by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
For more than a dozen years, Andrew Anglin’s Daily Stormer website had been the most popular Alt-Right publication anywhere on the Internet, probably having more readership than all the others combined.
This remarkable achievement came despite the absolutely unprecedented campaign of harassment, suppression, and deplatforming that he faced. His bitter enemies not only had him banned from virtually all standard Internet services but even arranged for the repeated confiscation of his website domains, something that previously would have seemed unimaginable.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Along the way, he also became one of the very first individuals ever banned from Twitter. After Elon Musk bought that company and proclaimed a new free speech policy, Anglin was briefly allowed back. But despite his careful avoidance of controversial topics, he was soon banned again.
All of this reasonably earned him the title of the world’s most censored writer. That was the moniker we provided him when he declared that anyone could freely republish his pieces and we began doing so, including well over 2,000 of his posts and articles during the last five years.
As might be expected, the enormous human and financial strain of maintaining a website under such very difficult conditions eventually became too much for him, and last month he finally abandoned that effort, publishing a post entitled “The End of the Daily Stormer.”
During the early period, his outrageously provocative and taboo-breaking commentary had produced such enormous growth in his traffic that he had rather boastfully predicted that within a few years he would surpass the readership of the New York Times and almost every other publication. But his ideological enemies put a stop to all of this, and in his closing post he described his unfortunate fate:
This is the site’s 13th year. However, it was only in its 4th year that the rug was pulled out from under me in a totally unprecedented manner. For 9 years, the site has limped along, with a significant but almost totally stagnant readership, no ability to grow. It was obscenely expensive to keep the site online, becoming financially nonviable.
Unconstitutional censorship is the reason I’m shutting down, and it’s the reason I’m posting to hundreds of thousands of people on dailystormer.pw instead of tens of millions on dailystormer(dot)com. What they did to me and my site was totally unprecedented, a level of censorship that no person or publication had ever been subjected to.
While the site was effective in many ways, even in its weakened state, my 25 year plan to build and manage the world’s most popular independent news and commentary outlet was canceled.
With a total blockade on me by every Western internet infrastructure company, I had to use shady offshore services that were otherwise designed for use by criminals. Absurdly expensive and inefficient.
But despite this, he still claimed to have won a moral victory, noting that some of the controversial topics whose coverage he had boldly pioneered had now gone entirely mainstream:
