Daily Stormer The Most Censored Publication in History
During the most serious illness of my life, which inexplicably coincided with the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, I experienced an intense series of dreams and visions which overlapped with the real world, there in my red room. I still don’t know if some of the conversations I had during that period were real or imagined. I assume the ones I had with dead people were imagined, though I wouldn’t bet my life on it. Along with a burst of creative energy, whatever it is that happened to me in this period has resulted in a series of deep personal reflections, many of which are only now starting to clarify in my mind.
I’ve come to believe that this experience was a message, from God and His angels, calling on me to look at the first half of my life, to realize it is half finished, and decide what I want to do with the second half in order that I may die with a meaningful legacy. As this is going to affect my work, it’s only right I share it with the reader.
In 2010, at the age of 25, having spent nearly a year living in a jungle reading books and learning how to track wild pig, I walked the twenty-five miles to the village where I could hire a motor cycle to take me to a place with electricity. Speaking in the second language I’d learned, I told my jungle friends I’d be back. Maybe I thought that was true, but it wasn’t. Disillusioned with the primitivist ideology I’d come to believe in, finding the jungle and its denizens a terrible bore, I went to live in a bamboo hut on the beach for six months, and continued to read, continued to build my understanding of themes I’d read about in the jungle, honing a new vision of man’s place that would stay with me for the remainder of my years.
In late 2011, while living in an $8 a night hotel in Belgrade, I started a blog dealing with historical revisionism and far-right politics. It became popular very quickly, filling a void no one knew existed.
After blogging for a couple years, I came up with the idea of a large-scale news website, which would have a big staff, and become one of the largest alternative media websites on the internet, offering unfiltered truth with a large dose of humor. On July 4, 2013, I launched the Daily Stormer.
The period between 2014 and August of 2017 was one of the best periods of my life. The energy was incredible, and I felt I was tapping into the lifeblood of the creative force of the universe, gorging on it. The site’s traffic was exploding exponentially, the memes we were spreading becoming a mainstay of youth culture. Everything was going according to plan.
Then, after the Charlottesville event, which I somehow ended up being blamed for even though I wasn’t there and had no role in planning it, a censorship machine that no one even knew existed came down on me. I was offered ways out, which I assume you can imagine. But like Giles Corey, I said: “more weight.”
I don’t regret any of it. I did the right thing and you’d have to have something wrong with you to regret doing the right thing. But the dream was dead. There was no longer any viability to a plan to turn my vision of news reporting into a major media brand.
What’s more, it completely ruined my life, beyond what most people could comprehend. A lot of that is known about, publicly, and you can look it up. The worst parts are not known, and won’t be for a while. Eventually, I can tell that story.
In the years since the dream died, there’s been a lot of reflection. I started writing this provocative, controversial, and often vulgar daily news material when I was a young man. I’m now in middle age. The site can’t make money, it can’t grow in any meaningful way. That reflection has become more intense in recent years, as I have other things I want to work on and feel that what I am doing on this site has lost much of the energy that made it great in the first place.
I want to make it clear that a handful of donors have been extraordinarily generous. You know who you are, and I can’t put into words how much I appreciate it, and love you for it. But ultimately, most of that money had to be spent on the expenses that came along with running a site that is sanctioned, while being dogged by the feds. Some of those expenses are public record, but the bigger ones are not, and I’m not really comfortable explaining the details. Perceptive people can probably imagine it.
The site remains influential, as anyone who reads it and watches the rest of the right-wing media is aware. My ideas are first sanitized and then spread by all kinds of popular influencers. People have made millions of dollars using my materials. But the fact that my ideas are sanitized before being distributed by people who don’t want to get banned from everything often strips them of their original intent.
Years ago, realizing that the donation model was not working, I started doing other work, and I’ve been pretty successful. But I’m left wondering: if I’ve already pushed this format to its limit, if the readership doesn’t care enough to try to keep this site online, if the most important ideas are not reaching a larger audience and are instead simply serving as entertainment for people already in the know, then what exactly am I doing here?
When the site was launched, I had a 30-year plan, where I would work my ass off for the first few years, then hire a staff and have time for other projects. That all became impossible in 2017, and the primary mission became simply keeping the site online. For another eight years, I was left writing 70 articles a week.
Am I going to be doing this when I’m 60? 80? Could my talents not be put to better use elsewhere? I was blessed with a set of skills, and those skills are not being used to their best effect anymore.
Hearing about boomers in their mid-life crises, and reading Bonfire of the Vanities in my late teens and seeing the details of it painted in a way only Tom Wolfe could, I dismissed the entire concept as ridiculous, as I couldn’t imagine ever needing a young mistress and a race car to relive a youth I never thought much of in the first place. As I entered middle age, I realized that the real midlife crisis is an analysis of what you’ve done and what you still have time to do, in order to have maxed out your potential. A catalog of vulgar news items peppered here and there with a few interesting essays (which were generally mediocre because I didn’t have the time or energy to edit them) is not the legacy I want. I’m very proud of the work, and don’t mean to demean it, but I believe I still have a few tricks up my sleeve.
The daily grind of running this site has taken a toll on my personal life. Exile is not hell, and my life is a lot more fun and exciting than most people’s, but the constant pressure has left my personal life in disarray. I don’t want to end up like Hunter S. Thompson, a brilliant writer who did all his best work in his thirties, then drank himself into oblivion before blowing his brains out in a shed on his farm. I have things I need to address, and I owe it to myself to find a better balance.
When the donation money dried up after I switched to Monero as the primary donation method, I began working on other writing projects for money, which have been much more professional and very successful. Applying things I’ve learned there to future writings in the political space would require me to get out of the daily grind that the current state of this website necessitates. I had never really edited my work before, and over the last three years, I’ve learned how to do that.
I have no doubt I’ve broken various records for word count output, and I doubt anyone is ever going to beat that record now that AI exists and can be used for this purpose. Now, I would like to focus on more polished material.
To be clear, I haven’t made any decisions yet. Ultimately, what I am trying to do is cut out these daily news updates. That has been the heart of the project, but I just don’t think I can do it anymore. I’m bored and I’ve become boring.
Regardless of the decision I end up making, I’m definitely not going to take the site offline, and I am going to keep publishing my writings here. I will use the site to publish longer and more polished essays, as well as books and potentially a podcast. I’ll probably also go ahead and keep posting the weekly memes. This would be after a three-month hunting trip, which I am going to need to clear my head and figure a few things out.
For the time-being, the site will keep going as it is, but it’s only right to reveal now that over the last year and a half, primarily since my illness, when I was flooded by God with images and ideas, my heart has not really been in this project, and after a lot of thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that the daily news project is probably going to have to wrap-up in the not too distant future.
I love you all, and I thank you all for joining me on this long, strange trip. I expect you all to join me in the next phase.
P.S.
I’d like to hear from readers on this.
You can hit me up on the Session app:
05572128ee1967255089ef79d7ad652b5c6765665b8299e294e05a37ac96dd0936
Or at the email:
staunchleftist1999@proton.me
There may be some angle here I’m missing. No final decision has been made, officially.
