Back In The Day, ‘The Anarchist Cookbook’ was Treasonous, Today It’s Ho Hum
Forty years ago, all the rage was a book that offered step by step instructions on making bombs, brewing LSD and assorted other counterculture activities. The 1971 tome, “The Anarchist Cookbook,” by William Powell, seems quaint by today’s standards.
Today, making bombs and fomenting any kind of violence is easily gleaned on the Internet by impressionable teenagers, seeking an identity and kindred violent spirits. Parents, siblings, teachers, clergy members should be familiar with the on-line sources that may be offering a deadly solution to a son’s, a daughter’s, a brother’s or a sister’s desperate search for meaning and belonging in a world of violence and racism. Living in the digital echo chambers can easily give succor to the naive young person that he or she is not alone in his or her anger and that he or she can easily obtain the necessary weapons to express his isolation and hatred.
Becoming familiar with the ever growing number of on-line avenues can seem impossible to adults whose familiarity starts with Facebook and Twitter and ends with YouTube. It’s like trying to teach quantum physics to someone who is just learning basic arithmetic.
The young man accused of killing 10 African Americans and wounding three more at the Tops grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., was a regular visitor to the most virulent racist, anti-Semitic websites. The accused, Payton Gendron, 18, detailed his attack on Discord, a chat app and streamed it live on Twitch.
It was a similar pattern with Salvador Ramos, the 18-year-old who burst into a Texas classroom and massacred 19 children and two teachers. In both cases, the accused shooters read online writings about the so-called “Great Replacement Theory,” posted by the gunman who murdered 51 Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. Gendron detailed his plans in advance, on-line while Ramos also made his intentions known on the Internet.
The pattern repeats with every mass shooting and the same places and names keep coming up, like BitChute, Epik, Rob Monster, Lauren Cherie Southern, Rebel Media, Stefan Basil Molyneux, Freedomain radio, Millennial Woes, Faith Julia Goldy, Paul Joseph Watson, Prisonplanetlive, Gab, Andrew Torba, Rick Wiles, Ray Vahey, Road to Power, Scott Rhodes, Patriot Front, KlanArchives, 14HAILVICTORY88, Survive the News, Release the Kracken, E. Michael Jones, Brother Nathanael, Discord. And that is just a smattering of the sewage that flows and is easily accessed by anyone.
Here is a brief primer on some of the sites and people who populate the on-line jungle of racist, anti-Semitic hatred.
* BitChute is a video hosting service launched in 2017 by Ray Vahey. The service has accommodated videos and comments calling for the extermination of Jews, glorifying violent beatings by police and anti-government militias, vilifying Black people and demonizing immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community and Muslims. The white supremacist group Patriot Front and the Proud Boys have BitChute channels. Another BitChute channel is “14HAILVICTORY88,”referencing the white supremacist 14-word creed and their mnemonic for “Heil Hitler.” The “Road to Power” run by white supremacist Scott Rhodes, was on a BitChute channel. BitChute still broadcasts Rhodes’ videos that ask “Is there anything more worthless than a negro,” while he shares clips of a Jewish doll burning in an oven overseen by Hitler, and warns, “Watch out, Jews.” Brother Nathanael’s BitChute videos refer to Jews as “parasitic” and claims “we have a chance to save America from Jewish ruin.”
Of the 21 antisemitic and white supremacist YouTube channels identified by the Anti-Defamation League in 2019, 14 had active BitChute accounts and were viewed more than 10.6 million times. Bitchute’s website is hosted by the domain registrar and hosting provider Epik, which is known to provide services to other extremist websites, including The Daily Stormer and Gab. The website is ranked 1,215 among millions of other websites, according to Alexa traffic rank.
* Gab News, which calls itself a “free speech social network,” was formed in 2016 by Andrew Torba, who describes himself as a 31-year-old, born again, Christian entrepreneur from rural northeastern Pennsylvania. Torba has described the average Gab user as “a Conservative Christian with a family and interests in hunting, fishing, cars, camping, news, politics, rural living, homeschooling, privacy, free speech, cryptocurrency, guns, and cooking.” A strong trump supporter, Torba claims he has “been relentlessly smeared by Big Tech, the mainstream media, academics, members of the U.S. Congress, foreign governments, and the political establishment for refusing to censor first amendment-protected political speech.”
Gab has been widely described as a haven for neo-Nazis, racists, white supremacists, white nationalists, the alt-right, anti-Semites, supporters trump, conservatives, right-libertarians, and conspiracy theorists like QAnon. The site received extensive public scrutiny following the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in October 2018, after the accused suspect had posted a message on Gab indicating an immediate intent to cause harm before the shooting. Gab was among the platforms used to plan the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In April 2020, Gab claimed that it had more than 1.1 million registered users and that their website was receiving 3.7 million monthly visitors globally.
Registered users of Gab include Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo. and former Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., Mike Lindell, The Gateway Pundit, Kaitlin Bennett, Mark Dice, Sidney Powell, the Republican Party of Texas, Kelli Ward, Laura Loomer, and Milo Yiannopoulos.
*Gab also developed a web browser named Dissenter, an open source web browser that allows conversations around individual URL’s and creates a public square on them where anyone can leave a comment.
* Discord is an instant messaging social platform that provides for voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media and files in private chats. By the end of 2017, Discord had drawn nearly 90 million users, with roughly 1.5 million new users each week. Due to the platform’s anonymity, “It’s pretty unavoidable to be a leader in this [alt-right] movement without participating in Discord,” said the an analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center. Discord was used to plan the “Unite the Right,” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va, on Aug. 12, 2017. Two days after the attack at the Capitol, Discord deleted the pro-Donald Trump server “The Donald”, “due to its overt connection to an online forum used to incite violence, plan an armed insurrection in the United States, and spread harmful misinformation related to 2020 U.S. election fraud.”
The accused killer in the Buffalo mass shooting, Payton S. Gendron,reportedly used a private Discord server as a diary as he planned the attack. About a half hour before the shooting, several users were invited by Gendron to view the server and read the messages.
* Epik is a domain registrar and web hosting company known for providing services to websites that host far-right, neo-Nazi and other extremist materials. It has been described as a haven for the far-right because of its willingness to provide services to far-right websites that have been denied service by other Internet service providers. Epik was used to help plan the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by trump supporters. The company was founded in 2009 by Rob Monster, a Dutch-American technology executive known for providing services to websites that host far-right, neo-Nazi, and other extremist content. Monster was widely condemned in the wake of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings for uploading video of the shootings to Twitter and Gab.
* E. Michael Jones is a Traditionalist Catholic theologian who blames Jews and women for the world’s troubles. Jones is frequently cited by white supremacists like Nick Fuentes, Daryush Valizadeh and Owen Benjamin and other groypers, white nationalist provocateurs who try to get their views accepted into mainstream conservatism. Valizadeh also known as Roosh V and Roosh Vorek, is an alt-right blogger who writings have been accused of being mysogynist, promoting rape, anti-Semitic and homphobia.
* Milton Kapner is better known as Brother Nathanael Kapner or Brother Nathanael, an anti-Semitic, self-proclaimed “monastic with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR)” who is popular in some conspiracy theorist circles. He has a following on YouTube with his programs, The Brother Nathanael Foundation and Real Jew News. The Brother Nathanael Foundation is a tax-exempt non-profit corporation, “dedicated to the promotion of Christian principles in American society.”
*Patriots.won was formerly TheDonald.win, a far right forum that has a picture of trump in its logo and runs posts like, “These sick fuckers WANT more school massacres just to push more gun control.”
* Lauren Cherie Southern is a Canadian alt-right activist and commentator who has promoted the “Great Replacement” theory and produced a video to promote the white nationalist viewpoint that garnered more than 600,000 views by March 2019. In May 2017, Southern supported “Defend Europa,” in the group’s efforts to obstruct search-and-rescue operations of refugees from North Africa in the Mediterranean Sea. Defend Europa is a volunteer organization dedicated to spreading information about “the current state of Europe that the mainstream media refuses to publish.” In July 2018, Southern visited Australia for a speaking tour with Stefan Molyneux but the pair was later banned from speaking in New Zealand.
* Stefan Basil Molyneux is an Irish-born Canadian far-right white nationalist and white supremacist who promotes conspiracy theories, scientific racism, eugenics, and racist views. He is the founder of the Freedomain Radio website, which claims to be the “largest and most popular philosophy show on the web.” The Freedomain Internet community has been called a cult by some.
* Colin Robertson, known as “Millennial Woes” or simply “Woes,” is a Scottish former YouTuber, white supremacist, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist. Robertson is known for supporting slavery, and has called for the bombing of refugees crossing the Mediterranean.
* Faith Julia Goldy is a Canadian far-right, white nationalist political commentator, who wrote for “The Rebel Media” and covered the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. and later participated in a podcast on The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website.
* Rebel News, also known as The Rebel Media and The Rebel, is a Canadian far-right political and social commentary media website that was formed in 2015 and has been described as a “global platform” for anti-Muslim ideology.
* Paul Joseph Watson is a British far-right You Tuber, radio host and conspiracy theorist. His career emerged through his work for conspiracy theorist and radio host Alex Jones and the website, InfoWars. Since 2011, Watson has hosted his own YouTube channel, “prisonplanetlive,” on which he has attacked social justice, feminism and anti-racist movements. As of January 2021, his channel has more than 1.9 million subscribers.
* TruNews is a far-right conspiracy theory and fake news website owned by Rick Wiles, frequently publishing racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic content. It has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Wiles has said that Jews seek to obtain control of countries to “kill millions of Christians.”
* Patriot Front is an American nationalist, white supremacist, and neo-fascist hate group founded by Thomas Ryan Rousseau. According to the Anti-Defamation League, the group generated more than 82 percent of the racist, antisemitic, and other hateful propaganda tracked by the ADL in the United States in 2021, with 3,992 incidents and distribution in every state except Hawaii and Alaska. On Aug. 12, 2017, Rousseau led members of Vanguard America at the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va. The Patriot Front manifesto says that “An African may have lived, worked, and even been classed as a citizen in America for centuries, yet he is not American. He is, as he likely prefers to be labeled, an African in America. The same rule applies to others who are not of the founding stock of our people, or do not share the common unconscious that permeates throughout our greater civilization, and the European diaspora.” Rousseau was also a Boy Scout working to earn his Eagle Scout badge before his 18th birthday.