Daily Stormer Targets Federal Judges Ruling Against Trump's Muslim Ban
The racist right is erupting with rage against federal judges who have blocked President Trump’s executive order temporarily banning Muslims from seven countries and barring Syrian refugees.
Andrew Anglin, publisher of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, a prominent clearinghouse of racist “Alt-Right” editorials and memes, called for the military to arrest “treasonous” U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly in Manhattan for “trying to flood America with terrorists” and has called for martial law if other judges follow suit.
“We have a problem,” Anglin wrote over the weekend. “Trump needs to arrest this woman immediately and have her charged with treason. If other judges protest, he needs to declare martial law and have them all rounded up and interned. We are at war here. This isn’t a game.”
Anglin stopped short of threatening Donnolly directly, but in an update, he called for Trump to deploy the “National Guard to the protest sites” at airports across the country and “shut them down completely.”
Such posturing isn’t new for Anglin, or for that matter, unexpected.
Just last month, he planned but later abandoned an armed protest in Whitefish, Montana, after the mother of Alt-Right leader Richard Spencer of the National Policy Institute came under community pressure for failing to condemn her son’s views. Anglin published the personal information of members of Love Lives Here, a non-profit in Montana’s Flathead Valley that addresses hate and extremism –– a retaliatory tactic used by online trolls, known as doxxing.
Anglin didn’t publish Donnelly’s personal information. But one reader, posting under the name “forbesmag,” provided the federal judge’s home phone number, her husband’s name and a message: “Traitorous idiot scum ‘judge’ Ann Marie Donnelly, appointed by the fake n----- president from Kenya, on the recommendation of k--- ‘senator’ Chuck Schumer.” As of Wednesday, Daily Stormer administrators had not removed the comment.
Far-right extremists often use doxxing to intimidate their perceived enemies, including judges.
Craig Cobb, the white supremacist who in 2013 attempted to establish an enclave of racists in North Dakota, took issue more than a decade ago with U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow after she ruled against the World Church of the Creator in a trademark infringement suit in 2000. Group leader Matthew Hale was arrested for soliciting Lefkow’s murder. He was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison, where he remains.
In retaliation, Cobb, a follower of the Creativity Movement, published Lefkow’s home address and a map to its location on the Internet. He also posted pictures of Lefkow’s husband and children on Stormfront, until recently the world’s largest white supremacist website.
Two years after that, in 2005, Lefkow’s husband and mother were murdered inside her Chicago house. The killer was not involved in white supremacy but was angry over Lefkow’s ruling in another case.
Another white supremacist, Hal Turner, a one-time racist radio host who also served as an FBI informant, was charged in June 2009 with threatening to assault and murder three federal judges. He listed their work addresses and photos on his blog, writing, “These Judges deserve to be killed.” After two mistrials stemming from juror confusion about his FBI role, Turner was found guilty in August 2010 of threatening to assault and murder the judges. He was sentenced to 25 months and was released from prison in 2012.Trump’s executive order indefinitely bars Syrian refugees from entering the United States and suspends the entry of all refugees for 120 days. It also blocks citizens and refugees of seven Muslim-majority countries –– Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen –– from entering the United States for 90 days.
In reporting on international travel problems, The New York Time wrote, “The global confusion that since erupted is the story of a White House that rushed to enact, with little regard for basic governing, a core campaign promise that Mr. Trump made to his most fervent supporters.”
Those supporters go far beyond the rank-and-file of the mainstream American conservative movement. They include extremists like Anglin, who gave Trump the moniker “Our Glorious Leader” during the campaign and, for a time, branded his website the most trusted “Republican” site on the web.
It’s no surprise why. Building a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico and barring refugees from war-torn, predominantly Muslim countries are ideas that energized the white nationalist movement during the campaign.
Rebranding itself as the Alt-Right to escape the political baggage the ideology had acquired through the years, the movement heard in Trump’s promise a solution to what it saw as a threat to America –– immigration.
Now, in what the racist right calls “Trumpmerica,” fringe figures like Anglin have gained a new prominence, though remain far outside the mainstream.
Anglin has warned, time and time again, that there is no room under Trump for dissent, not even if it comes from the judiciary.
“Trump swore to protect this nation from enemies foreign and domestic, and in this case, you have a domestic enemy protecting a foreign one,” Anglin wrote. “We have to shut it down. For great justice.”