The alt-right’s success at injecting extremist ideas into the mainstream since Griffin made his observations in 2014 has been driven by the white nationalist movement’s sprawling online presence which metastasized, drawing in more — and at times less stable — adherents. Now, they have moved into the streets.

In the runup to the 2016 presidential election, the alt-right enjoyed an unprecedented level of mainstream penetration and a correspondingly large audience through a series of opportunistic, media-manipulation campaigns.

The cornerstone of the alt-right’s tactics was an explicitly stated goal of shifting the Overton window through extreme rhetoric online. The Daily Stormer exemplified the style that came to represent the alt-right and its adherents online, both on their own sites and in the comment sections of those in the mainstream, with its vicious slogan, “Gas the kikes, race war now.”

The old white nationalist guard — a group familiar with the carnage that its most extreme adherents are capable of — met the Stormer’s radical rhetoric with equal parts skepticism and scorn. Three days after the Frazier Glenn Miller shooting, Griffin acknowledged that the white nationalist movement attracts isolated and marginalized individuals and openly worried about the potential of anonymous internet forums for breeding “self detonating lone wolf vanguardists.” Griffin, whose first recommendations was to stay grounded in reality, ended his critique by chastising the rhetoric of VNN’s founder, Alex Linder:

I’ve told [Linder] for 10 years now, publicly, that “exterminating the Jews” was a terrible idea, and I never backed away from that position. It was sound advice. Now [Glenn-Miller] has acted on his terrible idea, will probably get the death penalty, destroyed his own family, has killed three innocent people, and destroyed the lives of their families. I’m not the one who is going to have to live with that though.

The rhetorical parallels are clear between Linder and Anglin, who introduced Linder in an interview at the Daily Stormer as, “a big inspiration to me personally. He is, in a sense, the original Nazi troll. He was the first person I ever heard openly call for the extermination of Jews — this was a long, long time before we started saying ‘gas the kikes.’

Colin Liddell, who publishes what remains of Richard Spencer’s original Alternative Right blog made a vendetta out of Anglin’s tactics.

“The main function that the repetitive memes pumped out daily at the Daily Stormer serve is to isolate those who take them up from their fellow Whites,” he wrote in a September 2014 piece titled “Stormer in a Teacup.” “The racially awakened are therefore placed in cultural quarantine.”

The isolation that Liddell references echoes Griffin about the Internet bringing out the worst in those that are isolated and marginalized — two charges leveled against Anglin by Liddell in his diagnosis of the Stormer’s publishing strategy.

Anglin’s site has always carried a disclaimer that, “We here at the Daily Stormer are opposed to violence. We seek revolution through the education of the masses. When the information is available to the people, systemic change will be inevitable and unavoidable. Anyone suggesting or promoting violence in the comments section will be immediately banned permanently.”

However, the disclaimer is difficult to reconcile with content like Anglin’s June 5, 2017, “PSA: An Age of Ultraviolence is Coming,” which reads:

This is just a quick PSA for all white men. … An age of ultraviolence is coming. I do not know when, but I do know that most of you will live to see it. There is rapidly approaching a time when in every White Western city, corpses will be stacked in the streets as high as men can stack them. And you are either going to be stacking or getting stacked. … There will be leaders. You need to be prepared to recognize them for who they are, and you need to be prepared to do whatever they tell you to do, exactly as they tell you to do it. You are going to be required to do things that you cannot possibly imagine yourself doing right now. And if you do not do these things, you will die.

In its just over four years of operation, the Stormer’s audience included at least three readers who were either convicted of or indicted for murder.

On June 17, 2015, Dylann Storm Roof killed nine African-American worshipers and wounded one while attending a Bible study class at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof, then 21, told his victims, including Reverend and State Senator Clementa Pickney, that, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.”

In a manifesto posted to his website, lastrhodesian.com, Roof cited the Trayvon Martin case as his inspiration for searching on Google for “black on White crime.” According to Roof, “I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief.”

Roof, who had no real-world connections to known hate groups, complained that, “We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

Passages from Roof’s manifesto were found almost verbatim in the comment section of the Daily Stormer by user “AryanBlood1488.”

In the years since Roof’s Charleston massacre, he has become a favorite meme of Stormer users, who frequently affix bowl haircuts —similar to Roof’s — to their avatars and refer to him endearingly as “DyRo.”

Anglin even went so far as to suggest in the Stormer’s since deleted Discord server, “The Thunderdome,” that he was giving Roof a column at the Daily Stormer.

On March 22, 2017, another Daily Stormer reader, James Harris Jackson, was arrested after stabbing 66-year-old black man Timothy Caughman with a sword in Manhattan. Jackson, an army veteran, was 28 at the time of the alleged stabbing. He travelled to New York from Baltimore, Maryland, to conduct a “practice run” for what was intended to deter white women from race-mixing. He told a media source after his arrest that, “the white race is being eroded.”

In a post titled, “Real Swordsman Hours: Daily Stormer Gets Blamed for Sword Attack!” Anglin dismissed the connection between his website and Jackson’s murder before directing his readers to the “Race War” section of the Stormer.

“I’d rather this have not happened. I don’t really see that any point of value was proved by this slicing/dicing. This is why I so adamantly discourage violence. It’s bad propaganda,” Anglin wrote. “That said, I’m not going to go out of my way to condemn this guy. Why should I? Black people are killing us ‘randomly’ every single day - except it isn’t actually random, it is the exact same thing as here - these are attacks because of our race.”

Jackson told investigators that he travelled to New York to carry out the attack precisely because it is the “media capital of the world” and he wanted maximum exposure. The day after the attack, he went to a public library in the city to read about his actions before turning himself in.

After posting dozens of montages of alleged victims of a black-on-white crime epidemic — the type of images that regularly accompanied the propaganda Roof found on the Council of Conservative Citizens website — Anglin wrote, “Look at those, then ask me again if I give a single molecule of a fuck about this plastic bottles nigger [Caughman].”

Unlike Roof, Jackson claims he was involved in a white supremacist group, although the name of the group has yet to be released.