Andrew Anglin
Andrew Anglin is the founder of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website, which takes its name from the gutter Nazi propaganda sheet known as Der Stürmer. True to that vintage, Anglin is infamous for the crudity of his language and his thinking, a contrast to his sophistication as a prolific internet troll and serial harasser. Anglin’s organizing and harassment on the Daily Stormer led to lawsuits, and courts have awarded millions of dollars in damages to plaintiffs suing Anglin in recent years. But with his whereabouts unknown, Anglin has so far escaped full accountability for his actions.
About Andrew Anglin
Andrew Anglin is the founder and editor of the Daily Stormer – arguably the most influential neo-Nazi website in America during the latter half of the 2010s. Styled after popular image-heavy internet forums like 4chan and 8chan, the Daily Stormer nurtured a new generation of white supremacists online, spreading antisemitism, neo-Nazism and white nationalism with acerbic hyperbole and epithet-laden stories reflecting Anglin’s racist worldview.
At its height, Anglin’s blog drew in millions of readers. The Daily Stormer consistently ranked among the top 100,000 most-viewed websites from 2013 to 2017, according to the domain popularity tracking software Alexa. Though Anglin’s prominence has declined considerably since the collapse of the so-called “alt-right” in 2018, he has nevertheless sought to latch on to trends within the broader far right. Throughout 2021 and early 2022, Anglin used his website to heavily promote “Stop the Steal,” the anti-democracy movement that sought to challenge Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral win and ultimately culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
In 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center won a $14 million judgment against Anglin for his role in orchestrating a harassment campaign against Tanya Gersh of Whitefish, Montana. Anglin was also one of over a dozen defendants named in the Sines v. Kessler trial targeting “Unite the Right” organizers. In both cases, the plaintiffs sought a default judgment after Anglin refused to participate in legal proceedings.
On Sept. 28, 2022, a federal court in Montana announced its intent to hold Anglin in civil contempt for his failure to respond to Gersh’s post-judgment discovery requests. The court issued a bench warrant for Anglin’s arrest on Nov. 9, 2022, after he failed to comply with its order.
In his own words
“Hitler was aesthetically very cool. I don’t think even the Jews could argue with that.” – On Gab, May 23, 2022
“You have to be ready to die or go to prison, or you are worthless to the right-wing. This is more serious than rap music. You have to be willing to sacrifice everything. That was the core problem with the Alt-Right – these were people of low moral character, low levels of personal dignity, and basically no personal honor to speak of. So of course it was a feeding frenzy for the feds. Nick Fuentes is down to ride or die. All you have to do is listen to one of his rants, or look at how he’s responded to the pressure from the feds recently, and realize this n**** is gonna ride this muthafuka until the wheels come off.” – In a post on the Daily Stormer, Feb. 11, 2022
“What I have said is this: we need to immediately start pushing for secession. We don’t have any other actual choice, other than surrender.” – In a post on the Daily Stormer, Dec. 14, 2020
“My site is mainly designed to target children. … We have created a movement among the youth that we’re not even able [to] gauge the size of. … The cool kids are spreading [Daily Stormer content] to their friends, and they’re sharing these memes. … This is waking up and indoctrinating an entire – indoctrinating I guess is a negative word – but bringing an entire generation into this belief system.” – During an interview on Christopher Cantwell’s “Radical Agenda” podcast, Jan. 14, 2018
“A day is quickly coming when it is we who will be digging graves. … This is our war. This has always been our war, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Death to traitors, death the enemies of the white race! Hail victory!” – In an Anglin-penned speech given by Robert “Azzmador” Ray after “Unite the Right,” Aug. 12, 2017
“We are a generation of throwaways, which (((those who write history before it happens))) have slated to be the last generation of Heterosexual White Men. We are angry. There is a [sic] atavistic rage in us, deep in us, that is ready to boil over. There is a craving to return to an age of violence. We want a war.” – In a post on the Daily Stormer, Aug. 9, 2017, three days before “Unite the Right”
“The fact is, when you give women rights, they destroy absolutely everything around them, no matter what other variable is involved … Even if you become the ultimate alpha male, some stupid b---- will still ruin your life.” – In a post on the Daily Stormer, Mar. 31, 2017
“The day is coming when we’re going to tear down the hoax [Holocaust] memorial in Berlin and replace it with a statue of Hitler 1,000 feet tall.” – In a post on the Daily Stormer, April 8, 2016
“I ask myself this, in all things: WWHD? (What Would Hitler Do?). To be slightly more honest/specific, I ask myself what Hitler would do if he’d been born in 1984 in America and was dealing with this situation we are currently dealing with and also really liked 4chan and Anime. Hitler was, ultimately, the symbolic (and in some ways actual real life) culmination of traditional Europeanism.” – In an autobiographical post on the Daily Stormer, March 14, 2015
Background
Anglin grew up in Worthington, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus.
According to Anglin’s own account, he became a fascist after reading leftists including Noam Chomsky, exploring “all that Communist Jewish stuff,” and then studying religion, including Islam and Buddhism, before arriving at the work of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. In an autobiographical article entitled “Andrew Anglin Exposed,” Anglin expounded on his life’s path: “I started out with normal Alex Jones type conspiracy material, and then moved on to weirder conspiracy material, and then eventually decided Ted Kaczynski was right with regards to a coming apocalypse due to the rapidity of technological development.” (Jones is probably America’s most prolific conspiracy theorist. Kaczynski was the “Unabomber” who is now in prison.)
In 2017, however, journalists unearthed a far less flattering account of Anglin’s ideological journey. Former classmates at Linworth Alternative Program, an experimental high school, remembered Anglin as an outspoken liberal, vegan and atheist who condemned racism and homophobia, and sported dreadlocks and JNCO pants. At the same time, they said, he experimented with drugs, including psychedelic mushrooms, cocaine, and the cough syrup Robitussin. High school acquaintances told Luke O’Brien for The Atlantic that Anglin’s behavior took a dark turn and became “erratic and frightening” around the beginning of 10th grade. He demonstrated a propensity to violent tantrums, and in one alleged incident during a party in high school, Anglin repeatedly bashed his head on a sidewalk. Former classmates also recalled to reporters that Anglin’s violent tantrums left dents in the walls of his bedroom.
But as Anglin told The Atlantic, it was 4chan, a collection of image-based message boards, that was “more influential on me than anything.”
“I had always been into 4chan, as I am at heart a troll,” Anglin later wrote on the Daily Stormer. “This is about the time /new/ [a specific 4chan board] 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.”
Anglin decamped to Southeast Asia in the late 2000s. “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),” he said of that experience. “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 have no souls.” Despite such clear expressions of anti-Asian racism, Anglin’s travels abroad have led other white supremacists to accuse Anglin of “race mixing,” and others to conduct amateur investigations in an effort to prove that Anglin is not white. Perhaps these experiences have led him to align himself with other white power leaders who were subject to similar whispering campaigns within the white power movement. For instance, after members of the extremist-friendly messaging board 8chan outed Mike Peinovich, the founder of the white nationalist podcasting network The Right Stuff, as married to a Jewish woman, Anglin defended him.
In addition to Southeast Asia, Anglin has spent considerable amounts of time in Russia throughout the years. He voted in the 2016 via absentee ballot while in Krasnodar, a city in southern Russia near the Black Sea. One family member told The Atlantic he had moved there around 2015. Despite Russia’s harsh anti-extremism laws, which have been used to cripple Putin’s ultra-nationalist critics in particular, Anglin appeared to operate freely in the country.
Anglin returned to Ohio in 2012. He founded a short-lived website called Total Fascism, which was dedicated to long-form essays on fascism. Then, on July 4, 2013, Anglin launched the Daily Stormer. Anglin named his site after the infamous Nazi Julius Streicher’s antisemitic weekly newspaper, Der Stürmer. (The International Military Tribunal convicted Streicher of war crimes at Nuremberg and sentenced him to death. Allied forces hanged Streicher on Oct. 16, 1946.) He registered the original domain to his father, Greg.
From 2013 to August 2017, the Daily Stormer consistently ranked among the top 100,000 most-visited websites, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s review of data from domain popularity tracking software Alexa. (Alexa is a now-defunct tool that sought to estimate website visits through a special browser extension that some users installed on their computer.) Though the site’s popularity has plummeted since its high in 2017, Anglin has earned millions of dollars, largely in cryptocurrency. In 2021, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s publishing arm Hatewatch determined that Anglin traded at least $1,144,648 worth of Bitcoin across over 6,000 transactions. Another report from the Associated Press and PBS Frontline estimated that Anglin supporters sent him at least $4.8 million in Bitcoin since January 2017.
The rise of the Daily Stormer
The Daily Stormer couches its racist politics in memes and news commentary. Anglin uses “clickbait” headlines with titles like “All Intelligent People in History Disliked the Jews” and “Talking Monkey Harriet Tubman to Replace Indian-Killer Jackson on $20 Bill.” As Anglin explained in a podcast from 2016, his style of blogging – which combined daily news topics with lurid, meme-heavy racism – is a calculated appeal to a younger, internet-fluent generation of extremists that ultimately “desensitizes” readers to his ideas.
“Our target audience is white males between the ages of 10 and 30. I include children as young as ten because an element of this is that we want to look like superheroes,” Anglin explained in a blog post in 2017, prior to the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which Anglin promoted on his blog. Elsewhere around that time, Anglin claimed his blog “is mainly designed to target children.”
“Our goal has to be to give this [ideology] to teenagers and even before teenagers,” Anglin told racist podcaster and convicted felon Christopher Cantwell in early 2018.
Anglin’s blogging has drawn a dedicated and engaged fanbase that uses his site’s comment section as a rallying point for networking, organizing, and – most importantly – trolling.
Anglin’s fans, who refer to themselves as the “Stormer Troll Army” or “Stormers” for short, harass their perceived enemies online, often at Anglin’s behest. They coordinate their activities using the site’s forum, a bulletin board-style system that allowed users to comment on articles and in discussion threads. Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, a neo-Nazi hacker, collaborated with Anglin to build this infrastructure on the site. (Auernheimer involved himself with the Daily Stormer in 2014, when he left prison after his verdict on a number of hacking-related crimes was reversed.)
Throughout the Trump campaign, Anglin and his supporters used the Daily Stormer’s blog and its forum to coordinate harassment against women, Black people, Jews and Muslims, and to concoct and spread lies about those groups and individuals they targeted. Harassment and disinformation are political tactics for Anglin, aimed at awakening “White racial consciousness,” with the ultimate goal of sparking race war in America. Examples of these coordinated efforts include:
- In 2014, Anglin encouraged readers to send British Labour Party member Luciana Berger antisemitic messages on Twitter following the arrest of British neo-Nazi Garron Helm. Helm, a member of the British neo-Nazi group National Action, sent threatening messages to Berger on Twitter, which resulted convictions against him and his imprisonment. Anglin provided members of his “Troll Army” with guidance on how to set up anonymous email and Twitter accounts and protect their IP addresses.
- In September 2014, Anglin and other Daily Stormer contributors attacked Alex Jones, the extremist broadcaster Anglin once admired, for marrying a Jewish woman. Anglin lauded people for spamming Jones’ Twitter, YouTube channel and the Infowars comment section.
- In November 2015, Anglin launched “Operation: K---bart” or “#NoHydeNoPeace.” Daily Stormer fans flooded Breitbart’s comment section in response to the outlet’s decision to open a bureau in Israel, and its supposedly muted early coverage of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The campaign resulted in Disqus, a service that provides comment sections to websites, banning Anglin and the Daily Stormer.
- In mid-November 2015, Anglin tweeted out false eyewitness accounts under the hashtag #PrayForMizzou during ongoing racial justice protests at the University of Missouri. In these posts, Anglin implied that the Ku Klux Klan was present at the student protests and complicit with the university police department. This campaign saw Anglin banned from Twitter.
- In late November 2015, Anglin encouraged Daily Stormer readers to create fake White Student Union profiles on Facebook for “various universities.” “You don’t have to go there. Make one for Dartmouth, Princeton, etc. If they won’t let it on Facebook, put it on tumblr or wordpress or whatever. Get it up, then forward the links to local media,” Anglin wrote. Some outlets took the bait, publishing reports about racist student groups that did not exist.
Anglin’s fans also used social media sites including Twitter to promote racist hashtags – including #GasTheK----, #RaceWarNow, #OpenBordersForIsrael and #WhiteGenocide – in the hope that the sites promoted them as trending topics. Frequently they succeeded due to inadequate moderation from social media companies. As The Atlantic reported, bot networks appeared to have aided these efforts.
In March 2016, Auernheimer, then the Daily Stormer’s webmaster, dramatically escalated these trolling tactics by accessing thousands of printers, many of them at universities, and causing them to print out a flyer for Daily Stormer. Anglin expressed his ecstatic approval of Auernheimer’s actions to a Washington Times reporter, reportedly saying, “Of course I endorse it. Six million [a sarcastic reference to the death toll of the Holocaust] percent, I endorse this glorious action.”
Anglin’s fans found other ways to use their trolling skills in the real world. In late 2016, the Stormer Troll Army began organizing in small, localized groups across the United States, which they referred to as “book clubs.” “It’s a bit like Fight Club,” Anglin wrote in a blog post on the Daily Stormer’s website. In the article, he encouraged his audience to meet up in coffee shops, engage in firearms training, work out together, take part in political activism, meet women, and above all, “prepare for the coming race war.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center documented over 30 active “book clubs” in 2016 and 2017.
These stunts, combined with Anglin’s early and enthusiastic support of the Trump campaign, helped the Daily Stormer garner the attention of the mainstream media and other white supremacists. In December 2016, Anglin joined Richard Spencer and Mike Peinovich on a podcast in which they referred to themselves as “The First Triumvirate.” Anglin had declared “total war” on Spencer and his allies in 2014 amid one of his many feuds with other white power leaders, but in the euphoric aftermath of Trump’s victory they briefly put aside their acrimony.
Anglin continued to collaborate with other white supremacist leaders in the run-up to “Unite the Right.” In May 2017, Anglin published a blog post “declaring the summer of 2017 the ‘Summer of Hate.’” Anglin, Robert “Azzmador” Ray, a podcaster and coordinator for the Daily Stormer’s “book clubs,” and other site contributors encouraged “book club” members to travel to Charlottesville, Virginia, for the rally. In a July 30, 2017, blog post, Stormer contributor “Lee Rogers” invited readers and “book club” members alike to join “Daily Stormer staff” at the event.
In a handful of blog posts prior to the event, Anglin framed “Unite the Right” as a watershed moment for the alt-right – and a potentially violent one at that. In one blog post, cited in Integrity First for America’s lawsuit against “Unite the Right” organizers, Anglin wrote:
August 12, 2017 is going to be a shot heard around the world. … There will be before Charlottesville 2.0, and there will be after Charlottesville 2.0. There is no way to exaggerate the significance of this. We can make all the noise on the internet that we want, and this is great, but our real power will come only from numbers in the streets.
Thanks to the magnitude of this event, I truly believe more than I ever did before–that we will eventually win this struggle and secure the existence of our people and future for white children. It is our destiny. Next stop: Charlottesville, VA. Final stop: Auschwitz.
In a subsequent article, published on Aug. 9, 2017 – three days before Heather Heyer’s murder, Anglin wrote that “there is a craving to return to an age of violence” and that “we want a war.” Anglin and Ray also encouraged Daily Stormer readers to bring tiki torches for a Friday night torch march on the University of Virginia’s campus, as well as pepper spray, flag poles and shields.
Anglin did not attend “Unite the Right”, but he offered inflammatory live coverage of the event on the Daily Stormer’s website. On Aug. 12 at 11:22 a.m., Anglin posted a photo of “Unite the Right” rallygoers with the caption “WE HAVE AN ARMY. THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF A WAR.” Anglin also used his liveblog to provide specific instructions to attendees and, later, spread lies about Heather Heyer’s death. Shortly after James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a sea of protesters, murdering Heyer and injuring dozens of others, Anglin declared Fields’ attack to be an act of “self-defense.” Likewise, on the night of Aug. 12, mere hours after Heyer’s murder, Ray read a speech authored by Anglin to a crowd of white supremacist supporters declaring, “Death to traitors! Death to the enemies of the white race!”
The Daily Stormer’s donors took note. Anglin raised around $80,000 in cryptocurrency in August 2017, according to a 2019 HuffPost report. Most of the funds came from anonymous cryptocurrency donor who gave 14.88 Bitcoin to Anglin on Aug. 20, 2017. (Members of the white power movement place symbolic significance on the numbers 14 and 88.)
In the days after “Unite the Right,” Cloudflare and other web infrastructure withdrew their services from the Daily Stormer. Between 2017 and 2022, Anglin has blown through at least 15 domain names and a succession of hosting companies, going to extraordinary lengths to keep his toxic site online.
Anglin and Ray, the podcaster and white power organizer, were both named defendants in Sines v. Kessler. Neither man cooperated with the court’s demands, choosing instead to live as virtual fugitives. In September 2020, the plaintiffs in the case filed a motion to hold Ray in contempt of court and encouraged the court to request a warrant for his arrest. In March 2022, the plaintiffs asked for a default judgment against Anglin and the Daily Stormer’s holding company, Moonbase Holdings LLC, over his failure to participate in the case.
Targeting Tanya Gersh
In December 2016, Anglin targeted Tanya Gersh, a Whitefish, Montana, realtor who is Jewish. Gersh had agreed to help Sherry Spencer, mother of Richard Spencer, to sell a commercial building she owned in Whitefish. Sherry Spencer changed her mind, and then falsely accused Gersh of threatening her in a blog post. Soon after, Richard Spencer accused Gersh of extortion in a blog post and a video. On Dec. 16, a day after Spencer’s video was posted, Anglin published the first in a series of articles urging his followers to intimidate and harass the realtor, her family and associates.
The first of this 30-article series, which ran from that December into January 2017, was titled “Jews Targeting Richard Spencer’s Mother for Harassment and Extortion – TAKE ACTION!” In the piece, Anglin claimed “This is the Jews for you, people. They are a vicious, evil race of hate-filled psychopaths. When you do something they don’t like, they will use the power of the media to come down on you, assassinate your character. They will call you names and accuse you of all sorts of things. They will go after your money. If all of that fails, they will attack your mother.”
In subsequent articles, Anglin exhorted his followers continually to harass Gersh, members of the Whitefish Jewish community, and local business owners. Anglin’s articles even attacked the realtor’s 12-year-old son. Anglin published Photoshopped images of the realtor and her son on the entry gate to Auschwitz, as well as an image of her son being crushed by a Nazi tank. As a result of Anglin’s call to arms, the realtor and her family received over 700 threatening and intimidating antisemitic phone calls, voicemails, emails, text messages, social media posts and even harassing Christmas cards, causing the family to consider fleeing Whitefish for their safety and causing significant psychological harm to the realtor.
Anglin threatened an armed march on the city, going as far as obtaining a permit for Jan. 15, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, naming the march for King’s assassin. Anglin indicated that “We will be busing in skinheads from the Bay Area … I have already worked out most of the details with the leaders of the local groups. Several of our top supporters from Silicon Valley have offered to provide significant support for the march, but we may need to solicit donations to pay for gas/food for the skinheads.”
Despite Anglin’s threats, the march never materialized, and to date Anglin has not organized any significant real-life protest actions.
In April 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center and co-counsels in Montana filed suit against Anglin, accusing him of invading Gersh’s privacy and intentionally inflicting emotional distress, outlining how his campaign violated the Montana Anti-Intimidation Act, and seeking punitive and compensatory and punitive damages. On Aug. 8, 2019, a federal judge adopted a magistrate judge’s recommendation that Anglin should pay over $14 million in damages to Gersh. The court rejected Anglin’s defense that his harassment was protected by the First Amendment.
Since the trial, Anglin’s whereabouts have been unknown, and Gersh is still waiting to collect what Anglin owes her. On Sept. 28, 2022, a federal court adopted a magistrate judge’s recommendation to hold Anglin in civil contempt for his failure to respond to post-judgment discovery requests regarding information concerning his financial assets. The court granted Anglin 30 days to purge himself of contempt through complying with Gersh’s discovery requests. Anglin failed to comply with the court's request. On Nov. 9, 2022, the court issued a bench warrant for Anglin's arrest.
Daily Stormer’s ties to violence
Despite Anglin’s nominal ban on inciting violence in the comment section of Daily Stormer, at least one convicted mass murderer; one man accused of murder, a hate crime and terrorism; and a third man who is the suspect in a racist mass shooting have spent time among his audience.
In 2015, Hatewatch found comments on the Daily Stormer from a user using the screen name AryanBlood1488 that were a near-verbatim match for passages in a manifesto written by Dylann Storm Roof ahead of his shooting massacre of nine Black worshippers at the Charleston, S.C., Mother Emanuel A.M.E. church that June. (The numbers 14 and 88, often used together, are well-known neo-Nazi taglines.) Anglin responded with indifference, writing a post titled “If Dylan [sic] Roof was ‘AryanBlood1488,’ He Hadn’t Commented on the Daily Stormer in a While.” He added, “This isn’t particularly surprising, given that anyone reading about Black crime or other racial issues on the Internet would necessarily have come across this site.”
Anglin later merged coverage of Roof’s sentencing with the media hype around the abduction and torture, broadcast on Facebook Live, of a mentally challenged white man by four black youths in Chicago. Referring to Roof as “DyRo,” Anglin claimed in “As the Final Stage of DyRo’s Trial Begins, Chicago Torture-Kidnapping Highlights Why He Did It” that “…[Roof] did understand the concept of the media covering up black crime, however, so you have to wonder why he didn’t foresee that this act would not prove anything, but simply further the narrative of evil whites oppressing innocent brown people. Whatever the Case, DyRo is the Victim.”
In March 2017, another reader of the Daily Stormer, James Harris Jackson, murdered a 66-year-old black man, Timothy Caughman, with a 26-inch sword in Manhattan. During an interview from the Rikers Island jail complex, Jackson told the New York Daily News that he had spent time on the Daily Stormer interacting with “like-minded people.” In March 2017, Jackson was charged with murder as a hate crime and terrorism. In January 2019 he pleaded guilty to the murder in and was sentenced to life without parole that February.
Before Jackson was revealed as a frequenter of the Daily Stormer, Anglin published an article titled “After White-on-Black Murder in NYC, It’s Time to Rally Around White Supremacists,” where he wrote, “It’s time for society to rally around White Supremacists, and show that we don’t blame them for a single act of someone who wrongly used their beliefs for evil. … It’s really encouraging to see people banding together like this, showing White Supremacists that they don’t have to be ashamed, because they’ve done nothing wrong.” After Jackson’s connection to the Daily Stormer came to light, Anglin penned another article in which he stated: “I’m not going to go out of my way to condemn this guy. Why should I? Black people are killing us ‘randomly’ every single day–except it isn’t actually random, it is the exact same thing as here–these are attacks because of our race.” He followed the statement with dozens of photos of alleged victims of “black-on-white” crime, a longtime propaganda tool of white supremacists that seeks to illustrate an embattled white majority under siege by supposedly violent people of color.
A suspect in a May 14, 2022, mass shooting that killed 10 people and injured three others in Buffalo, New York, also referenced the Daily Stormer in a racist screed attributed to the alleged attacker. In the document, the suspect claimed that the Daily Stormer was one of three websites that helped shape his violent and conspiratorial worldview, specifically his belief that whites were “doomed” to be replaced by non-whites due to “low birth rates and high rates of immigration.”
In the aftermath of the shooting, Anglin sought to distance himself from the alleged Buffalo shooter, claiming in a blog post that the suspect couldn’t have been a Daily Stormer reader because he received the COVID-19 vaccine. (Anglin has published conspiracy theories and propaganda opposing restrictions meant to limit the spread of COVID-19, including vaccinations.) On May 16, 2022, Anglin announced on the extremist-friendly website Gab that the Daily Stormer had lost another domain because of the website’s inclusion in the alleged attacker’s manifesto.
Anglin’s promotion of ‘Stop the Steal’
Anglin supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. The Daily Stormer posted hundreds of articles in support of Trump, including articles attacking his Republican primary opponents and their families. When Trump polled in first place for the first time during the primary, Anglin wrote: “If the Donald gets the nomination, he will almost certainly beat Hillary, as White men such as you and I go out and vote for the first time in our lives for the one man who actually represents our interests.” Anglin and his followers referred to Trump as “Glorious Leader” or “Humble Philosopher” while praising his xenophobic and racist remarks on the campaign trail. Following Trump’s announcement that he would ban all Muslim immigration into the United States, Anglin wrote: “Get all of these monkeys the hell out of our country–now! Heil Donald Trump–THE ULTIMATE SAVIOR.” On key dates during the primary, there were typically new banners featuring Trump posted to Anglin’s site.
The day after Donald Trump won the presidential election, in a post simply titled, “We Won.” Anglin wrote: “Our Glorious Leader has ascended to God Emperor. Make no mistake about it: we did this. If it were not for us, it wouldn’t have been possible.” Anglin also encouraged his followers to harass Muslims and make them feel unwelcome.
Anglin’s enthusiasm for Trump seemed to wane at times during his presidency, but after he lost the 2020 election, Anglin promoted lies that challenged the result. On Nov. 4, 2020, after Trump addressed his supporters from the White House wrongly claiming that he won the election, Anglin told his readers to “stand by.” (This remark echoed Trump’s instruction to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during a campaign debate in which he was asked whether he would condemn the hate group.)
At that time, Anglin wrote, “Under no circumstances can we allow this country to be stolen from the people. … Get your people together now, and tell everyone you know to get their people together and get them ready to move,” he wrote in the Nov. 4, 2020, blog post.
The Associated Press and other major media outlets announced that they projected Joe Biden to be the next president of the United States on the morning of Nov. 7, 2020. Anglin challenged the results in a Nov. 7, blog post, calling the announcement “the biggest and most public scam in all of electoral history.” In the same piece, he proclaimed that “we are ready to die for our country, and for our President.”
Anglin continued to promote “Stop the Steal” events and lies about the 2020 election on his blog. Some notable examples include:
- On Nov. 7, Anglin posted an article with a link to the official StopTheSteal.us website, where Trump supporters posted information about anti-democracy “Stop the Steal” rallies. (The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab later tied the domain to a marketing firm run by Ali Alexander, one of the architects of the “Stop the Steal” movement.) “We have to stand up and we have to FIGHT!” he wrote.
- On Nov. 8, Anglin posted another blog promoting StopTheSteal.us and encouraging readers to start “occupying capital cities.”
- Throughout November and December, Anglin provided coverage of multiple “Stop the Steal” events throughout the country, including ones in Atlanta, Phoenix, and Washington, D.C. Anglin lauded white nationalist and “Stop the Steal” proponent Nick Fuentes’ ability to rally supporters to attend these events, at one point referring to him as a “king,” while occasionally disparaging Ali Alexander. In a Nov. 19, 2020, post, Anglin questioned Alexander’s fundraising practices, accusing his efforts to solicit donations on the StopTheSteal.us website of being a “money grab by a total grifter.”
- On Jan. 5, 2021, Anglin prompted readers to attend the Jan. 6 “Save America” rally in Washington, D.C. “It will be the biggest rally yet. No one knows what is going to happen, but it might be something wonderful,” Anglin wrote.
- On Jan. 7, 2021, the day after the rally-turned-insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Anglin referred to the rioters as “patriots” and “heroes,” and declared that Trump supporters need “to push for secession.”
Just weeks before the insurrection, French programmer Laurent Bachelier sent Anglin and over a dozen far-right figures, including Nick Fuentes, Bitcoin before killing himself through an intentional drug overdose. Yahoo News reported in January 2021 that federal investigators were looking into whether Bachelier’s donation was tied to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Anglin claimed to have abandoned Bitcoin in late 2020 in favor of Monero, a privacy-focused coin whose transactions are untraceable on the blockchain. He cited “spies from various ‘woke’ anti-freedom organizations” using their “unlimited resources to try to link these transactions to real names” in a Feb. 21, 2021, blog post.
The Southern Poverty Law Center reached out to Anglin over email and a private message on the extremist-friendly website Gab regarding Bachelier’s donation. He did not respond.
More recently, Anglin has indicated his support for other Republicans running on platforms of anti-immigrant populism. On June 8, 2022, Anglin wrote that Peter Thiel-backed Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters was “dropping the red pills we all wanted to hear.” The endorsement came in a post citing a media report that had Masters blaming gun violence on “gangs ... people in Chicago, St. Louis shooting each other. Very often, you know, Black people, frankly.” The story also reported that Masters had “repeatedly echoed the ‘great replacement theory.’”
In a subsequent post, Anglin responded to an incident where Masters apparently pushed a 73-year-old protester to the ground at a June campaign event in Green Valley, Arizona.
“Blake Masters is getting better and better,” Anglin wrote, adding, “I cannot give a more forceful endorsement, and I demand that anyone in Arizona (who is not some kind of known neo-Nazi or whatever) get in contact with his campaign and see what kind of help he needs.”
Masters publicly repudiated Anglin's support in early July 2022.