Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer is a self proclaimed white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and the digital mastermind behind the world's largest alt-right hate website, the Daily Stormer.
Auernheimer was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison for charges related to computer hacking. After his sentence was overturned on a technicality, he fled to Transnistria, a Russia-backed breakaway region in Moldova on the border with Ukraine.
In August 2017, Auernheimer moved the Daily Stormer to the dark web after Google and GoDaddy refused to host it. Around the same time, Twitter banned several accounts associated with The Daily Stormer. Auernheimer himself was banned from Twitter in December 2016 for his hateful propaganda.
Besides fighting to keep the Daily Stormer online, Auernheimer’s “hacktivism” has included hijacking printers on college campuses to make them print out swastika-bedecked fliers. A few months later, in two subsequent waves of "fliering", Auernheimer depicted Jews being killed and raped and called his followers to support and defend acts of violence against anyone perceived to be anti-white.
Despite having Jewish relatives according to his mother, Andrew Auernheimer holds frightening and dangerous antisemitic views. On the Nazi podcast 'Radical Agenda' , Auernheimer said Jews were to blame for the Daily Stormer website losing its dot-com status, requiring it to be moved from domain to domain: “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,” he stated. “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.”
He also added that retaliation against Jews should focus on the “top” Jews, and “the most Jewish Jews.”
As the COVID-19 pandemic has led to more people spending time at home and conducting meetings and business online, an increasing focus has been placed by radical groups on facilitating hate and harassment on such platforms. Auernheimer is believed to be at the forefront of this virtual racist campaign.
On March 24th, a Jewish youth group out of Boston was conducting an online Zoom meeting when two of the participants spotted that Auernheimer has infiltrated the call (see screenshot below). Since the incident, many groups are reporting incidents of the new "Zoombombing" trend.
We call on you to stay alert! If you are participating in a virtual meeting such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams Meeting, or Google Hangout and have been "Zoombombed" please contact us here.