The loosely knit group was shocked to the core Saturday night when one of its most influential leaders — a man known to his online followers as “Mike Enoch,” a virulent racist and anti-Semite — was revealed to be a New York website developer named Mike Peinovich, who has said that his wife is Jewish. Although the motivations behind Peinovich’s apparent deception are not clear, his operation presumably generated some modest cashflow from true believers in the alt-right crusade.
As one chagrined poster on Enoch’s website put it, “It’s pretty bad for your WN [white nationalist], fourth reich, neo-nazi, facist [sic] movement when one of the head guys happens to be married to a Jew.”
Enoch/Peinovich is the creator of the popular neo-Nazi website The Right Stuff (TRS). For several years, he has also co-hosted a podcast called “The Daily Shoah,” a deliberately offensive pun on the Hebrew term for the Holocaust.
In his online persona, Peinovich routinely cracked jokes about killing Jewish people and forcibly deporting Muslims and people of African descent. The weekly program had roughly 100,000 regular listeners, many of whom regularly sent in financial donations by PayPal or bought merchandise from the site.
Peinovich’s wife appears to have been aware of the entire situation. She even appeared on “The Daily Shoah” several times, including a special holiday-season segment in 2015 where she read a neo-Nazi parody of “The Night Before Christmas.” Introducing the clip, which can be found online, Peinovich said his wife was “very proud of it.”
Peinovich’s doxxing — a term referring to revealing someone’s private information online — was largely the work of anonymous left-wing users on the Medium blog site, in a post that has since been deleted. Word spread like wildfire throughout the alt-right’s many web forums and message boards over the weekend, as TRS fans and detractors battled over whether the information was legitimate or not.
That initial report had an air of credibility, since the identities of Peinovich’s fellow “death panelists” on the podcast had been revealed earlier in the week. That doxxing was done by members of a rival website called 8chan, who attacked TRS for supporting the principle that non-Jewish white nationalists had common interests with extreme right-wing Israelis, which is anathema to hardcore neo-Nazis and anti-Semites.
First the 8channers unmasked one of Peinovich’s colleagues, a University of Nebraska philosophy student who called himself “Ghoul,” and whose mother was revealed to be married to another woman. After that, 8channers and anti-fascist activists temporarily worked together to dox the rest of the “Daily Shoah” crew. “Bulbasaur” was exposed as a corrections officer living in Nashville and “Seventh Son” was revealed as a guitarist in an obscure Goth-rock band.
The big prize for the doxxers, however, was Peinovich. As the creator of TRS, he was (at least until this weekend) regarded as one of the three most influential figures in the alt-right, alongside Daily Stormer creator Andrew Anglin and Richard Spencer, the co-creator of the “alt-right” label.
Though TRS has not received as much coverage in the mainstream press, it originated or popularized many alt-right pranks and memes, including the practice of identifying Jewish people or those suspected of being Jewish with (((triple sets of parentheses,))) bogus White Student Union schemes at educational institutions, and racist or anti-Semitic song parodies. Peinovich was also reportedly among the people who gave the Nazi salute at the infamous National Policy Institute conference after Trump’s election in November.
Mike Enoch’s downfall was set in motion in December when a former alt-right vlogger named Mike Cernovich hinted to his viewers that one of his rivals “is morbidly obese and is married to a Jewish woman.” He declined to say whom he meant, but that salacious rumor set the cyber-sleuths to their task.
