ARYAN NATIONS DEFLATES ‘SOVEREIGNS’ IN MONTANA

Several weeks after Anglin’s trolling
of the Mizzou protests, dozens of
White Student Union (WSU) pages
began appearing on Facebook. The reaction
from students and administrations
alike was predictable condemnation and
outrage. After one such response from
the administration at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Anglin
copied the idea for another one of his
own campaigns of organized subversion.
“So, guys. Here’s the plan: Make
more of the White Student Union pages
on Facebook for various universities.
You don’t have to go there. Make one
for Dartmouth, Princeton, etc.,” Anglin
wrote on his website. “If they won’t let it
on Facebook, put it on tumblr or wordpress
or whatever. Get it up, then forward
the links to local media.”
What followed was massive media
coverage — from ABC News, USA Today,
The Washington Post and others — all
asking if the pages were authentic. Only
a handful of the WSUs seemed to be real
groups. However, in a matter of a day,
Anglin was able to help propel extremist
ideas from the neo-Nazi fringe into
the mainstream, and it took no time for
other white supremacists to take notice.
‘Sock Puppets’ and the Klan
“It doesn’t matter who started them
or why, whether it was ‘real’ or a satire,
spontaneous or coordinated: A few
dozen Facebook pages made the concept
of White Student Unions real through
manipulated tension and predictable
media amplification,” wrote Abigail
James on the white nationalist journal
Radix. “Worst-case scenario, this particular
incident fizzles out and we learn
a few new tricks. If we’re sensitive to
opportunities and smart about it, it can
be done again.”
Radix’s endorsement of tactics popularized
by the comparatively lowbrow
Daily Stormer is perhaps even more
remarkable than the media coverage
itself. Radix and its publisher Richard
Spencer claim to be the bourgeois
thought catalog of the “new right,” and
they were suddenly heaping praise and
taking cues from neo-Nazi Anglin’s legion
of anonymous Internet trolls. (To get a
sense of Anglin, consider that his website
is named for Der Stürmer, the obscene
and gutturally anti-Semitic rag published
by Julius Streicher, a Nazi leader who
was executed for crimes against humanity
after being tried in Nuremberg.)
“You are having a quite remarkable
effect. I would say that this recent trolling
campaign of yours, I thought, was
pretty incredible to get all of that mainstream
coverage and all of that absolute
hysteria about Ku Klux Klan on the
Mizzou [University of Missouri] campus,”
Anglin’s Radio Stormer co-host
Sven Longshanks said. “Apart from being
hilarious, it really did make a point of
how easy it was to stir these blacks up.”
Using platforms like Twitter is old
hat for the more savvy Internet racists
who have long taken advantage
of online anonymity to spread racist
messages like “#WhiteGenocide” and
“The Mantra,” a screed devised by Bob
Whitaker, the 2016 presidential candidate
for the American Freedom Party
(AFP), that reads, in part, “Asia for the
Asians, Africa for the Africans, White
countries for everybody!”
Seeding false news stories on this scale,
however, is new for racists like Anglin.
“I’m just one guy. This could have
been done by anybody,” Anglin said.
“What I’m saying about the Holocaust,
and joking about ‘Gas the Kikes’ is that
you’re using the same methods they used
to destroy our traditional systems against
them. … In many ways, it’s the whole concept
behind the Daily Stormer.”
Acknowledging that he has his own
“sock puppet” accounts — accounts registered
to a fake name — Anglin and his
co-host encouraged listeners to strike
out on their own and impersonate people
of color and women in order to conduct
“culture jamming.” Longshanks
went as far as to suggest purchasing disposable
mobile phones to avoid detection
and banishment from social media platforms
like Twitter.
Culture jamming is a tactic normally
associated with anti-consumerist movements,
and typically uses satire and irony
to discredit commercial or political
messages and claims. In that context, it
has sometimes been referred to as “subvertising”
or “guerrilla communication.”
‘Holocaust Humor’
“Anglin’s tactics, really a bastardized
form of cultural jamming, have many
effects. One of them is to discredit the
official narrative. Another one is to sow
seeds of doubt and to suggest a false
equivalency between viewpoints and
positions where there truly is a right
and a wrong,” Mark Dery, a culture critic
who writes about the dark side of the
American psyche, told Hatewatch.
“Another tactical move Anglin is
attempting is to simply stress the mainstream
media. … It’s never been less economically
viable to run a really rigorous
investigative news operation. If you can
just distract reporters and stretch their
resources thin, sending them on a wild
goose chase for what is effectively a
media hoax, in a sense you’ve already
won because they’re not covering stories
that need to be covered, and they’re
squandering resources on something that
doesn’t pan out.”
Last month, using more overt tactics,
racists from around the globe managed
to get the hashtag #BoycottStarWarsVII
to trend over a supposed “anti-white”
agenda — based on the casting of a
female and a black man as the film’s
leads — without the help of the mainstream
media. Director J.J. Abrams was
the primary target for supposedly leading
a campaign of “white genocide” through
his casting choices. The attack generated
enough attention to elicit headlines from
news organizations like The Guardian,
the Daily Mail, Wired and the Daily Beast.
Another popular series of memes has
been built around attaching anti-Semitic
quotes, including some from Hitler, to
images of Taylor Swift. Although primarily
born in noxious environments such
as the depths of Reddit, as well as 4chan
and 8chan’s /pol/ sections, they can be
found with some frequency in the comment
threads of mainstream sites.
Anonymity binds most of these campaigns
together. With the exception of
known leaders on the radical right who
20 splc intelligence report