The Daily Stormer
The Daily Stormer is an American neo-Nazi commentary and message board website that advocates for a second genocide of Jews. It is part of the alt-right movement. Its editor, Andrew Anglin, founded the outlet on July 4, 2013, as a faster-paced replacement for his previous website Total Fascism, which had focused on his own long-form essays on fascism, race, and antisemitic conspiracy theories. In contrast, The Daily Stormer relies heavily on quoted material with exaggerated headlines.
The site is known for its use of Internet memes, which have been likened to the imageboard 4chan and cited as attractions for a younger and more ideologically diverse audience.
The Daily Stormer orchestrates what it calls the "Troll Army", which is involved in Internet trolling of figures with whom Anglin disagrees politically. In August 2017, after causing outrage by insulting the victim of a car-ramming homicide at the far-right Unite the Right rally, the website was rejected by several domain registrars. In August 2019, the site went offline temporarily when their service provider, BitMitigate, was cut off by their cloud infrastructure provider; the site found another provider.
In June 2019, a federal judge ordered Anglin to pay $4.1 million to comedian Dean Obeidallah, whom Anglin had falsely accused of orchestrating the Manchester Arena bombing. In August 2019, a federal judge ordered that Anglin pay $14 million to Tanya Gersh, a woman from Whitefish, Montana, against whom he had organized a targeted harassment campaign.
Management
Founder
was born in 1984, and grew up near Columbus, Ohio. According to both Anglin and his childhood classmates, he was liberal as a youth. He attended the Linworth Alternative Program and the Worthington Kilbourne High School from 1999 to 2003, where he was remembered as a dreadlocked vegan. His friends in high school report that his behavior changed during his sophomore year at Linworth, where he exhibited self-harming behavior, and began to promote conspiracy theories. After high school, Anglin took classes at Columbus State Community College in 2003, and studied English at Ohio State University for one semester in 2004.In 2006, Anglin launched a conspiracy theory website, Outlaw Journalism, which was modeled after the works of Alex Jones and Hunter S. Thompson, whom Anglin admired.
In 2008, after posting on Outlaw Journalism that the only way for humanity to survive was to return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, Anglin began traveling around Southeast Asia, eventually ending up in Davao City, in the Philippines. In 2011, he spent several weeks with a Tboli village in southern Mindanao, where he initially intended to stay permanently, selling some of his possessions to raise money for a dowry to marry two local Muslim women. In 2012, Anglin wrote that he found the locals to be "a civilized, non-aggressive and industrious people" but he eventually came to consider them too "primitive", became lonely and only wanted to associate with members of his own race, and "By the Grace of God, I found Adolf Hitler."
In 2012, Anglin launched another website, Adventure Quest 2012, which discussed conspiracy theories such as the existence of reptilian humanoids. He described the aim of the site as seeking to "mend the wounds produced by modern society... and the reader transcend these physical bonds and reach total ascendancy. To mend these wounds, the world must learn to embrace diversity and color." In 2014, he stated that although he agreed with the central tenets of Nazism, he had reservations over reintroducing all aspects of Hitler's regime. A self-proclaimed "troll", Anglin stated that he was introduced to Nazism on the online imageboard 4chan. Later in 2012, he launched his first neo-Nazi website, Total Fascism. Feeling that Total Fascism was not appealing to a younger demographic and had articles that were too long, Anglin launched The Daily Stormer on July 4, 2013, with shorter articles and a more provocative style. Anglin said in March 2014 he spends 70 hours a week writing for the website.
Anglin's location is not known. An investigative article by The Huffington Post in November 2016 analyzed his social media and FBI sources, and concluded that he was living in Germany. Rumors have also claimed that he is residing in Russia. In July 2017, Anglin told CNN he was residing in Lagos, Nigeria. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the site as being headquartered in Worthington, Ohio, with activity in several other states. The website is registered in the name of Anglin's father Greg, who runs a Christian-inspired counseling service in Worthington.
Finances
The Daily Stormer is primarily funded through donations which Anglin solicits regularly from site visitors. His father was protested against by Anti-Racist Action for receiving donations from the site's readers to pass on to his son. In February 2017, the website announced a corporate sponsor—Smerff Electrical, owned by Simon Hickey of Brisbane, Australia, whose website contains images of alt-right meme Pepe the Frog. Anglin told Mother Jones that he received donations from Silicon Valley, and that Santa Clara County, California was the largest source of traffic to his website.The site is believed to have received over $200,000 in Bitcoin contributions since it began accepting the cryptocurrency in 2014. As of 2021, Anglin has received approximately $481,000 in Bitcoin. Money entering and being spent by the accounts was publicly tracked by a Twitter bot named 'Neonazi BTC Tracker', until 2020, when the account's final post was made. A Twitter account supportive of the Stormer announced that Coinbase was deleting accounts of persons attempting to send Bitcoin to them; Coinbase stated in general terms that it "prohibits use of an account which would abuse, harass, threaten, or promote violence against others". On August 20, 2017, for example, Anglin received a donation of 14.88 bitcoin, the number being a reference to Fourteen Words, and to Adolf Hitler. At the time, it was worth $60,000, but had Anglin kept the entire amount, it would have been worth about $235,000 by the end of the year.
The Daily Stormer is run through a company called Moonbase Holdings, with Anglin saying that he chose the name so that donors could avoid scrutiny from their credit card companies. The company made $3,400 per month on the alt-right crowdfunding website Hatreon, which ceased operations in February 2017. In his defamation lawsuit against Anglin, Muslim American radio personality Dean Obeidallah requested that Moonbase Holdings be scrutinized to find any other individuals with connections to the company.
Content and reception
The Daily Stormer takes its name from the Nazi Party's tabloid newspaper Der Stürmer, known for its virulently antisemitic caricatures of Jews and semi-pornography involving Jews raping young Aryan girls. Its publisher, Julius Streicher, was executed after the Second World War for crimes against humanity.The Southern Poverty Law Center described the site as "the newest up and comer in the heated competition to rule the hate web", which "has in the last six months often topped the oldest and largest hate site on the web, Stormfront, in terms of reach and page views, based on Alexa data". Anglin claimed in May 2016 that the website's traffic had doubled over the last six months, peaking at 120,000 daily visitors. The website is part of the alt-right movement, and it calls itself "The World's Most Visited Alt-Right Website". As the movement made headlines in mid-2016, "bolstered in part by the unexpected rise of Donald Trump and Britain's decision to leave the European Union", Anglin declared: "We won the meme war; now we've taken over the GOP, and we did this very, very quickly." Unlike other figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Anglin does not play down the extremist elements in the alt-right, stating that: "The goal is to ethnically cleanse White nations of non-Whites and establish an authoritarian government. Many people also believe that the Jews should be exterminated".
Andrew Anglin uses The Daily Stormer as a platform to promote misogynistic conspiracy theories, claiming that politically active "hite women across the Western world" are pushing for liberal immigration policies "to ensure an endless supply of Black and Arab men to satisfy their depraved sexual desires." In July 2018, Anglin summarized his misogynistic views, writing: "Look, I hate women. I think they deserve to be beaten, raped and locked in cages."
Content and style
Anglin asserts that the purpose of The Daily Stormer is to provide "a means to propagandize people... to get them to look at the world in a certain way". Headlines include "All Intelligent People in History Disliked Jews", and "Adolf Hitler: The Most Lied About Man of All Time". The site bills itself as "America's #1 Most-Trusted Republican News Source". According to The Jewish Chronicle, The Daily Stormer "posts hundreds of racist articles targeting black people, Arabs and Jews". The website offers pro-separatist coverage of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, which Anglin considers "the correct moral position". The site promotes the conspiracy theory that Jews are shape shifting reptilians who rule the Earth, which Anglin had previously discussed on his web site Adventure Quest 2012.The SPLC stated that The Daily Stormer owed its success to the online imageboard 4chan becoming popular among racists, as both websites use similar memes and rhetorical styles. One meme the website has used is to overlay photographs of Taylor Swift with anti-Semitic quotations, including comments made by Hitler. The website puts triple parentheses around the names of Jews, a far-right meme created by fellow website The Right Stuff. Jacob Siegel of The Daily Beast wrote that the website was growing in popularity amongst a younger audience due to its use of humor, and was attracting activists of other anti-political correctness ideologies—such as Gamergaters, men's rights activists and opponents of social justice warriors—who would not usually identify with fascism. The SPLC has also documented Anglin's involvement in and encouragement of culture jamming by making hyperbolic statements in fake online accounts as women and minorities. He has also said that "ridiculous" statements such as "gas the kikes", if repeated in media coverage, can work to desensitize the public to the Holocaust. He also believes that his extreme right-wing rhetoric can normalize less extreme right-wingers such as Trump. In December 2017, The Huffington Post leaked Anglin's 17-page style guide for the website, which included the guideline that articles must be so extremely hyperbolic that readers would be unsure whether the content is parody.
The hacker and Internet troll known as "weev" wrote an article on the website after his release from prison in October 2014, espousing his conversion to Neo-Nazism and his opposition to Jews who had built "an empire of wickedness the likes the world has never seen". Fredrick Brennan, founder of the online community 8chan, wrote an article on The Daily Stormer encouraging eugenics, based on his own experiences of having brittle bone disease.
Florida-based Jewish troll Joshua Ryne Goldberg, who encouraged a 2015 attack on a free speech exhibition in Garland, Texas, under the alias of a Muslim extremist, wrote white supremacist articles for The Daily Stormer under the pseudonym Michael Slay. In 2022, while serving time in American federal prison, Goldberg published an article on the self-publishing website Medium detailing how he became a writer for The Daily Stormer and mocking The Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin. In 2017, The Sydney Morning Herald journalist Luke McMahon - who had previously unmasked Goldberg - unmasked another Daily Stormer writer, Australia First Party member Nathan Sykes, revealing that he, too, was actually Jewish.
The Daily Stormer accepts freelance work and pays $14.88 per article. The second-most prolific writer on the website goes by the pseudonym "Zeiger" and was unmasked in 2018 by the Montreal Gazette as Gabriel Sohier Chaput, an IT consultant from Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie, Quebec. Gabriel Sohier-Chaput was also a member of the now-defunct neo-Nazi online forum Iron March and was a supporter of the terrorist organization Atomwaffen Division writing articles promoting the group. In January 2023, Sohier-Chaput was found guilty of criminally promoting hatred against Jews as a result of an article he wrote for the site in 2017, an offense that could result in a sentence of up to two years in prison.
Another notable prolific writer was Robert Warren "Azzmador" Ray, an East Texas-based neo-Nazi who gained national prominence from an appearance on a Vice News documentary by Elle Reeve about the Charlottesville riots where he complained that Charlottesville was run by "Jewish communists and criminal niggers". Ray is also the creator of The Krypto Report, the main podcast show of the Daily Stormer. A more recently-known associate/member of The Daily Stormer was Daniel Kenneth Jeffries from Granbury, Texas who goes by the nickname of "Grandpa Lampshade" and hosts the "Thoughts on the Day" segment on the United Kingdom-based neo-Nazi radio network Radio Aryan founded by Steve "Sven Longshanks" Stone, Laurence "Max Musson" Nunn, and Jeremiah "Jez" Bedford-Turner of which the radio is prominently featured on The Daily Stormer. Some of Jeffries/Lampshade's posts were also shared by Robert Bowers, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter and domestic terrorist.
The Daily Stormer attracted media coverage when the SPLC stated that white supremacist spree killer Dylann Roof—who on June 17, 2015, shot nine African Americans to death in the Charleston church shooting—may have made several comments on the site. The SPLC found similarities between one user's comments and Roof's manifesto. The Daily Beast stated that Anglin "repudiated Roof's crime and publicly disavowed violence, while endorsing many of Roof's views". In October of that year, Anglin gave a positive reaction to an attempted assassination on Henriette Reker, a pro-immigration candidate to be mayor of the German city of Cologne, decrying her as a "feminist hag".
In May 2017, "weev" set up the first non-English version of The Daily Stormer, El Daily Stormer in Spanish. It focused on news related to white nationalism in Spain and Latin America. El Daily Stormer was one of the sites where the identity of the victim of La Manada was spread. In December 2018, three admins of the site were arrested by the national police of Spain and a fourth member has been identified.