Andrew “weev” Auernheimer

Andrew “weev” Auernheimer first made headlines as a prolific internet troll and hacker, a denizen of 4chan known for lashing out at perceived enemies online. But his antisemitism was never well disguised. After serving a 15-month prison sentence on hacking-related charges that were overturned on a technicality in 2014, Auernheimer came out as a virulent white supremacist in an article posted on the Daily Stormer, where he railed against the black judge and Jewish prosecutor in the case that sent him to prison. Auernheimer left the United States not long after his release, but continues to advocate for the genocide of non-whites in stories and podcasts posted online, as well as perform system administrator duties for the Daily Stormer.

In his own words

“After we finished rescuing Jewry, we invited them into our home. We treated them as honored guests. They repaid us with treachery. They did the same thing to us that they did to the Germans. They took control of our systems of finance and law. They hyperinflated our currency. They corrupted our daughters and demanded they subject themselves to sex work to feed their families. These are a people that have made themselves a problem in every nation they occupy, including ours.”
— “What I Learned from My Time in Prison,” Daily Stormer, October 2014.

“America doesn't have a gun violence problem, it has a minority problem.”
— Interview with the PandoDaily website, November 2014.

“The first phrase I learned in arabic: ‘al-maot lil yahood’ (death to the Jews).”
— “What I Learned from My Time in Prison,” Daily Stormer, October 2014.

“I unequivocally support the killing of children. I believe that our enemies need such a level of atrocity inflicted upon them and their homes that they are afraid to ever threaten the white race with genocide again. We will not relent until far after their daughters are raped in front of them. We will not relent until far after the eyes of their sons are gouged out before them. We will not relent until the cries of their infants are silenced by boots stomping their brains out onto the pavement.”
— From a flyer Auernheimer sent to 50,000 computer printers across the country, August 2016.

“The reality we have to accept is that we have to kill them all.”
— On Christopher Cantwell’s podcast, discussing non-whites, January 2017.

“Islam is really good about this; it takes every loser and has them kill as many people as possible on their way to failure. This is exactly the kind of person that should be committing acts of mass murder — he had no other options to serve his people.”
— On Christopher Cantwell’s podcast in January 2017, discussing murderer Dylann Roof, who killed nine African Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015.

“Please, Donald Trump, kill the Jews, down to the last woman and child. Leave nothing left of the Jewish menace. It is all on you, my glorious leader.”
— “K---- Tried to Frame Me for Synagogue Threats a Second Time,” Daily Stormer, March 2017.

“I want a global empire run by whites.”
— NPR interview, August 2017.

“If you don’t let us dissent peacefully, then our only option is to murder you. To kill your children. To kill your whole families. There is only one thing absent free speech that we can do to express our dissent and that’s to slaughter you like dogs, and you’re gonna have it coming and your children will deserve to die.”
— Discussing Jews with Christopher Cantwell, December 2017.

Background

Though Andrew Auernheimer, better known by his hacker name, “weev,” first came out as a white supremacist in 2014 in an article posted on neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin’s website, the Daily Stormer, he has said his white nationalist beliefs solidified when he was in his early teens. Auernheimer’s parents adopted two black children when he was young, who he has described as “like foreigners in my house,” and stated, “the very foundations of my existence have been comprised of foreigners breaking apart my home.”

Auernheimer is unique in the racist “alt-right” movement due to strong evidence that he has Jewish ancestors. His Jewish heritage was first reported by Gawker in 2012, though Auernheimer denied the report. In late 2017, Auernheimer’s mother told Newsweek that, despite his virulent antisemitism, Auernheimer has Jewish relatives on “both sides of his family,” as well as Native American blood. Auernheimer subsequently addressed his possible Jewish ancestry, saying, “The idea I have a distant Jewish ancestor, I didn’t care at the time. Even if it were true, who cares?”

Some other white supremacists did care, including Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Worker Party, who told Newsweek, “Jews cannot be part of the white nationalist movement, just as a white man can’t be a part of a black-nationalist group like the Nation of Islam.”

While Auernheimer was gaining infamy as an internet troll in the late 2000s, he was producing online quasi-religious racist and antisemitic podcasts calling himself the “iProphet,” under the auspices of his own “Last Church of Christ,” which he registered as a business in West Hollywood in 2009. Among his iProphet rants: “America is a f-- nation! Jews are violent preobrate [sic] rebels against God’s will! Thank God for IEDs! Israel’s doom is coming. God’s promises are sure! God bless Fred Phelps. God bless Shirley Phelps-Roper. God bless the Westboro Baptist Church!”

In a late 2017 YouTube video, Auernheimer spoke of reviving the Last Church of Christ, decrying religions like Lutheranism and Mormonism for abandoning antisemitism and racism.

Auernheimer’s was questioned about his iProphet antisemitism by law enforcement in 2009 after threatening phone calls were made to a Jewish synagogue in Portland, Oregon. Another man with no apparent connection to Auernheimer was arrested for the threats, but prior to the arrest, a security awareness alert sent out by the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland  printed the year, model and license plate number of Auernheimer’s vehicle with a warning to readers that “if Auernheimer is seen near any Jewish facility, authorities should be notified immediately by calling 911.” Auernheimer was livid, and continues to refer to the incident as “when they tried to frame me for terrorism and used it as an excuse to dox me.”

One of Auernheimer’s first online attempts to attract media attention occurred in 2009 when he exploited a reporting mechanism on Amazon to flag inappropriate content. His target was LGBT literature — “The hypocracy [sic] of the gay community disgusted me,” he wrote in a post about the hack. “So I decided to get them back, and cause a few hundred thousand queers some outrage.”

Over a weekend in April, a script of code Auernheimer wrote caused hundreds of LGBT books to be flagged as “adult” material and excluded from Amazon’s best-seller lists, resulting in the online retailer being accused of corporate homophobia until Auernheimer took credit on his LiveJournal blog.

In 2010, Auernheimer and a fellow hacker discovered a vulnerability in AT&T’s security that exposed the emails of iPad users on its network. Auernheimer revealed the flaw to a reporter at Gawker and was subsequently charged and convicted of one count of identity fraud and one count of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization. The verdict was controversial because Auernheimer claimed he hadn’t stolen passwords or actually hacked into a server.

Auernheimer went to prison in 2013 and was released the next year after the judgment was vacated on a technicality.

Auernheimer’s case had been extensively covered by mainstream and tech media, and he’d been supported by digital freedom advocates like the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But the majority of the coverage ignored Auernheimer’s outspoken racism and antisemitism. Shortly after being released from prison, Auernheimer proudly sported a large swastika tattoo on his chest.

In October 2014, a friend of Auernheimer’s tweeted, “I am a friend of @rabite’s [Auernheimer’s former Twitter handle]. I can’t believe it took a picture of a swastika for y’all to notice his whole white pride trip. He’s not subtle.”

That tweet appeared a day after Auernheimer’s first article for the Daily Stormer showed up online, “What I Learned from My Time in Prison,” which featured a photo of Auernheimer’s swastika tattoo.

“I’ve been a long-time critic of Judaism, black culture, immigration to Western nations, and the media’s constant stream of anti-white propaganda,” he announced, before attacking the judge and prosecutor from his trial. “Judge Wigenton was as black as they come. The whole time a yarmulke-covered audience of Jewry stared at me from the pews of the courtroom. My prosecutor invited the whole synagogue to spectate.”

Auernheimer took on the role of chief technology officer for the Daily Stormer, which had launched the year before in 2013. “Well, you know, it's not - we're not exactly like a normal company, you know? It's not like we all have executive titles and venture backing,” he explained in a 2017 interview with NPR, regarding his role at the Daily Stormer.  

In 2016, the commenting platform Disqus banned the Daily Stormer from using its software, which prompted Auernheimer to set up a bulletin board system specifically for the hate site. The next year, Auernheimer lent his services to the white supremacist website The Right Stuff, founded by white nationalist Mike “Enoch” Peinovich.

Auernheimer announced in his first Daily Stormer post that “my ink and I have expatriated to Canaan.” In November 2014, a reporter with PandoDaily interviewed Auernheimer in Beirut, Lebanon, where Auernheimer declared, “The only hope I have of returning to the land I love, where I was kidnapped at gunpoint and had my house bulldozed, is if there is such a consistent level of change that most of the agents of the federal government are dead.”

Auernheimer chose Lebanon because it has no extradition treaty with the United States, he told the reporter. In the interview, he also praised Timothy McVeigh as a hero, and said, “America doesn’t have a gun problem, it has a minority problem.”

Auernheimer has since bounced around Eastern Europe, and reporting in 2017 has him living in Transnistria, a Russia-backed breakaway region in Moldova. The United States doesn’t recognize Transnistria and hence has no extradition agreements with it. Auernheimer claims there are sealed indictments against him in the U.S., and that Europol attempted to arrest him in Croatia.

“I can go back again [to the U.S.] if I don’t mind going to prison on even more false charges,” he wrote on 4chan’s /pol/ in January 2018. “[T]he Department of Justice specifically says the case against me can be refiled, and they also have refused to give back my property saying that investigations are still open. … They are actively looking for me, I know that because I had to leave a place over surveillance there.”

Despite thousands of miles between Auernheimer and the U.S., he’s consistently used the internet to troll and spread white supremacist messages in America. In 2015, he paid for a promoted tweet saying white people should “defend ourselves from violence and discrimination.” He wrote in a post about the trolling that “you can do some wonderful targeting” on Twitter. “You can aim for people that have donated to Democratic campaigns, or animal rights causes (can’t wait to try to sell those people some furs). You can aim for women who shop fine jewelry. You can also choose to display ads to followers of specific users, like @Jezebel or @feministing.” The latter are Twitter accounts for feminist websites.

“Today I’m going to see how people feel about preventing white people from being subject to genocide,” he continued. “You see, only white countries are to be endlessly subject to hostile waves of minorities brought in bulk from Islamic nations or bred locally on welfare with white tax money.” Auernheimer also pointed out that the tweet he paid for appeared to Twitter users who had blocked his account. “I’m sure later I’m going to have some fun using selective targeting to put some ads in front of people who might really object to my presence in their timeline.”

In 2016, Auernheimer exploited vulnerable web-connected printers across the country several times, sending white supremacist flyers and ads for the Daily Stormer. The first incident occurred in March when computer printers at colleges began to spit out swastika-laden flyers reading, “WHITE MAN are you sick and tired of THE JEWS destroying your country through mass immigration and degeneracy?” along with the Daily Stormer URL.

In early August 2016, Auernheimer struck again, this time explicitly calling for violence against non-whites in flyers sent to college campus printers. “I unequivocally support the killing of children,” he wrote on the flyers. “I believe that our enemies need such a level of atrocity inflicted on them and their homes that they are afraid to ever threaten the white man with genocide again. … We will not relent until far after their daughters are raped in front of them. We will not relent until far after the eyes of their sons are gouged out before them. We will not relent until the cries of their infants are silenced by boots stomping on their brains out onto the pavement.”

The flyers also praised Charleston, South Carolina, mass murderer Dylann Roof, who killed nine black people during a church service in 2015, and Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011 as a supposed political statement against immigration.

Later in August, Auernheimer struck vulnerable printers again, this time with flyers featuring a deranged story of a man who commits mass murder in a Jewish synagogue. The story ended with a promotion for Million Dollar Extreme, a sketch comedy troupe that appeared on the Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim” television show in 2016, and was a favorite of the alt-right. The troupe is led by Sam Hyde, an acquaintance of Auernheimer’s who is often blamed in 4chan hoaxes for real-world mass shootings.

Auernheimer was named in Buzzfeed’s 2017 exposé of Breitbart as one of Milo Yiannopoulos’s collaborators and advisers during Yiannopoulos’s controversial stint at the far-right website. Auernheimer shared his thoughts on Yiannopoulos’s alt-right article for Breitbart in 2016, and Yiannopoulos wanted approval from a Breitbart editor for Auernheimer to appear on his podcast, writing, “He’s one of the funniest, smartest and most interesting people I know. … Very on brand for me.”

Even Breitbart couldn’t take Auernheimer’s extremism, apparently. Breitbart editor Alex Marlow wrote back, “He’s a legit racist. … This is a major strategic decision for this company and as of now I’m leaning against it.” Auernheimer never appeared on the podcast.

In May 2017, when a former neo-Nazi who converted to Islam murdered his two neo-Nazi roommates in Tampa, Florida, Auernheimer chimed in on the Daily Stormer, saying he knew all three men involved, who were members of a neo-Nazi group called Atomwaffen (German for “atomic weapons”).

“Atomwaffen are a bunch of good dudes. … Normal Nazi shitposters, basically,” Auernheimer wrote. “They made just one mistake: they trusted a r-------convert, and now two of them are dead.” Auernheimer, who was both a moderator and a frequent participant in the Daily Stormer Discord chat room, went on to say he’d banned Devon Arthurs, the alleged murderer, from the Daily Stormer Discord chat server, and that Arthurs had been banned from Atomwaffen’s “Ironmarch” forum as well.

After the “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017, during which anti-racist counter-protester Heather Heyer was allegedly killed by a white supremacist who plowed his car into a crowd, Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin wrote a gleeful post calling Heyer a “fat, childless 32-year-old s---.”

This article pushed internet domain registries and companies like Cloudflare, which provides protection from attacks for websites, to kick the Daily Stormer off their platforms. The Daily Stormer lost its .com domain which forced Auernheimer to place the site on a succession of different countries’ domains as well as on the dark web in a cat-and-mouse game wherein the domain registries would kick the Daily Stormer off once they discovered its content.

Auernheimer, apparently in a revenge-seeking move, called for white supremacists to harass mourners at Heyer’s funeral, writing, “What’s the location of the fat s----’s funeral … get on it, e-sleuths. I’d do it myself but slammed with current logistical issues. I want to get people on the ground there.”

Auernheimer’s extreme vitriol even got him kicked off Gab, the “free speech” alternative to Twitter favored by the racist alt-right, in September 2017. He had posted on Gab, “Jews have cornered the whole Internet. And I really think the only way we’ll have any freedom of speech here is if someone teaches them a lesson. Remember how there wasn’t another Ruby Ridge or Waco after Timmy lit up the Murrah building? People in power only learn one way.” Gab said the post violated its policy against threats and terrorism.

In early 2018, Auernheimer found himself in an internet feud with Matt Parrott, who co-founded the Traditionalist Worker Party with his son-in-law Matthew Heimbach. After a story in Wired magazine revealed that a list of members of the neo-Confederate hate group League of the South was leaked to anti-racist activists and the Southern Poverty Law Center, Anglin posted a story titled “No. F------. Lists. — What is So Difficult About That?” In it, Anglin encouraged his white supremacist readers to leave groups they joined that keep membership lists.

Parrott took offense to Anglin’s story, and posted his own retort, with this jab aimed at Auernheimer: “Forget about that Jewish troll who wormed his way up into the leadership of Daily Stormer with full access credentials. Anglin has no time to talk about that.”

Auernheimer responded with an open letter to Parrott, accusing him of “interacting with law enforcement authorities to marching around with drug addled street thugs and obvious informants in stahlhelms.” Auernheimer, still sensitive about accusations regarding his Jewish heritage, and the Daily Stormer’s discussion forum, The Goyim Know, has threatened to ban anyone who accuses Auernheimer of being Jewish.

In January 2018, Auernheimer took to 4chan to talk about his life in Transnistria:

Listen man, I miss america every day. I just had someone bring me mcdonalds from another country by train. I have totally failed to learn conversational Russian. I can pay my bills and pick up women but i cant ever have a real discussion with anyone about anything… I pretend on video that it doesn’t get to me because i have an obligation to appear strong and not falter for the youth, because video soundbytes are what most of the public sees and I don’t want kids thinking that my life in exile is total despair and I’m miserable, but it is and I am. I’m f------ lonely and I hate it… Becoming part of an extremist fringe of trainwrecks is not good, I don’t want anyone to move towards the situation I am in by any degree.