The Alt-Right On Campus: What Students Need To Know | Southern Poverty Law Center
MATTHEW HEIMBACH
Matthew Heimbach
Born in 1991, Matthew Heimbach is considered the face of a new generation of white nationalists. He is a regular speaker on the radical-right lecture circuit.
While a history student at Towson University in Maryland, he founded the White Student Union and organized a student night patrol with flashlights and pepper spray to counter what he described as a “black crime wave.” In 2012, “race realist” Jared Taylor spoke to the White Student Union at Heimbach’s invitation. Taylor is the founder of the white nationalist New Century Foundation.
After Towson graduated in 2013, his White Student Union was folded into the Traditionalist Youth Network, a new white nationalist organization cloaking itself in “traditionalism” that was founded by Heimbach and his father-in-law, Matthew Parrott. In late 2014, Heimbach assumed a leadership role in the League of the South as the neo-Confederate hate group’s training director.
Uninhibited and raw in his rhetoric, Heimbach has suggested that African Americans could find a homeland in the South or “areas like Detroit,” charitably adding: “[W]e don’t have to be antagonistic towards them.” He has also said that we “shouldn’t give up California just yet. Because it truly is beautiful in terms of weather, but it’s full of Mexicans and that’s sort of a problem.”
MIKE ENOCH
Mike Enoch
If you can stomach the ugly bigotry, Mike Enoch’s website, The Right Stuff, is a primer for some of the lingo used by neo-Nazis and the alt-right. From “niggertech” (mediocre, gaudy objects) to “ovenworthy” (anything improved by immediate incineration) to the “echoes” meme (putting triple parentheses around the names of people online suspected of being Jewish), it can be found on The Right Stuff.
Raised in a New Jersey suburb, Enoch, whose real name is Mike Peinovich, produces a podcast, The Daily Shoah, in which he rails against Muslims, establishment conservatives and Jews. The podcast, which has reportedly garnered as many as 100,000 regular listeners, allowed Enoch, who is in his 30s, to be considered one of the most influential purveyors of alt-right propaganda. The online magazine Salon described Enoch as someone who “routinely cracked jokes about killing Jewish people and forcibly deporting Muslims and people of African descent.”
When anti-fascist activists alleged in January 2017 that his wife was Jewish, The Daily Shoah co-host “Bulbasaur” tweeted that Enoch belonged in a gas chamber himself. Enoch appeared months later at an alt-right rally in Washington, D.C., as a speaker and railed against the Jews. “When you talk about Jewish privilege, which is objectively provable, we can prove it,” he said. “Who’s in control of the Federal Reserve Bank? Who’s in control of the media? Who’s in control of our foreign policy? Jews. We know that it’s Jews.”
ANDREW ANGLIN
Andrew Anglin
Born in 1984, Andrew Anglin is the founder of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, the nation’s leading extremist website, which aptly takes its name from the gutter Nazi propaganda sheet known as Der Stürmer. True to that vintage, Anglin is infamous for the crudity of his language and for mobilizing his online troll army to harass perceived enemies.
Anglin grew up in Ohio and was radicalized after discovering the work of Texas radio show host Alex Jones, one of the most prolific conspiracy theorists in contemporary America.
Created as a “news” site, the Daily Stormer encourages online trolls and a militia for a coming race war. The website, which has established 31 physical chapters in the United States and more in Canada, has been designated a hate group by the SPLC.
Those who have posted on the website include Dylann Roof, who massacred nine African Americans in Charleston in 2015. Among Anglin’s favorite trolls is “Weev,” the pseudonym of Andrew Auernheimer, who has hacked printers on university campuses to unleash a flood of swastikas and white supremacy fliers.
In December 2016, Anglin joined Richard Spencer and Mike Enoch (pseudonym for Mike Peinovich) on a radio show in which they referred to themselves as “The First Triumvirate.” The move was a bid for unity among three leaders of the fractious alt-right. Following the high-profile doxing of several hosts from The Daily Shoah, one of the alt-right’s most popular radio programs, Anglin took to the Daily Stormer to take up for Peinovich after it was alleged that his wife is Jewish.
In 2017, the SPLC, along with its co-counsel, filed suit in federal court against Anglin for orchestrating a harassment campaign that relentlessly terrorized a Jewish woman and her family with anti-Semitic threats and messages. The lawsuit describes how Anglin used the Daily Stormer to publish articles urging his followers to launch a “troll storm” against the family, which received more than 700 harassing messages.
NATHAN DAMIGO
Nathan Damigo
A 30-year-old former Marine corporal, Nathan Damigo started the group “Identity Evropa” after reading the work of former KKK chief David Duke while serving five years in prison for armed robbery. His group, whose fliers have appeared at dozens of campuses across the country as part of its “#ProjectSiege,” is a reimagining of the defunct National Youth Front, the youth arm of the white nationalist American Freedom Party, which Damigo also led. Members must be of “European, non-Semitic heritage.”
Identity Evropa was founded in March 2016. It hit the ground running just months later over the July Fourth weekend, when supporters posted fliers promoting “European identity and solidarity” in 17 cities. Addressing a class at Cal State Stanislaus, Damigo called himself an “identitarian” – a reference to a racist European movement – and rejected terms like “racist” and “supremacist” as “anti-white hate speech.”