From the Los Angeles Times, June 24, 2015:
Andrew Anglin, 30, the publisher of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, wouldn’t say where he was.
He wouldn’t even say if he was in America.
Anglin has gotten a lot of media requests after the Southern Poverty Law Center said Dylann Roof, the man accused of killing nine black parishioners in Charleston, S.C., last week, was possibly a commenter on the Daily Stormer, Anglin said in a Skype audio interview Tuesday.
Anglin decided to respond to a Los Angeles Times interview request because — it’s a small world — he saw the reporter tweet Monday night about reading “The Forever War,” a classic and widely hailed 1974 science-fiction novel by Joe Haldeman about a human war against an alien race that lasts for centuries. Coincidentally, Anglin had also just read it.
“It seems like the mainstream media generally doesn’t want to talk about my site that much,” said Anglin, whose site uses racist terms, features a section called “Race War” and regularly trumpets stories about crimes with white victims and black suspects.
“Right now, a divide is happening. And there are only going to be two sides. Either you are with the SJWs [social justice warriors] or you are with the Fascists,” Anglin wrote in a May 29 post.
Sample headline: “Blacks Loved Slavery and Regretted Its End.”
Anglin created Daily Stormer — named after the notorious Nazi tabloid “Der Stürmer” — around the time that George Zimmerman, who shot and killed black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, was on trial for murder.
However, Anglin said the Zimmerman trial wasn’t the reason he created the site, whose readership has grown every quarter since 2013, according to website-traffic-tracking site SimilarWeb.
“I wanted something punchy and funny and enjoyable to read, and something that anybody can get something out of,” said Anglin, who previously ran a site called “Total Fascism,” which featured longer essays.
“A lot of people on the Internet prefer to write long essays, which a lot of people don’t read, which have a limited audience. … My ideology is very simple. I believe white people deserve their own country. … There’s not really anything that can happen that can affect my ideology because it’s so simple and straightforward.”
Anglin, who lists a mailing address in Worthington, Ohio, also doesn’t believe that violence is necessary to bring about a white nationalist revolution, but that the first step is to disseminate information — hence the Daily Stormer.
“There could be all types of different peaceful solutions if you were able to publicly discuss these issues and look for goals that make sense. Right now, you’re not even allowed to discuss this publicly on any level,” Anglin said. “The first thing that needs to be done with any of this is have a public conversation about this.”
Today, Anglin said, “information flows in a completely different way and we’re able to have a discussion where everybody can be included in it and the truth of the matter can be found.” (Anglin’s Twitter icon calls for Twitter to lift its ban on controversial conservative blogger Chuck Johnson.)
Anglin’s site, although unique in its combination of fascism with a millennial tone, does not differ greatly in ideology from many white-supremacist websites that traffic in negative stories about African Americans and Jews. The Southern Poverty Law Center does not keep count of such websites, but says the number of hate groups across the country has increased by 30% since 2000.
In 2012, the center counted 186 Ku Klux Klan groups, with 52 separate websites, in addition to hundreds of other groups described as white nationalist, neo-Nazi and skinhead groups, most with websites.
That doesn’t mean those sites are aligned with Anglin’s vitriolic ways, however. Far from it.
“Oh, you poor boy,” Jared Taylor, a “race realist” who publishes American Renaissance, said in an interview when a reporter mentioned reading the Daily Stormer. “They have an extremely harsh, dismissive and insulting tone toward blacks. I think that kind of rhetoric is extremely unhelpful.”
The blog “Alternative Right” in 2014 posted that “hatred, among the weak and the feeble, is often simply transmogrified fear, which is one of the odours emanating from The Daily Stormer and its audience, who feel attracted to Anglin’s schtick in the same way that poor, downtrodden Whites are attracted to monster trucks and professional wrestling.”
“It is hard not to conclude that Anglin is a paid shill and agent provocateur, whose purpose is simply to infest and discredit White nationalism,” the post concluded.
Other hardliners have previously raised questions whether Anglin was mixed-race — a big no-no among white supremacists, as you may have guessed. That led Anglin to publish photos of his family to demonstrate his racial heritage.
