In the early afternoon of Jan. 14, about 40 protesters gathered in the drizzle outside a brown-brick office complex and displayed posterboard placards that read “Worthington is not a safe space for Nazis” and “Greg Anglin takes Nazi $.”

Greg Anglin, under the name Morningstar Ministries, leases suite 121 inside the building at 6827 N. High St., and the Nazi connection comes from his son, 32-year-old Andrew Anglin, a Worthington native who runs the world’s most-visited white supremacist website, the Daily Stormer.

Until recently, the Daily Stormer accepted mailed donations through suite 121.

The Daily Stormer embraces neo-Nazi ideologies and spreads Andrew Anglin’s message through short, news-related posts riddled with racial epithets. “I ask myself this, in all things: WWHD? (What Would Hitler Do?),” Anglin wrote in a 2015 Daily Stormer post.

While Anglin initially responded via email to a reporter, he didn’t respond to specific interview requests. Reached by phone, his father refused to comment, saying, "I don't talk to reporters."

Protesters, led by the Columbus chapter of Anti-Racist Action (ARA), hoped to hobble the Daily Stormer’s donation pipeline by exposing the source of the site’s funding. Initially, it seemed to work. Within 10 days of the protest, the Daily Stormer removed the High Street address from its “Contributions” page.

“We wanted to raise awareness. By drawing attention to this and what they’re about, it says, ‘Hey, look. This is not a joke. Here’s what’s going on. Look at this website. See what’s going on in your community,’” said Olivia Flak, an ARA organizer.

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"I think people are afraid to talk about things in the dark. It’s terrifying to them. They’d rather pretend it’s not there,” said ARA protester Gail Burkholder, who first knew Andrew Anglin as a student in her preschool class at Calumet Christian School in Clintonville.

“My background is I’m Jewish,” she said. “I grew up in New York — in Trump Village, by the way — surrounded by neighbors with (Holocaust number) tattoos on their arms. That was my childhood. ... It’s in my genetic makeup that I absolutely have to do this. There’s no fear whatsoever.”

Before launching the Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin was simply Andy, a high school freshman at Worthington’s Linworth Alternative school, where he attended classes beginning in 1999 after attending elementary school at Worthington Christian Middle School. He would later transfer to Worthington Kilbourne High School, graduating in 2003.

In interviews, five of Anglin's former high school classmates, who asked not to be named for fear of repercussions, described him as quirky, funny, smart and nice, but also standoffish, fiercely independent and occasionally antagonistic. (All published details were corroborated by multiple sources.)

At the time, Anglin was a devout vegan. “We were all socially liberal, and he was in line with everybody in our small, alternative school,” said one friend.

“When people used homophobic or racist slurs around him (in high school), he was very outspoken about saying that was not OK,” said another acquaintance.

Those who knew Anglin best described his family life as “normal,” noting his strong relationship with his father. In a January video-conference interview with an ABC/Fox affiliate in Montana, Anglin said, “I get along fine with my parents. Hopefully, human relationships can go beyond politics.”

Beginning in his sophomore year, some classmates noted a marked change in Anglin. After he transferred to Worthington Kilbourne, he lost touch with many of his Linworth Alternative classmates.

After high school, biographical details on Anglin grow hazy. He took classes at Columbus State Community College in 2003, but at age 23 moved to the Philippines, where he taught English. Anglin’s current whereabouts are unknown.

Writing on the blog True Fascism, a precursor to the Daily Stormer he created in 2012, Anglin described his time in Southeast Asia, saying an awakening took place.

“It was only among my own kind — those of the European race — that I would ever be able to share true kinship, as it is only they who share my blood, and can understand my soul,” he wrote.

In March 2013, his web domain was registered using the email gregorymarkanglin@yahoo.com and a mailing address of 6827 N. High St., Worthington. A few months later, on July 4, Andrew Anglin debuted his new website, which replaced Total Fascism’s wordy essays in favor of short, racist takes on breaking news.

Historically, a website founded by white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader Don Black had been the online hub of neo-Nazi activity, but the Daily Stormer took over as the most-read white supremacist website in the world this past summer. The site’s readership spiked considerably during the presidential campaign. Between September and January, the site's global traffic ranking jumped from 24,927 to 14,435, according to estimated web-data metrics from Alexa, a company that charts commercial web-traffic data.

The Daily Stormer site attracts more than 10 million page views from nearly 500,000 unique monthly visitors, according to Alexa.

Unlike Stormfront and some other sites, the Daily Stormer targets younger readers, who are more familiar with internet subcultures found on sites such as 4chan. The image-heavy site is littered with familiar alt-right symbols, including Pepe the Frog and swastikas, and uses large headlines laced with ethnic slurs.

“He purposefully uses provocative and extreme language to rally his supporters,” said Marilyn Mayo, a research fellow with the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks extremist groups. “He’s definitely on the more extreme end of the alt-right. … You have people who hold his views but don’t use the same kind of virulently racist and anti-Semitic language he uses.”

Anglin combines his internet savvy with a deep love for, and knowledge of, Nazi propaganda. The Daily Stormer is named after Der Stürmer, a weekly Nazi newspaper published by Julius Streicher in the the lead-up to World War II.

Keegan Hankes of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit organization in Montgomery, Alabama, that tracks what it calls hate groups and combats discrimination through education and litigation, has closely followed Anglin’s activities since the Daily Stormer debuted. Hankes said Anglin quite purposefully talks about the same subjects over and over again in much the same way Streicher and others in the Nazi propaganda machine once did.

“It’s a type of indoctrination. It’s literally how effective propaganda works,” Hankes said. “He has a thought-out plan, and he’s committed to it.”

Despite his site’s popularity, Anglin isn’t universally revered among extreme-right leaders. Some of the criticism is due to his past.

“He’s a controversial figure within the white supremacist movement because he lived in Asia and the Philippines, and at one time he had relationships with Asian and Filipino women, which is considered something that is traitorous by white supremacists,” Mayo said. “He’s also controversial because he’s a misogynist and has attacked and belittled women, including white women, on his site.”

Others in the movement don’t like his troll-heavy approach. In the days after Donald Trump won the presidential election, for example, Anglin called on his readers to attack liberals online, flooding them with emails and social-media messages encouraging them to kill themselves. "'Mass Suicides After Trump Victory' would be a headline the media would play up, but all it do would demoralize the left even further," he wrote.

“There’s a real healthy debate going on in a lot of different areas about whether trolling is the right tactic and whether that flippant tone is ultimately going to help (white nationalists) cross the finish line with the white nation,” Hankes said.

Racist online screeds sometimes cross over into the real world. Dylann Roof’s killing of nine black people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, raised the Daily Stormer’s profile when it came to light that parts of Roof’s manifesto were found nearly verbatim in comments made on the Daily Stormer. That has led many to believe that Roof was a Daily Stormer commenter.

It’s often difficult to tie a specific hate crime to a certain website, and the Daily Stormer’s homepage lists a disclaimer that opposes violence and advocates “revolution through the education of the masses.”

On Friday, in a post titled “Choking Last Jew Gasp: Daily Stormer has Mailing Address and Bitcoin Shutdown,” Anglin addressed the removal of the Worthington address from his website.

“With the mailing address — it was at my dad's office. It's the address I've used since I moved out of my house as a teenager, for mail from the government, the bank, so on. It worked well because it's inside an office building,” he wrote. “Anyway, the ... SPLC called up the owner of the building (and) started making threats, so the building company was going to cancel his lease if I didn't stop using the mailbox there.”

Anglin listed a new mailing address — a post office box in Worthington.

In the same post, he also proudly posted the site’s recent traffic numbers and reassured readers of his bold plans. “The future belongs to us,” he wrote.

That attitude motivates Gail Burkholder and fellow protesters to keep pushing back against the white nationalist movement.

“We have to be out there bringing what’s dark into the light,” she said. “We need to let the good people of America know, no matter who they voted for, that this exists. There are people out there willing to hurt people based on who they are.”