Like 4chan trolls—or, for that matter, millions of Twitter users—Anglin was also less interested in being taken seriously than in getting media attention, even if it was overwhelmingly negative. In one campaign, Anglin encouraged his “Troll Army” to create fake “White Student Union” Facebook pages at elite universities and then forward the links to local media. As with the “Holmies” ruse a few years earlier, the “media took the bait, and reports of racist student groups appeared in several places.”14
Anglin also used the media to amplify troll attacks. He insisted that Daily Stormer articles about some “enemy Jew/feminist” always include links to the subject's social media—implicitly inviting attacks. “We've gotten press attention before when I didn't even call for someone to be trolled,” said Anglin, “but just linked to them and people went and did it.”
Like Breitbart's Milo Yiannopoulos, Daily Stormer's bread and butter was outrageous headlines that drove curiosity and, thus, page views. But, unlike its 1930s fascist namesake, Daily Stormer always hedged its fascism with a hint of irony. One of the most infamous headlines—“All Intelligent People in History Disliked Jews”—was so overblown that it might have been a parody of anti-Semitism.
Anglin's entertaining approach to hate, pseudo-ironic bluster mixed with Sturm und Drang, brought in a large collection of younger and more ideologically diverse readers than traditional hate sites. Daily Stormer was so successful at drawing traffic that, in just three years, it surpassed Don Black's long-time leader Stormfront to become the most visited hate site on the web.
Daily Stormer also operated as a kind of convergence point for the strange journey of 4chan from a chaotic, creative, ridiculous, and obscene virtual clubhouse for nerdy millennials to a neo-Nazi website and troll command center. For example, weev, the hacker interviewed in the 2008 New York Times Magazine article, has served as the Daily Stormer's webmaster for several years, following his release from prison. The site was intentionally modeled after successful liberal blogs like BuzzFeed and Gawker,15 the site that hosted the Tom Cruise video that set off Anonymous's crusade against Scientology. A more far-reaching indictment came from the leaked version of the Daily Stormer's style guide, a document that explicitly spelled out the game plan of Anglin's 4chan-inspired fascism.
Some of the seventeen pages address traditional style concerns—insisting, for example, that links not “stretch into the spacing between words”—but the guide also discusses hijacking the mainstream media. To integrate its neo-Nazi propaganda with more familiar authority, the guide encourages using large block quotes from mainstream sources.16
In fact, aspiring writers are encouraged to make mainstream sources a critical component in every story with a three-part format: commentary, quote from mainstream source, more commentary. Just as the troll armies hijacked the media to spread fake stories and encourage trolling attacks, the Daily Stormer is designed to “co-opt the perceived authority of the mainstream media.”17
While Anglin cites Mein Kampf as required reading, his approach to spoon feeding fascism to readers is pure 4chan. Writers are advised to “always hijack existing cultural memes in any way possible. Don't worry if the meme was originally Jewish.”
Similarly, the guide insists on retaining some sort of humor while attacking Jews or feminists. The claim that “dehumanization is extremely important, but it must be done within the confines of lulz” is also reminiscent of 4chan's credo to do everything for the laughs. Anglin was determined not to make the same mistakes as Anonymous, after its foray into earnest, offline politics left it open to attacks that it was excessively serious.
But the guide also exposes the darkness behind this insistence on abrasive sarcasm. Anglin describes his half-ironic approach to extremist tropes as “I am a racist making fun of stereotypes of racists, because I don't take myself super-seriously.” Then, the truth behind all this obfuscation: “This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes.”18
Visitors to the Daily Stormer are thus bombarded by articles cloaked in the authority of mainstream media mixed with familiar memes and seemingly facetious humor. The goal is to confuse readers, especially those whose first reaction is resistance to fascism. “The unindoctrinated [sic],” the guide notes, “should not be able to tell if we are joking or not.”19
The then-emerging “alt-right” movement associated with Breitbart and 4chan had been jokingly called “Nazis who like memes.” And though Breitbart had tried to position itself both as a rallying point for the “alt-right” without being explicitly racist, Anglin draws a direct line between the two publications. Breitbart's content, he said, is “basically stuff that you would read on the Daily Stormer.”20 Likewise, the slippery, dangerous irony of the Daily Stormer is, in fact, essentially the same game plan advanced by flamboyant, over-the-top Breitbart provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.
In both cases, the desired result is an innovative form of radicalization. Both websites used amusing clickbait headlines to draw in readers, both quoted mainstream sources in an attempt to co-opt their authority, and the articles were often little more than topics to start angry discussions on the voluminous comments thread. There were a few, minor differences. Anglin's prose, blunter and more offensive, was targeted at millennials, while Breitbart's slightly more coy style was easily digestible for less hip, older readers. Unlike Daily Stormer, Breitbart never explicitly endorsed anti-Semitism. In fact, Andrew Breitbart, who was Jewish, founded the site to be ferocious defender of Israel. Nonetheless, coded references like the echo symbol around the names of Jews—e.g., (((Andrew Breitbart)))—were rampant on Breitbart's comment sections.
The similarities were more important, though. Readers of both Daily Stormer and Yiannopoulos may have clicked on the article for a chuckle. But these memes and humor were just like the “cherry flavor”21 in children's medicine. It didn't really matter why readers visited the Daily Stormer, as long as a whole new crop of potential extremists were being exposed to white supremacist memes and arguments.
By bringing readers in through “curiosity or naughty humor,”22 Anglin solved one of the longstanding problems of extremist websites: they had tended to attract people who were already converts to the cause. Both Yiannopoulos and the Daily Stormer made far-right and even neo-Nazi politics part of a larger conversation. And they packaged it in cynical hipster humor, making it easily digestible for a whole new crop of potential extremists with nothing more than a cell phone.
Among the millions of people attracted to the Daily Stormer was someone with the username “AryanBlood1488.” The number “14” is a reference to a white nationalist credo, while 88 is an alphanumeric code for “Heil Hitler,” since H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. The numbers have significance for white supremacists and neo-Nazis either separately or together. Daily Stormer cheekily paid their writers $14.88 per story.
After Dylann Roof's murderous outburst, it came to light that passages in his manifesto exactly matched posts by “AryanBlood1488.” Roof had cited other sources for his inspirational material, movies, websites, in his manifesto. Why he didn't attribute these quotes?
Roof, it turned out, was “AryanBlood1488.” In fact, after shooting nine churchgoers in Charleston, Dylann became a hero to many of the site's readers. Anglin referred to him as DyRo, like a celebrity's shortened name. Roof even received the ultimate 4chan tribute: his own meme, an image representing the bowl cut he always wore.
The role Anglin and weev's website played in Roof's radicalization versus, say, Stormfront is unknown. Completely obvious, though, is how Daily Stormer was designed to appeal to a “normal” twenty-something with no initial interest in neo-Nazi ideology. More importantly, the new media ecosystem in which the Daily Stormer flourished—frantic tweeting, overheated rhetoric, attention hacking of mainstream media, and slippery, mocking hostility—was just as critical to the spread of extremism between 2008 and 2016 as the sharp economic downturn. There was, however, one less recognized factor that contribu
ted greatly to that extremism-friendly media ecosystem.
One early October evening around 1871, two scholarly young men met at a spot overlooking the Vltava River in central Prague. After a brief discussion, they continued to the nearby old Jewish Cemetery, where they concealed themselves behind tombstones. About an hour later, a key clicked in the lock. After a long silence, the gate creaked open, and the hidden men glimpsed a slow procession of long-coated white figures entering the cemetery.
The first knelt before a tombstone, touched the stone three times with its forehead, and whispered a prayer. Twelve more figures followed, walking up to the tombstone and repeating the ritual before kneeling down on the ground. At the stroke of midnight, a sharp metallic sound rang out from the grave and blue flame appeared, illuminating the thirteen kneeling shapes.
A dull voice spoke: “I greet you, Roshe beth Aboth of the twelve tribes of Israel.”1
“We greet you, son of the accursed,” responded the leaders of the tribes of Israel.2
“A hundred years has passed,” continued the voice. “Where do the princes of the tribes come from?”3
Starting with the Prince of Judah, the tribes reported in from cities in every part of Europe—including Amsterdam, Toledo, Krakow, Constantinople, and London. Then the voice called the prince of the Tribe of Aaron to conduct the meeting. He came forward and asked each representative how they could fulfill their plan, which, it quickly became clear, was to enslave Christians and dominate the world.
The Tribe of Reuben said, “All the moveable capital must go over to the hands of the Jews.”4 The representative of Judah demanded: “Transforming the artisans into our factory workers, [so that] we will be in a position to direct the masses for our political purposes.”5 The Tribe of Levi suggested seeding “free-thinking, skepticism, and conflicts”6 with regard to church and schools “under guise of progress and equal rights for all religions.” The leader of the Tribe of Zebulun stated that “support[ing] every kind of dissatisfaction, every revolution, increases our capital and brings us nearer to our goal.”7
Other representatives suggested controlling the press, the financial markets, abolishing usury laws, destroying the Christian conception of family, placing the weakened military class under the power of money, controlling every business based on speculation and profit, intermarrying with Christians, and taking over positions in government as well as becoming scientists, doctors, artists, actors, and philosophers. The Tribe of Simeon advocated controlling the ownership of land and rent collection, but the harsh sarcasm his comments drew suggested that his advice was a little obvious.
Finally, the meeting was adjourned for another hundred years. After the cemetery emptied, the two scholars agreed to sound the alarm about this dire threat to society.
These events as depicted in Sir John Retcliffe's The Jewish Cemetery in Prague and The Council of Representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel are, of course, fictional. The ghostly meeting in a cemetery, the secret rituals, even the presence of Satan were all pieced together by what the publisher described as Retcliffe's “fantastic imagination.”8 Unfortunately, the stories would quickly transmogrify into truth for millions of Europeans.
As Herman Bernstein explains in The History of a Lie, Retcliffe's novelette—his name was actually Hermann Goedsche—was updated by members of the Russian tsarist secret police and republished in 1905 as Protocols of the Elders of Zion, supposedly penned by Sergius Nilus, a mysterious Russian mystic. The Protocols purports to be the minutes of a meeting passed on to Nilus by a prominent, but unnamed, Russian conservative who had in turn received it from an unknown woman who had stolen it from an influential Jewish Freemason in France.
In this version, powerful Jewish leaders gathered in the late nineteenth century to discuss their goals of global hegemony through, among other things, controlling the press and financial markets, as well as subverting the morals of gentiles. It sounds familiar, because it is. According to Bernstein, “Every substantive statement contained in the Protocols originates with [the] Goedsche-Retcliffe novelette.”9
As it turns out, the tsarist police had published the work in hopes of diverting attention from the unrest that was rife in Russia at the time, spurred in part by a humiliating 1905 military defeat at the hands of the Japanese and a series of subsequent revolutions. That effort ultimately failed—the 1917 revolution ended with the murder of the imperial Romanov family—but the Protocols lived on, carried by the exiled Russian elites across Europe.
Far from condemning the fanciful tale to the dustbin of history, its vague details—dates, places, sources—made the narrative more adaptable. The framework in the Protocols was leaned on to explain the Jewish influence behind both Communist revolt and capitalist usury. The evil cabal was reportedly masterminding the perceived decline in Christian morality while the actions of Jewish bankers and Kaiser Wilhelm II, reputedly a Jewish agent, explained the German defeat in World War I.
Indeed, the Protocols was so successful in promoting numerous conspiracy theories over such a short time frame that, in 1921, the Times of London published an exposé debunking the work's veracity. Bernstein's book painstakingly traced the direct path from a fictional novelette to a reputedly real document that appeared that same year, but facts alone could not put a stake in the heart of this preposterous story.
The following decade, a version of the Protocols was assigned as factual by some German schoolteachers. Far from disappearing, the ideas promoted by the Protocols—that Jews are responsible for the evils that befall white Europeans—were very much present during the extermination of two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.
After the horrors of the Holocaust, Nazi emblems, literature, and symbols were banned outright in Germany and restricted or stigmatized in much of the rest of Europe. But the idea of a secretive, international group pulling the strings behind every major event in the world lived on, shape-shifting as needed to accommodate extremists on the right, left, and beyond.
On the far right, anti-Semitism tends to express itself crudely, even flamboyantly, in swastikas, Stormtrooper apparel, and Nazi-era salutes. Sometimes, the debt to the Protocols can be obvious on other points of the extremist spectrum. Consider, for example, Louis Farrakhan's Saviours’ Day Address in Chicago on February 25, 2018. “The Jews were responsible for all of this filth and degenerate behavior that Hollywood is putting out turning men into women and women into men,” the Nation of Islam leader told his audience, then added, “Farrakhan, by God's grace, has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew and I'm here to say your time is up, your world is through.”10
More often, far-left groups avoid explicit anti-Semitism, while still employing code words and phrases that have developed as acceptable euphemisms for the secret Jewish interests “exposed” by the Protocols’ various authors. Thus “financial elite,” “international bankers,” “banksters,” and the “Israel lobby” all became part of the common vernacular of the anti-globalization movement of the late 1990s.11 Not surprisingly, the Protocols also enjoy popularity among Islamic extremists. In 2006, Osama bin Laden described the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as the “Zionist-crusaders war on Islam.”12
But the Protocols also hold a more mainstream appeal in parts of the Muslim world. In 2002, an Egyptian television series called Horse without a Horseman showed one episode each night during the holy month of Ramadan. In the early twentieth century, the heroic Egyptian character fighting British occupiers comes across the Protocols. He has it translated and discovers that many of the things described in the book are happening. Mohamed Sobhi, the well-known actor who played the main character and co-wrote the script, said that the issue of whether or not the Protocols story was authentic didn't matter. “Zionism exists,” he said, “and it has controlled the world since the dawn of history.”13
Conspiracy theories cut across the political spectrum because, ultimately, they are the oxygen that extremism breathes. Such theories combat facts with emotion.
They explain the world dualistically, as good versus evil, and often provide easy scapegoats for complex societal problems. By discrediting the mainstream media and actual experts of all kinds, conspiracy theories create a fertile seedbed for radicalization, and in so doing, they set the stage for violent extremism.
Renowned domestic terrorist David Lane is a case in point.
At one level, David Lane was just another hard-luck kid. He was born in Iowa in 1938 to an alcoholic father who beat him, his siblings, and their mother. The father even sometimes pimped out his wife to friends for booze money. Lane later described him as a “drunk, a scoundrel and low-life of the worst kind.”14 His father died when Lane was only four, although not before he had beaten Lane's brother so harshly that he was permanently deaf. Afterward, Lane's mother had trouble making ends meet and was soon arrested for stealing food scraps out of a garbage bin. All her children were put in an orphanage, and Lane was soon adopted by a Lutheran minister and his wife.
As a child, Lane grew to strongly dislike church and Christianity. He was close with his adoptive mother, but described his new father as having “a personality which practically no one could bear.”15 The family moved to new parishes constantly. At every new school, Lane said he had to fight to prove himself, making him tough, but a “bit of a loner” and resentful of richer classmates.16
Lane eventually graduated from high school in Aurora, Colorado, and went to work for the power company as a troubleshooter. He married his high school sweetheart, but their relationship soon fell apart. He left the power company and became a real estate agent but lost that job for refusing to sell houses in white neighborhoods to African Americans.17
Still in his early twenties, Lane was clearly adrift. He'd found some work but nothing like a career. He actively disliked religion and appeared to have had a weak social network. In addition to the absence of inhibitors, Lane was rife with destabilizers: a divorce, shifting jobs, long-term grievances against his richer classmates, and so on. In such a rudderless state, conspiracy theories gave him narratives that explained his life: none of this was his fault because hidden malevolent forces were controlling his life.
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