Prolific Alt-Right Propagandist's Identity Confirmed
Thanks to the anonymity of the internet, a man can become a major player in the white supremacist “alt-right” movement without ever revealing his face to his audience. And that’s just what Joseph Jordan did.
Jordan, a 30-year-old-man from Queens, New York, with light olive skin, slicked-back hair and rockabilly sideburns, has inhabited the busy, online alt-right persona of “Eric Striker” since at least 2015, Hatewatch determined through over a dozen interviews with people inside and outside of the alt-right movement.
Jordan’s rise from being a history major at Queens College to one of the most prolific content creators in the alt-right is the story of a man who became increasingly guarded of his private identity while pursuing a leadership role in the world of organized hate. His efforts to guard his identity coincide with other members of the alt-right questioning if Jordan really shares their goal of building a country for only whites – and if he is even really white.
Identifying Eric Striker within the “cult”
Jordan, using his Eric Striker persona, hosts a downloadable audio show called “Strike and Mike” with Michael Peinovich, an influential figure of the alt-right who runs The Right Stuff (TRS) podcast network. Members of Peinovich’s inner circle have garnered a reputation for fiercely protecting their names against public exposure. At the same time, they have developed a reputation for hiding things about themselves that other people in the movement would find unpalatable.
For example, “Spectre,” an alt-right performer who hosts the TRS podcast “Third Rail” and targets journalists with hatred, told other people in the alt-right he was a wealthy psychiatrist from Seattle. Hatewatch revealed in January that Spectre is really Trey Garrison, a journalist from the Dallas area whose byline stopped appearing online in recent years. Peinovich, who was revered by other figures in the movement in part for his outspoken antisemitism, lost credibility among his peers in early 2017 when anonymous activists revealed his wife was Jewish.
Jordan, while performing as Striker, typically focuses his rhetoric on his desire to drive Jewish people out of America and to warn his audience against the threat of an “underground homosexual culture,” to borrow one of his lines from a 2016 podcast. He’s comfortable using slurs like "n----r" on social media, but the targets he most frequently derides are Jewish people and members of the LGBTQ community, an extensive review of his propaganda reveals.
He contributed almost 700 posts to the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer between the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2018. Since 2016, he has appeared on hundreds of hours of alt-right podcasts across dozens of different shows. Few alt-right performers of the Trump era have produced as much propaganda in terms of raw megabytes as Jordan has under his Striker moniker.
Antifascist activists exposed Jordan as Striker in 2017, before he was publicly aligned with Peinovich. While speaking as Striker to his audience, he repeatedly claimed the information about his identity was bogus. Under mysterious circumstances, someone also removed from the web a blog post that named Jordan as Striker, creating an atmosphere of lingering doubt around his identity in the alt-right. The post remained in archive form. Here is how Hatewatch confirmed that post to be accurate:
A white nationalist close to the inner circle of Peinovich leaked images and video of a man they identified as Striker to Hatewatch in the context of criticizing the roles those two men play in the movement. Hatewatch took that material and an archive of the deleted blog post about him to white nationalists, left-wing activists and author Vegas Tenold, who encountered a man who was identified by members of the neo-Nazi group Traditionalist Worker Party as Striker and “Nazi Joe” in 2017. These sources all confirmed to Hatewatch that the man pictured in that material was Striker.
Hatewatch then passed the same pictures and videos of the man identified as Striker to three people who shared a classroom with Joseph E. Jordan at Queens College between 2009 and 2013, when he was a student in the history department. These sources quickly recognized Striker as being Jordan. The same people from Queens College also listened to Jordan’s voice in clips from the alt-right podcast “Strike and Mike,” which he co-hosts as Eric Striker with Peinovich. They immediately knew who he was but asked not to go on record in this story out of fear of possible retaliation from him.
The person close to Peinovich’s inner circle shared a photo of a person who appears to be Jordan, holding a bottle of liquor and sitting in a circle beside white supremacist and alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer in Spencer’s Virginia loft. The photo was taken following an abbreviated anti-immigrant rally held on Dec. 3, 2017, in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., according to the person who shared it with Hatewatch.
The same person also shared video of a book-burning ritual staged by Peinovich’s inner circle in Fishkill, New York, in mid-2017. The person described the atmosphere around such Peinovich-led events as that of “a cult,” echoing statements made by people who have left the alt-right movement and are now critical of it.
The leaked video shows Peinovich and the person others have identified as Jordan throwing up Hitler salutes over a fire of burning books as white nationalists yell out slogans like “white Sharia” and “white Afghanistan.” “White Sharia” is a call by alt-right men to strip white women of their freedoms and reduce them to chattel.
Jordan did not respond to an opportunity to comment on this story and used his Twitter account to threaten legal action against Hatewatch after the request was made. Peinovich sent a cease-and-desist letter to Hatewatch after a request for comment was sent to his email address.
A morally conservative “communist” from Queens
Jordan’s family resides in Flushing, Queens, which is one of the most diverse places in the entire world. They live split across two fifth-floor apartments in a building that is just a seven-minute cab ride from where the New York Mets play at Citi Field. Hatewatch spoke to residents of the neighborhood who are Jewish, Muslim and Catholic. They are immigrants from places as far away as Afghanistan, Korea, China and Paraguay, representing the exact type of society Striker’s cohorts at the Daily Stormer often depict as a dystopia.
Additional evidence that Jordan lives in that neighborhood came from one of his former college classmates. That person told Hatewatch Jordan complained about diversity in Flushing once before a history class.
During a podcast that often focuses on Holocaust denial called “The Realist Report,” Jordan – using his Striker persona – said, “I live in a very urban and cosmopolitan city,” before acknowledging that he was from the “Tri-State area” and mentioning that he had been researching a meeting hall for Industrial Workers of the World in Manhattan.
Jordan’s parents, both of whom have either Latinx first names or surnames, married in 1988, according to records listed on Ancestry.com. A neighbor told Hatewatch she has known the family for years and that Jordan’s mother told her she was an immigrant from South America.
The neighbor who knew Jordan’s parents also told Hatewatch he is rarely seen in the vicinity of the working-class block where his family lives. A woman with an accent answering the door at his parents’ apartment told Hatewatch in February that Jordan had left the country.
Jordan told two people in the alt-right movement he was Italian, the reporting finds. One of the two people told Hatewatch they asked Jordan to name the part of Italy from which his family emigrated, but he couldn’t do it.
Jordan introduced himself to people at Peinovich-led New York City recruiting events in 2017 as Striker and told people there he organized with leftists as a student at Queens College before converting to fascism. Queens College told Hatewatch that Jordan graduated from their school in the summer of 2013 with a degree in history.
Leaders of prominent left-wing groups who worked on the Queens College campus during the time that Jordan was a student told Hatewatch they didn’t remember him, calling into question a detail he has repeatedly made a salient part of his public backstory. He told “The Realist Report” that “I’ve been … a communist my entire life,” and that “I was very unhappy about my life and I was looking for answers” before becoming involved in radical politics. He said that he abandoned left-wing activism because of his “morally conservative” views about gay marriage. He also called himself a “socialist” in the same episode.
Golden Dawn era
Jordan organized with the New York City chapter of the neo-Nazi group Golden Dawn, activity that likely began during his final year at Queens College, the reporting finds.
Greek anti-racist activists from the New York City area told Hatewatch they had been harassed by members of the local chapter of Golden Dawn at times when a person who appeared to be Jordan was in photos with that group. The activists said they recognized Jordan’s face and were able to connect pictures of him shared by Hatewatch to images of Golden Dawn from a demonstration the group staged outside of the Greek consulate in Manhattan. Those images were posted on Golden Dawn’s website in November 2013. Golden Dawn published a propaganda video to YouTube in June 2014 in which a person the activists identified as being Jordan makes a brief cameo wearing aviator sunglasses in an elevated subway car.
Just as Eric Striker’s writing on the Daily Stormer evidenced his homophobic nature, posts on New York City Golden Dawn’s website contained similar language and themes. An Oct. 7, 2014, post on the group’s website falsely claims:
From the 1960’s into the 1980’s, pedophiles marched alongside homosexuals in what was deemed the sexual revolution in America and Europe-a [sic] revolution … ideologically based on the perverse thoughts and pseudo-sciences of Jewish intellectuals at war with Western Civilization, such as Wilhelm Reich, Sigmund Freud and Herbert Marcuse.
Herbert Marcuse’s book One-Dimensional Man, which criticizes capitalism, mass media and advertising, was among the books sacrificed at Peinovich’s “cult” book-burning rituals, according to additional video that was leaked to Hatewatch by the source close to him.
Left-wing activists also passed along screenshots taken from the page of a Facebook user who went by “Boseph Bordan” between 2013 and 2015 and suggested it was the same person based upon Jordan’s writing style, his subjects of interests and photos that were posted to his page.
Members of organized hate groups often protect their identities with pseudonyms, but the alt-right movement was in its nascent stage at that time, and the efforts white supremacists took to obscure their identities were often less sophisticated than they are today. The Boseph Bordan account no longer appears publicly on Facebook’s site.
The Boseph Bordan account directed other Facebook users to target the account of a left-wing activist named Marina Sitrin, who was involved in Occupy Wall Street. Boseph Bordan suggested Sitrin was a “Jewess from Argentina” and a “smug Jew b----.” The tactic of dragging a Jewish person’s name in front of potentially antagonistic followers is similar to what Jordan, as Striker, and the Daily Stormer’s editor Andrew Anglin did at that website against political targets they wanted to see hurt.
“Jews try and use pornography to try and infect normal people with the mental insanity of queers, pedophiles, zoophiles,” the Boseph Bordan Facebook user wrote. “Like everything they get their hands on, the octopus weaponizes visual media to spread diseases to weaken their enemies (in the case of the Jew, the enemy is every non-Jew in the world).”
Jordan, as Striker, frequently blames Jewish people for the existence of LGBTQ people and baselessly equates same-sex attraction or transgenderism with pedophilia. In February, for example, Jordan used his current Twitter handle, @Strikerisnazbol, to call another user “LGBTP,” switching out the letter “Q” for queer with the letter “P” for pedophile, which is a slur commonly found on alt-right forums like 4chan.
From Pizzagate to FBI hidden cameras
Jordan’s Eric Striker byline first appears online around 2015, when he wrote posts for anitsemitic street activist Matthew Heimbach’s blog TradYouth.org. He reinforced the brand in 2016 on his own blog, The Social Nationalist, which covered his familiar obsessions with Jewish people, LGBTQ people and pedophilia in vivid detail. But the name really became a fixture in the world of hate when he joined with Anglin at the Daily Stormer.
Jordan, using the Striker name, cooked up a howling, 1,000-word rant about Halloween for Anglin on Oct. 25, 2015, in what would become his first post on that site. The post, “Hebreween: Cultural Marxist Ogre Thinks ‘Sexy’ Costumes for Pre-Pubescent Girls are Great,” attempted to falsely link Jewish people to pedophilia.
“We’re coming, Jew,” he warned at the end of the post.
Jordan, publishing under the name of Striker, backed up his words by publishing almost one antisemitic post per day on the Daily Stormer over the next two-and-a-half years, blaming Jewish people for everything from Sports Illustrated swimsuit models not being thin enough for his taste to his belief that heavy metal music was becoming too politicized.
He mentioned on a March 2018 episode of “Strike and Mike” that while writing for the Daily Stormer, “[Anglin] used to let me write whatever I want.”
As the Daily Stormer’s most prolific subordinate to Anglin during that time, Jordan falsely speculated under his Striker byline that Stephen Paddock, the mass murderer who killed 58 people at a concert in Las Vegas in 2017, may have been an “Antifa sympathizer.” He called Mexican immigrants “bean people.” He also fantasized in lurid ways about what he imagined to be the desires of gay men:
“Homosexuals as a rule have sexual fantasies about straight men,” he opined in November 2017 on the Daily Stormer in a post falsely suggesting that gay men were predisposed to acts of violence. “The only way to make these fantasies come true is through violence, intimidation and rape – in prison, in post-Don’t Ask Don’t Tell military barracks, in Hollywood, etc.”
Jordan, using the handle "Pr0tocolsrReal," also posted hate to the Daily Stormer’s forum, The Goyim Know, where mass murderer Dylann Roof is believed to have been a commenter. On the forum, Jordan appeared to revel in graphic video that showed a woman being punched in the face at a protest.
“Love seeing that Tumblr whale’s head snapped back,” he wrote.
Jordan, using his Striker persona, became a recurring guest of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke’s radio show in 2017, at the same time he was writing for the Daily Stormer. Jordan and Duke have paired for more than 50 radio conversations, the reporting finds. Duke is perhaps the most well-known American white supremacist. He frequently speaks disdainfully about immigrants from Mexico and Latin America, repeating the refrain that they must “go back” on Twitter and in public appearances. Duke did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Jordan’s early podcast appearances demonstrate a strong appetite for wild conspiracy theories – including so-called Pizzagate, which pushed the false rumor that Democratic operatives were running a pedophilia ring out of a Washington, D.C.-based pizzeria.
“If you’re a DC f-- who’s got all this money and power and no accountability eventually you get sick and tired and want to do new things to get that titillating feeling,” he said on a show hosted by frequent David Duke collaborator Patrick Slattery in December 2016, explaining why he incorrectly believed gay men might be molesting young boys at Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria.
Jordan, again as Striker, also became a regular fixture on the white nationalist-friendly social media network Gab starting in 2017. Gab played home to Robert Bowers, a man accused of murdering 11 people at a Pittsburgh area synagogue in October 2018. Jordan used the handles @estriker, @Eric_Striker, and @Eric_StrikerDS on Gab to contribute to the site’s cacophony of hate, according to screenshots captured by Hatewatch. He tried and failed in July 2018 to launch a viral hashtag demanding that Grindr, a dating app for LGBTQ people, be taken offline, for example.
“Homosexual serial killers use it to lure people and murder them,” he wrote of Grindr. “Gay pedophiles use it to find boys to rape. Sick f--- use it to give knowing and unknowing people AIDS on purpose.”
The Eric Striker Gab accounts were deleted after Hatewatch reached out to Jordan for comment on this story.
Jordan, as Striker, claimed on Gab in September 2018 that FBI agents were trying to recruit an associate of his in the alt-right movement as an informant. He implied they were secretly filming that person with a hidden camera device placed outside of the person’s home.
That post was issued after he had become firmly entrenched in Peinovich’s TRS podcast network – foreshadowing what would become a regular topic of conversation for the pair – their outspoken mistrust of law enforcement and the judicial system.
Alliance with Peinovich deepens
By 2017, when Jordan was throwing up Hitler salutes with Peinovich at the book burning, he had already established himself as a loyal underling for Golden Dawn, the Daily Stormer and the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP) by churning out hateful propaganda in bulk.
His willingness to work under other leaders of hate groups potentially earned him a close relationship with Peinovich – a Falstaffian figure of contemporary white supremacy who has built up a large audience for himself by podcasting and aggressively recruiting young people to the cause of building a separate nation for only white, non-Jewish people.
In addition to book burnings and so-called pool parties, which are closed-door white nationalist recruiting events staged by Peinovich and members of his inner circle, Jordan and Peinovich crossed paths at various hate rallies in 2017, the reporting finds.
Both men participated in the deadly “Unite the Right” rally, which took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 and helped make the subject of white supremacy a national news story in America.
Peinovich appeared to endorse the idea of his podcast listeners bringing weapons to it, telling them in the lead-up to the rally, “Bring whatever you need [to Charlottesville], that you feel you need for your self-defense.”
In his book, Everything You Love Will Burn, Vegas Tenold described Jordan in Charlottesville that weekend as “Nazi Joe,” a “short, skinny kid with a big head and cartoonish features.” An individual who appeared to be Jordan clashed with police and antiracist activists at the event, clad in an army helmet and shoulder pads, according to images and video reviewed by Hatewatch.
Jordan and Peinovich also participated together in that anti-immigration rally staged in front of the White House on Dec. 3, 2017, according to a person who also attended the event and spoke to Hatewatch. An individual who appeared to be Jordan carried an American flag that Sunday, according to video reviewed by Hatewatch. He hid his face behind aviator sunglasses and a kerchief as he and other marchers moved through the streets of the nation’s capital, the video shows.
Peinovich, Heimbach and Spencer featured as the guest speakers. Antiracist demonstrators doubled the men in number, however, and Jordan and his cohorts left the scene in just 20 minutes. The aborted event was emblematic of a continuing difficult time for the alt-right in terms of staging public events.
The attendees of the anti-immigration event at the Washington, D.C., rally regrouped that Sunday night at Spencer’s loft in Alexandria, Virginia, according to people who attended.
The pictures leaked to Hatewatch show the man others have identified as Jordan with other TWP members, including Heimbach, and Tony Hovater, who was once the subject of a controversial profile in The New York Times.
Heimbach, who at that time was the leader of TWP, referred to Jordan reverentially as “Mr. Striker” in a conversation with Hatewatch. He called Jordan “a comrade of the utmost integrity and principles of National Socialism.”
When asked about rumors of Jordan’s Latin American heritage, Heimbach said they didn’t matter to him because “Central and South America have a complex history of revolutionary politics.”
Anglin posted several times on Gab about Striker in December 2017 and January 2018 after "Strike and Mike" was launched. He complained publicly in multiple Gab posts about what he perceived to be a change in Striker due to his associations, suggesting he had abruptly become unwilling to “name the Jew.” “Naming the Jew” in white nationalist circles connotes a willingness to speak in nakedly antisemitic terms without couching language to be more socially acceptable.
“That’s a different Eric Striker,” Anglin quipped to a Gab user coming to the Jordan persona’s defense. “The one on Strike and Mike only talks about ‘globalist’ and ‘the illuminati elite.’"
While it’s possible that Jordan, as his Striker persona, softened language for Peinovich’s benefit, given the ubiquity of crude racial slurs found in the electronic pages of the Daily Stormer, it also appeared to work both ways. Jordan seemed to push Peinovich to adopt a much bleaker and paranoid vision of the world than had previously be shown on TRS. Jordan, for example, calls law enforcement officers “pigs,” and the pair have devoted segments on “Strike and Mike” to expressing their fears about being watched by the police and the FBI.
The men also devote hours of airtime to fantasizing out loud about how people they consider to be their enemies are being humiliated. They take a keen interest in journalists who have reported on the alt-right.
“All of the people that were hired after Charlottesville to do hit pieces and dox people … those people that you hired … you Jews out there who listen to this,” Jordan – as Striker – said on a January episode of “Strike and Mike,” talking to what he imagined to be the Jewish bosses of reporters who cover the alt-right movement. “Those Antifa members that you hired are getting high on their own supply.”
In addition to “Strike and Mike,” Jordan hosts an antisemitic YouTube livestream show called “The People’s Square” under his Striker persona, along with a co-host who goes by the pseudonym “Borzoi Boskovic.” The show is broadcast on Peinovich’s website. Jordan’s podcast and livestream appearances were likely pulling in over a thousand dollars per month in handouts throughout January and February of this year, based on figures provided by the crowdfunding site Streamlabs.
Streamlabs banned "The People’s Square" on Feb. 27, following a report about their fundraising efforts by the blog Angry White Men. YouTube restricted Borzoi Boskovic’s videos in the European Union after Hatewatch reached out for a comment about “The People’s Square.”
Suspicions about Striker’s race and his politics pervade the alt-right
Jordan’s faceless Eric Striker persona is producing an energetic swell of content for the alt-right at a time when the movement is “failing,” to quote “Joachim Hoch,” a propagandist ally of the white nationalist cause. The trouble is, Jordan’s appeal to those around him is limited not only by his facelessness – it’s also hindered by uncertainties over his race, and over his political agenda, an extensive Hatewatch analysis of commentary about him finds.
“All the TRS Nazbol f--- are non-white,” a Gab user going by the handle @Moooarpheus wrote in a December comment under a post in which Jordan – using an Eric Striker account – was promoting one of his podcasts with Peinovich. Nazbol is short for “National Bolshevik” and refers to a perversion of Marxist ideology focused around the scapegoating of Jewish people. @Moooarpheus shared a picture of a person he claimed to be Jordan, posed like neo-Nazi politician George Lincoln Rockwell and smoking a pipe. “Imagine my surprise.”
Jordan wrote back, challenging the user to appear on “The People’s Square”:
“Moarpheus is the red pill within a red pill: everyone is a Jew or a shill,” Jordan replied. “Would you ever be interested in coming on the People’s Square and explaining your research and info please?”
Hours later, however, Jordan deleted his reply and disengaged from the discussion without adding a word. A similar accusation took place on a white nationalist-friendly forum in November 2018, under a thread about Jordan’s identity called “Altright LOLcow doxed, isn’t even white.” The post featured pictures of the person others have identified as Jordan that were later verified by Hatewatch while reporting this story.
“Join anything linked to [alt-right culture] and you will find 30% white and then mixed-race kids LARPing [as white],” an anonymous user said of Jordan’s identity.
A Twitter user going by the handle @GithYankee commented on a thread in which the subject of Jordan’s racial lineage was addressed, suggesting that he could never be put in a leadership position.
“Ok, he looks white but is apparently half [Puerto Rican],” the user said. “I have a rule with people’s ideas and not their background,” @GithYankee wrote. “[Obviously] he could never be leadership without coming clean.”
On April 30, @Rumples42296282, a pseudonymous Twitter account linked to the alt-right community called Striker, “Eric ‘Mestizo’ Striker,” referring to a word that describes a person who is of mixed Latinx descent.
But Jordan’s political vision is perhaps even more problematic for many white supremacists than the hovering doubts about his ethnic lineage. He boasted on a March 2018 episode of “Strike and Mike” that he had influenced TWP’s “anti-capitalism” aesthetic. He bragged on Twitter as recently as February that his ideas represent “a true socialism.” Commenters in the Daily Stormer’s forum, The Goyim Know, frequently trash Jordan’s Eric Striker persona for appearing to sound like a leftist infiltrator.
A forum regular who goes by the handle Fash McQueen suggested he was pushing the alt-right in a direction that was hurting the cause:
“Striker was a regular on [the alt-right YouTube show] Heel Turn until the original host kicked him off the show for being a f------ Marxist,” Fash McQueen griped in February 2019. “Even when Striker isn’t on the show, he’s in the chat saying things like ‘Heil Spencer! Death to America!’ Yes, those exact words.”
Jordan’s Striker persona even gets detractors on Peinovich’s website, where commenters typically bathe the two hosts with star-struck reverence.
“Striker: once a communist, always a communist,” a user going by the name “Arthur Jackson” wrote Jan. 5 in the comments on an episode of “Strike and Mike.”
A TRS user going by the handle “Andrew Anglin” posted on Peinovich’s website March 17 that the host had allowed Jordan, as Striker, to “do full entryism” on TRS and spread views that he deemed to be damaging to the viability of the alt-right movement at large.
“Striker now possesses the entire credibility of this site, something he did nothing to earn,” the comment stated. “He is incapable of gaining his own audience because his ideas are so shitty.”
Paranoia rising, listeners dropping
Peinovich’s TRS network is losing subscribers at the time that Jordan’s Striker persona has become a featured performer on it. Both men have adopted a more overtly paranoid rhetorical tone in recent months, both on social media and on podcasts.
Peinovich, who boasted in early 2018 that his audience “is always growing … never declined,” has since reported a decrease in listeners to his podcast website in legal documents. Anglin, writing in the Daily Stormer on March 7, described TRS’s website as undergoing a “traffic collapse.”
Jordan and Peinovich blamed mysterious Jewish intelligence agencies for the criticism of their podcasting work in a January episode of "Strike and Mike."
“Everybody who listens to ‘Strike and Mike’ knows this is happening. You see a shill on YouTube saying, ‘hey, don’t support that guy he’s a Jew,’” Jordan said, suggesting that criticism of him from other people in the alt-right was coming from paid agents. “You see that shit … you have a feeling that it’s a shill, but you can’t prove it.”
Meanwhile, Jordan’s @Strikerisnazbol Twitter account posts frequently about the people he believes are trying to destroy the alt-right. He wrote March 12 that FBI agents and journalists were colluding to use “brute force” against the alt-right movement without offering any evidence to support the claim. He called police officers “pigs … Antifa with a badge” on March 13, referring to the arrest of two members of the Proud Boys on felony assault charges. He followed that up with two more posts fretting about the police.
“IN POLITICAL PROSECUTION," he wrote in one of them, “YOUR SCALP IS ALL THEY WANT.”
Photo illustration by SPLC
