Leading neo-Nazi website expands audience with Spanish-language edition
How does a leading neo-Nazi website that has railed against Hispanic immigrants expand its audience beyond a loyal base of U.S. white supremacists? By publishing a Spanish-language edition, of course.
The Daily Stormer -- infamous for orchestrating internet harassment campaigns by its "Troll Army" of readers -- recently launched El Daily Stormer as a "news portal" tailoring its racist, anti-Semitic content for readers in Spain and Latin America.
Andrew Auernheimer, a notorious computer hacker and internet troll who writes for the English-language site, says the Spanish edition fits their mission to spread Hitlerism across the world.
"We want our message to reach millions more people," he said in a telephone interview.
Hate sites have realized that the U.S. has no monopoly on white nationalists and other far-right extremists, says Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project. Others, such as Stormfront, already created multilingual forums.
"The white supremacist movement has really viewed itself as past borders, reaching out to white people in other countries," Beirich said.
The law center represents a Montana real estate agent who sued The Daily Stormer's founder, Andrew Anglin, last month for unleashing an anti-Semitic "campaign of terror" against her family.
Anonymous trolls bombarded Tanya Gersh's family with hateful and threatening messages after Anglin published the family's personal information in a December post that accused Gersh and other Jewish residents of Whitefish, Montana, of engaging in an "extortion racket" against the mother of white nationalist Richard Spencer.
Anglin's site takes its name from Der Stürmer, a newspaper that published Nazi propaganda. It includes sections called "Jewish Problem" and "Race War."
El Daily Stormer titles its anti-Semitic section "Judiadas," an offensive term with roots in medieval Spain, where it was invoked to justify genocidal attacks on Jews.
The Spanish site also includes appeals for donations and unpaid articles, and a forum where people complain about Chile and Argentina filling up with "negros," referring to people from Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay.
Auernheimer, known online as "weev," said a team of volunteers is writing original content for the Spanish-language site. The site's appeal for unpaid collaborators says being a dissident "has never been a lucrative activity," and that it is looking for writers "willing to risk everything for the survival of our race."
"We have a big Spanish-speaking population on our forums, so it was an easy direction to branch out into," he said.
About 40 percent of The Daily Stormer's 3.2 million unique monthly visitors are in the U.S.; the Spanish edition has added fewer than 10,000 since its recent launch, Auernheimer said.
Surpassing Stormfront as the top U.S. hate site hasn't been a financial boon for The Daily Stormer, which calls itself "100 percent reader-supported." Anglin complained in January that a Ukrainian advertising company had banned them, leaving an Australian electrician as the site's only advertiser.
"We don't have revenue commensurate with a publication of our size," Auernheimer said.
