Neo-Nazi Daily Stormer Allies with Richard Spencer, Harasses Whitefish, Montana Jewish Community
White Nationalist Richard Spencer has brought little more than bigotry and unwanted national attention to Whitefish, Montana, the base of his National Policy Institute (NPI). Just weeks after shouting “Hail Trump” amidst Nazi salutes from his audience at a Washington D.C. conference, Spencer helped import another ill to the Flathead County town – an alliance with an out-of-state neo-Nazi who is now harassing members of the Whitefish Jewish community.
On December 16, neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin began harassing Jewish people in Whitefish who had spoken out against Spencer’s bigotry. Anglin used his Worthington, Ohio-based website, The Daily Stormer, to publish community members’ addresses and contact information alongside their photos superimposed with yellow Star of David patches. Jews all across Europe under Hitler’s regime were forced to wear such patches. Anglin’s website called Love Lives Here – a community human rights organization – a “Jew terrorist group” and urged Daily Stormer readers, “So Then – Let’s Hit Em Up. Are y’all ready for an old fashioned Troll Storm?”
The harassment campaign came after press reports that Sherry Spencer, Richard’s mother, was considering the sale of a building she owns in Whitefish following public exposure stemming from her son’s racist activity. Sherry Spencer’s Whitefish home is listed as the Principal Office address for NPI in records filed with the Virginia State Corporation Commission. Similarly, Andrew Anglin’s father, Gary Anglin, is the registrant for the Daily Stormer website. His office address in Worthington, Ohio has been used to solicit funds for the neo-Nazi page. The Daily Stormer apparently takes its name from WWII-era Nazi Julius Streicher’s Der Sturmer tabloid, notorious for obscene anti-Semitism and “blood libel” claims that Jews engage in ritual child sacrifice. Such scurrilous ideas helped fuel the climate that led to the Holocaust.
Anglin’s harassment continued December 17 when the crass anti-Semite urged Daily Stormer supporters to “Keep calling these people. Keep emailing them. Make it known to them that the jig is officially up. We aren’t playing this game anymore…Hail Victory” [Bold in original]. Anglin’s call to action spurred a barrage of threats directed at a half-dozen people in the community, including one declaring, “Go choke on a shotgun and die…You would all be of greater worth to society as human fertilizer than as citizens.” (See Jewish Leaders Targetted in Posting).
On December 23, Anglin escalated his campaign, announcing plans for an armed march in Whitefish in January. A photo promoting the march includes an image of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz and photos of the Jewish members of the Whitefish community previously targeted by Anglin. The neo-Nazi writes,
“As far as all of you wanting to attend the planned March on Whitefish in January – we’re going to have a pretty stringent RSVP process. Because many protesters will be armed, we have to make sure we weed-out any potential nutjobs. This needs to be extremely professional, which is why we’re mainly relying on pre-vetted skinhead groups.”
Anglin’s plan to rely on neo-Nazi skinheads give lie to his feigned interest in weeding out “nutjobs.”
Trump, White Identity and White Nationalist Strategy
The campaign against Jewish people in Whitefish comes as Spencer and Anglin are working through the implications of a Trump presidency for their movement. A recent podcast by The Right Stuff (TRS) featuring Spencer, Anglin, and TRS’s Mike Enoch provides the context to understand the anti-Semitic harassment in Whitefish.
Finding more common ground than difference, and apparently setting aside recent feuding, Spencer and Anglin discussed the implications of the recent election. “I was totally enthused by Trump,” Spencer said, “But we now are in a new position…I’m afraid that Trump really is going to be a big disappointment burger for us to eat. And I think that we need to…keep pushing and keep hammering.” He concludes,
“Trump was a stepping stone… I will have undying respect for him. But…it isn’t enough. That was the first step towards the identity politics that we want. But we need to keep pushing towards…a different consciousness amongst people.”
Anglin responds,
“I’m totally on board with you…The whole Trump movement was about white identity…What are his policies gonna be? Does it really even matter? I mean, obviously it does matter. And we want to keep pushing him to whatever he can do, and whatever he’s willing to do…[But] ultimately that’s a secondary issue of the movement that’s been created and the momentum of white people to say…”This is our country and we have a right to it?”…It’s always about moving things in the direction you want to go…I think we’ve accomplished a massive thing here.”
These movement “thinkers” advocate exploiting this new context with bolder expressions of white nationalism even as they attempt to press further into the mainstream. On one hand, this involves pushing policies rooted in white nationalism. This surfaced in a December 15 article by Guillaume Durocher in Radix Journal, published by the National Policy Institute and edited by Spencer to promote “scientific” racism. Durocher also writes for white nationalist venues such as American Renaissance and the Occidental Observer. About Trump he scribbles,
“If a reality-TV billionaire can take on the entire liberal-internationalist politico-media establishment campaigning on a national-populist platform and win, then none but God know (sic) what else is possible…In this spirit, I make the following modest proposals that the Trump Administration, and any other patriotic Western governments, could pursue immediately to save both Western civilization and the people who produced that civilization.”
Durocher’s proposals include:
- “The creation of a ‘Greater-European League’ including all Western and European countries…
- [S]hutting down all Third World immigration…
- The abolition of NATO and its replacement with a defensive military alliance of all Western and European nations, including North America, Europe and Russia…
- [P]romote European consciousness and awareness of the primacy of shared ethnic-genetic interests among all our peoples…
- The creation of a vast European-American Market…
- An official objective of raising the birth rates of indigenous Europeans and the European diaspora…Given the scientific reality of heredity, the intellectually and physically best members of our people…should become conscious of their duty to perpetuate the line.”
Durocher’s “modest proposals” broadcast a white nationalist internationalism, the aim to ban immigration by people of color into “European” countries, and a mix of biological determination and its eugenic fellow traveler. Spencer announced plans to release new policy proposals in the coming year and recently discussed running for the U.S. House seat of Representative Ryan Zinke, currently Donald Trump’s pick to be Secretary of Interior.
This attempt to mainstream a bolder white nationalism is accompanied by a second prong – engaging in strident expressions of white nationalism and anti-Semitism and aggressively confronting anti-racists. This is seen in Anglin’s attack on Jews in Whitefish and the warning that “We aren’t playing this game anymore…Hail Victory.” Elsewhere, Anglin calls on even more violent themes from the neo-Nazi movement. Of the December 14 TRS podcast, Anglin wrote in the Daily Stormer that he, Spencer and Enoch “sat down to talk about the goals and the future of our movement…The three of us care not for our own egos or lives…We care only about the agenda, which is:
We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
These, of course, are the notorious “14 Words” penned by neo-Nazi David Lane. Lane was a member of the Order, an underground terror cell formed by members of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations and National Alliance. In 2007 Lane died in federal prison while serving a 150-year sentence for his role in the murder of Jewish talk show host Alan Berg. While Anglin has claimed that his campaign against Jewish people in Whitefish is not violent, he is clearly drawing from violence-related neo-Nazi slogans. An exchange between Anglin and Enoch continued in this vein:
Anglin: “There’s no such thing as being too ambitious…People say you can’t ever do this, you can’t ever just come out and say you’re a neo-Nazi and that you want to gas every Jew there is…[laughter]…In actuality, if you do that, in my experience, you can do it. And people will be like, ok, well, you know, that’s his thing.”
Enoch: “We have lived so long with these bullshit pieties that we’re all expected to pay homage to, right. Meanwhile, our people have been the butt of every joke and every nasty condescending remark…I mean look, you’re supposed to feel so bad about what you [Anglin] just said. But I’m seeing people saying, ‘You know these people in Tennessee that voted for Donald Trump, you know they deserve to burn’…And you’re gonna get mad at me for making a joke about, you know, people burning in an oven – F— You!”
The TRS podcast also gave Richard Spencer a chance to express an anti-Semitism he generally holds tight-to-the-vest. Spencer’s reticence to be openly anti-Semitic is a likely product of his influence by paleoconservatives Paul Gottfried and Sam Francis, who set aside open anti-Semitism in favor of a pan-white nationalism. In a discussion of the place of Jews in western society, Spencer offered:
“I guess the difference [between Jewish and Chinese people] is that unlike the Chinese, the Jews are really in our heads… I’m fine in a way…with the alien way that the Japanese look at the world, you know, because…the Japanese are not an enemy of the white race. But we’re connected with the Jews in this way that we kind of both need each other in some terrible sense… We can’t underestimate their power and the degree to which they really have embedded themselves in our civilization and our psyche. Like it is a powerful thing, we’re not dealing with Mexicans, we’re not dealing with Chinese civilization…The Jews, it’s a much more painful relationship… It’s a very tragic thing” [italics added].
The discussion continues,
Spencer: “They [Jews] kind of need us in a way… But in a weird way, it’s the people that shall not dwell alone, to borrow a title from Kevin McDonald’s book. They do need us.”
Anglin: “It’s a virus. They’re a human disease” [laughter]
Spencer: “Somewhat inflammatory language, but I understand what you’re saying.”
Kevin McDonald is a former psychology professor and active anti-Semite and white nationalist who provides an academic veneer to the movement’s bigotry. A onetime editor of the white nationalist Occidental Quarterly, he argues that Jews are genetically driven to destroy Western societies. Following Anders Brevik’s July 2011 massacre of seventy-seven people at a Norwegian youth camp, McDonald called the mass murderer “a serious political thinker with a great many insights and some good practical ideas on strategy.”
Spencer later discussed plans for a college tour in the coming year, hoping to debate liberal professors about “the legitimacy of white identity” and find campus-based groups and individuals willing to host him. He stated, “I wanna do a college tour…Let’s go to all of these places. Let’s freak everyone out. If you’re not triggering them hard, you’re doing something wrong.”
The attack on the Jewish community in Whitefish, Montana is set in this context of increasing boldness by white nationalists and neo-Nazis in the wake of the Trump election. But Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin’s anti-Semitism is not going unchallenged. Love Lives Here is bringing the Whitefish community together to oppose this outburst of bigotry and support the Jewish community. The Montana Human Rights Network has been actively exposing Richard Spencer’s racism and rallying people around the state to stand together. Bigotry and racism thrive when good people look the other way. This will not be the case in Montana. Please support these groups and stand beside the community of Whitefish.
