Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker and internet troll better known by his online pseudonym ‘weev’, has unveiled a swastika tattoo and declared himself an anti-semite and white supremacist in a post on notorious racist website The Daily Stormer.

On Wednesday, Auernheimer wrote of his “first tattoo… a 4.5 inch swastika on my chest,” which features characters from Norse mythology, which is often invoked by white supremacists.

About Jews, he says: “They took control of our systems of finance and law. They hyperinflated our currency. They corrupted our daughters and demanded they subject themselves to sex work to feed their families. These are a people that have made themselves a problem in every nation they occupy, including ours. What’s saddest is that we are the enablers of this problem.”

He goes on: “I look on Google Street View and see the place I used to live in, before I was kidnapped at gunpoint and held in foreign territories based on the lies of blacks and Jews. It has been bulldozed. A new house is there.

“It has become impossible not to empathize with the Palestinians. The first phrase I learned in arabic: ‘al-maot lil yahood’ (death to the Jews).”



This news will come as acutely embarrassing to a number of figures on the political Left who lauded Auernheimer during his trial and incarceration. New Statesman writer Laurie Penny praised Auernheimer in bylined opinion pieces as well as on Twitter, where she called for his release using the hashtag #freeweev.

Note that @rabite just got sent down for 3.5 years for computer violations. That’s 1.5 years longer than the #steubenville rapists #freeweev — Laurie Penny (@PennyRed) March 18, 2013

Artist and writer Molly Crabapple, another prominent figure on the Left, wrote an emotional account of Auernheimer’s sentencing in VICE. “I didn’t go there to write an article. I went because his conviction was wrong, and my friends and I cared for him. I meant to be another body filling the courtroom, to provide whatever support that’s good for,” she opined.

Support for Auernheimer from Penny and Crabapple has been controversial among other writers and activists, since he released the details of many Apple customers in the course of his hacking efforts. He also became, as both concede, a notorious internet troll.

But the two can apparently now add virulent anti-semitism and ugly neo-Nazism to the list of embarrassments generated by their friendship with and support for a man who on Wednesday wrote: “The Jews abused our compassion to build an empire of wickedness the likes the world has never seen.”

Auernheimer states in his Daily Stormer op-ed that he currently resides in Lebanon, but is not planning to renounce his US citizenship. “I plan on coming back with an army, be it human or automaton,” he explains. “One day I will come to collect every single bit of the debt owed to me by the thugs and criminals that have hijacked my country.

“After I am done I will rebuild my home in the Ozark mountains.”