Religion and Politics

The Making of an American Nazi

For The Atlantic, Luke O’Brien profiles 33-year-old Andrew Anglin, a former progressive turned neo-Nazi who uses the website The Daily Stormer to disseminate his hateful rhetoric. O’Brien writes that Anglin embraced progressive attitudes in the early years of high-school: “He wasn’t so different, back then, from the antifascist activists who would one day protest outside his dad’s office.” Sometime around his sophomore year of high-school, Anglin became erratic, turning to self-harm, drugs, and eventually radical, far-right politics. O’Brien concludes, “Like so many emotionally damaged young men, Anglin had chosen to be someone, or something, bigger than himself on the internet, something ferocious to cover up the frailty he couldn’t abide in himself.”

Read at The Atlantic

• Email
• Print