but if you’re sending your 8-year-old daughter to see this:

Then you do, by divine natural law, deserve to suffer for it in the most horrible imaginable way.

I hope her parents didn’t die with her.

And I hope they are someday able to understand why they deserved this.

There are laws in the universe. And when they are transgressed, these transgressions have consequences. Sadly – and I mean that genuinely, it is sad – it doesn’t matter if you know you are breaking these laws or not.

Rules still apply."

"Andrew Anglin Exposed!"

"I started out with normal Alex Jones type conspiracy material, and then moved on to weirder conspiracy material, and then eventually decided Ted Kaczinski was right with regards to a coming apocalypse due to the rapidity of technological development, read a bunch of stuff from Jaques Ellul and Jean Baudrillard, and went to live in a jungle in Asia for a while.

To be clear, I was actually already living and working in Asia at the time, because it was just so much more sensible economically. Also, it is a lot of fun in Southeast Asia (China isn’t), and 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). As the reader is aware, 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 don’t have souls.

Having been raised mostly without exposure to non-Whites, this was when I first started thinking seriously about race as a biological concept. Eventually, I got fed up and realized that I couldn’t live in a jungle with a bunch of 80 IQ jungle people.

I had always been into 4chan, as I am at heart a troll. This is about the time /new/ 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.

Then, without really any knowledge at all of the contemporary White Nationalist scene, I started Total Fascism, a blog promoting total fascism."

"The Alt-Right's Asian Fetish, Audrea Lim, The New York Times." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/opinion/sunday/alt-right-asian-fetish.html

"Andrew Anglin Does the Philippines -- Jailbait Style." https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=53b_1426403408

Columbus Alive, "White Nationalist From Worthington." https://www.columbusalive.com/entertainment/20170208/white-nationalist-from-worthington

"In 2007, two freshman-year friends had strikingly similar run-ins with Anglin. On both occasions, Anglin expressed a deep interest in conspiracy theory and, in particular, reptilian humanoids, a concept that posits global leaders either are, or are controlled by, lizard-like beings. These theories would form the backbone of Anglin’s first forays into blogging on his site Adventure Quest 2012, which launched with a post laying forth the site’s mission to mend “the wounds produced by modern society ... and [help] the reader transcend these physical bonds and reach total ascendancy.” “To mend these wounds,” Anglin wrote, “the world must learn to embrace diversity and color.”

Later posts would delve into the lives of reptilians and humanoid sharks.

[...]

"Writing on his blog True Fascism, a precursor to the Daily Stormer first launched in 2012, Anglin described an affinity for Filipinos, referring to them as “a civilized, non-aggressive and industrious people.” Over time, however, he started to believe it impossible to develop deeper, more meaningful relationships with the island dwellers, owing to what he described as “minds ... as primitive as their living.”

“While living in the jungle, I began drinking too much of a strong coconut wine brewed by the locals, began to feel deeply depressed and alone, and eventually left that life behind, forever,” he wrote. “It was only among my own kind — those of the European race — that I would ever be able to share true kinship, as it is only they who share my blood, and can understand my soul. ... By the Grace of God, I found Adolf Hitler.”

After delving deeper into the writings of Hitler and former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Anglin launched the short-lived Total Fascism, which included long-form posts about everything from Hitler’s artwork to a written desire to round up non-white immigrants and place them in concentration camps “until they can be shipped back to wherever they are from.” "

The Atlantic, Luke O'Brien, "The Making of an American Nazi." https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/the-making-of-an-american-nazi/544119/

"Former friends recall that Anglin’s parents seemed blind to their son’s alarming behavior. And while he could be tender toward his younger siblings, Chelsey and Mitch, and loyal to his friends, he also had a sadistic side. Alison (who asked that her last name be withheld from this article) told me that during Anglin’s sophomore year, she called him, distraught: She said she’d passed out at a party and been raped by a friend’s older brother. She needed compassion and support, but Anglin just laughed and broke up with her.

“You’re a slut,” she remembers him saying.

Several girls Anglin had gotten to know at another high school began calling her house at all hours of the night, according to Alison and other sources. “You deserved it,” they’d say. “You slut.” Alison says the abuse went on for weeks, as Anglin showed friends a video he’d made of them having sex.

After the breakup, Dan Newman, another friend at the time, remembers Anglin once bashing his head into the walls of his bedroom in such a frenzy that his mother had to call the police. Several classmates told me that Anglin didn’t date again in high school and sometimes tried to kiss other boys, including one black student he especially liked. Whether this behavior was authentic experimentation or just for shock value, it’s notable in light of the extreme homophobia Anglin has since expressed on The Daily Stormer and elsewhere. He has advocated, for instance, throwing gays off buildings, isis-style."

Lawsuits

From the Atlantic piece:

"At the time, Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin barely knew each other. Spencer, who fancies himself white nationalism’s leading intellectual, cloaks his racism in highbrow arguments. Anglin prefers the gutter, reveling in the vile language common on the worst internet message boards. But Spencer and Anglin had appeared together on a podcast the day before Sherry’s Medium post was published and expressed their mutual admiration. Anglin declared it a “historic” occasion, a step toward greater unity on the extreme right.

It was in this spirit that Anglin “doxed” Gersh and her husband, Judah, as well as other Jews in Whitefish, by publishing their contact information and other personal details on his website. He plastered their photographs with yellow stars emblazoned with jude and posted a picture of the Gershes’ 12-year-old son superimposed on the gates at Auschwitz. He commanded his readers—his “Stormer Troll Army”—to “hit ’em up.”

“All of you deserve a bullet through your skull,” one Stormer said in an email.

“Put your uppity slut wife Tanya back in her cage, you rat-faced kike,” another wrote to Judah.

“You fucking wicked kike whore,” Andrew Auernheimer, The Daily Stormer’s webmaster, said in a voicemail for Gersh. “This is Trump’s America now.”

Over the next week, the Stormers besieged Whitefish businesses, human-rights groups, city-council members—anyone potentially connected to the targets. A single harasser called Judah’s office more than 500 times in three days, according to the Whitefish police. Gersh came home one night to find her husband sitting at home in the dark, suitcases on the floor, wondering whether they should flee. “I have never been so scared in my entire life,” she later told me."

Between Two Lampshades: "Enoch, Spencer, and Anglin." https://therightstuff.biz/2016/12/14/between-two-lampshades-enoch-spencer-and-anglin/

Luke O'Brien, Huffpost, "Andrew Anglin’s Lawyer Visited The Elusive Nazi’s Hometown And Madness Ensued" https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nazi-andrew-anglin-lawyer-mark-randazza_n_5a6a3622e4b0ddb658c4a36b

Missoulian, "Anglin forfeits defense in MT neo-Nazi 'troll storm' case; his attorneys withdraw" https://missoulian.com/news/local/anglin-forfeits-defense-in-mt-neo-nazi-troll-storm-case/article_ea7bc4d3-3ae9-5866-b6ce-4ef6fba9a7ce.html

"Anglin attorneys Marc Randazza and Mathew Stevenson filed a motion Tuesday to withdraw from the case. In their motion, Randazza said the attorney-client relationship "has broken down" and created an "irreconcilable conflict" for the defense.

In a phone interview with the Missoulian, Randazza said he had little interest in continuing his representation of someone unwilling to follow a federal judge's order.

"My client made the decision years ago he was going to expatriate himself and never return," Randazza said. "When a federal judge tells you to do something and you refuse, you put your lawyer in a difficult position."

Randazza's filing to withdraw as counsel indicates the motion was sent to his client at an email address as well as four different physical addresses in Ohio."

"Heather Heyer: Woman Killed in Road Rage Incident was a Fat, Childless 32-Year-Old Slut" https://dailystormer.name/heather-heyer-woman-killed-in-road-rage-incident-was-a-fat-childless-32-year-old-slut/

"Why We Terminated Daily Stormer," The Cloudflare Blog. https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

"Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.

Our team has been thorough and have had thoughtful discussions for years about what the right policy was on censoring. Like a lot of people, we’ve felt angry at these hateful people for a long time but we have followed the law and remained content neutral as a network. We could not remain neutral after these claims of secret support by Cloudflare."

Wired, "Why Cloudflare Let and Extremist Stronghold Burn." https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-cloudflare/

From the Atlantic piece, the results of The Optics Debate:

"His panic was almost palpable as he tried to walk back the fearsome reputation he’d cultivated. “I am not actually a ‘Neo‑Nazi White Supremacist,’ nor do I know what that is,” he wrote in mid-September. He claimed that his violent rhetoric was never sincere but simply a way to mock those who slap a Nazi label on anyone who “stands up for white people’s rights” or “refuses to believe the stupid lies about Hitler” or rejects the “alleged Holocaust” narrative. Anglin now shared what he said had been his true editorial approach all along: “Ironic Nazism disguised as real Nazism disguised as ironic Nazism.”

Five days later, he posted about “the world being ruled either by reptiles from another dimension or some other type of reptilian or insectoid race of aliens.” Where the irony started and stopped was hard to know. I emailed Anglin one more time asking for an interview. He didn’t answer. The next day, he wrote a post calling for the mass execution of journalists. “I want to see pieces of journalist brains splattered across walls,” he wrote."