STORMFRONTbak
---
all phobes?
MERRI OK
Andrew Anglin found humor in the livestreamed video of a man in New Zealand storming into the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, then shooting and killing 49 people.
see anglin
https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map
BAK 12 25
==
founder self-harm eg hit in face npr 11/14/17
---
---
AN 12 25
Far-right extremists have been organizing online since before the internet – and AI is their next frontier
How can society police the global spread of online far-right extremism while still protecting free speech? That’s a question policymakers and watchdog organizations confronted as early as the 1980s and ’90s – and it hasn’t gone away.
Decades before artificial intelligence, Telegram and white nationalist Nick Fuentes’ livestreams, far-right extremists embraced the early days of home computing and the internet. These new technologies offered them a bastion of free speech and a global platform. They could share propaganda, spew hatred, incite violence and gain international followers like never before.
Before the digital era, far-right extremists radicalized each other primarily using print propaganda. They wrote their own newsletters and reprinted far-right tracts such as Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and American neo-Nazi William Pierce’s “The Turner Diaries,” a dystopian work of fiction describing a race war. Then, they mailed this propaganda to supporters at home and abroad.
I’m a historian who studies neo-Nazis and far-right extremism. As my research shows, most of the neo-Nazi propaganda confiscated in Germany from the 1970s through the 1990s came from the United States. American neo-Nazis exploited their free speech under the First Amendment to bypass German censorship laws. German neo-Nazis then picked up this print propaganda and distributed it throughout the country.
This strategy wasn’t foolproof, however. Print propaganda could get lost in the mail or be confiscated, especially when crossing into Germany. Producing and shipping it was also expensive and time-consuming, and far-right organizations were chronically understaffed and strapped for cash.
Going digital
Computers, which entered the mass market in 1977, promised to help resolve these problems. In 1981, Matt Koehl, head of the National Socialist White People’s Party in the United States, solicited donations to “Help the Party Enter The Computer Age.” The American neo-Nazi Harold Covington begged for a printer, scanner and “serious PC” that could run WordPerfect word processing software. “Our multifarious enemies already possess this technology,” he noted, referring to Jews and government officials.
Soon, far-right extremists figured out how to connect their computers to one another. They did so by using online bulletin board systems, or BBSes, a precursor to the internet. A BBS was hosted on a personal computer, and other computers could dial in to the BBS using a modem and a terminal software program, allowing users to exchange messages, documents and software.
With BBSes, anyone interested in accessing far-right propaganda could simply turn on their computer and dial in to an organization’s advertised phone number. Once connected, they could read the organization’s public posts, exchange messages and upload and download files.
The first far-right bulletin board system, the Aryan Nations Liberty Net, was established in 1984 by Louis Beam, a high-ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations. Beam explained: “Imagine, if you can, a single computer to which all leaders and strategists of the patriotic movement are connected. Imagine further that any patriot in the country is able to tap into this computer at will in order to reap the benefit of all accumulative knowledge and wisdom of the leaders. ‘Someday,’ you may say? How about today?”
Then came violent neo-Nazi computer games. Neo-Nazis in the United States and elsewhere could upload and download these games via bulletin board systems, copy them onto disks and distribute them widely, especially to schoolchildren.
In the German computer game KZ Manager, players role-played as a commandant in a Nazi concentration camp that murdered Jews, Sinti and Roma, and Turkish immigrants. An early 1990s poll revealed that 39% of Austrian high schoolers knew of such games and 22% had seen them.
Arrival of the web
By the mid-1990s, with the introduction of the more user-friendly World Wide Web, bulletin boards fell out of favor. The first major racial hate website on the internet, Stormfront, was founded in 1995 by the American white supremacist Don Black. The civil rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center found that almost 100 murders were linked to Stormfront.
By 2000, the German government had discovered, and banned, over 300 German websites with right-wing content – a tenfold increase within just four years.
In response, American white supremacists again exploited their free speech rights to bypass German censorship bans. They gave international far-right extremists the opportunity to host their websites safely and anonymously on unregulated American servers – a strategy that continues today.
Up next: AI
The next frontier for far-right extremists is AI. They are using AI tools to create targeted propaganda, manipulate images, audio and videos, and evade detection. The far-right social network Gab created a Hitler chatbot that users can talk to.
AI chatbots are also adopting the far-right views of social media users. Grok, the chatbot on Elon Musk’s X, recently called itself “MechaHitler,” spewed antisemitic hate speech and denied the Holocaust.
Countering extremism
Combating online hate is a global imperative. It requires comprehensive international cooperation among governments, nongovernmental organizations, watchdog organizations, communities and tech corporations.
Far-right extremists have long pioneered innovative ways to exploit technological progress and free speech. Efforts to counter this radicalization are challenged to stay one step ahead of the far right’s technological advances.
Michelle Lynn Kahn, Associate Professor of History, University of Richmond
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
===
---
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/neo-nazi-andrew-anglin-claims-religious-mandate-for-men-to-force-women-to-submit/
kyle m no pix vid
during a recent podcast, neo-Nazi and admitted “rape promoter” Andrew Anglin declared that Christian men must dominate women and force them to submit because that is the only way that women can be genuinely happy.
Anglin, who was booted off of Twitter in 2013 only to be reinstated late last year, is the publisher of “The Daily Stormer,” a neo-Nazi website named after a Nazi propaganda newspaper. He maintains close ties to white nationalist Nick Fuentes and others within Fuentes’ far-right America First movement, including multiple streamers on Fuentes’ “anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-Black, antisemitic” Cozy.TV platform. Those streamers are fully aware of Anglin’s toxicity and thus make halfhearted attempts to disguise his identity behind the less-than-clever pseudonym “Wang Lin” whenever he appears on their programs.
It is via his “Wang Lin” persona that Anglin recently teamed up Cozy.TV streamer “Paul Town,” whose real name is reportedly Evan Zenker.
On a recent episode of their “Wangtown” podcast, Anglin declared that the founders of Christianity and early church leaders were basically “incels” who taught that the only way for women to be happy is for them to be forcibly subjugated by men. While the term “incel” is defined as an involuntary celibate individual, it has become associated with a misogynist movement of men who blame women for their problems and believe women owe them sex. Fuentes and others on the far-right have adopted the term to justify their contempt for women.
“Anyone who tries to say that Christianity supports women and women’s dominance and that Christianity says women are not obsessed with sex and don’t base their entire existence around sex, go read the letters of Paul, go read any of the church fathers,” Anglin said. “It sounds like an incel forum if you read what the first Christians were writing.”
Anglin complained that “the basic problem with all of Western civilization was that the church sold out the people” by encouraging women to be educated, which he claimed only “fuels women’s egos, which is not even healthy for women.”
“When women are liberated, they have higher expectations,” Anglin argued. “So, because their expectations are not met, they become unhappy because they have new expectations from feminism. And it’s like, well, Occam’s Razor: the most obvious thing is that women don’t actually get any happiness from this liberation. What gives women happiness is marriage and being submissive to a man, which obviously, they don’t do that voluntarily. You’re not going to have a woman voluntarily submit to you; you have to force her. That’s the reality. You have to dominate the woman, and even if you do think you have dominance, she’s gonna keep pushing you. I mean, there’s women who get divorced in their 60s and 70s. So it’s a lifelong thing to try and wrangle this bitch like a wild horse, but a horse [eventually] breaks.”
Tags: Andrew Anglin Evan Zenker misogyny Women
---
---
7 22?
blake Masters, a Republican candidate in Arizona's U.S. Senate race, rejected the endorsement Friday of Andrew Anglin, the creator of neo-Nazi blog site Daily Stormer.
---
---
25 million $
https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/charlottesville-verdict/
Returning a verdict against dozens of white supremacist leaders and organizations who organized Unite the Right, a Virginia jury has awarded millions in damages to nine plaintiffs who were injured in the violence during the chaotic rally that ended with a car attack by James Fields.
The defendants were found liable in four of six counts, including a Virginia state conspiracy claim that they subjected the plaintiffs to racial, religious or ethnic harassment or violence. But the mixed-race jury deadlocked on a major claim in the civil case against the organizers, whether they engaged in a conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence.
The plaintiffs presented evidence over the course of the four-week trial showing that the defendants meticulously planned the Unite the Right rally on the digital chat platform Discord. While the ostensible reason for the rally was to support two Confederate monuments slated for removal in Charlottesville, the organizers' private communications revealed that their true inspiration was a violent rally four months earlierin Berkeley, Calif. and that they hoped to bait left-wing opponents into the streets, and as primary organizer Jason Kessler put it, "fight this shit out."
The evidence showed that Kessler quickly reached out to Matthew Heimbach, an avowed fascist and antisemite who led the Traditionalist Worker Party and had already organized a coalition of "hard right" white supremacist groups that included League of the South, the National Socialist Movement and Vanguard America. All the organizations sent members to Charlottesville, and the leader of Vanguard America wound up providing a shield to Fields before he drove his car into counter-protesters.
After securing a commitment from Spencer — then the most famous figure in the alt-right movement that emerged on the coattails of Donald Trump's 2016 election — for the headlining speaker slot, Kessler wrote in a phone text: "We are raising an army, my liege, for free speech but the cracking of skulls, if it comes to it."
The plaintiffs also presented evidence that Elliot Kline, both a lieutenant to Spencer and a leader of Identity Evropa, organized Unite the Right alongside Kessler. Kline's former girlfriend, Samantha Froelich, testified that he was obsessed with exterminating Jews, saying he would "gas the kikes forever." Robert "Azzmador" Ray, a contributing writer for the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, mentioned in a Discord chat in the month prior to Unite the Right that had "just got done with an hourlong chat with some of the organizers and I feel better about the thing. The plan is the same: Gas the kikes." After macing counter-protesters at the Aug. 11 torch march, Ray reported to his fellow neo-Nazis: "I personally literally gassed half a dozen kikes."
Counsel for the defendants argued that Fields car attack was not reasonably foreseeable or intended by the defendants, who anticipated only pushing and shoving, or, at most, fist fights, but the jury evidently didn't buy it. The defendants all testified that they did not know Fields and had not seen him prior to his appearance at the Aug. 12, 2017 rally.
Plaintiff Natalie Romero was injured in Fields' car attack, which left her with a fractured skull, a cleft lip, persistent headaches and trouble maintaining balance. Romero and co-plaintiff Devin Willis were among a small group of University of Virginia students who linked arms around a statue of Thomas Jefferson during a torch march in which white nationalists made monkey noises at them and threw lit torches at their feet while macing, punching and kicking others. All the plaintiffs, who include a pastor, a landscaper, a paralegal who recently passed the bar exam, testified that they have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of physical injuries or emotional distress.
As she and a dozen or so counter-protesters linked arms around statue, Romero described the sound of the approaching torch marchers as "almost like thunder, like the earth was growling." She recalled that they chanted "Blood and soil" and "White power."
"There's another that I hate repeating," Romero testified. "I like, hear it in my nightmares. If my phone buzzes, I hear the same cadence, the 'You will not replace us.' That one is just so terrifying to hear the whole time."
---
---
https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/white-nationalists/
AH
Historically, one of the ways in which opponents of White supremacists, neo-Nazis and other domestic terrorists have attacked them was by going after them monetarily. But extremists, according to the Associated Press and PBS' "Frontline," are finding a way around that: cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Monero.
In an article that is part of an AP/"Frontline" collaboration, reporters Erika Kinetz and Lori Hinnant explain, "Radical right provocateurs are raising significant amounts of money from around the world through cryptocurrencies. Banned by traditional financial institutions, they have taken refuge in digital currencies — which they are using in ever-more-secretive ways to avoid the oversight of banks, regulators and courts, finds an AP analysis of legal documents, Telegram channels and blockchain data from Chainalysis, a cryptocurrency analytics firm."
Kinetz and Hinnant point to the Daily Stormer, founded by White supremacist/neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin in 2013, as an example of an extremist website that has profited from cryptocurrencies in a major way.
"The Daily Stormer website advocates for the purity of the White race, posts hate-filled, conspiratorial screeds against Blacks, Jews and women and has helped inspire at least three racially motivated murders," Kinetz and Hinnant note. "It has also made its founder, Andrew Anglin, a millionaire. Anglin has tapped a worldwide network of supporters to take in at least 112 Bitcoin since January 2017 — worth $4.8 million at today's exchange rate — according to data shared with The Associated Press. He's likely raised even more."
The reporters add that when Anglin was "cut off by credit card processors and banned by PayPal," Bitcoin became "his main source of funding." When Anglin's "Retard's Guide to Using Bitcoin" was published in April 2020, he said that he had been funding the Daily Stormer through Bitcoin exclusively for four years. But Anglin, according to Kinetz and Hinnant, abandoned Bitcoin in favor of another cryptocurrency, Monero, because "the transactions are all hidden."
According to Beth Littrell, an attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center, cryptocurrencies are making it harder to sue violent extremists than it was in the past.
Littrell told "Frontline" and the AP, "We were able to sue the Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist organization, in essence out of existence…. The law is evolving but lagging behind the harm."
---
---
2009 climategate:
Mann quickly became a central target for climate change deniers. Right-wing groups and Republican politicians called for the federal government to revoke his research funding and for his university to investigate him. He received an envelope in the mail containing white powder; it turned out to be cornstarch. “You and your colleagues who have promoted this scandal ought to be shot, quartered, and fed to the pigs along with your whole damn families,” declared one emailer. Along with other climate experts, Mann was featured in an anti-Semitic poston the white supremacist website Stormfront—an ominous foreshadowing of 2016.
“I could easily brush off many of the attacks,” Mann would later write in his book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, which discusses the right’s assault on his research. “But to the extent that the industry-funded disinformation machine was taking direct aim not just at me—my livelihood, my reputation, my safety—but even my family, I was becoming incensed.”
==
---
https://twitter.com/olgaNYC1211/status/1248436809870249989/photo/1
ton-that hack malware phish ggl pAx dickinson bix insider, weeve stormer
==
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/clearview-ai-facial-recognition-alt-right_n_5e7d028bc5b6cb08a92a5c48
long many lnx pix docs?
Far-Right Helped Create The World’s Most Powerful Facial Recognition Technology
Clearview AI, which has alarmed privacy experts, hired several far-right employees, a HuffPost investigation found.
By Luke O’Brien
04/07/2020
Advanced facial recognition technology poses a mortal threat to privacy. It could grant the government, corporations and even average citizens the ability to capture a photo of anybody and, with a few keystrokes, uncover all kinds of personal details. So when The New York Times published an exposé about a shadowy facial recognition firm called Clearview AI in January, it seemed like the worst nightmare of privacy advocates had arrived.
Clearview is the most powerful form of facial recognition technology ever created, according to the Times.With more than 3 billion photos scraped surreptitiously from social media profiles and websites, its image database is almost seven times the size of the FBI’s. Its mobile app can match names to faces with a tap of a touchscreen. The technology is already being integrated into augmented reality glasses so people can identify almost anyone they look at.
Clearview has contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, BuzzFeed reported earlier this year, and FBI agents, members of Customs and Border Protection, and hundreds of police officers at departments nationwide are among its users.
With the coronavirus pandemic increasingly throwing the country into chaos and President Donald Trump moving to expand domestic surveillance powers ? in theory, to better map disease spread ? Clearview has sought deeper inroads into government infrastructure and is now in discussions with state agencies to use its technology to track infected people, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Even if you’ve never heard of Clearview, you likely have an online presence — maybe a friend or a relative has posted a photo of you to Facebook — which means you’re probably in its database. Clearview’s CEO and co-founder, Cam-Hoan Ton-That, and his associates chose to mass-violate social media policies against scraping accounts to build an image warehouse of unprecedented size, as several outlets have noted recently.
What hasn’t been reported, however, is even scarier: Exclusive documents obtained by HuffPost reveal that Ton-That, as well as several people who have done work for the company, have deep, longstanding ties to far-right extremists. Some members of this alt-right cabal went on to work for Ton-That.
Clearview stated that it had immediately parted ways with some of these people when HuffPost reached out for comment for this story, but the pervasive links between the company and the alt-right can’t be simply dismissed as a few bad apples.
Big Brother, it turned out, was wearing a MAGA cap.
A Mysterious Hacker
Little is known about Ton-That, a 31-year-old Australian hacker who moved to San Francisco in 2007. He made a name for himself two years later by unleashing a computer worm that phished the login credentials of Gmail users. Ton-That showed no remorse after journalists traced the worm to him— he simply set up another phishing site.
By 2015, he had joined forces with far-right subversives working to install Trump as president. They included Mike Cernovich, a Trump-affiliated propagandist who spearheaded the near-deadly Pizzagate disinformation campaign; Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, a neo-Nazi hacker and the webmaster for The Daily Stormer; and Pax Dickinson, the racist former chief technology officer of Business Insider who went on to march with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In this far-right clique, two of Ton-That’s associates loomed larger than most thanks to their close connection to billionaire Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member and Trump adviser: Jeff Giesea, a Thiel protégé and secret funder of alt-right causes, and Charles “Chuck” Johnson, a former Breitbart writer and far-right extremist who reportedly coordinated lawfare against media organizations with Thiel. And according to new documents obtained by HuffPost, Johnson appears to have received funding from Thiel for a startup that the Southern Poverty Law Center would label a “white nationalist hate group.” (Johnson has filed suit against HuffPost in Texas over a January 2019 article about his visits to members of Congress to discuss “DNA sequencing.”)
People involved with Clearview appear to have gone to great lengths to conceal their links to the company and each other. Johnson, for instance, does not appear on any of the incorporation documents and has left little public trace of his association with Ton-That beyond a Facebook post. But multiple far-right sources who know Johnson told HuffPost that he and Ton-That were in close contact at least as early as 2016, and that Johnson told them he was working with Ton-That on facial recognition.
Johnson told one source late that year that he viewed the technology as a way to potentially “identify every illegal alien in the country.” In early 2017, Johnson introduced Ton-That to another source, saying he was a gifted coder he’d hired to build the facial recognition tool. Around the same time, Johnson stated on Facebook that he was “building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads.”
Video and private messages obtained by HuffPost confirm that Johnson and Ton-That were collaborating on far-right schemes in 2016; by early 2017 at the latest, they were in contact about scraping social media platforms for the facial recognition business. At least two people who worked for Johnson took jobs with and worked for Clearview until late March, when the company claims to have severed ties with them after HuffPost reached out with questions.
Thiel himself has an obvious interest in mass surveillance: Palantir, his data-mining behemoth, aggregates enormous amounts of personal information about immigrants and undocumented workers, and it provides the analytical tools for ICE raids. In 2017, Thiel became one of Clearview’s earliest investors. He did not respond to questions sent to him and his spokesperson.
Like other tech products scaled in dodgy ways, Clearview may have grown too big to rein in. Every time police use Clearview, they upload images of people they’re trying to identify ? even child sex abuse victims ? to Ton-That’s unregulated and ever-expanding database, where they are stored indefinitely.
No federal laws exist to govern the use of facial recognition. “The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University, told the Times.
Clearview also appears to spy on law enforcement searches. After a Times reporter had police officers run her photo through the app, the officers received calls from Clearview representatives asking if they were speaking to a journalist. The potential for abuse is vast.
“The fear is that the kind of authoritarian control this [tool] will grant will wind up in the hands of the wrong people,” said Liz O’Sullivan, the technology director at the nonprofit Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.
Like, for instance, a Clearview contractor who is fond of disseminating Third Reich propaganda about Jews. The same extremist, with whom Ton-That now claims to have parted ways, was instrumental in helping sow disinformation from Kremlin operatives in 2016 to assist the Trump campaign. A Clearview “investigator” who appeared to work for the company until late March is part of a D.C.-based white nationalist crew that gathers in secret.
Yet another Clearview employee who left the company after an inquiry from HuffPost is a Croatian-born extremist who wrote in 2015 that he “wholeheartedly endorse[s] racism, racialism, ethnocentrism, Islamophobia, Eurocentrism and anti-Semitism.” Writing under a pseudonym on various blogs, he had embraced the possibility of balkanizing America, which could allow authoritarian states such as Russia or China to fill the power vacuum.
“For a stable and sustainable global order to exist,” he wrote, “the United States Government as we know it must be destroyed.”
A White National Convention
In July 2016, far-right extremists descended on Cleveland for the Republican National Convention. The alt-right’s intellectual figurehead, Richard Spencer, was there, as was Cernovich. So was Johnson, who at the time was running GotNews, a site that employed white nationalists to crank out race-baiting content for Trump supporters. Peter Brimelow, the publisher of the white nationalist VDARE, showed up. British political saboteur Milo Yiannopolous attended a “twinks for Trump” party that featured anti-Muslim speakers such as Pamela Geller and Geert Wilders.
One night, Spencer attended a dinner with Johnson and other members of the far-right at an upscale Italian restaurant. He found himself sitting at a table with Ton-That, a striking figure with long black hair. The hacker arrived at the dinner with Johnson after they’d caused a minor fracas. They’d harassed Michelle Fields, a former Breitbart reporter who’d had her arm roughly grabbed at a Trump rally a few months earlier by the candidate’s then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. At the RNC, Johnson chased after Fields in the street until her fiancé shoved him away. The incident was captured in a video uploaded to Johnson’s GotNews YouTube channel. In the background, you can see Ton-That with Johnson, laughing as Fields scrambles away. (Fields worked for HuffPost at the time.) Over dinner that night, the hacker was more subdued.
“He was smart,” Spencer told HuffPost of Ton-That. “He was into this esoteric reactionary sphere stuff. I remember he was talking about celibacy and the priestly order being celibate and thinking for the group and not having mundane concerns.He was into quasi-Catholic neo-trad[itional] reactionary type stuff.”
The neoreactionary movement, also known as “NRx” or “Dark Enlightenment,” is a geeky subset of the racist, misogynistic far-right that has festered in Silicon Valley’s libertarian circles for over a decade, especially within the cryptocurrency community. Its members revere Thiel, microdose LSD and gussy up totalitarian ideas with a pseudo-intellectualism that creates a moral pretext for them to undermine ? “engineer,” they might say ? democracy. With tech skills and access to vast wealth, they have an influence that has eluded the bookish young men in Spencer’s orbit. Ton-That had been affiliated with this neoreactionary confederacy since before the 2016 RNC.
The movement’s high priest, Curtis Yarvin, is a programmer who goes by “Mencius Moldbug” and has a cryptocurrency startup funded by Thiel. Yarvin, who seemingly endorses slavery and has written approvingly of apartheid, has argued the U.S. would be better off if ruled by a CEO-king. To make this happen, he advocates for a soft coup. Among neoreactionaries, Trump is often referred to as the “God-Emperor” who will restore order to an immigrant-flooded nation under the thumb of a progressive media-academic complex ? “global Jewry,” in neo-Nazi-speak.
Giesea, whose ties to Thiel go back decades, organized the dinner in Cleveland. As a student, he edited Thiel’s libertarian newspaper, The Stanford Review. He later worked for Thiel’s first hedge fund, and then for Koch Industries’ public affairs office. Thiel put up seed money when Giesea started his own company.
Ahead of the 2016 election, Giesea worked closely with Cernovich to help organize a social media insurgency that could direct the far-right’s energy toward a singular purpose: getting Trump elected. Their network amplified extremists, besmirched opponents and disseminated Kremlin-boosted disinformation.
Jeff Giesea talks politics in a Periscope video.]
In a “How to Fund the Alt-Right” guide posted online in 2016 under an alias Giesea used, donors were encouraged to give money to white nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations. (“Not me at all,” Giesea said. “I don’t know who did that.”) The guide stressed the importance of anonymity and recommended donors use Bitcoin and PayPal, the online money transfer company founded by Thiel.
Spencer said Giesea donated $5,000 ? the maximum amount that didn’t require donor disclosure to the IRS ? to his white nationalist organization, the National Policy Institute, in 2016. (“No comment,” Giesea said.) Spencer told HuffPost that he later came to feel as if Giesea was trying to use the energy of the alt-right for political subversion and profit.
Auernheimer, the neo-Nazi hacker, described Giesea in a private Discord chat as a “major investor providing help to racists … a hugely connected dude … with lots of business interests who was supporting [T]rump stuff.” (“That’s not true,” Giesea said.)
At Giesea’s dinner in Cleveland, conversation turned, inevitably, to building the ethnostate, according to Katie McHugh, a former Breitbart editor who attended the event and has since renounced far-right extremism. A group of Hispanic waiters in earshot looked on warily. Someone at the table apologized to them. The waiters laughed nervously. Then the extremists, Ton-That among them, set out into the night to put their plans into motion.
Chuck Johnson’s Online Hatefest
If you were a hip far-right elitist in 2016, the online place to be was a Slack channel Johnson set up for WeSearchr, a now-shuttered crowdfunding platform he had launched. In private messages between Johnson and McHugh from 2015, Johnson described a meeting with Thiel that year to pitch his crowdfunding idea.
“Thiel gave me all the money I need,” Johnson said. “[W]rote me a check on the spot.”
Thiel declined to comment.
WeSearchr raised bounties for alt-right causes and would soon earn the designation of “white nationalist hate group” from the SPLC.
Johnson had a well-deserved reputation as a troll, but he was also a central node in a web of extremists. And he had many enemies ? the social media companies that took away his platforms, the news outlets that exposed him, the liberal society that he was convinced had allowed minorities to get into Harvard at his expense.
“When I met Chuck, I wondered why we weren’t weaponizing people like him,” Giesea told BuzzFeed.
Giesea belonged to Johnson’s WeSearchr Slack. So did Cernovich. And so did Ton-That.
Altogether, there were about 400 people in the channel, according to McHugh, who was a member and provided HuffPost with several dozen messages from the channel. The group was a who’s who of racist political saboteurs and moneyed terraformers of society, with a sprinkling of alt-right celebrities like George Zimmerman, who joined the channel in June 2016 and was auctioning off the weapon he used to kill Trayvon Martin. Johnson, who had deemed Zimmerman a “great man,” published a GotNews post to drive up the price of “the mighty gun that slain the dindu.”
Far-right politics brought George Zimmerman and Chuck Johnson together, as illustrated by this social media post of the two discovered by Little Green Footballs, a blog that has been tracking Johnson for years.]
Ton-That shared his far-right views in the WeSearchr Slack, as well as online more broadly. He has since deleted his social media accounts, but archives of his Twitter exchanges from 2015 and 2016 show him spreading anti-liberal talking points and Islamophobia, as well as amplifying figures like Yiannopolous.
He was clearly reading/listening to pretty trashy conservative media, and/or pretty trashy conservative people.
Ben Wheeler, a coder in New York, about Clearview co-founder Cam-Hoan Ton-That
Ben Wheeler, a coder in New York who met Ton-That in 2015 through programmer pals, called out the Australian for tweeting far-right conspiracies in the run-up to the 2016 election.
“He had some very inaccurate takes on [Hillary] Clinton, he was clearly reading and talking to people in the Breitbart vein,” Wheeler wrote in a message to HuffPost. “[A]s an example of her corruption, he pointed to the ways he said the Clintons used Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to embezzle money. I looked that up and it was one of those almost certainly false claims from one untrustworthy source. He was clearly reading/listening to pretty trashy conservative media, and/or pretty trashy conservative people.”
One of these people was likely Andrew Auernheimer, the webmaster for The Daily Stormer, the most popular neo-Nazi website. Another member of the WeSearchr Slack channel and a close collaborator with Johnson, Auernheimer devoted ample time to boosting both Johnson’s crowdfunding platform and his extremist friends.
Aurenheimer told HuffPost that he had “never heard of” Ton-That.But in 2015, he appeared to interact publicly with him on Twitter to bemoan the number of liberals in academia, a conversation HuffPost was able to piece together by looking at replies to the two alt-right members that remain online.
Auernheimer spoke often of his desire to slaughter Jewish children, start a race war and destroy the United States. He landed in federal prison in 2013 on identity fraud and hacking charges. After his conviction was vacated on a jurisdictional technicality, he reentered society with a giant swastika on his chest. He declared himself a neo-Nazi on The Daily Stormer and called for government agents and their families to be assassinated. He left the country and vowed revenge on America. “I plan on coming back with an army, be it human or automaton,” he wrote. He now claims to be based in Transnistria, a breakaway region of Moldova aligned with Moscow and beyond the reach of U.S. extradition treaties.
Andrew “weev” Auernheimer publicly declared himself a neo-Nazi in 2014 in a post on The Daily Stormer, which included this picture.]
Like Ton-That, Auernheimer also had an interest in biometrics. Around the time of the 2016 RNC, he told a friend that he was “working on facial recognition, specifically about black people.” When contacted by HuffPost, Auernheimer clarified that he’d been “building a racial, not facial, recognition project [that] took characteristics from the entire body, not just the face.” At the time, the system had been too costly to mount on drones, he said, but he planned to revisit the idea soon. Auernhemier could not provide any proof to support his statements. Ton-That told HuffPost that Clearview had nothing to do with the neo-Nazi.
“I never met him and he did no work for the company,” Ton-That said.
But Auernheimer had worked closely with Johnson for years, and he, too, claimed a connection to Thiel. A month after being released from prison in 2014, Auernhemier told a hacker friend in direct messages that he was “meeting with Peter Thiel’s right hand.” (Auernheimer denied making this claim, but HuffPost authenticated the messages with their recipient. Thiel didn’t respond to questions for this story.)
That same year, Auernheimer teamed up with Johnson to mine the leaked database of the Ashley Madison infidelity website for kompromat. They partnered again in 2015 to publish covertly recorded smear videos of Planned Parenthood officials. (Auernheimer told HuffPost he and Johnson “have nothing to do with each other” and are “radically opposed politically and socially.” HuffPost obtained numerous friendly emails they had exchanged.)
Johnson frequently collaborated with Giesea as well. In one especially inglorious caper, they arranged for Bill Clinton’s sexual assault accusers and Barack Obama’s Trump-supporting half-brother Malik to appear at the 2016 general election debates. “Malik Obama, getting him to endorse Trump, they brought him to Giesea’s apartment and just gave him cash,” Spencer said. “At least, that’s what Giesea told me.” (“I don’t recall any of that,” Giesea told HuffPost.)
When HuffPost reached Malik Obama in Kenya to ask if he’d taken money from Johnson and his associates to promote Trump, Obama responded by saying, “Donald Trump is the best president America ever had and Charles Johnson is my friend.”
But Johnson always had bigger plans than Malik Obama. He’d filled his black book with the names of far more important people whose coattails he could ride: Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas; xenophobic commentator Ann Coulter; Blackwater founder Erik Prince; high-profile attorney Alan Dershowitz — and Ton-That, whose technical ability offered Johnson a different pathway to power. They were the same age, with the same focus, fighting the same internet culture war.
In one WeSearchr Slack exchange, Johnson linked to an article about the aggressive stock trading habits of Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), calling her “one of the best day traders ever.”
“Of course,” Ton-That replied, “it’s a chink.”
They also agreed on target selection.The WeSearchr Slack members reserved a good portion of their animus for Gawker, a publication that had aggressively covered Thiel and his business interests. Thiel had furtively bankrolled numerous lawsuits against the blog ? the most notable being an invasion of privacy case filed by former professional wrestler Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea after Gawker published a portion of sex tape he was in.
The alt-right backed Thiel to the hilt. WeSearchr co-founder Pax Dickinson urged members of Johnson’s Slack channel to compile a list of Gawker employees and feed it to neo-Nazi trolls on far-right websites such as 4chan. “Let them do the contacting,” Dickinson wrote of the trolls, seemingly aware that his plan could lead to harassment.
Johnson had his own vendetta against Gawker, which had covered him critically and in one instance mocked him over a rumor that he defecated on a floor in college. Johnson had sued Gawker for defamation and later reached a confidential settlement with the blog. “In a just world, I’d have them killed,” Johnson said of Gawker and its CEO, Nick Denton. “But we are not there yet.”
Johnson, however, was in a position to crowdfund a WeSearchr bounty to sniff out plagiarism at Gawker, an ultimately fruitless quest. Ton-That, whom Gawker had also covered critically after his phishing scams seven years earlier, jumped at the chance.
“[W]ho else is working on gawker plagiarism & wants to collaborate?” he messaged the channel at the beginning of June 2016. “[I]’m scraping all their articles right now.”
On June 10, 2016, Gawker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and put up its assets for sale. A few days later, Cernovich posted a photo of Ton-That and Johnson having a meal, both of them flashing the “OK” sign that has become a popular hand gesture for white nationalists in the Trump era.
Chuck Johnson and Hoan Ton-That flash the “OK” sign over a meal in 2016.]
When BuzzFeed confronted Ton-That about the photo, he claimed he was “only making the Okay sign in the photo as in ‘all okay.’” That August, Ton-That messaged the WeSearchr channel with an idea to crash a “funeral” party Gawker employees were throwing to mourn the demolition of their publication. “Wish I had a hulkomania shirt,” he wrote.
It was during this period of his life, ensconced among extremists online and off, that Ton-That began building the company that would become Clearview.
In 2016, the Australian hacker brought on two unnamed engineers to help him on the project, according to The New York Times. Ton-That refused to give HuffPost their names. One helped design a program to scrape images of faces from a range of sites and social media platforms, often in violation of their policies. The other created a facial recognition algorithm.
The Birth Of ‘Smartcheckr’
On election night, Ton-That partied with Johnson and Dickinson in New York amid a sea of red MAGA caps. Two days later, Johnson posted a news story from The Sun to his Facebook. It included a photo of Dickinson and Ton-That celebrating bawdily. “My business partners are in the Sun and I feel left out,” Johnson wrote.
Far-right extremist Pax Dickinson celebrates Donald Trump’s election in 2016 with Hoan Ton-That in New York City.]
Johnson was very likely referring to a business that was registered in New York a few months later and followed the same naming convention as WeSearchr: Smartcheckr. The company would eventually rebrand as Clearview, as Ton-That later told the Times.
In January 2017, Johnson indicated on Facebook that he was “building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads.” Soon, he was boasting to friends and acquaintances that he was working on a powerful facial recognition tool.
Chuck Johnson dropped hints on Facebook in January 2017 that he was working on a facial recognition project.
A person who used to be close to Johnson and requested anonymity out of concern for their safety told HuffPost that they saw him “with a whole bunch of really important people” at Trump Hotel in spring 2017, “and he was going on and on about this facial recognition software he had hired people to build.” Johnson, they added, was with one of these hires ? “some coding wizard” with long hair in a ponytail. “He kept introducing him as a prodigy who was building the software,” the source recalled. When HuffPost showed the source photos of Ton-That, they confirmed he was the man with Johnson. “If it’s not him, that’s his twin.”
Not long after the election, McHughgot a call from Johnson. “He told me they had a way to identify every illegal alien in the country,” she said. “He brought up facial recognition technology and demanded I call Stephen Miller because he knew Stephen Miller was a true believer.”
It’s unclear if Johnson ever spoke to Miller, the architect of Trump’s brutal immigration policy. But around the same time, Johnson was working behind the scenes with Giesea and Thiel ? a member of the transition executive committee ? to recommend alt-right candidates for science and technology appointments with the incoming administration, according to Forbes. A person close to Trump’s transition confirmed to Politico that Johnson participated in transition-related meetings.
By this point, Johnson had a well-documented track record of bigotry and dirty tricks. In 2015, he’d been permanently ? and noticeably ? suspended from Twitter after requesting funds to “take out” a Black civil rights activist. In 2016, he’d gone on an alt-right podcast called “Fash the Nation” to talk at length about the evolutionary traits of “Jews” and “Blacks.” (“They’re dumber,” Johnson said of African Americans.)
In January 2017, Johnson hosted a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session during which he was asked for his thoughts on “the Holocaust, WW2, and the JQ in general.” (The “JQ,” or “Jewish Question,” is a term anti-Semites, including Hitler, have used for over a century as shorthand for their conspiracy theory that Jews have too much control over society.) “I do not and never have believed the six million figure,” Johnson wrote. “I think the Red Cross numbers of 250,000 dead in the camps from typhus are more realistic but I confess to having complicated views on the subject. I think the Allied bombings of Germany were a war crime. I agree with [Holocaust revisionist] David Cole about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real. Why were their [sic] swimming pools there if it was a death camp?”
Two weeks after Johnson’s Holocaust denial on Reddit, SMARTCHECKR, LLC was registered in New York. The address associated with it belonged to Richard Schwartz, who had been a top aide to Rudy Giuliani when he was mayor of New York City. Schwartz would later admit to being one of the founders of Smartcheckr.
:{:{}:
}:
Thiel was one of the company’s earliest investors. “In 2017, Peter gave a talented young founder $200,000, which two years later converted to equity in Clearview AI,” Thiel’s spokesman, Jeremiah Hall, said in a statement. Hall didn’t specify which founder he meant and did not respond to questions for this story.
Emails and messages obtained by HuffPost show that Ton-That and Johnson were in touch about Smartcheckr in 2017. In one email thread, Johnson and his associates at GotNews discussed a dogwhistle post they were putting together about a racially motivated mass shooting in Fresno, California, that had been committed by a Black man who was Muslim. Tyler Bass, a GotNews writer, wondered if there was an easy way to scrape “an entire Facebook page quickly ... the next time another American goes apeshit and before Facebook pulls it down out of shame.” He added Ton-That to the conversation, who replied quickly. “I’m working on this for smartcheckr,” the hacker wrote. “Plan to make these tools available for our guys.”
A Series Of Troubling Hires
Bass was one of Ton-That’s guys. He had become interested in hacker culture as a young man, and he was arrested on a computer harassment charge in Virginia in 2013 that either the alleged victim or the prosecutor declined to pursue.
Bass later morphed into a committed racist. By 2017, he was asking around about a writing job with American Renaissance, a heavyweight white nationalist organization. He already belonged to a white nationalist crew called the “DC Helicopter Pilots,” according to McHugh, who dated him in 2017. The group was a Washington-area chapter of The Right Stuff, an influential pro-Trump organization that attracts neo-Nazis. Members of the DC Helicopter Pilots ? likely a reference to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s practice of executing dissidents by throwing them out of helicopters ? met regularly, at least once to eat swastika-shaped cookies. One chapter leader was a State Department official assigned to the Bureau of Energy Resources who advocated for a nuclear-armed white ethnostate.
A few weeks after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017 ? which Bass told McHugh that he attended with his 8-year-old son ? he found a job as an “investigator” doing “remote software testing” at Smartcheckr.
HuffPost obtained five of Bass’s résumés spanning from May 2017 to the present. He claimed to have assembled “devastating opposition dossiers on open-borders figures and activists” while working for Johnson and said he created “counternarratives for third-party reporters to mold mass perception.” His résumés also say he helped Johnson vet candidates for the Trump administration transition team. The administration declined to comment.
Another early Smartcheckr hire was Douglass Mackey, an otherwise unremarkable Middlebury graduate who’d washed out of a job in finance and became an alt-right superstar in 2016 under the alias “Ricky Vaughn.” The advocate of “global white supremacy” was so effective at disseminating pro-Trump, anti-Semitic propaganda and Kremlin-originated disinformation that MIT Media Lab named his Twitter account on a list of top influencers on the election, ahead of NBC News and the Drudge Report.
A photo posted by neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell identifying Douglass Mackey, left.]
In 2017, Mackey and an unidentified partner pitched Smartcheckr to the racist Republican candidate Paul Nehlen, who was vying for the Wisconsin seat of retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan. Nehlen, another member of Johnson’s WeSearchr Slack channel, was quickly radicalizing from outlandish bigotry to white nationalist extremism. He’d soon appear on David Duke’s radio show to talk about machine-gunning migrant children.
In a proposal Mackey sent Nehlen, Smartcheckr promised to micro-target potential voters and donors for $2,500 per month. The company would do oppo research by tapping “unconventional databases.” Ton-That’s “proprietary search and facial recognition technology” would allow for analysis of voters’ social media and their views on various issues.
Nehlen said on a podcast that he gave Mackey access to his Facebook through Business Manager, a tool for managing pages and accounts, for three months. “He didn’t post anything,” he said. “He didn’t do anything. He was suggesting that he was going to be able to grow my audience or whatever. He did nothing.”
Ton-That told BuzzFeed that Mackey only worked “for 3 weeks as a consultant to Smartcheckr, which was the initial name of Clearview.” He denied any knowledge of Mackey’s Ricky Vaughn persona — even though Mackey was also a member of the WeSearchr Slack channel, where he used the handle “Richard Vaughn” and the same avatar that he did on Twitter. Ton-That claimed Mackey had been referred to him by a “liberal Democrat.” But Johnson posted a video in October 2016 in which he called Mackey a “friend of mine, a guy that I’ve talked to on the phone, a good guy.” Mackey did not respond to emails from HuffPost.
Ton-That also claimed Mackey sent an “unauthorized proposal” to Nehlen and that “the technology described in the proposal did not even exist.” And yet Johnson had been bragging about the technology for the better part of a year. Bass was already troubleshooting Smartcheckr’s “flagship product,” according to his résumé.
In early 2018, still angry about getting ripped off, Nehlen disclosed that Mackey was Ricky Vaughn — something that was previously known only to high-ranking members of the alt-right. One of them, Christopher Cantwell, posted the Smartcheckr proposal Mackey sent Nehlen on his website. Twitter and other platforms lit up with white nationalist chatter.
“[O]ne of my closest pals just got his life ruined,” Auernheimer said of Mackey in The Daily Stormer forum.
Andrew Auernheimer was upset after Mackey’s identity was revealed.
Smartcheckr employees and associates scrambled to hide their connections to the company and each other after the incident. Schwartz, the former Giuliani aide, sanitized his LinkedIn profile. Smartcheckr used a reputation management service to suppress information about itself and Schwartz by clouding Google search results with fake webpages, according to a source close to the company.
Richard Schwartz listed himself as a Smartcheckr co-founder on LinkedIn until it was revealed that Mackey was a white suprema
Richard Schwartz listed himself as a Smartcheckr co-founder on LinkedIn until it was revealed that Mackey was a white supremacist.
Schwartz did not respond to questions from HuffPost.
Eventually, the commotion subsided. Ton-That and Smartcheckr tightened up operational security. They’d incorporated Clearview AI in Delaware through a third-party registered agent the previous year and would shift to that name for the facial recognition business.
“Thank ... goodness the panicked speculation about Smartcheckr is dying down,” Bass emailed McHugh. “Still, it’s not going to be great. If you have any thoughts on how to tailor things going forward in light of Mackeygate, as you offered, please let me know.”
Clearview Hits The Bigtime
In January 2018, Ton-That surfaced at the “Night for Freedom” party Cernovich organized in New York. Up on stage, Gavin Mcinnes, the Canadian founder of the neo-fascist Proud Boys gang, joked about “faggots” and the genitalia of transgender women. Pizzagate-peddler and neo-Nazi collaborator Jack Posobiec turned up. So did Canadian cult leader Stefan Molyneux and James O’Keefe, who in 2009 made a Thiel-financed video that mocked people of color.
McHugh was standing in a cluster of people when Ton-That materialized out of the crowd. It had been almost two years since she’d seen him at the far-right dinner in Cleveland. They chatted briefly. “Hoan told me things were going well for him,” McHugh said. “Especially with his company.”
The hacker melted back into the party. McHugh never saw him again.
Things certainly were going well. By the time of Cernovich’s event, Clearview had found more investors, including Ton-That’s former boss at AngelList, Naval Ravikant, and Kirenaga Partners, a small venture capital firm in New York. The firm’s founder, David Scalzo, told the Times that “there’s never going to be privacy” and shrugged about the possibility that technology “might lead to a dystopian future or something.”
Another early investor was Hal Lambert, a Texas money manager and major GOP fundraiser who is close with Ted Cruz and claimed to be on Trump’s inaugural committee. Lambert had also invested early in Anduril, a Thiel-backed defense contractor that is building autonomous surveillance systems to police the southern border. Lambert has railed against the political left and the news media, most recently appearing on Fox Business Network to downplay the danger of coronavirus and accuse journalists of stoking fear.
When reached by phone, Lambert expressed surprise to hear about anti-democratic extremists associated with Clearview. But he admitted to knowing Johnson. He also said he’d known Ton-That prior to Clearview because the coder “worked on some data stuff” for the investor. Lambert declined to provide further details, citing “proprietary” work.
Throughout 2018 and into the following year, Ton-That worked with Schwartz to sign up law enforcement agencies for Clearview. The company claimed to have “mountains” of data in its “proprietary image database.” The Clearview team started aggregating every mugshot taken in the U.S. over the last 15 years, according to emails obtained by OneZero. Schwartz peddled the tech at law enforcement conferences. Ton-That set up bogus LinkedIn profiles to run ads that hyped the technology, according to BuzzFeed.
To help drum up more business, Clearview recruited Jessica Medeiros Garrison, a former executive director of the Republican Attorneys General Association and a Daily Caller contributor. The company also retained Paul Clement, the former U.S. solicitor general and perennial right-wing consideration for the Supreme Court, as its attorney.
Clearview brought on high-powered attorney Paul Clement to represent the company.
Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies were signing up for Clearview: the Indiana State Police, the New York State Police, the Chicago Police Department, the Atlanta Police Department, police departments in New Jersey and Florida, and the Department of Homeland Security. So did the Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division of the Texas Department of Public Safety, a contract that has not been previously reported. Clement sent a letter to the Atlanta Police Department last summer stating that “over 200 law enforcement agencies around the nation” were using Clearview. That number would triple within months, according to The New York Times.
Clement provided a legal cover for police to sidestep civil rights concerns, writing that Clearview didn’t violate the Fourth Amendment because the mere act of posting anything to social media removed any expectation of privacy.
Clement also anticipated the argument that facial recognition has baked-in racial bias problems. A majority of algorithms tested in 2019 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology falsely identify female and darker-skinned faces at much higher rates than white male faces. Clearview was simply more accurate than existing technology, Clement wrote. (The company appears to have shunned an independent audit of its technology and did not participate in the NIST test.) Moreover, he added, Clearview used “non-race-based algorithms” to minimize bias. Clement offered no evidence in his letter to support either claim.
On his April 2018 résumé, Bass wrote that he was identifying “prostitution and gang connections of subjects on 24-hour deadlines.” Clearview promotional materials state the company “began solving crimes using newly developed facial-recognition technology” in 2018, meaning that Ton-That and his employees may have had the ability to snoop on police searches and criminal investigations and harvest images of suspects for their database for almost two years.
The company also found a big client in Rudin Management Company, a multibillion-dollar real estate firm for which Bass did “background screenings of tenants and hires.” He started hiding his employer on his résumé. He worked, he said, for “Confidential.”
On his résumés, Bass took increasing steps to conceal his connection to Ton-That’s company.
On his current résumé, Bass highlights that he used his “familiarity with the Spanish language” at Rudin Management, an indication that Clearview and the real estate firm may have had a white nationalist vetting Spanish-speaking people for jobs and housing. Bass now claims to work directly for Rudin Management, which Rudin Management says is untrue.
“The individual in question was never employed by Rudin Management,” a spokesperson said. But Rudin did use Ton-That’s company to screen people, according to the spokesperson: “We utilized Smartcheckr’s services for a period of time to conduct routine background checks based on publicly available information.”
Rudin Management refused to provide further details, but the firm previously told BuzzFeed that it also used a surveillance camera system developed by Clearview that works with the facial recognition technology.
Bass declined to speak with HuffPost.
A Radical Liaison To Law Enforcement
As Clearview continued to sign up police departments, the far-right extremists at the company interacted more with law enforcement. In an email from December 2019 obtained by BuzzFeed, Clearview employee Marko Jukic pitched a free trial of the technology to a nationwide police listserv: “We invite you to test the limits for yourself.”
Jukic had for years used an alias derived from his surname to spread racism and anti-democratic ideas, praise Vladimir Putin and even write approvingly about a potential collapse of the United States government. Born in Croatia, Jukic identified as an extremist Catholic traditionalist and had spent most of his childhood bouncing around the world with his Croatian mother and American father, a political officer with the U.S. State Department.
He dropped out of Northwestern University in 2016. Soon enough, he went to work for Johnson and became an active member of the WeSearchr Slack channel. He coordinated with Ton-That on the Gawker-scraping project and tweeted about radical organizing with the former director of the Thiel-funded Machine Intelligence Research Institute.
Marko Jukic and Chuck Johnson in Cleveland during the 2016 Republican National Convention.]
In his early adulthood, Jukic, who just turned 24, published many thousands of extremist words on neoreactionary blogs. He declared that “diversity, equality, tolerance and the rest of the lot of contemporary progressive values are indisputably corrosive to civilization as they are today practiced.” He expressed homophobic, misogynistic and racist views. “[I]f you spend a few hours letting your disenchanted friends and family know that it’s OK to use the word ‘nigger’ [and] point out that democracy is a miserable failure,” he wrote, “you will have accomplished far more concrete good in the world than you would have by spending a few hours doing almost anything else.”
He was opposed to multiculturalism and wrote that Jews did not belong among people of European heritage. “The answer to the Jewish question,” he wrote, “is quite simple: segregation and separation. ... [U]nlike progressives, neoreactionaries do not believe one can abolish the laws of nature and turn diversity into a strength, least of all using the State. Diversity engenders animosity and eventually violence, and is thus a weakness.” Genocide wasn’t a solution, Jukic wrote, “unless you have the biggest bully around on your side.” By that, he meant the power of the state.
“In context that is a quote urging far right extremists to avoid Jewish people and to disavow anti-Semitic violence,” Jukic said.
Jukic was prone to flights of wild-eyed neoreactionary fancy, imagining a future where a king ruled America and would tackle “welfare spending” by sending the military and heavily armed militias to “pacify” the “ghettos” with lethal force. Journalists who set foot in occupied zones would be assassinated. “[V]iolence most definitely is the answer,” he wrote. He supported the “generous use” of racial profiling to curb immigration, as well as a wall along the Mexico border equipped with high-tech cameras and drones.
In much of his writing, he looked to the ethnonationalism of Putin’s Russia for inspiration and speculated about a Russian empire that encompassed Hawaii and extended to San Francisco.
In his vision of a new geopolitical order, the first step, Jukic wrote, was to dismantle and balkanize what he described as the “uniquely evil” United States. To neoreactionaries, that meant replacing democracy with some form of authoritarianism. Two years later, however, he’d decided that balkanization or civil war in America was impossible because “America’s diversity problem is not regional, but national and ubiquitous.”
“This is not unwarranted pessimism but the sober reality that has to be accepted before any real goals can be achieved,” he wrote about a month later. “Just because the United States cannot Balkanize does not mean it cannot collapse into chaos, however.”
Jukic emailed HuffPost a statement in which he claimed his posts were “exercises in theatrical hyperbole and comedic satire.” He was, he said, a young man trying to shock his reader. His talk of balkanization was little more than an off-the-books 4chan-fueled college bull session. He said he no longer believed that “America’s severe societal problems” would lead to governmental collapse, although he still felt the political process remained “fundamentally broken.” And he’d “always disavowed” political violence, he said.
“I wrote a number of purposely inflammatory things as a teenager and young adult to test boundaries,” Jukic said in his statement. “I never meant any harm, but I admit my insouciance and prodigious imagination would not always give that impression. It’s something that I put firmly in the past many years ago already of my own accord, long before being contacted for this article, and I intend to keep it that way. Those quotes do not represent my thinking or views in the present day.”
But many of Jukic’s posts appeared about two years before he says he started working at Clearview. Richard Spencer’s Radix Journal syndicated some of his writing. Other far-right extremists took Jukic seriously and engaged him in long conversations about radical politics.
As far-fetched as Jukic’s vision seemed, he’d thought deeply about his tactics and eschewed the open activism the alt-right had embraced, most notably in Charlottesville. Instead, he endorsed the neoreactionary concept of “passivism”: lie low, create hidden networks, quietly build the “machinery” to subvert the system. “Victory will not be won at the ballot box,” Jukic wrote in 2016. “Donald Trump will need to build his own regime, his own state, and make it so good that the existing regime defects to it in fear and awe of his power. He’ll need his own NYT, his own State Department, his own CIA, his own Harvard.”
Three years later, Jukic was pitching Clearview to law enforcement.
Subverting Democracy
After the Times published its investigation into Clearview in January, New Jersey’s attorney general ordered all police in the state to stop using its tool. Two Democratic senators introduced legislation to put a moratorium on facial recognition use by government officials and contractors until Congress could regulate the technology. Other lawmakers questioned Clearview about the company having licensed its technology to organizations in authoritarian countries such as Saudi Arabia, Singapore and United Arab Emirates.
Social media companies fired off cease-and-desist letters demanding that Clearview stop scraping photos and data. The company was hit with multiple lawsuits by people who alleged that Clearview illegally collected their biometric information, including a class-action suit in New York federal court. Another class-action in Virginia federal court alleged that Clearview had violated the Virginia Computer Crimes Act, the same law Bass was arrested for allegedly violating in 2013 and for which he was never prosecuted. Vermont’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against Clearview last month, alleging that the company had broken state laws by collecting images of Vermonters, including children, without their consent.
Clearview raced to do damage control. A “user code of conduct” materialized on the firm’s website, along with a promise that the technology would have no consumer applications and be available only to law enforcement and “select security professionals.” But that wasn’t true ? Clearview was aggressively courting companies and private clients such as Macy’s, Bank of America and Walmart, according to a list leaked to BuzzFeed.
Clearview also allowed investors and Trump-affiliated elites to play around with its app and unregulated database.The company set up an account for the company of former Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller. His company has run almost 20 searches, according to BuzzFeed. John Catsimatidis, the billionaire Trump donor and owner of Gristedes Foods, the largest grocery store chain in Manhattan, tested the facial recognition technology at one of his supermarkets in an effort to catch shoplifters, according to The New York Times. But Catsimatidis, who is friends with Schwartz, also used the app to snoop on a man he spotted on a dinner date with his daughter.
And Johnson appears to still be involved with the company. On a flight to Boston in January, the far-right extremist befriended a passenger and showed off a facial recognition app that could only have been Clearview, according to BuzzFeed.
Ton-That bobbed and weaved through television interviews, letting more details slip while asserting a First Amendment right to access anything posted on social media. A number of banks were using Clearview, he told CNN, but he declined to name them. He admitted to meeting with legislators but didn’t say what they’d discussed. He declined to name them, too. Most of all, he downplayed the dangers of his technology.
“This is not a 24/7 surveillance system,” he said.
Another Clearview attorney, Tor Ekeland, emerged to field media requests. Ekeland was also Auernheimer’s lawyer and had made his name by getting the neo-Nazi out of federal prison. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Another round of damage control ensued after HuffPost reached out to Jukic with questions last week. Ton-That said through a spokesperson on March 27 that Clearview had severed ties with both Bass and Jukic.
“I was shocked by and completely unaware of Marko Jukic’s online writings under a different name,” Ton-That said. “As soon as those writings were brought to my attention, we took steps to separate him from the company.”
But Ton-That almost certainly knew Jukic’s neoreactionary pen name. In Slack channel messages and emails between the two that date back to 2016, Jukic used the same alias as he did on Social Matter, a prominent, now-defunct neoreactionary blog run by a former Daily Caller writer who later took a job at a Thiel-funded think tank.
In a statement to HuffPost, Ton-That professed his love for America ? in large part, he said, because of his adopted country’s diversity. He said he found white supremacist and anti-Semitic views “abhorrent.” He shared an insight into his background that could apply to many intelligent, wayward young men who stumble into hateful online echo chambers.
“I grew up in Australia, but truthfully, I grew up on the Internet,” Ton-That said. “I grew up without television or movies as cultural touchstones. I learned about the world, its inhabitants and ideas online. It’s where I learned my craft to program and code, and how to navigate the vast variety of information, thoughts and views. It had not always been a straight path, and it had not always served me well. There was a period when I explored a range of ideas—not out of belief in any of them, but out of a desire to search for self and place in the world. I have finally found it, and the mission to help make America a safer place. To those who have read my words in the Huffington Post article, I deeply apologize for them.”
When HuffPost contacted Johnson in late March, he pretended to be an undercover U.S. intelligence operative who’d been recruited out of high school. “Would prefer being kept out of whatever you are doing,” he said. “Nearly got me killed by a foreign government last time.” Johnson said his government contract prohibited him from talking to the press. He then spoke at length with HuffPost, and said if this article ran, “you’ll wind up hurting our country as China, Russia, Israel, and Britain all roll out facial recognition products which curtail our liberties.”
The next day, a man using the pseudonym “John Smith” called from a VoIP line with a West Palm Beach number after HuffPost insisted that Johnson have a credible person verify his claims. “Smith” refused to say where he worked but offered vague reassurances that the government had vetted “the DNA” of the Clearview team and found no “red flags.” That team, according to Smith, included Johnson, whom Smith described as “not a significant equity holder” in Clearview. When asked again if Johnson had a stake in Clearview, Smith said, “I believe so. I don’t know for sure.”
Johnson later texted HuffPost. “I’ve done my part,” he wrote. “Marko and Hoan do good work on behalf of our country.” Johnson refused to answer any questions about his involvement in the company or his relationship with Ton-That, who did the same when first contacted by HuffPost but eventually distanced himself from Johnson.
“Charles Johnson is not an executive, employee, consultant, and doesn’t have a board seat at Clearview Ai,” Ton-That told HuffPost a week after his first statement. He refused to disclose whether Johnson had an equity stake in the company.
But the money behind Clearview and the company’s opaque origins are bound to raise more eyebrows, especially during a health crisis in which a hard-right Trump administration could expand domestic surveillance in ways that would be hard to unwind. Clearview’s secretive founders have already shown a callous disregard for the privacy of American citizens. Even more concerning are their connections to a dark strain of political extremism now coursing through Silicon Valley and Washington.
In April 2016, Johnson announced himself as an extremist in a GotNews video. “What is the alt-right?” he said. “I guess I’m sort of on the ground floor here given that I’m friends with Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug.”
To read Yarvin is, in the neoreactionary godfather’s own words, to find “instructions” for a quiet “fascist coup” in America, one that might take 25 years, maybe 50. What Yarvin calls a “reboot” of America would dissolve the government and “terminate democracy.” All in the name of a stable new world order.
If you squint, you can almost see it underway, as techno-authoritarians who openly deride modern America as an obsolete operating system build-out, through their own companies and the complicity of law enforcement, an all-seeing eye unbound by the statutes that constrain the government’s use of personal data. Does the Trump adviser behind many of these efforts — the German-born American billionaire with a third citizenship quietly purchased from New Zealand ? really have the best interests of every American in mind?
More than a decade ago, Thiel committed a statement to print that should adjoin his every mention in the press.
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” the Clearview investor wrote in a 2009 essay for the Cato Institute.
He meant it.
---
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/neo-nazi-troll-andrew-anglins-celebratory-mood-crushed-by-14-million-judgment-against-him/
david n kos
Over the weekend, Andrew Anglin was in a celebratory mood, thanks to Donald Trump’s racist tweets telling congresswomen of color to go back to their native countries.
Then, on Monday, the hammer fell on the notorious neo-Nazi troll and publisher of The Daily Stormer. A judge in **Montana, ruling in a lawsuit brought by a Jewish woman from Whitefish and the Southern Poverty Law Center, determined that Anglin owed the woman $14 million in damages for the “troll storm” he unleashed on her in early 2017.
Magistrate Judge Jeremiah Lynch found Anglin had acted with “actual malice,” declaring his conduct was “egregious and reprehensible,” and recommended that real estate agent Tanya Gersh be awarded the maximum in punitive damages under Montana law ($10 million) and more than $4 million in compensatory damages. The findings now await final approval from a federal judge.
Suddenly, after crowing all weekend about Trump’s tweets, The Daily Stormer fell silent and disappeared from the “dark web” site where it now resides. On Monday, Anglin had posted several laudatory pieces about Trump: “This is the kind of WHITE NATIONALISM we elected him for. And we’re obviously seeing it only because there’s another election coming up. But I’ll tell you, even knowing that, it still feels so good,” he wrote.
Noting that among the people Trump attacked was an African American congresswoman, Ayanna Pressley, who was born and raised in Chicago, Anglin said, “This is not some half-assed anti-immigrant white nationalism. Trump is literally telling American blacks to go back to Africa.” He later added, “All Trump is doing is once again expressing our collective anger. … This is what elected Trump and this is what will always be the best way for him to gain support."
Anglin and his fellow neo-Nazis have openly and avidly supported Trump since the fall of 2015 and all during the 2016 campaign, thanks in large part to the signals he regularly sent through social media and his speeches indicating his support for their views. After the election, these same white nationalists and far-right extremists have continued to march in his name, resulting in a wave of hate crimes in which the perpetrators have used Trump’s name to terrorize vulnerable minorities.
The Montana lawsuit resulted from Anglin’s attempts to defend fellow white nationalist Richard Spencer, who resides in Whitefish part time with his parents. Concerned by his rising national profile after the election, a number of community leaders in Whitefish, including real estate agent Tanya Gersh, began raising concerns about his presence there.
Anglin became involved in the controversy by publishing Gersh’s name and addresses, as well as the names of her children, as well as those of several prominent Jewish leaders in Whitefish, alongside their photos and superimposed Star of David patches, claiming they were responsible for the Spencers’ problems. Simultaneously, an online army of “trolls” descended en masse on some of the people in Whitefish who had been identified as opposing his parents’ business. Their Twitter and email accounts were flooded with anti-Semitic and misogynistic threats.
“So Then—Let’s Hit Em Up. Are y’all ready for an old fashioned Troll Storm?” Anglin wrote. He demurred that he was not advocating “violence or threats of violence or anything even close to that.” A week later, he published another post claiming he was preparing to bus in skinheads from the Bay Area of California: “I have already worked out most of the details with the leaders of the local groups,” he wrote. “We are continuing our barrage against the criminal Jews of Whitefish,” he wrote. “We are planning an armed protest in Whitefish … we can easily march through the center of the town carrying high-powered rifles.”
Anglin’s threats initially spurred Whitefish’s police chief to step up patrols, particularly for the people Anglin named in his posts.
For his part, Spencer attempted to tamp down the controversy—but only by heaping blame on his critics while rationalizing Anglin’s behavior and suggesting the whole thing was a “joke” and a “troll” prank. Appearing on white supremacist leader David Duke’s radio program, Spencer claimed he wanted to try to keep his part-time Montana home out of the limelight created by his white nationalist activism. “I don’t host conferences, I don’t hand out fliers here,” he said. “It’s just a place I go to get my work done. I like being out here. I don’t want my daughter growing up in Washington, D.C. – I don’t need to tell you why.”
The problem, he claimed, was caused by local Montana activists who had organized to oppose his efforts several years before, notably local anti-hate group Love Lives Here and the Helena-based Montana Human Rights Network. He claimed they had attempted to strong-arm his mother into denouncing him but had failed.
In a YouTube rant, Spencer called for the controversy to just go away: “I’m just saying this—let’s just end this. Let’s put it to bed. The controversy’s over. Don’t bring it up again. I won’t bring it up again. I’ve said all I need to say.” As for Anglin, Spencer explained, “He’s wild. We have different styles. But this is one thing I will say, and I will say this with confidence. Andrew Anglin is a rational person. Andrew Anglin has specifically stated that this is nonviolent and that no laws are broken. This is—this was a troll. So that’s what it is. People were pushing back.”
The larger Whitefish community’s response to the threats to Jewish community members spoke loudly. “It’s important to know that the businesses that were hit by this were strongly supported in the community,” said Will Randall of Love Lives Here. “Their businesses are booming now. They were hit at the beginning and were frightened, scared. And then the community came in and said, ‘Well, I’m going to buy your product. I’m going to buy your soap, or your services. We’ve got your back.’”
The threats created a national stir, with various media organizations ranging from CNN and The Washington Post to local Montana news outfits picking up the story and magnifying it. Eventually, it emerged that Anglin had not obtained the proper permit for a march, and he announced it was being postponed. He promised to file for a permit later, but never did.
In April 2017, the SPLC and Gersh filed suit against Anglin, noting, “The threats took an emotional and physical toll on Gersh. She experienced panic attacks and feared answering the phone. She often went to bed in tears and woke up crying. She had trouble leaving her home and felt anxiety in crowds. She gained weight, lost hair and was in physical pain. She had been prescribed medication and had sought other treatment, including trauma therapy.”
In response to the suit, Anglin allegedly fled the country to avoid being served the court papers—reportedly to places such as Cambodia and Albania.
Anglin lost a similar lawsuit earlier this year to comedian and pundit Dean Obedeillah, who was awarded $4.1 million in damages after The Daily Stormer falsely claimed he had masterminded a London terrorist attack.
Monday’s ruling is a court victory, but it’s unclear whether Gersh will ever collect the money from Anglin, who could remain in exile abroad in order to avoid being forced to pay. “The significance is not in whether we will collect the money,” SPLC attorney David Dinielli said in an emailed statement to The Associated Press. “The significance is that Tanya Gersh, a real estate agent from a small town in Montana, stood up to fight the most notorious neo-Nazi on the web, and she won.”
==
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/23/politics/fbi-white-supremacist-domestic-terror/index.html
---
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/fbi-says-it-lost-missing-files-on-the-white-nationalist-hate-site-stormfront-report/
no lnx
FBI told reporter Emma Best that has lost or could not find its records on the white nationalist hate site Stormfront, MuckRock reported this week.
Best had requested the records through the Freedom of Information Act, but the bureau only returned 104 pages of files. It believed there were more records to find:
For your information. a search of the indices of our Central Records System reflected there were additional records potentially responsive for your Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts (FOIA) request. We have attempted to obtain this material so it could be reviewed to determine whether it was responsive to your request. We were advised that the potentially responsive records were not In their expected location and could not be located after a reasonable search. Following a reasonable waiting period. another attempt was made to obtain this material. This search for the missing records also met with unsuccessful results.
It’s not clear how extensive a “reasonable search” has to be, so it’s difficult to assess if the materials are truly lost or just inconveniently stored.
“FBI claims to have lost the file on the neo-nazi group Stormfront. Sure, Jan,” Best said. Best added that they didn’t think the bureau was acting unusually deceptive, noting that the FBI claims it can’t find records frequently.
“My implication wasn’t that they lost it on purpose, just that they either didn’t look very hard or have an organizational system that would have Hoover spinning in his grave,” they explained.
Forward reported that some of the members on Stormfront were “gleeful” in response, suspecting that an ally in the bureau buried the files. But a review of the forum showed that many of the hate site users seemed shocked that the bureau would have any interest in Stormfront at all. Some suspected that the failure to release the files may even be an attempt to hide the extent to which the bureau is monitoring the site.
Combating white supremacy has long been a part of the FBI’s mission, even while it also targeted civil rights leaders in the past. Director Christopher Wray recently said it poses a “persistent, pervasive threat” to the United States, and the bureau has recently found an increase in the white supremacist domestic terrorism. But critics have said that President Donald Trump’s administration, it has become more difficult to fight the danger this ideology poses.
==
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/03/15/after-new-zealand-shooting-far-right-racists-claim-victimhood-hail-killer-hero
Andrew Anglin found humor in the livestreamed video of a man in New Zealand storming into the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, then shooting and killing 49 people.
Anglin, who runs the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, noted that a video of the shooting was being taken down almost as fast as people could put it up.
“That being said, of the mass shootings I have seen this is by far the funniest one of them all,” Anglin wrote Friday morning, just hours after the mass killings. He continued:
This dude is already a folk hero to so many, and we have to agree that what he did was indisputably heroic in the classical sense. It is not an uncommon thing for heroes to act foolishly. The odds are people are going to crowdfund statues and memorials in honor of this guy. This dude is funny and joking around, which makes him seem far more funny and personable than the death cult invaders that he is slaughtering.
The shootings come at a high tide of global anti-Muslim sentiment. In the U.S., President Donald Trump’s “Muslim Ban” barring people from seven majority-Muslim countries from immigrating sparked fierce political debate. And far-right candidates and parties around the globe regularly demonize Muslims for political gain.
As the horror of the killings spread across the world, on the far right, reactions were a mix of celebration, victimhood and warnings that events such as these are the first steps toward a race war.
The responses were typical of the racist right, when a white attacker kills Muslims or other people of color: ugly, self-pitying and showing very little regard for the victims.
A silent gunman
The gunman livestreaming the attack from a head-mounted camera said he was a 28-year-old Australian called Brenton Tarrant. The footage showed him firing indiscriminately at men, women and children from close range inside the Al Noor mosque.
“Remember, lads! Subscribe to PewDiePie,” Tarrant said – in reference to a controversial Swedish YouTube star popular among the racist “alt-right” – before driving to the mosque.
His guns and equipment were marked in white with white supremacist slogans, including the “14 Words” that are a common refrain among the far right and racist communities and were first coined by American white nationalist David Lane.
Footage filmed by the gunman at the Al Noor mosque showed him driving up to the front door, before taking weapons from his car, entering the mosque and firing at people inside.
On the video, Tarrant’s voice is rarely heard. He’s mostly present as hands holding a gun and pulling the trigger, with some heavy breathing in the background. After shooting multiple people at the mosque, Tarrant went outside and began firing down the street.
At one point in the video, a woman lying in the street after being shot can be heard yelling, “Help me!” before Tarrant shoots her several more times. The attacker ran over her with his car as he fled the scene.
Almost 15 minutes into the video, Tarrant is seen driving. He says: “It’s time for the fuel. Let’s burn these fucking mosques to the ground,” and “There wasn’t really time to aim because there were so many targets.”
Tarrant also fired a shotgun through his windshield at someone and moments later blew out his passenger-side window with a shotgun blast aimed at a pedestrian.
Before the attack, Tarrant posted a 73-page manifesto titled “The Great Replacement” outlining his intentions and espousing far right and anti-immigrant ideology.
A celebration of optics
In typical fashion, Anglin stopped just short of openly applauding the shooter in posts on the Daily Stormer.
"Listen: no one gives a fuck about Moslems. These people kill us every day, they kidnap our girls, they overcome our countries and riot in the streets, and normal people are laughing their asses off that for once in history someone actually gave back what we’ve been getting,” Anglin wrote. “I don’t support this attack, obviously – I am a man of peace. But it sure as hell wasn’t bad optics."
Andrew Auernheimer, a neo-Nazi and white supremacist hacker who goes by “weev,” echoed those sentiments.
“Even though it is bad behavior, it definitely feels really fucking good to watch,” Weev posted Thursday night on the Daily Stormer.
A poster called “TheKidsAreAltRight” also took to the Daily Stormer to validate the shooting.
“I think my thirst for vengeance has officially surpassed my fear of repercussions when it comes to events like this,” he wrote. “I’m not endorsing violence, but when it happens to our enemies I’ve reached the point where I can’t muster a single fuck to give.”
In the incel community, where men blame their lack of sex or relationships on women, “Cope With The Rope” described himself as a “fucked person”
“I love bloodshed and seeing people suffer,” he wrote.
“I think we can see two different strategies at play from Breivik and Tarrant,” a commenter going by “Psychopathic Anime Nazi” wrote on the Daily Stormer, referring to Anders Behring Breivik, a far-right terrorist in Norway who killed 77 people in 2011. “Breivik did the big brain targeted elimination of traitors in the making. Tarrant attacks people anyone can recognize as invaders. It seems like the public is finding Tarrant more palatable than Breivik.”
Self-pity and a war
In the hours after the deaths in New Zealand, the names of right-wing shooters returned to news stories: Dylann Storm Roof in Charleston, South Carolina, Robert Bowers in Pittsburgh and Breivik.
...
---
http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/alt-righters-pushing-horrid-theory-heather-heyer-died-weight-related-heart-attack
Even President Donald Trump has condemned James Fields, Jr., the Nazi-obsessed attacker who killed Heather Heyer at last month’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
But according to Media Matters, some white nationalists online have begun painting Heyer’s death a heart attack to absolve Fields and portray her murder as a false flag.
On September 5, the fringe right-wing blog Occidental Dissent published a post claiming Heyer’s mother “said in an NBC interview she died of a heart attack,” and went on to blame the supposed “heart attack” on her weight.
“We can’t find any information about Heather Heyer’s injuries or an autopsy,” the blog’s notoriously racist writer Hunter Wallace claimed. “She does seem to be a very large woman though. My guess is that she was at least 250 pounds lying on her back in 90 degree heat. It is reasonable to wonder if her health had something to do with her death.”
“To my knowledge,” he continued, “no one else has died in these incidents when protesters are in the street and get run over. It happens quite frequently.”
The post was quickly picked up by fake news site Before It’s News, and Wallace’s claims became the subject of multiple alt-right YouTube screeds “debunking” the notion that Heyer had been murdered.
Andrew Auernheimer, who hacker-turned-Daily Stormer writer who infamously threatened CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, wrote that supposed “proof” of Heyer’s heart attack meant Fields should be exonerated. http://www.rawstory.com/2017/07/neo-nazi-vows-to-hunt-down-children-of-cnn-staffers-over-reporting-on-pro-trump-reddit-troll/
“Murder charges on Fields gotta be dropped,” Auernheimer wrote on Gab, the alt-right’s favorite social network, “and the public has to get told it’s because Heyer was a f*cking fat cow.”
The theory soon spread to 4chan and Reddit, including the popular r/The_Donald subreddit.
Conspiracy theories ranging from the notion that Heyer was killed by a Hillary Clinton supporter to Scott Baio’s assertion that her murder as a false flag have circulated in the weeks since her death.
==
==
Service Provider Boots Hate Site Off the Internet
by Ken Schwencke
The web services company Cloudflare appears to have ended its relationship with the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer.
==
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/03/02/waning-storm-posting-trends-stormfronts-financial-backers-and-forum-members
...
Around the time of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency, posts by non-paying members spiked, reflecting the atmosphere of racial anxiety in the country at the time.
This initial wave peaked around the signing of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in early 2010 and declined precipitously until mid-2011 and the run-up to the 2012 presidential elections.
Posts by non-paying forum members spiked again around the shooting death of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014, a high-water mark for the site that has not been reached since.
...
---
https://www.splcenter.org/20140401/white-homicide-worldwide
no link img
Stormfront, the leading white supremacist Web forum, has another distinction — murder capital of the Internet.
Want to read this in PDF form? Click here.
A typical murderer drawn to the racist forum Stormfront.org is a frustrated, unemployed, white adult male living with his mother or an estranged spouse or girlfriend. She is the sole provider in the household. Forensic psychologists call him a “wound collector.” Instead of building his resume, seeking employment or further education, he projects his grievances on society and searches the Internet for an excuse or an explanation unrelated to his behavior or the choices he has made in life.
His escalation follows a predictable trajectory. From right-wing antigovernment websites and conspiracy hatcheries, he migrates to militant hate sites that blame society’s ills on ethnicity and shifting demographics. He soon learns his race is endangered — a target of “white genocide.” After reading and lurking for a while, he needs to talk to someone about it, signing up as a registered user on a racist forum where he commiserates in an echo chamber of angry fellow failures where Jews, gays, minorities and multiculturalism are blamed for everything.
:{:{}:
}:
Assured of the supremacy of his race and frustrated by the inferiority of his achievements, he binges online for hours every day, self-medicating, slowly sipping a cocktail of rage. He gradually gains acceptance in this online birthing den of self-described “lone wolves,” but he gets no relief, no practical remedies, no suggestions to improve his circumstances. He just gets angrier.
:{:{}:
}:
And then he gets a gun.
The hatemaker:
Don Black, the former Alabama Klan leader who founded and still runs Stormfront, provides an electronic home and breeding ground for racists who have murdered almost 100 people in the last five years. To this day, he remains fiercely unapologetic, even as he rakes in donations from his forum members.
It is a myth that racist killers hide in the shadows. Investigators find that most offenders openly advocated their ideology online, often obsessively posting on racist forums and blogs for hours every day. Over the past two decades, the largest hate site in the world, Stormfront.org, has been a magnet and breeding ground for the deadly and the deranged.
There is safety in the anonymity of the Web, and comfort in the endorsement others offer for extreme racist ideas, argues former FBI agent Joe Navarro, who coined the term “wound collector.” “Isolation permits the free expression of ideas, especially those which are extreme and which foster passionate hatred,” Navarro, who helped found the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Division, wrote in 2011 in Psychology Today. “In this cocoon of isolation the terrorist can indulge his ideology” without the restrictions of the routines of daily life.
Then there is a trajectory from idea to action.
Though on any given day, fewer than 1,800 registered members log on to Stormfront, and less than half of the site’s visitors even reside in the United States, a two-year study by the Intelligence Report shows that registered Stormfront users have been disproportionately responsible for some of the most lethal hate crimes and mass killings since the site was put up in 1995. In the past five years alone, Stormfront members have murdered close to 100 people. The Report’s research shows that Stormfront’s bias-related murder rate began to accelerate rapidly in early 2009, after Barack Obama became the nation’s first black president.
For domestic Islamic terrorists, the breeding ground for violence is often the Al Qaeda magazine Inspire and its affiliated websites. For the racist, it is Stormfront.
Making Excuses
Investigators find that most offenders openly advocated their ideology online for lengthy periods while sucking up the hatred around them. Yet Stormfront’s founder, former Alabama Klan leader Stephen Donald “Don” Black, shrugs off responsibility for what he has wrought.
The homicidal trend began just four years after the site went up. On Aug. 10, 1999, Buford O’Neil Furrow, a known user of Stormfront, left his parents’ home in Tacoma, Wash., and drove to Los Angeles, where he shot and wounded three children, a teenage girl and an elderly woman at a Jewish day care center. Furrow then shot and killed a Filipino-American postal worker.
Buford Furrow (AP Images/
Eight months later, on April 28, 2000, just days after exchanging E-mails and a phone call with a woman he met on the Stormfront “Singles” page, Richard Scott Baumhammers shot and killed his next-door neighbor, a 63-year-old Jewish woman. Next, he drove to the victim’s synagogue, shot out the windows and painted two large red swastikas on the front of the building. And then Baumhammers went on a shooting rampage, specifically targeting minorities and murdering five people. A sixth victim would die of his injuries several months later.
:{:{}:
}:
When Baumhammers’ connection to Stormfront was pointed out in media reports, Black denied any responsibility. He claimed Baumhammers “had been previously diagnosed as something worse than schizophrenic.” But Black did note that attention to the killings had more than doubled the number of “hits” to his website.
Richard Baumhammers (AP Images / Keith Srakocic)
Furrow, 37, and Baumhammers, 34, were both unemployed and still living with their parents at the time of the killings. The next Stormfront user to commit murder was also living with his parents. This one was in the ninth grade.
On April 19, 2002, Ian Andrew Bishop, a 14-year-old so-called “Stormfront Youth” killed his brother by striking him repeatedly in the head with a claw hammer, allegedly because he thought 18-year-old Adam Bishop was gay. “He said his brother was a faggot,” said a 15-year-old witness. “He said he wanted to kill his parents, too.”
Bishop’s activity on Stormfront included downloading and distributing Third Reich images while promoting his racist views in the neighborhood. Described as a “racist bully with neo-Nazi views,” Bishop’s attorney cited his activities on Stormfront as evidence Ian was “troubled” and “drawn to the skinhead philosophy.”
Again, Black denied any responsibility in the Bishop case, claiming “Bishop killed his older brother because he thought his parents liked him better. But we’re ‘responsible’ for that too,” he added sarcastically, “since he was a ‘good kid’ before visiting SF.”
Ian Andrew Bishop (Tribune-Review / AP Images / Scott Spangler)
The Body Count Skyrockets
James “Yankee Jim” Leshkevich
The murders would keep on coming, their frequency accelerating. On Feb. 19, 2008, James “Yankee Jim” Leshkevich, who had posted more than 5,000 times to Stormfront in the preceding four years, beat and strangled his wife to death in the living room of the home they shared in West Hurley, N.Y. Then he hung himself.
Similarly, a little over two years later, on April 21, 2010, Curtis Boone Maynard shot and killed his ex-wife outside her Lake Jackson, Texas, home. He then shot his 16-year-old stepdaughter in the face, severely wounding her, before killing himself during a subsequent police chase. Maynard had posted almost 900 times on Stormfront before he was banned for publishing personal information about a black woman who had voted as a juror to acquit a black murder suspect.
In April 2009, a few months after Obama’s inauguration and less than four hours after logging on to his Stormfront account, Richard Andrew Poplawski ambushed, shot and killed three Pittsburgh, Pa., police officers, and wounded a fourth.
Richard Poplawski (AP Images/ Jason Minick)
Poplawski, 22, was unemployed and living with his mother when an early morning argument escalated between the two and resulted in her calling 911. Poplawski waited just behind the front door with his AK-47 assault rifle and shot and killed the first three police officers who responded. Another officer was injured before a SWAT team shot and wounded Poplawski and then took him into custody.
Fifteen weeks before the murders, Poplawski, who went by the name “Braced for Fate” on Stormfront, wrote that he kept his AK-47 “in a case within arms reach.” He’d been a registered Stormfront member for 20 months prior to the murders, but with a Web footprint going back to at least 2001. He started on pro-Second Amendment forums, moved to conspiracy pages and finally landed at Stormfront, where he had at least two user names, “Braced for Fate” and “p0p633.” An aspiring skinhead, Poplawski posted his “Iron Eagle” Nazi tattoo under his p0p633 user name in 2007, about 16 months before the killings.
The worst mass murder was still to come.
Anders Breivik
On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik set off a truck bomb in front of a government building in downtown Oslo, Norway. The blast killed eight and injured hundreds more. Dressed as a police officer and armed with a Ruger Mini-14 assault rifle and a Glock pistol, Breivik then boarded a ferry to Utoya Island, where a Workers Youth League summer camp was being held. There, Breivik shot and killed 69 people, most of them teenagers.
When he was taken into custody by a SWAT team without incident, Breivik calmly told authorities that he blamed the government for allowing Norway to be “invaded” by Muslims.
At the time of the killings, Breivik had been a registered member on Stormfront for almost three years. Under the username “year2183,” Breivik introduced himself in October 2008. In one post he wrote, “Feminism, corrupt treacherous politicians, a corrupt treacherous media, pro-immigration Jewry and a corrupt academia is the hole in the ‘dike,’ while Muslims are the water flooding in.” After a rant about Islamic enemies, Breivik was warmly welcomed by close Black confidant Freeland Roy Dunscombe, or “TruckRoy”: “glad to have you here.”
Hours before he began his terror campaign, Breivik E-mailed a copy of his racist manifesto to two other influential Stormfront members, Billy Joe Roper (see related story, p. XX) and Timothy Gallaher Murdock, who runs the racist WhiteRabbitRadio.net. In his manifesto, Breivik claimed he was banned from Stormfront, though a search shows no suspension. Breivik later admitted he was not removed as a registered member.
“I was never kicked out of Stormfront,” he said last September. “Instead, I attacked them in the compendium in order to protect them … [as] an army of leftist journalists otherwise would strike hard.”
Breivik’s large purchases of chemicals before the attack had been reported to the authorities, who took no heed because he claimed he was a farmer. If they had looked at Breivik’s posts on Stormfront, they might have felt differently. His racist vitriol and posts suggesting overthrowing his government almost certainly violated Norway’s laws against hate speech. Following the pattern for so-called “lone wolves,” he had broadcast his violent intentions ahead of time on Stormfront.
A year later, in August 2012, after Breivik was convicted and sentenced to 21 years in prison, a Stormfront thread announced the sentence and included a photograph of Breivik defiantly raising his fist in the air. Some posters lauded Breivik as a “hero” and a “P.O.W.”
Black provided his own commentary on Breivik. “Unfortunately, I happened upon this thread this morning, just before our radio show. This makes me want to pull the plug on this place and never look back,” Black wrote, before laying out a stark assessment of those on his site: “We attract too many sociopaths.”
Monetizing Murder
Although Stormfront posters eventually grew critical of Breivik’s actions, the public interest the attack generated on the site resulted in the highest number of registered users ever on the forum. In the 24 hours after the killings, 4,481 members were online, a record that stands to this day. Alexa, which monitors Web traffic, shows that Stormfront visits spiked globally on the day of the Oslo attacks. This means money to Black, whose banner ads pay him by the click.
A year after the Oslo terrorist attacks, in mid-summer 2012, more media came Black’s way from two more mass killings and a bizarre mutilation murder attributable to registered members.
J.T. Ready (Corbis / Natalie Keyssar)
On May 2, 2012, less than six hours after logging in and posting on Stormfront, Jason Todd Ready shot and killed four people, including an infant, before killing himself. Ready, 39, was unemployed and living with his estranged girlfriend, Lisa Mederos. He shot and killed her, her daughter Amber and her 15-month-old granddaughter, Lily. Ready then shot and killed Amber’s 24-year-old fiancée, Jim Hiott, before turning his gun on himself. Ready had made 678 posts on Stormfront in the two years prior to his death, often raising funds for his armed anti-immigrant militia group, U.S. Border Guard.
Luca Rocco Magnotta (FEREX / AP Images / Rex Features)
Also in May, Black was taking media heat over a Canadian murder suspect known as Luka Rocco Magnotta, 29, who had posted on Stormfront under two usernames in the 12 months prior to the torture and dismemberment killing of a Chinese immigrant. In September 2011, eight months before the murder, Magnotta complained: “It was unfare [sic] that every country in the world was able to have their heritage protected, blacks get their own countries, chinese [sic] get their own countries ... if white people want their own countries then we are denied that right.” Magnotta, whose real name is Eric Clinton Kirk Newman, also followed Black on Twitter.
Wade Michael Page (Contributed)
Three months after the Magnotta murder, on Aug. 5, 2012, Wade MichaelPage shot and killed six people at a Sikh temple, including an 84-year-old woman, and wounded four others before killing himself during a shootout with police. Page, a longtime racist skinhead, had been a registered user on Stormfront, under various user names, for more than 10 years.
Motivational Culpability
A haggard-looking Don Black appeared on a CBS News affiliate’s newscast three days after the Sikh Temple killings. While attempting to minimize Page’s activities on Stormfront, Black said Page’s actions were “counterproductive” but then added, “We think the Sikhs should be back in Punjab.”
As Alexa Internet Inc. shows, though Stormfront’s online popularity had been in a gradual decline over the previous two years, the August 2012 Sikh temple killings resulted in one of the highest and most significant spikes of the year for the online forum (there also was a notable and rapid decline following the Sikh temple killings). And Stormfront appears to have benefited financially from the publicity that summer. Monthly donations to the site rose from $6,545 in August 2012, to $8,028 in September to $10,032 in October of that year.
A strong argument could be made that Stormfront is, in effect, monetizing murder. And Black’s personal history undermines the argument that he had no reasonable way to know how his website and the hatred he hawks was attracting and motivating a new breed of unstable, sociopathic killers. That ugly reality has been a recurring theme in Don Black’s life for almost half a century.
A Lifetime of Hate
In many respects, Don Black resembles the prototypical killers that seem to be drawn to Stormfront. Black, 60, is a frustrated, unemployed white adult male living with an ideologically estranged wife, Chloe Hardin Black, who has publicly denounced the racist movement. She is the sole provider in the household.
Black spends hours every day online, utterly convinced of the supremacy of his race while expressing frustration with the inferiority of his outcomes. He occasionally complains about the sociopaths Stormfront seems to attract or laments that his only son, Derek, recently publicly denounced white supremacy.
A young Don Black (seen here in Klan robe) has known most key racist leaders in his life, including David Duke (in tie); Jerry Ray, the brother of Martin Luther King assassin James Earl Ray; and Joseph Paul Franklin, a racist serial killer who was executed last year.(The Tennessean / Jimmy Ellis)
Black’s 46-plus years of involvement with the racist movement started at the age of 15, when, like the fratricidal Ian Andrew Bishop, he began distributing racist fliers around his high school. That he was involved with a subculture of sociopaths would become quite obvious, given who Black met while on his very first “movement” road trip at the age of 16.
In the summer of 1969, Black traveled to a World Union of National Socialists meeting in Arlington, Va., in the back seat of a beat-up Chevy Chevelle, sitting next to a 19-year-old James Clayton Vaughn for more than 12 hours. Neo-Nazi and soon-to-be Klan leader David Duke was driving.As Black recollects, Vaughn was the very first person he met in the “white nationalist” movement to which he would devote his life.
Joseph Paul Franklin (AP Images/ Al Behrman)
Vaughn, who would change his name to Joseph Paul Franklin, later became probably themost prolific racist serial killer in U.S. history, targeting interracial couples and killing as many as 20 people in several states between 1977 and 1980 (he was convicted of eight murders). Franklin was executed last year.
:{:{}:
}:
Black’s exposure to the worst of the racist movement continued the following year. He spent his 17th birthday in the hospital with a bullet wound in his chest after being caught trying to steal the mailing list of the racist National States Rights Party. The shooter, Jerry Ray, was the brother of Martin Luther King Jr. assassin James Earl Ray. Jerry Ray was prosecuted for attempted murder but acquitted after claiming self-defense. Black pleaded guilty and received one year of probation.
Jerry Ray
By 1975, Black was a rising leader in the Alabama wing of David Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a position he kept for the next 12 years. But his ambitions went beyond the robe and hood. On April 27, 1981, Black was arrested with nine other white supremacists as they prepared to board a yacht to invade the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica, oust its black-run government, and transform it into a “white state.”
Black’s resulting three-year federal prison sentence was time well spent taking classes in computer programming. He eventually set up a dial-up bulletin board service for the radical right and, in March 1995, that service evolved into Stormfront.org, the Web’s first and best-known hate site. Black saw clearly that with this new technology, white supremacists might finally bypass the mainstream media and political apparatus he felt had long restricted the racists’ message.
“The potential of the Net for organizations and movements such as ours is enormous,” Black told a reporter in 1996. “We’re reaching tens of thousands of people who never before had access to our point of view.”
He was right.
:{:{}:
}:
In January 2002, Stormfront had a mere 5,000 members. But only a year later, membership had more than doubled to 11,000; and a year after that, in early 2004, it had reached 23,000. By this year, membership had hit about 286,000 registered users, though most were inactive. These numbers didn’t include the many people who simply read Stormfront postings without actually joining up (becoming a member allows one to post messages and also to view personal information.) Stormfront also became home to other hate sites that shared its servers and advertised their wares.
After a life basically monetizing ethnic hatred and death, Don Black, who walks with a cane from a 2008 stroke, has become increasingly philosophical. On the Stormfront page eulogizing serial killer Franklin, he wrote: “I may be the only person here who actually knew Franklin. I’ve been contemplating how my life would have been different had he remained the only ‘White Nationalist’ I’d ever met. I’d have quit in disgust. I had just turned sixteen, and maybe I could have then led a ‘normal’ life.”
With nearly 100 bias-related homicides attributable to registered members of his site since 2009, a great many “normal lives” are no longer being led.
Still, Black remains defiant. The theme song for his daily radio program on the Rense Radio Network is a remake of Johnny Cash’s “I Won’t Back Down.”
His wife, his son, and those who cared for the victims of racist killers connected to Stormfront probably wish he would.
---
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/don-black
... While the site remains popular in racist circles today, Black came under criticism in 2008 from other white supremacists for toning down its offensive content and for the claimed renunciation of racism made by his wife, Chloe Black, to a reporter.
In His Own Words
"The people that visit Stormfront have a righteous indignation to the Israelization of America. Zionism unbound, that is what goes on in Washington, D.C., these days. … [T]he Jewish people demolish homes abroad and condition peoples minds with the media here in the U.S.A."
:{:{}:
— 2004 interview with Impact News
}:
"I remember [the 1950s] quite well, that a lot of people were mad about blacks. They were mad about school integration and black crime…. [B]ut …it was kind of rare to find someone that really, fully understood the Jewish involvement … behind all of this promotion of the destruction of culture and our heritage, the destruction of our schools and our neighborhoods. … [W]ith the Internet — and, I think, with this involvement in the Middle East, American involvement in the Middle East — everything's changed. I mean, we have to calm down people sometimes on Stormfront about the Jews."
— Stormfront.org radio, 2008
"I get nonstop E-mails and private messages from new people who are mad as hell about the possibility of Obama being elected. White people, for a long time, have thought of our government as being for us, and Obama is the best possible evidence that we've lost that. This is scaring a lot of people who maybe never considered themselves racists, and it's bringing them over to our side."
— 2008 interview with The Washington Post
"[I]f Obama wins, then Americans, white Americans, are really going to realize where they stand. It'll be demoralizing for a lot of our people, and also white people throughout the world, to have the world's greatest military power headed up by a black."
— Stormfront.org radio,2008
Criminal History
On April 27, 1981, Black and nine other white supremacists were arrested as they prepared to board a yacht stocked with weapons and ammunition to invade the Caribbean island of Dominica and take over its government.Black served three years in federal prison for his role in the invasion plot and for his violation of the Neutrality Act.
In 1987, Black, along with Klan leader David Duke,was reportedly charged with reckless conduct and for illegally blocking a state highway in Forsyth County, Ga., where they had traveled to take advantage of simmering racial tensions.
Background
Going back to high school, Don Black has always been one of the more enthusiastic proponents of white power. One of his first forays into the organized movement was in the 1970s, when he volunteered for the late white supremacist J.B. Stoner's unsuccessful run for governor of Georgia. He stayed with the campaign until Stoner's campaign manager,Jerry Ray, the brother of Martin Luther King Jr. assassin James Earl Ray, shot Black in the chest. The shooting apparently stemmed from accusations that Black had broken into Stoner's office to steal a mailing list for the National Socialist White People's Party.
After recovering, Black went on to join the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the group headed by David Duke in the 1970s. Working on Duke's unsuccessful campaign for Louisiana state Senate, Black won Duke's trust, moving up to become his mentor's right-hand man in addition to his post as Alabama grand dragon, or state leader. When Duke left the group amid allegations that he'd tried to sell its membership list to another Klan group for $35,000, Black took over. Later, in the 1970s, according to The Crusader, a KKK newspaper, Black sponsored marches in defense of Robert Chambliss, who stood accused (and was later convicted) of the 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls in Birmingham, Ala. Not long after, Black got into trouble himself. In 1981, he and nine other white supremacists were arrested as they prepared to board a yacht with which they intended to invade the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica, oust its black-run government, and transform it into a "white state." Black's resulting three-year federal prison sentence was time well spent. He took classes in computer programming that would provide the basis for his future.
Not long after his release, Black launched an unsuccessful campaign for a U.S. Senate seat from Alabama. He wound up marrying Duke's ex-wife, Chloe Hardin, and moving to West Palm Beach, Fla. Once there, he began dabbling with his computer, eventually setting up a dial-up bulletin board service for the radical right. By March 1995, that service evolved into Stormfront.org, the Net's first ever and best-known American hate site.
Black saw clearly that with this new technology, white supremacists might finally bypass the mainstream media and political apparatus, getting their message out to people who otherwise would never hear it. And he realized the importance of the fact that people who now could read about white supremacist ideas in the privacy of their own homes without fear of embarrassment or reproach. "The potential of the Net for organizations and movements such as ours is enormous," Black told a reporter in 1996. "We're reaching tens of thousands of people who never before had access to our point of view."
The results have been fairly spectacular. In January 2002, Stormfront had a mere 5,000 members. A year later, membership reached 11,000; and a year after that, in early 2004, it had 23,000. By 2008, membership hit about 133,000 registered users, though the majority were inactive. These numbers don't include the large numbers who simply read Stormfront postings without actually joining up (becoming a member allows one to post messages and also to view personal information posted by other members).
One of Stormfront's main attractions is that it provides forums for so called "white nationalists" to post articles, engage in forum discussions, and share news of upcoming racist events. Below the Stormfront motto, "White Pride World Wide," are links to racially charged news stories like "Mestizo Rapes White Woman in Elevator" and "Negro Man Stabs Elderly Woman, Shoots Detective, Negroes Screaming ‘Police Brutality." Stormfront's various forums can also contain threads like "What do you want done with theJews?," "Aryan Storm Rising," and "To Hate or Not to Hate." But one thing you won't normally find on Stormfront today, unlike in its early years, are racial slurs. In fact, new members are explicitly warned not to use such language, and also not to post violent threats or anything describing illegal activity. It's not that Stormfront is about moderation. The talk is all about the evils of African Americans, homosexuals, non-white immigrants, and, above all, Jews, who are blamed for most of what's wrong in the world. But Black clearly has modeled his site on some of the tactics used by David Duke, who famously urged his Klan followers to "get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms." As Black once told a reporter, "We don't use the ‘nigger, nigger' type of approaches."
Duke and Black have remained close over the years. In 2004, Black was on hand to celebrate the end of Duke's one-and-a-half year federal prison term (for mail fraud and misstating his income taxes) at a New Orleans event put on by Duke's European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO). Black signed on to Duke's "New Orleans Protocol," a set of principles "pledging adherents to a pan-European outlook." More recently, Duke has been a regular on Black's Stormfront.org Radio, an Internet radio program that features white supremacists.
In 2008, Black made the news when the Intelligence Report reported that his wife Chloe worked for Emilia Fanjul, wife of sugar baron Jose "Pepe" Fanjul, as an executive assistant. Part of Chloe's duties involved serving as a publicist for Glades Academy, a charter school created by Emilia Fanjul to help poor minority children. Despite having attended an event put on by the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens a month earlier, Chloe Black told the Palm Beach Post, "I am not involved with the website [Stormfront] and do not agree with extremist or racially prejudiced views." The Post, based on information supplied by the Southern Poverty Law Center, also reported that Don Black had recently toned down Stormfront, banning many symbols of Nazism that formerly were common on the site, including swastikas and SS lightning bolts, and getting rid of particularly offensive terms, including "nigger." White supremacists were not happy. In racist Web forums, they ripped both Don and Chloe, denouncing them for caring more about money than their beliefs.
The 2008 presidential election gave Stormfront a lift. Don Black boasted on the site he was seeing six times the usual web traffic because of a possible Obama win. "There are a lot of angry White people out there looking for answers," he wrote. "Let's show them. We will not be defeated."
In 2009, the BBC reported that five American right-wing extremists were among 16 individuals banned from entering the United Kingdom for reasons of "fostering extremism or hatred." Black was one of those banned. According to the U.K. Home Office (the lead U.K. government department for immigration and passports), Black was banned for "promoting serious criminal activity and fostering hatred that might lead to inter-community violence in the UK."
On July 15, 2013, the Southern Poverty Law Center received an unsolicited E-mail from Black’s 24-year-old son Derek in which he renounced the white nationalism he had been taught by his father. Derek, who had started a children’s page on Stormfront at age 12 and who had later hosted a radio show featuring racist guests, cited a “gradual awakening process” to explain his change of heart. He wrote that he had come to see the arguments of white nationalism as “principally flawed,” adding that he had realized that American society is marked by an “overwhelming disparity between white power and that of everyone else” and that white nationalism was really about “an entrenched desire to preserve white power at the expense of others.”
“Advocating for white nationalism means that we are opposed to minority attempts to elevate themselves to a position equal to our own,” wrote Black, who had just finished his third year at New College of Florida. “It is an advocacy that I cannot support, having grown past my bubble, talked to the people I affected, read more widely, and realized the necessary impact my actions had on people I never wanted to harm.”
Derek’s renunciation followed a November 2012 post to a students-only forum at his college in which he wrote that he was not a white supremacist and that, contrary to the assumptions of his peers, he supported same-sex marriage, environmental regulation, and legal abortion.
Don Black, writing on Stormfront, expressed surprise while confirming that Derek had indeed penned the E-mail, contrary to suspicions of others in the white nationalist movement that he had been blackmailed by the SPLC. “I don’t want to talk to him, but his big sister called him, and he confirmed that he had written what the SPLC posted,” Black added. “He says he doesn’t understand why we’d feel betrayed just because he announced his ‘personal beliefs’ to our worst enemies. Oh well. Just when I thought I couldn’t lose anything else.”
Stormfront entered its 20th year in March of 2015 with Black still at the helm. Commanding a website with nearly 300,000 users as well as a daily radio show with the ability to reach a global audience makes Black one of the most recognizable and active white nationalists in the movement today.
---
3/17
---
no graphs
This post is part of a continuing Hatewatch series examining the Newslinks & Articles section of Stormfront.org. Until last summer, Stormfront was the most trafficked white supremacist website online.
High-level analysis of the site’s registrations, the activity of its posters, and their financial contributions reveals an underfunded and dated hate forum struggling to bring in new members despite an unprecedented level of attention given to white nationalism and supremacist ideologies over the past year.
Despite the fact that registrations have declined precipitously since President Barack Obama was elected to his first term, overall posting to the site’s most popular section has remained at historically high levels. This spike began as user registrations peaked around 2008 and persisted through the end of 2016.
Since early 2004, cumulative registrations — all accounts that have been created, both active and dormant — to Stormfront have increased steadily. However, the number of unique posters per month over that same span has remained consistently low, hovering around 1,000 users contributing at least one post to any Newslinks & Articles thread.
This trend indicates that while those roughly 1,000 active posters may not be the same each month, the number of dormant accounts on Stormfront is increasing rapidly.
To get a better idea of the true number of active accounts at any given period on Stormfront, Hatewatch analyzed the activity of posters in three-month intervals.
An active user is anyone who posted at least once per three-month interval. While there was a high degree of variance in successive activity periods, from late 2008 until the end of 2016, the number of posters fluctuated in a range between 6,000 and 10,000.
Notable outliers during the period examined were the reelection of President Obama in 2012 and the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer who fatally shot Trayvon Martin, in July of 2013 – the all time highest number of unique posters for any three-month period on Stormfront.
The spike in posters around the Zimmerman trial is significant because the shooting and subsequent trial was a lightning rod for white supremacists that have long labored to construct a false narrative of black-on-white crime and white victimhood. Dylann Storm Roof, who went on to murder nine parishioners of the Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston in 2015 cited the Zimmerman case as what prompted him to search “black-on-white crime” in Google, and “awakened” him to a fictional epidemic of crimes against whites.
Roof was a registered member of Stormfront and used the forum to attempt to meet other Columbia area racists, according to testimony offered by FBI Special Agent Joseph Hamski during the Roof trial.
---
http://gizmodo.com/google-wont-alter-the-holocaust-denying-results-for-di-1790025043
==
https://www.splcenter.org/resources?f[0]=field_ideology%3A11495
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2017/eye-stormer
Propelled by the Trump campaign and a new focus on the 'alt-right,' the Daily Stormer is now the top hate site in America.
The celebrations at The Daily Stormer began early on Nov. 9, just hours after the presidential election was called for Donald Trump. And Andrew Anglin, the neo-Nazi who started the website in 2013, was in full-on arsonist mode.
“Female Hajis Fear to Wear the Headtowel in Public After Trump Win — You Should Yell at Them,” read one of the first post-election headlines written by Anglin that day. “Fear,” he wrote below. “Now is the time for it.We want these people to feel unwanted. We want them to feel that everything around them is against them. And we want them to be afraid.”
“This was not a presidential Election,” Anglin added. “It was a referendum on the international Jewish agenda. And the biggest part of that agenda is multiculturalism.”
Anglin and his confederates had plenty of reasons to celebrate. The man Anglin had endorsed 17 months earlier, in the wake of Trump’s out-of-the-gate description of Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers, had won, shocking the entire American political establishment.
The campaign that preceded that victory, with its dog whistles to the racist right, had helped propel Anglin and his movement into public consciousness.
Just three months earlier, The Daily Stormer had moved into the real world from cyberspace, setting up a “Troll Army” of activists who follow Anglin’s lead in the vicious online harassment of enemies of his movement.
And in July, four months before Trump’s win, The Daily Stormer had become the most popular English-language website of the radical right, eclipsing the Stormfront site that had held that position since the early days of the Internet.
“We won, brothers,” Anglin wrote a few hours after Hillary Clinton conceded. “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.”
The very next day, a new banner went up atop the site: “Andrew Anglin’s The Daily Stormer, ‘America’s #1 Most-Trusted Republican News Source,’ First in Facts — First in Integrity!” Bracketing the site’s new “Republican” masthead were photos of former President Ronald Reagan and President-elect Donald J. Trump.
img
In the Beginning
The early days of the radical right on the Internet were dominated by Stormfront, a huge web forum set up and run by a former Alabama Klan leader and ex-felon named Don Black. Black had learned his programming skills while serving time in prison for an ill-starred effort to invade a black-run Caribbean island.
Black inaugurated Stormfront in March 1995, just a month before the Oklahoma City bombing left 168 men, women and children dead. Over the years that followed, he built up the site to the point where it had hundreds of discussion threads going simultaneously, many of them in sections for languages other than English. The site also benefitted from enormous attention from the mainstream media, mainly because it was the first of its kind and a relative rarity.
The site grew slowly at first but then much more rapidly as the white nationalist movement in Europe and the United States expanded. In early 2002, Stormfront had a mere 5,000 registered users, but that grew to 11,000 in 2003, 23,000 in 2004, and so on. By 2015, Stormfront had surpassed 300,000 registered users, although only a small fraction of that number was actively posting.
Black tried hard to maintain a relatively non-sectarian environment on Stormfront, and he brought in his son Derek as a contributor and, in 2010, as co-host of the racist radio show that eventually became Stormfront Radio. At around the same time, he began hosting real-world conferences of leading radicals.
But clouds were gathering around Stormfront.
In 2008, Black’s wife, thought to be a movement stalwart, told a newspaper, almost certainly disingenuously, that she did not agree with her husband’s views. Five years later, Derek Black famously renounced the movement, initially in a letter to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Don Black also angered many followers by trying to ban talk of violence and the use of racial slurs and Nazi symbology. He took sides in certain movement squabbles, alienating some of his followers. In 2014, the site was further damaged by a Southern Poverty Law Center report documenting that registered Stormfront users had committed nearly 100 murders.
At the same time, Black’s endless pitches for money were growing tiresome to many of those who had backed him, some of them with major cash contributions. And, most recently, his health increasingly became an important issue.
Beginning in 2013 — the same year The Daily Stormer began — Stormfront’s Alexa ranking began to plummet. From a ranking of around the 14,000th most trafficked site on the Internet, it fell to around 40,000th by mid-2015.
Another factor, too, seemed critical. Stormfront’s stodgy presentation and clunky features were increasingly behind the times. Meanwhile, The Daily Stormer was featuring flamboyant and eye-catching — if grotesquely racist and guttural — headlines that functioned as “click bait.” In effect, Stormfront looked like an ancient online version of The New York Times, even as The Daily Stormer increasingly took on the appearance and jazzy language of modern news sites like Buzzfeed.
Gathering Storm
Andrew Anglin grew up in Worthington, Ohio, in a family that did not share his later affinity for Nazism. He describes his ideological journey as beginning with an exploration of “all that Communist Jewish stuff” and including an examination of both Islam and Buddhism. But it seems the real gateway to Anglin’s future beliefs came when he started looking at materials produced by Texas radio host Alex Jones, a wild-eyed conspiracy monger who interviewed Trump during his campaign.
“I started out with normal Alex Jones type conspiracy material, and moved on to weirder conspiracy material,” Anglin wrote in an autobiographical piece. He said that he “then eventually decided Ted Kaczynski [the anti-technology terrorist known as the Unabomber] was right with regards to a coming apocalypse.”
Anglin says he spent time living and working in Southeast Asia, a fact that has led to accusations from his detractors in the movement of “race mixing.” “To this day,” he wrote in words that enraged some white supremacists, “I have very 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.” But he tempered these statements — tolerant words for a neo-Nazi — with the opinion that “Chinese people have no souls.”img: Celebrating fascism: neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin gives the Nazi salute.
Eventually, he came to full-blown Hitler worship, starting a short-lived website called Total Fascism, where he posted his own long-form essays on fascism, race and the alleged role of Jewish people in America. “I had always been into 4chan [an image board website inhabited by many racist radicals], as I am at heart a troll,” or Internet provocateur and harasser, Anglin wrote. “This is about the time /new/ [a particular 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 by community in a real sense, while authoritarianism would allow for technology to develop in a direction that was beneficial rather than destructive to the people.”
On July 4, 2013, Anglin started what would become his main project, The Daily Stormer. The site took its name from Der Stürmer, an astoundingly vile and pornographic Nazi newspaper started by Julius Streicher and specializing in attacking Jews. Streicher was later hanged for war crimes at Nuremberg.
The new site, created from the ashes of Total Fascism, specialized in punchy, image-heavy stories that often rely heavily on quoted material. It used hyperbolic headlines — “All Intelligent People in History Disliked the Jews,” for instance, or “SS Auschwitz Guard Dies Days Before Scheduled Lynching by Kikes” — to grab readers’ attention, build up participation and shift people’s thinking.
Anglin relied heavily on the daily news, although it was news poisoned by his particular views, to drive his message home. “You make a very simple message, where you hit the same points over and over and over again and you repeat them,” he explained in a podcast on his site last year. “That’s been my style. That’s why I do the news. Because it can be new information all the time while still repeating the same points over and over again. … It’s about creating a gigantic spectacle — a media spectacle, which desensitizes people to these ideas.”
One of those who seems to have been “desensitized” to ideas like genocide and race war was Dylann Storm Roof, the young man who murdered nine black churchgoers in South Carolina in 2015 in a bid to start a race war. Posting under the moniker of AryanBlood1488 (the numbers are references to white supremacist slogans), Roof wrote about black-on-white crime — a central topic on The Daily Stormer and Roof’s self-described motive for mass murder.
Getting Real
The Daily Stormer is not merely a propaganda shop. Increasingly, it has become a malignant presence in the real world.
From the beginning, Anglin encouraged his readers to engage in trolling campaigns against his enemies. An early example came in November 2015, when he launched “Operation: Kikebart,” an attack on the right-wing news outlet Breitbart News after it decided to open a news bureau in Jerusalem.
Anglin’s “Stormers,” later rechristened the “Stormer Troll Army,” flooded the Breitbart site with vicious comments, demanding that it close its Israel bureau and accusing it of being part of a Jewish conspiracy. The aim, Anglin said, was to fill the comment sections with neo-Nazi propaganda to the point “where they just give up on trying to ban people, and then we guide their readership toward Jew-hatred by informing them of the truths we possess.”
It got so bad that Disqus, a comment platform used by both Anglin and Breitbart, cut service to The Daily Stormer.
Other early examples include “Operation: Jew Wife,” in which Stormers were directed to flood the website of conspiracist Alex Jones, who was seen as insufficiently anti-Semitic and who allegedly has a Jewish wife. Another campaign targeted Julia Ioffe, a Jewish journalist subjected to a barrage of incredibly vicious electronic attacks after Trump criticized her for her profile of Melania Trump.
Such tactics ramped up in March 2016, when neo-Nazi Andrew Auernheimer, a sophisticated computer user now working with Anglin, wrote code that caused thousands of printers around the country, most of them at universities, to spontaneously begin printing. What emerged, to the shock of recipients, was a pamphlet reading: “White man are you sick and tired of the Jews destroying your country through mass immigration and degeneracy? Join us in the struggle for global white supremacy at the Daily Stormer.”
The stunt generated headlines across the country.
Auernheimer, who goes by the Internet handle of “Weev,” has been increasingly active at The Daily Stormer as Anglin struggles to meet technical hurdles posed by the site’s rising profile. In 2015, Auernheimer bought ad blocks on Twitter and then used Twitter’s metrics report on the success of those ads to gauge how best to popularize certain white supremacist themes.
“I made a promoted campaign for the 14 words [a famous white supremacist slogan] and also for something about whites’ need to defend themselves from violence and discrimination,” he said last year. “Then I targeted it against feminist women and minorities and watched them all flip out. I think the biggest converter to our cause is shit lib reactions. Triggering [outrage] is the national sport. People want to see the blue haired establishment break down and cry.”
On Aug. 23, 2016, Anglin formalized his attempts to affect the real world, publishing a call for supporters to “Register Now for the IRL [In Real Life] Troll Army AKA The Stormer Book Club.” Anglin described the club as “groups to prepare for the coming race war,” a place to “form cells, build bonds, develop brotherhood. You will become stronger, better men. It’s a bit like Fight Club.”
Remarkably, the call produced results. The Southern Poverty Law Center has confirmed that by late 2016 Anglin had managed to produce 31 distinct chapters of his Troll Army that were actually active. A month later, Anglin urged followers to “BUY GUNS!” in case Clinton won the presidential contest. “The race war is coming,” Anglin wrote in that missive, “and it is coming quickly.”
Stormers and the Alt-Right
Long before it adopted the motto describing itself as “America’s #1 Most-Trusted Republican News Source,” The Daily Stormer billed itself as “The Most Visited Alt-Right Web Site.” That was a reference to the so-called “alternative right,” a sort of kinder, gentler rebranding of white supremacy for public relations purposes that has picked up a great deal of steam in the last year.
The Alt-Right is fundamentally about the idea that societies and nations should be based on race, an old mainstay of the radical right. But most of its self-described activists tend to avoid neo-Nazi imagery and Klan robes, preferring to paint themselves as real intellectuals seeking to solve real problems.
Not Andrew Anglin. He specializes in a kind of sophomoric and repulsive humor about topics like the Holocaust. He styles himself a “general,” ordering his Stormer Troll Army into dirty campaigns meant to frighten enemies with threats and insults, often accompanied by publication of their personal information.
But he also sees himself as a guardian of the Alt-Right name. In March 2016, Breitbart published “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” by Breitbart tech editors Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos. The story whitewashed the racism at the core of the movement, enraging Anglin.
“Basically, they claim that everything the alt-right says it believes they don’t actually believe, but simply say they believe as part of a joke to piss off feminists and Black Lives activists,” he wrote in response. “This is not the exact opposite of what’s actually happening, but it is close enough.”
Regardless of these internecine squabbles, the Alt-Right received enormous publicity last year, especially after an August speech by Clinton that lambasted Trump for failing to disavow his support in that movement. One result of Trump’s apparent sympathy for the Alt-Right and Anglin’s adoption of the label was that The Daily Stormer got even more mainstream attention.
Three days before the election, Anglin tried to repay the debt. Announcing “Operation No Survivors,” he implored readers to vote for Trump. The goal was for each of his alleged 100,000 readers from the United States to convince five other people to vote for the man Anglin calls “Glorious Leader.” The comment section of Anglin’s Election Day story detailing followers’ efforts to get out the vote reached a total of some 3,000 posts, thick with racist and anti-Semitic memes.
Whither The Daily Stormer?
On July 18, 2016, The Daily Stormer officially surpassed Stormfront’s traffic totals, making it the most popular English-language radical right website in the world. Andrew Anglin had successfully used computer and communications savvy, rising right-wing populism, the Trump phenomenon, and his own signature vulgarity and aggressiveness to displace Don Black, for years arguably the radical right’s most longstanding and respected cyber-leader. Few had seen it coming.
“The Stormer’s impact has been underrated,” Brad Griffin, a key player at the racist Occidental Dissent website, which is sometimes syndicated at The Daily Stormer, wrote recently. “From my perspective, it sure looked like it was the aggressive trolling of journalists and conservatives on Twitter that put the ‘alt-right’ on the map. … As I watched it unfold, I couldn’t believe how successful the troll armies were at getting under the skin of these people.”
Whether or not those “successes” will continue for The Daily Stormer, which has certainly benefited from the country’s political situation, is not clear. One problem for Anglin is that prominence on the radical right, combined with the power of the Internet, has not always worked out well for racist leaders.
A little-noticed video mounted on YouTube by an enemy of Anglin’s is a case in point. In it, Anglin is seen talking to his own cell phone camera as he walks through a glitzy mall in the Philippines. Bouncing along beside him is a dark-skinned Filipina who appears to be of high school age. She giggles and laughs as the pair walks through the mall, with Anglin occasionally telling her to “shut up.”
The girl, Anglin says, is “my jailbait girlfriend.”
Then he goes on to say that she is “obviously descended from Africans,” adding that she had straightened her hair and gotten a weave — admissions that could easily have the effect of ruining Anglin’s movement stature. In the world of contemporary neo-Nazis, “race-mixing” is a cardinal sin. Commenters on the video lambast Anglin as a “pedo,” a “wigger” (white nigger) and a “pussybitch.”
Apparently, Anglin isn’t worried.
“Dear Liberals,” he wrote days after the election. “You have never been humble in your victories over the White Man. You have gloated. You have insulted us, attacked us, threatened us, condemned us, even while you had the massive advantage over us. Here’s the thing: We are not going to be humble either. We beat you. We beat you badly. And now that you are on the ground, we are going to keep kicking you in the head. I have heard there are no tears in heaven. So you should probably just kill yourselves. And you should livestream it.”
---
If you Google “did the Holocaust happen” the first result is a link from Stormfront.org, a neo-Nazi and white supremacist forum that’s widely regarded as the internet’s “first major hate site.”
That’s troubling for sure, but Google’s response was far more concerning. Google told Fortune that the company is “saddened to see that hate organizations still exist,” but it does “not remove content from [its] search results, except in very limited cases such as illegal content, malware and violations of our webmaster guidelines.” The Google spokesperson made sure to add, “The fact that hate sites appear in Search results does not mean that Google endorses these views.”
Titled “Top 10 reasons why the holocaust didn’t happen,” the first post on the forum asks other Stormfront members to help the original poster come up with reasons the Holocaust did not happen so he can “give a good argument.” People on the message board claim things like “no tons of human remains were ever found” and “Auswitcz [sic] was a place where synthentic rubber was being produced and U.S. intelligence was focused on Auswitcz for that reason. No U.S. intelligence reports ever gave any indication of gassing or mass extermination.” For the record, this is all bullshit. The Holocaust happened.
In an era where misinformation runs rampant online, Google’s refusal to alter these search results is distressing, though not unexpected. (Facebookhas been experiencing similar issues!) In Steven Levy’s history of Google, In the Plex, he recounts when Sergey Brin’s struggle with a similar issue in 2004. He called altering the results “bad technology practice.” But what happens when an uneducated person tries to look up facts and Google sucks them into an online forum spouting conspiracy theories?
==