Twitter Still Has A White Nationalist Problem

Last month, Twitter put up another blog post declaring that it had made “strides” to build a “healthier” service . Fewer bots, less spam, proactive policing of abuse. It sounded, again, like progress.

Then Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, appeared at TED2019 in Vancouver, Canada, to talk about the “health of the conversation” on his platform. Dorsey, who still commands puffy profiles in The New York Times , often resorts to meaningless jargon when confronted with actual questions . In Vancouver, he threw around terms like “shared reality” and “variety of perspective.” He talked about watching “measurements trend over time.” Eventually, the TED moderator, Chris Anderson, cut him off.

“Jack, just picking up on some of the questions flooding in,” Anderson said. “A lot of people [are] puzzled why, like, how hard is it to get rid of Nazis from Twitter?”

Dorsey, who became a billionaire by monetizing outrage online, laughed uncomfortably. Again with the Nazis? Dorsey has never had a good answer to this question. He still doesn’t.

“We have policies around violent and extremist groups,” he told the audience in Vancouver. “And the majority of our work and our terms of service works on conduct, not content. So we’re actually looking for conduct. So conduct being using the service to periodically or episodically to harass someone, using hateful imagery that might be associated with the KKK or the American Nazi Party. Those are all things that we act on immediately.”

If those policies worked, the alt-right podcast king Mike “Enoch” Peinovich would not have been on Twitter this month mocking a new memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to African American victims of white supremacy . Peinovich would not be on Twitter advertising a neo-Nazi podcast on which he disparages the memorial as a “dumb monument that’s meant to be an assault on the white people of this country [because] nobody cares about black people... Kikes gave money to build this piece of trash.” He would not be on Twitter inspiring one of his white nationalist followers to tweet a photo of flames consuming the memorial with the message: “Shame to let that nice wood go to waste … Metaphorically speaking” a reference to the rash of arsons around the country targeting mosques, black churches and social justice centers.

The white supremacist accused of murdering 51 people in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March was also on Twitter, where he spread Islamophobia, white supremacist propaganda and articles about terrorist attacks. He tweeted pictures of his weapons and posted links to a disturbing manifesto he wrote, apparently in anticipation of the deadly rampage. Only after he was charged in a mass murder did Twitter act.

The shooter may have carried out the genocidal end goal of white supremacy, but there are thousands of white supremacists on Twitter with the same mindset, most of them anonymous and working in concert. In a 2018 study, extremism expert J.M. Berger offered an “extremely conservative” estimate that at least 100,000 alt-right users are on Twitter . The repercussions for these bad actors are practically nonexistent.

“We just didn’t invest enough,” Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, who also became a billionaire by monetizing outrage online, told CNN Business this week. “We underestimated the level of bad actors that we would see and the level of impact they would have.”

Take the anonymous alt-right troll called “Spicci,” who leads a harassment gang on Twitter called The Shed and has appeared on white nationalist podcasts to wish death on journalists. For years, Twitter has allowed him to run multiple fake accounts and use the service to menace people and tweet racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic content. Although Spicci has been reported countless times, Twitter typically does nothing. When the company does suspend him, he returns within minutes and continues harassing people. But the process of evaluating his “conduct” starts anew.

Norman “Trey” Garrison of Texas, a failed journalist turned white nationalist podcaster who goes by “Spectre” online, has similarly cycled through dozens of accounts and easily sidestepped Twitter suspensions so he can harass and threaten people. Twitter lets Amy Mekelburg, a notorious Islamophobe  endorsed by President Donald Trump and followed by several members of his administration, stay on the platform to blast hate about “Muslim invaders” that is all too similar to some of the language in the Christchurch suspect’s manifesto. Mike Cernovich, a far-right propagandist, rape apologist and conspiracy theorist who collaborates with white nationalists, uses Twitter to smear people as pedophiles . But Cernovich, who has been praised by Donald Trump Jr. , is still on the platform as well, even after a man deluded by the “Pizzagate” disinformation campaign Cernovich spread stormed a restaurant with an AR-15 and fired off some shots.

Indeed, many far-right extremists are enjoying an unbroken run of hideous behavior on Twitter that stretches back to at least the start of the Gamergate harassment campaign in 2014. They join in pro-Trump Kremlin-linked disinformation operations such as Pizzagate , the Seth Rich conspiracy and QAnon . They use Twitter in an effort to incite racist violence for example, by falsely blaming the recent Notre Dame cathedral fire on Muslims. And they use it to celebrate their terrorist attacks, such as the one in Christchurch.

“These same exact social media tools, whether used to recruit or propagate ideology or promote acts of terrorism, are the same tools that we saw being used by ISIS and foreign terrorist organizations,” Mary McCord, who oversaw terrorism prosecutions at the Department of Justice from 2014 to 2017 and is now a visiting professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said at a recent event at the New America think tank in Washington.

In 2018, every one of the 50 extremist killings in the United States tracked by the Anti-Defamation League was committed by a perpetrator with ties to a right-wing extremist group . White supremacists were responsible for 78% of them. The rising number of “lone wolf” attacks such as the ones at synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, California, as well as murders in recent years carried out by terrorists such as church shooter Dylann Roof show that the online radicalization process for these homegrown extremists is frighteningly similar to that of ISIS, which relied heavily on Twitter to advance its bloody agenda.

In 2015, for example, 23,880 ISIS accounts generated around 17.4 million tweets, according to an analysis by a group of computer scientists at Texas A&M University and the University of Southern California. That comes out to 730 annual tweets per ISIS account.

White nationalist accounts are far more prolific. A team of data scientists called ”Susan Bourbaki Anthony ” looked at a smaller dataset of 44 white nationalist accounts from May 1, 2017, to April 30, 2018, and found that the accounts posted at least 173,426 tweets during that period. That’s 3,942 annual tweets per white nationalist account more than five times the rate of the ISIS accounts. Yet Twitter executives have done far less about white supremacy.

Toward the end of April, it became clear why, as Dorsey slouched into the Oval Office to meet his most controversial customer .

President Trump routinely violates Twitter policies against abuse and harassment, uses the service to whip up his racist followers and retweets white nationalists like Lauren Southern. Twitter permits this behavior out of what it calls, in an Orwellian twist, a concern for the “public interest.” The president nevertheless used his April meeting with Dorsey much as Republicans did in a similar meeting last year to complain about how Twitter censors “conservative” voices. (Earlier this month, the Trump administration unveiled an online tool for people to report this supposed censorship along with their personal data directly to the White House, a move that was hailed by some white nationalists.)

For its part, Twitter cast the Trump-Dorsey summit as focused on ”protecting the health of the public conversation ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections .” On the same day as his White House visit, however, Dorsey called Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) to tell her that he would not take down a misleading tweet by Trump that appeared to incite violence against the Muslim congresswoman and resulted in a flood of death threats against her, many of them on Twitter .

Two days later, Vice’s Motherboard published a story  that shed new light on Dorsey’s unwillingness to crack down on Nazis. In the piece, an anonymous employee explained that, though Twitter had done an admirable job algorithmically scrubbing ISIS propaganda from the platform, the company won’t do the same with white supremacist content because the algorithms would flag Republican politicians and their followers. Twitter advertises itself as politically neutral, but the company’s failure to check far-right extremism is in itself a political decision. Large numbers of white nationalists support Trump, according to extremism experts . Those “conservative” voices Trump wants in full throat on social media are often goose-stepping online with the “very fine people” who rioted in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. In May, the administration cited free speech concerns in refusing to sign an international call to action to combat online extremism  in the wake of the Christchurch massacre.

“These extremists have manipulated social media to move from the margins to the mainstream,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, at New America this month. “The idea that Facebook and Google and Twitter can hover over the rest of us and that they bear no responsibility is just plain wrong.”

Social media platforms are private companies. They can regulate content and users how they see fit. Earlier this month, Facebook banned several far-right extremists for promoting violence and hate. Among them: conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, neo-Nazi Republican candidate Paul Nehlen and white nationalist British political operative Milo Yiannopoulos, who was so upset that he took to Gab, a social media platform popular with neo-Nazis, to promote civil war in America .

On Twitter, Trump raged about the Facebook bans.

“I am continuing to monitor the censorship of AMERICAN CITIZENS on social media platforms,” he wrote. “This is the United States of America — and we have what’s known as FREEDOM OF SPEECH! We are monitoring and watching, closely!!”

To reinforce his point, Trump retweeted Canadian white nationalist Lauren Southern and British fake news merchant Paul Joseph Watson, one of the extremists banned by Facebook. The First Amendment protects only against government censorship, not decisions made by social media companies a distinction seemingly lost on Trump.

Meanwhile, the trolls keep taking advantage of Twitter’s ineptitude or complicity. While I was writing this story, Cernovich used Twitter to accuse Vic Berger, a video producer and humorist who has taken to satirizing Cernovich after being harassed and slandered by the propagandist, of stalking children and trying to hurt Cernovich’s young daughter. He produced no evidence that this was true. But evidence doesn’t matter to Cernovich’s fans, some of whom responded to his Berger provocations with tweets about putting Berger in the hospital. After Berger reported Cernovich to Twitter, the company sent Berger an email about 16 hours later stating that Cernovich’s account had been suspended.

But Cernovich was not suspended , and he continued to tweet about Berger stalking children. Three days later, Twitter sent Berger a second email, again saying Cernovich’s account had been suspended. Cernovich, though, was not suspended this time, either, and Twitter allowed him to keep accusing Berger of criminal behavior without any evidence.

Twitter has been far less permissive with journalists and researchers who cover extremism. Twitter recently suspended Elizabeth King, who covers white nationalists for various publications, after she called Eoin Lenihan, a far-right harasser who works with Spicci and is now trying to pass himself off as an extremism expert, a “cunt” for disseminating false information about journalists that increases the risk of extremist violence against them. (Twitter has suspended Lenihan three times since last year, but he remains on the platform.) In April, Twitter locked Michael Edison Hayden, a Southern Poverty Law Center investigator, out of his account after he accurately tweeted about a white power symbol found at the scene of an arson attack on a famous civil rights training center . Twitter locked me out last year for tweeting a pro wrestling joke at alt-lite propagandist Will Chamberlain amid a Twitter-enabled harassment campaign directed at me that Chamberlain amplified.

That Twitter facilitates vast amounts of libel, harassment and threats is no secret. If the company were treated as a news publisher and Dorsey certainly makes decisions like one when, for example, he cites “newsworthiness” to justify leaving up Trump’s abusive tweets  it would have been sued out of existence long ago. But Twitter gets to hover above the harm it helps cause because, like Facebook and other social media companies, it is immune from liability under federal law. Which helps Twitter’s bottom line. The company just had an impressive first quarter of 2019 , raking in more ad revenue and users than expected and inking premium content video deals . If banning white nationalists would outrage Trump supporters, it might also chip away at Twitter’s business metrics.

When contacted for comment, Twitter spokeswoman Katie Rosborough refused to answer any of HuffPost’s specific questions about white nationalists and offered up only a boilerplate response.

“We are committed to combating abuse and improving the health of the public conversation,” Rosborough said. “As per our Hateful Conduct Policy, we prohibit behavior that targets individuals based on protected categories, including race, ethnicity, national origin or religious affiliation. We now take increasingly proactive action using our technology but always encourage account holders to report, block, and mute to protect their experience on the service.”

Almost two years after Twitter announced new rules to crack down on users associated with violent hate groups and abusive content , however, many prominent and known white nationalists and white nationalist groups operate openly on the platform. HuffPost identified more than 60 of them. We have listed them below. Many violate Twitter’s policies. Others have been banned but are still active. Some are violent. Others use Twitter to fuel stochastic terrorism by demonizing a group or a person who could then become a target for a fanatic. These are not anonymous Nazi trolls that a multibillion-dollar company can fool people into thinking it’s unable to catch. They are, by and large, some of the public leaders of an extremist movement predicated on violence.

Jack Dorsey gives them the run of the place.

WHITE NATIONALISTS ON TWITTER

Though these accounts are easily discoverable on Twitter, publishing their names could bring them more attention. For that reason, HuffPost is only publishing their user IDs, not the @ “handles” most commonly associated with Twitter accounts.

Since we began assembling this list last month, four of the 62 accounts have been suspended. Two were not suspended but appear to have self-deleted to evade oversight. We are leaving these accounts on the list because Twitter permitted the suspended users to repeatedly post extremist content before taking action and seemingly took no action against users that deactivated their accounts.

This list is far from comprehensive. We are excluding prominent anonymous white nationalists, who can have thousands of followers and go through dozens of accounts, and propagandists such as Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, who work with white nationalists . Nor are we including Islamophobes like Mekelburg and Pamela Geller, who do not identify as white nationalists but whose views often align with the ideology. The same holds for mainstream Republican pundits such as Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson.

In the photos below, many white nationalists wear “Make America Great Again” caps or express support for Trump. During the 2016 election, white nationalists rallied around Trump en masse, accurately viewing the racist authoritarian as a means to seize a greater share of mainstream political power. Twitter was Trump’s medium of choice. So it was the medium of choice for far-right extremists. While their bigotry and propaganda is now echoed by much of the Republican base, several prominent white nationalists have since rejected Trump. He has done too much neoconservative saber-rattling for their taste or failed to deliver on issues like the border wall. Grotesquely, some now shun him for having too many close connections to Jews. But the damage these extremists and Twitter (and Trump) have done by spreading a message of hate and radicalization will linger for years.

 
Mike “Enoch” Peinovich => 985138702602133511

The podcast panjandrum of the alt-right, Mike Peinovich, a former libertarian who now enjoys sieg heiling at book burnings , has been a central figure in radicalizing young men to white nationalism through his “The Right Stuff” platform. Peinovich participated in the deadly white supremacist riot in Charlottesville and has worked closely with many other leading far-right figures, such as Andrew Anglin and Richard Spencer.

Andrew Anglin => 1071550279529705472

Andrew Anglin runs The Daily Stormer, the world’s biggest neo-Nazi publication. A criminal, slanderer and serial harasser who was involved in organizing the Charlottesville riot, Anglin claims to be living abroad in a secret location out of fear for his safety. He has branded himself the “most censored person on the internet,” but he isn’t censored on Twitter, despite being banned from the platform in 2015 for spreading racist lies. Anglin is currently using an anonymous “sock” account to promote his neo-Nazi site and harass people. He told HuffPost that he operates several other sock accounts. ”What was the point of GAB in the first place?” he said. “Twitter is LIT.”

Richard Spencer => 402181258

The closest thing to a figurehead in the alt-right movement, Richard Spencer has a more restrained presence on Twitter and knows how to tweet between the lines, sticking mainly to political commentary. For the past few years, however, Spencer has been in the middle of major white nationalist events that resulted in violence, including Charlottesville and a speech he gave in Gainesville, Florida, where one of his supporters tried to shoot a protester while two other Spencer fans urged on the shooter. One of the Spencer supporters, Colton Fears, who later pleaded guilty to the charge of accessory after the fact to attempted first-degree murder, spoke with HuffPost before the attempted murder. “Basically, I’m just fed up with the fact that I’m cis-gendered, I’m a white male, and I lean right, towards the Republican side,” Fears said, wearing a pin of the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf of the Waffen-SS . “And I get demonized if I don’t accept certain things.” 

Jason Kessler => 467620549

This violent white nationalist and onetime Daily Caller writer organized the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville during which hundreds of racists and fascists rioted in the streets and attacked counter-protesters, with one of them murdering Heather Heyer. “Heather Heyer was a fat disgusting Communist,” Kessler tweeted at the time. “Communists have killed 94 million. Looks like it was payback time.” Twitter soon awarded Kessler a blue check mark to indicate his “verified” status on the platform. The designation, which most users understandably view as a status symbol, touched off a firestorm of criticism , after which Twitter announced it was suspending the verification program. But Twitter has secretly been verifying select users, including Dorsey’s parents (and, it would seem, this writer, who was given a blue check mark last summer after being threatened with violence on Twitter by Trump supporters). 

Nick Fuentes => 2442888666

Nick Fuentes is a popular coat-and-tie white nationalist and “Make America Great Again” propagandist with a big social media reach. He cut his teeth as a run-of-the-mill Trump cheerleader for Right Side Broadcasting Network, but made a splash when he called for the execution of CNN “globalists.” In 2017, clips of his racist rants behind the scenes were leaked on Twitter, and Fuentes split with RSBN after he attended the Unite the Right rally. He now makes a living demonizing immigrants, women and Jews on his YouTube show, ”America First,” and giving speeches at white nationalist gatherings. 

Matt Parrott => 21626308

A longtime white nationalist organizer and leader, Matt Parrott co-founded the now-defunct Traditionalist Worker Party, a major neo-Nazi organization involved in violence in Charlottesville and other rallies around the country. Like Spencer, Parrott strives to approach far-right extremism from an intellectual standpoint and keeps it mostly buttoned up on Twitter. “I’m really thankful that Jack [Dorsey] lets me on his website,” he recently tweeted .

David Duke => 72931184

Although the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and convicted felon is approaching 70, Duke is still one of the most popular and influential figures in the modern white nationalist movement. While he has little to show for his years of anti-Semitic tirades, aside from a single term in the Louisiana House of Representatives and a daily radio program, he has successfully groomed a number of young people into a life of white supremacist activism. Duke was one of many well-known attendees at the Unite the Right rally in 2017.

Brad Griffin => 1061127626725736448

A member of the League of the South, Griffin literally married into the movement in 2014 when he wed Renee Baum, daughter of the late Council of Conservative Citizens founder Gordon Baum. His white supremacist worldview stretches back even further to when he founded the hate site Occidental Dissent, where he decries “black-run Amerika” and praises the likes of Anders Breivik . Since then, Griffin has made a name for himself as one of the alt-right’s most-skilled doxers. He also organized the white supremacist rally in Shelbyville, Tennessee, in 2017 , which attracted several hundred racists and fascists.

Patrick Casey => 854868563311636480

Casey got his start in the white power scene working for white nationalist media shop Red Ice under the pseudonym “Reinhard Wolff.” When Eli Mosley stepped down as the leader of the hate group Identity Evropa in late 2017, Casey shed his anonymity before taking the reins  and attempting to steer the group away from its toxic “alt-right” label. It didn’t work. When IE’s Discord chats were leaked to the public early this year, revealing the type of racism and anti-Semitism Casey hoped to keep private, he once again did damage control by giving IE an even more banal name: the “American Identity Movement.”

Stefan Molyneux => 313038011

A popular YouTube crank and alleged cult leader , Molyneux has made a career out of howling about the injustices of feminism and government handouts before his hundreds of thousands of followers. His favorite pastime by far, however, is dusting off discredited race science and insisting to listeners that black and Hispanic people have lower average IQs than whites. Molyneux has been openly extolling the virtues of white nationalism since he visited Poland to make a documentary last year. In February, Molyneux tweeted , “When it came to slavery, blacks were the [drug] dealers. Whites were the users.” Donald Trump Jr. is a Molyneux fan and retweeted a video the white nationalist made with Mike Cernovich to spread the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. This month, Trump Jr. promoted Molyneux again on Twitter.

Kevin MacDonald => 87229781

The alt-right’s favorite academic, this retired California State University, Long Beach, professor authored an infamous book that posits that Jews undermine white societies as part of a group evolutionary strategy. MacDonald’s writing has brought untold numbers of people to the white nationalist cause. He currently edits The Occidental Quarterly, a publication of the Charles Martel Society, and rants about “white genocide” on popular white nationalist podcasts.

MacDonald is all but unknown outside far-right extremist circles, which is why it was shocking to see Trump Jr. promote the anti-Semite on Twitter in August 2016 , a decision that delighted people like Gabriel Sohier Chaput, a Canadian neo-Nazi contributor to The Daily Stormer . “Just the fact that Trump Jr. retweeted him should bring a lot of attention to Kevin MacDonald’s work,” wrote Chaput, who supports the ultra-violent neo-Nazi terrorist organization Atomwaffen.

James Edwards => 763938568502775808

A neo-Confederate white nationalist radio host, James Edwards has written that for African Americans, “slavery is the greatest thing that ever happened to them.” In 2016, Edwards, who has given speeches at white nationalist conferences, sued The Detroit News over a column labeling him a Klan “leader.” A Republican-appointed judge rejected Edwards’ defamation claim , writing that Edwards “espoused views consistent with those associated with the Klan and... repeatedly and publicly embraced several individuals who are strongly associated with the Klan.” That same year, Trump Jr. appeared on Edwards’ radio show to discuss how the Trump campaign was changing the Republican Party. “It’s not a campaign anymore, it’s a movement,” Trump Jr. said . A few months later, Eric Trump went on Edwards’ show .

Steve King => 48117116

Possibly America’s most racist sitting congressman, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) has spent years demeaning immigrants and people of color. Some of the lowlights that will eventually grace his obituary include claiming that some immigrant Dreamers developed ”calves the size of cantaloupes ” from hauling drugs across the border, keeping a miniature Confederate flag at his desk (Iowa fought for the Union), questioning if any racial “subgroup” besides white people contributed to civilization, and wondering aloud why terms like “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” are so offensive. King has retweeted prominent neo-Nazis and white nationalists on several occasions. In October 2017, Trump Jr. went pheasant hunting with King and killed several birds, which pleased King. “[T]he sky was so full of feathers that one could be convinced that the angels were having pillow fights,” the Republican congressman said.

Faith Goldy => 83748727

In 2017, far-right activist Faith Goldy was fired from Rebel Media after attending the Unite the Right rally and making a friendly guest appearance on a podcast hosted by neo-Nazi Robert “Azzmador” Ray , a violent criminal associate of Andrew Anglin. Goldy has made appearances on other white nationalist shows since then, including “Red Ice TV” and Stefan Molyneux’s show. She has repeated and defended the ”14 Words ,” a popular white supremacist slogan coined by a neo-Nazi terrorist . Her ultimately failed run for mayor of Toronto was promoted by Rep. Steve King.

Jean-François Gariépy => 274567177

A Canadian YouTube streamer in the mold of fellow white nationalist Stefan Molyneux, Gariépy is preoccupied with race and IQ studies. This former Duke University neuroscience researcher co-hosted the alt-right “Bloodsports” debates and now hosts his own show, where he often interviews prominent white supremacists such as Richard Spencer, Mike Enoch, David Duke and Jared Taylor. More disturbing, however, are the allegations against Gariépy raised in court filings. In a Texas guardianship case, Gariépy was accused of luring and attempting to impregnate a developmentally disabled 19-year-old while still married to his ex-wife, who claimed in a separate child-custody case in North Carolina that Gariépy tried to kidnap their infant child. Gariépy has denied any wrongdoing but was unsuccessful in his attempt to block the guardianship application of the teenager’s parents after claiming, falsely, that the woman was his pregnant fiancée. Meanwhile, Gariépy’s ex-wife won sole custody of their child.

Lana Lokteff => 2349347329

The co-founder of the disturbingly popular Red Ice media network, Lokteff uses her YouTube and Twitter platforms to denounce immigration and depictions of interracial couples in advertisements, which she calls “more devious than blatant in-your-face mass murdering.” On her show, Lokteff has interviewed a number of conspiracy theorists, white supremacists and other fringe figures. A speaker at the racist Identitarian Ideas IX conference in Stockholm, Lokteff bragged that it was “women that got Hitler elected.”

Henrik Palmgren => 2231109295

Lana Lokteff’s husband, Henrik, co-founded Red Ice and is the most frequent host of its flagship series “Red Ice TV.” Palmgren shares his wife’s hatred of Jews, Muslims and non-whites, as well as her penchant for conspiracy theories. Palmgren also spoke at Identitarian Ideas IX, where he complained about the “libtards that are undermining... the future of our children” and “rapidly turning the next generation of Europeans into minorities in their own countries.”

Norman “Trey” Garrison, aka Spectre => 1121503799200423936

Trey Garrison, a 50-year-old failed journalist turned alt-right podcaster, uses Twitter to promote racism, Holocaust denial and genocide. But he stands out as one of the platform’s most dogged harassers. Garrison’s favorite target: journalists.

During the June 2018 shooting rampage that claimed five lives at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, Garrison used Twitter to taunt victims in real time after one of the trapped Gazette employees tweeted a cry for help. He also cribbed from “The Turner Diaries,” the violent white supremacist novel that inspired Oklahoma City terrorist Timothy McVeigh, to create a “Day of the Brick” campaign to encourage extremists to attack reporters with bricks. For almost a month, Twitter executives allowed hundreds of anonymous white supremacists to amplify Garrison’s call to violence.

Scott Greer => 599817378

One of Tucker Carlson’s pet racists, Greer was for several years the deputy editor of The Daily Caller, an unusually high-ranking position for a person with so little experience. In 2016, I learned that Greer was a white nationalist. I emailed him photographs of himself in white power paraphernalia on the compound of a white nationalist group. I told Greer’s boss at The Daily Caller, Vince Coglianese, about my reporting. But Coglianese chose to protect Greer. The Daily Caller again shielded Greer when the Southern Poverty Law Center publicized his white nationalist ties  the following year. In 2018, The Atlantic ran a story based on leaked chat logs  that proved Greer had written under a pseudonym for Richard Spencer’s publication, Radix Journal. Only then did The Daily Caller and Greer part ways.

Lauren Southern => 164070785

A former Rebel Media correspondent, Southern is a popular propagandist for the cause of white nationalism. In 2017 she joined an anti-immigrant group called Defend Europe as it sailed the Mediterranean Sea hoping to stop migrant rescues. The effort, spearheaded by Sellner, was thwarted when the crew became stranded and had to be bailed out by a refugee rescue ship. Last year, Southern produced a pseudodocumentary promoting the racist myth of “white genocide” in South Africa. She also praised Orania , an all-white “ethnostate” in South Africa’s Northern Cape province, for being free of crime.

Martin Sellner => 2510374854

Martin Sellner currently helms the Identitarian Movement of Austria, a fascist and anti-immigrant organization known for engaging in high-profile demonstrations. Sellner and his fellow identitarians like to brand themselves as ”right-wing hipsters ,” but this label belies the racial hatred at their movement’s core. Dozens of members of Austria’s surging far-right Freedom Party, which was founded by neo-Nazis, have ties to the Identitarians. Sellner, who is engaged to Brittany Pettibone, has taken pilgrimages to memorial services for Wehrmacht soldiers and received a sizable donation from the Christchurch suspect prior to the massacre of 50 Muslim worshippers in late March. Sellner offered to buy him a beer.

Brittany Pettibone => 274316654

Racist American vlogger and conspiracy theorist Brittany Pettibone was also part of the Defend Europe crew. But she made her own international news last year when she tried to visit the United Kingdom to interview violent Islamophobic criminal Tommy Robinson only to be denied entry on the grounds that her presence would not be “conducive to the public good.” Pettibone has no such access problems on Twitter, where she has a blue check mark and almost 150,000 followers.

Katie Hopkins => 21439144

Another participant in the Rebel Media-to-white nationalist pipeline, professional hatemonger Katie Hopkins has almost 1 million followers on Twitter and traffics heavily in racist rhetoric online. Last year Hopkins tweeted side-by-side pictures of Meghan Markle, who is black, and Kate Middleton, who is white, along with the caption “No competition. You can’t buy class. #RoyalWedding2018.” When criticized by a black Twitter user, Hopkins lashed out by calling her a “Jigga-Boo” in a tweet she later deleted. She’s tweeted a video clip of herself calling for an ethnostate for “white Brits.” And this year she tweeted  “How is your Somali, sir?” to President Trump a reference to U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar. Like Lauren Southern, Hopkins produced her own propaganda film alleging that a “white genocide” is taking place in South Africa.

 
Tara McCarthy => 3412642223

British YouTube vlogger Tara McCarthy was once a left-wing vegan anti-natalist who opposed procreation. But she found her calling some would say her grift in the alt-right, transforming herself into a white nationalist who prattles about how white women need to pop out babies by the litter. McCarthy also opines frequently about evolution, relying on fake information that reveals her ignorance about science. She has, for example, called black people a separate “subspecies” and said that whites could “arguably be considered a separate species.” Humans cannot be distinguished genetically by race .

Jason Köhne => 822299610018365440

Jason Köhne is a white nationalist vlogger and author who preaches against the concept of “white guilt” to his small band of dedicated followers, whom he advises on how to “go free” that is, adopt white supremacist beliefs. Beneath his self-help guru facade lurk the usual crude beliefs about the danger of “diversity hires” and the “deleterious effect on our future” of interracial couples. Köhne uses Twitter to relentlessly hype his shows and books. So far he has been banned from Streamlabs and Venmo for terms-of-service violations.

Evan McLaren => 863484637351489541

A white nationalist attorney who once clerked for the district attorney’s office in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, McLaren took charge of Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute almost a month after the Unite the Right rally. Less than a year later, McLaren resigned , citing vague personnel changes at the white supremacist think tank. But he’s held on to his Twitter account, which he uses to defend convicted Charlottesville murderer James Fields Jr., mock Jewish people and troll journalists.

Tony Hovater => 109758899

An officer with the Traditionalist Worker Party before it collapsed. Hovater lost his job  after The New York Times profiled him in a widely criticized fluff piece. He turned to collecting donations through GoyFundMe, a fundraising platform run by Matt Parrott that no longer exists. But Hovater presses on, spending his time today tweeting things like , “The baseline for Jews is ‘don’t subvert your host nation’ and yet here we are.” Hovater also has “1488” in his Twitter bio. The 14 stands for the white supremacist “14 words” slogan. The 88 represents the eighth letter of the alphabet (H) repeated twice for “Heil Hitler.”

Lucian Wintrich => 15362651

Among the smarmiest of white nationalists, Wintrich pals around with members of the Proud Boys, a violent fascist gang. At the 2016 Republican National Convention, he organized a “Gays for Trump” party with Peter Thiel acolyte Jeff Giesea, who has worked with numerous white nationalists, and Jim Hoft, the publisher of The Gateway Pundit, a far-right slander rag. Richard Spencer, Milo Yiannopoulos and Roger Stone attended. Pamela Geller, a major Islamophobe, gave a speech. There, Wintrich unveiled “Twinks4Trump,” a photo series of barely dressed post-pubescent boys sporting MAGA hats. Wintrich later displayed the same photographs in a Manhattan exhibition where Yiannopoulos donned a MAGA cap and bathed in pig’s blood . In 2017, The Gateway Pundit hired Wintrich to be its White House correspondent and was granted a press credential by the Trump administration.

Paul Ramsey => 53979469

Nicknamed the ”smiling nationalist ” for his jocular demeanor, Paul Ramsey’s views on race and gender are no less poisonous than your average neo-Nazi. In one of his YouTube videos from 2014, Ramsey told a “parable” in which he compared African Americans to rattlesnakes. He recently courted mockery by tweeting that women shouldn’t shake hands because it was “designed as a greeting between men.” Ramsey currently hosts his own white nationalist show on YouTube and has spoken at several conferences for American Renaissance , the organization headed by white nationalist Jared Taylor.

Augustus Sol Invictus => 3219461544

Formerly known as Austin Gillespie, this libertarian lawyer turned neo-Nazi was a featured speaker at the deadly Unite the Right rally. Invictus, who represented the former head of a neo-Nazi organization in trying to overturn the man’s conviction for conducting paramilitary training with the alleged goal of inciting a “race war,” once filmed himself stabbing a goat to death and drinking its blood as part of a pagan ritual. In 2015, when he was 32, he seduced a high school senior by lying to her about being a debate coach. He eventually began abusing her, according to a report she filed with police. Invictus punched and strangled her , once until she passed out in a closet into which he’d dragged her. When she came to, he was holding what she believed to be a gun to her head. “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you right now,” he said, according to the account she gave police.

Sam Hyde => 963146508706222080

Sam Hyde, one of the co-founders of alt-right comedy troupe Million Dollar Extreme, gained notoriety for unusual pranks , including a deliberately offensive 2013 stand-up routine in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, in which Hyde berated his audience for being “hipster faggots” and claimed that positive portrayals of LGBT people were an example of the “ZOG media machine destroying the family.” His Nazi-promoted sketch comedy show, ”Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace ,” premiered on Adult Swim in 2016 and was unceremoniously canceled the same year. Hyde has become a living meme after mass shootings, the alt-right mocks the bloodshed by circulating a photo of Hyde posing with guns and blames the violence on him. Hyde, who has been banned from Twitter, is still on Twitter. 

Steve Sailer => 209693451

Steve Sailer is a former National Review writer who popularized the term “human bio-diversity” another name for scientific racism and was described as the “man who invented identity politics for the New Right.” Sailer, whom Richard Spencer credits with helping “redpill” him, currently writes for The Unz Review and routinely demeans people of color. Following Hurricane Katrina, Sailer wrote that African Americans “possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups” and “need stricter moral guidance from society.” He repeated the same sentiment after Hurricane Maria with regard to Puerto Ricans, thousands of whom the Trump administration left to die.

Peter Brimelow => 74760182

British expat and white nationalist Peter Brimelow is the founder of the rabidly anti-immigrant VDARE Foundation and its associated website. In 2013, Brimelow wrote in an article deemed too extreme for WorldNetDaily that “Democrat policy is to swamp the historic American nation by abetting, not just an invasion by foreigners, but colonization — the development of enclaves that are to all intents and purposes no longer American territory.” He has also spoken at prominent white nationalist conferences hosted by Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute and Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance.

Joseph Jordan, aka Eric Striker => 882164627479683073

Joseph Jordan, better known by his pseudonym Eric Striker, is a longtime fascist and fixture of the alt-right movement . Between the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2018, Jordan had written some 700 articles for the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer, often lashing out against Jewish people and the LGBTQ community. In one typically deranged rant, Jordan wrote that the “Jew is the virus that launches many infections against our national body’s white blood cells.” Jordan was identified as one of many racists who marched in Charlottesville and currently works for The Right Stuff, a white supremacist website, where he co-hosts a podcast with Mike Peinovich. Jordan still tweets bigoted (and sometimes baffling ) things from his current Twitter handle.

Peter Imanuelsen => 707231479047315456

A white nationalist vlogger and conspiracy theorist who, despite his Twitter handle, is a British national born in Norway to what appears to be a family of tax cheats, Imanuelsen serves as a major node for alt-right propaganda in Europe. He uses his verified Twitter account to broadcast anti-immigrant views , as well as outright racism and anti-Semitism, to his nearly 130,000 followers. “I think Hitler had some good points,” Imanuelsen has tweeted on more than one occasion. Jack Dorsey has also allowed him to get away with posting statements like these.

Angelo John Gage => 2432310906

An Iraq War veteran and white nationalist, Angelo John Gage used to run the now-defunct National Youth Front, which the SPLC described as the “youth arm of the white nationalist American Freedom Party.” When Gage stepped down as the NYF’s leader in 2015, its then-vice chairman, Identity Evropa founder Nathan Damigo, took his place. 

Ethan Ralph => 113137765

A relic from the misogynistic Gamergate era, Ethan Ralph is an accomplished harasser who runs his own blog and hosts an online radio show. Ralph has appeared on Red Ice shows hosted by Lana Lokteff and white supremacist lecher Matt Forney. In 2017, Lane Davis, an alt-right troll who wrote for Ralph’s blog, murdered his father during a heated argument. Davis is serving a 17-year sentence . Ralph, himself no stranger to the justice system, pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer in Virginia in 2016 and received a three-year penitentiary sentence, all but six months of which were suspended as Ralph was put on probation.

John Friend => 43661233

John Friend is a neo-Nazi who produces content for The American Free Press, a virulently anti-Semitic publication founded by deceased Holocaust denier Willis Carto , and runs his own website. During a 2015 appearance on ”The Brian Ruhe Show,” Friend claimed that Adolf Hitler was the “greatest thing that’s happened to Western civilization.” He has also referred to the Holocaust as “one of the most egregious and outrageous falsehoods ever perpetrated against mankind.” That didn’t stop YouTube stars and Trump surrogates Lynette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson (“Diamond and Silk”) from going on Friend’s show in 2016.

Jim Goad => 21613794

Jim Goad is the former editor of Answer Me!, a magazine that ran from 1991 to 1994 and often featured the artwork of racist cartoonist Nick Bougas under the pseudonym A. Wyatt Mann. Goad has written articles for the far-right Taki Mag and appeared on white supremacist shows like “Red Ice TV,” where he’s promoted his new book, an ode to white victimhood called “Whiteness: The Original Sin.” On his podcast, he has interviewed the likes of Alex McNabb, a white supremacist and former EMT , neo-Nazi Patrick Little , and Holocaust denier Michael A. Hoffman II .

Brien James => 266643241

Before co-founding the Vinlanders Social Club, a violent, racist, skinhead organization whose members murdered several people, Brien James jumped from one white supremacist hate group to another. In Knightstown, Indiana, James and some friends started a gang called the Knightstown Boys. By his late teens, he was active with the Klan. In 1999, James helped found the Outlaw Hammerskins and, one year later, allegedly beat a man half to death for refusing to sieg heil. More recently, James launched the American Guard , a so-called “Constitutional Nationalist” group that has mobilized at a number of far-right pro-Trump rallies.

Matt Forney => 1380911874

Matt Forney, a white supremacist and men’s rights activist who publishes a nasty goulash of a literary magazine called Terror House, once declared, “Women should be terrorized by their men. It’s the only thing that makes them behave better than chimps.” Forney’s racism and misogyny are matched only by his Islamophobia and homophobia. After the Pulse gay nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, in 2015 that took 49 lives, Forney wrote: ”No functioning, healthy society would allow Pulse — or the kinds of men who frequented it — to exist . No healthy society would mourn their passing.”

Irma Hinojosa => 742749379623165955

A virulent Islamophobe, Irma Hinojosa used to co-host the online show “The Right View” along with a handful of other MAGA-loving women who called themselves the Deplorable Latinas. (Another of the show’s hosts, Ximena Barreto , is a Pizzagate-peddling crackpot who briefly worked as a Health and Human Services Department official.) Hinojosa has complained on Twitter about “low IQ Muslim refugees from third world countries” and raved about white genocide. She eventually struck up a relationship with anti-Semitic activist and former Proud Boy Johnny Benitez, who has engaged in fascist street violence.

Tim Dionisopoulos => 297101242

At Providence College, Tim Dionisopoulos doubled as chairman of the school’s Republican club and head of a chapter of Youth for Western Civilization, a white supremacist organization . When Dionisopoulos graduated and took his racism to Washington, conservative doors swung open for him. He worked for Campus Reform, a right-wing college news website run by the Leadership Institute, an organization that trains grassroots activists, including several prominent white nationalists. (Mitch McConnell and Karl Rove are also alumni.) Dionisopoulos moved on to the Media Research Center, a right-wing organization that works to erode the public’s trust in the press and climate science.

Paul Nehlen => suspended during reporting

Paul Nehlen burst onto the scene in 2016 as a white nationalist Republican candidate running against House Speaker Paul Ryan. Nehlen grew increasingly extreme as he began appearing on white nationalist podcasts. Twitter permanently banned  him last year after he posted a racist meme about Meghan Markle. Nehlen now identifies as a neo-Nazi and openly supports terrorists like Dylann Roof and Robert Bowers. Until a few weeks ago, he was still active on Twitter and calling for Jews to be murdered . His tweets grew so extreme in the days before the Poway synagogue shooting that even several alt-right members expressed concern to HuffPost that Twitter could allow Nehlen to continue posting such violent content. “He’s literally going to get people killed,” one alt-right serial harasser who goes by “Spicci” said. (HuffPost has no reason to suspect that Nehlen inspired the Poway shooting or that Spicci had advance knowledge of the terrorist attack, although the shooter declared his intent on 8chan .) 

Daniel McMahon => suspended during reporting

Daniel McMahon , better known online as Jack Corbin, is a self-described “fascist” in his 30s who has made multiple Twitter accounts to harass and try to dox anti-fascist activists. McMahon is similarly active on Gab, a Twitter knock-off popular with white nationalists, where Tree of Life shooter Robert Bowers repeatedly shared McMahon’s posts . McMahon doesn’t limit himself to social media. He has also worked the phones to harass and threaten activists , the staff of a college newspaper and a Seattle restaurant . Twitter’s policy about holding users accountable for behavior off Twitter never seems to stop McMahon from getting back on the platform.

Jovanni “Jovi Val” Valle => suspended during reporting

This former member of the Proud Boys gang was suspended from Twitter during the reporting of this story. Toward the end of April, Valle tweeted a photo of himself sieg heiling in front of a Nazi flag . He also got egged in the face in New York City while walking around with a a different Nazi flag on May Day spouting racism and homophobia. Valle’s national fascist debut came in June 2017, when he and Sal Cipolla, a racist goon , and Laura Loomer, the Islamophobic conspiracy theorist and ambush artist, rushed the stage at Shakespeare in the Park in a pro-Trump stunt. A month later, a sympathetic Sean Hannity brought Valle on his radio show . By then, Valle was on his way to being openly neo-Nazi. In 2018, he helped Jason Kessler organize a second Unite the Right rally in Washington. He put together a rally this year to support James Fields Jr., the white nationalist who murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. In April, Valle organized a “Fash Bash” party to celebrate Hitler’s birthday .

Bryden Proctor => suspended during reporting  

Bryden Proctor is a former stand-up comedian whose jokes revolved around his veganism, depression and fondness for booze. That was before he morphed into a white supremacist who proudly marched alongside other bigots who chanted “Jews will not replace us!” in Charlottesville. Today Proctor co-hosts his own podcast, where he’s fond of dehumanizing black people, gays, Jews and women. After the alleged suicide of a fellow Charlottesville marcher whose name was revealed in the press, Proctor ordered his audience to “dox journalists” in retaliation. Proctor also collaborated with Garrison on the Day of the Brick campaign on Twitter designed to incite violence against journalists.

Matthew Heimbach => self-deleted during reporting

The violent neo-Nazi criminal Matthew Heimbach was the head of the Traditionalist Worker Party until March 2018, when he choked Matt Parrott unconscious after Parrott caught Heimbach sleeping with Parrott’s wife , who was also Heimbach’s stepmother-in-law. Heimbach has been a white nationalist since his college days. With his gift for gab, he rocketed to a leadership position within the alt-right at a young age and worked hard to forge ties with the National Socialist Movement and older violent skinhead crews, as well as foreign fascist groups. Heimbach, who once boasted a blue check mark, eagerly jumped into the violent fray in Charlottesville and at other rallies.

Michael Hill => self-deleted during reporting

Michael Hill is the co-founder and current president of the League of the South, a pro-secessionist organization that, according to the SPLC , participated in many of the Confederate battle flag rallies that took place after the 2015 massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. (The League of the South protested the SPLC in 2014 over their advocacy for same-sex marriage.) Hill, who led the League of the South and the Traditionalist Worker Party into battle in Charlottesville, has warned his followers to never “underestimate the perfidy of the organized Jew” and reacted to the Christchurch massacre by declaring he had “no sympathy for dead Muslims.” He has been banned from Twitter multiple times . He is still on Twitter.

WHITE NATIONALIST ORGANIZATIONS ON TWITTER

The Right Stuff => 1055215213685821441

The account for Peinovich’s The Right Stuff network promotes his stable of white nationalist podcasters, retweets neo-Nazis and spews anti-Semitism. Far-right extremists count on Twitter’s complacency to reach potential recruits. Twitter has been especially accommodating to Peinovich and TRS.

Red Ice TV => 52352820

A white nationalist media network that began as a hive for online conspiracy theories, Red Ice produces some of the slickest extremist video and radio content and serves as a key platform for far-right voices.

American Identity Movement => 1074531802168131589

The white nationalist group Identity Evropa was founded by a violent racist criminal, but its members worked hard to present themselves as spit-and-polish young Republicans . After embarrassing setbacks involving stolen valor and leaked chats that showed just how racist and anti-Semitic its members were , the group rebranded as the American Identity Movement.

American Renaissance => 990362730694565888

Although banned on Twitter, American Renaissance, an older white nationalist organization that hosts a popular annual conference, still maintains a presence on Dorsey’s platform to spread racism and hate.

VDARE => 27522964

Named for Virginia Dare , the first English child to be born in the New World, Peter Brimelow’s VDARE operates in the same vein as American Renaissance white nationalism dressed up in pseudo-intellectualism to make it more palatable to the mainstream. Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan are regular contributors to its website. In 2016, the Republican National Convention promoted a VDARE tweet on the digital banner in the Quicken Loans Arena on the day Trump accepted his party’s nomination. That was no accident. During Trump’s acceptance speech, the RNC broadcast another tweet from a different white supremacist account on the big screens . Twitter has boosted VDARE for over a decade.

Defend Europa => 276760126

Defend Europa spreads Islamophobia, migrant crisis fearmongering and white genocide propaganda. A white nationalist content mill in Europe, the deeply racist site complains about globalization but serves as connective tissue for nationalist movements across the continent. Rep. Steve King has promoted Defend Europa on Twitter, and it is believed that in 2016, Trump retweeted the site’s owner, Jason Bergkamp, who has praised Hitler .

Goy Talk => 4770323116

A relatively new neo-Nazi podcast that is part of the Vanguard Streaming Network on YouTube, Goy Talk has already hosted Christopher Cantwell, Joseph Jordan, David Duke, Mike Peinovich and Richard Spencer. Last month, the podcast had neo-Nazis Paul Nehlen and Patrick Little on to debate the most effective way to start a race war and commit genocide against Jews and blacks.

Patriot Front => 1086516228968058880

An offshoot of Vanguard America, the group associated with white nationalist terrorist James Fields Jr., Patriot Front formed in the aftermath of the deadly Charlottesville riot during which Fields murdered Heather Heyer. Under the leadership of Thomas Rousseau, this heavily armed fascist gang embraces violent insurrection and envisions an America where “ethnostate rape gangs” can target unmarried white women . Patriot Front engages in menacing street-level activity, sends “calling cards” to the home addresses of journalists’ family members and puts up propaganda flyers in metropolitan areas around the country.

Anti-Communist Action => 827689891790278657

A violent neo-Nazi-affiliated group whose members advocate mass killings of minorities and the overthrow of the U.S. government and share bomb-making materials , Anticom has worked security for Richard Spencer and helped organize white supremacist rallies. The organization has cells in at least 15 U.S. and Canadian cities. Twitter has given Anticom a platform since February 2017.

Counter-Currents => 154891961

The anti-Semitic recluse Greg Johnson runs Counter-Currents, one of the most influential white nationalist publishing imprints. Counter-Currents sells James Mason’s “Siege,”  a Charles Manson-inspired book that recommends terrorism and race war and has in turn inspired the neo-Nazi terrorist group Atomwaffen Division , whose members have committed at least five murders. Counter-Currents calls the book a “tool for mental self-liberation and perhaps even a guidebook for living.” The organization doesn’t just traffic in words. It hosts real-world forums where white supremacists assemble. Twitter has let Counter-Currents sling racism and hate for nine years.

American Freedom Party => 412838388

Formed by members of a racist skinhead group, the American Freedom Party (formerly American Third Position) is a white nationalist political party that has unsuccessfully run several candidates for public office. The party boasts connections to a who’s who of white nationalists in America. Kevin MacDonald and James Edwards are two of the organization’s directors. William Johnson, a Columbia-educated lawyer who has spent over three decades advocating for the deportation of all non-white immigrants and U.S. citizens, serves as the party’s chairman. A decade ago, Johnson successfully cozied up to Republican and libertarian supporters of Ron Paul , according to the SPLC. In 2016, the Trump campaign selected Johnson as a delegate for California’s Republican presidential primary. The American Freedom Party has been on Twitter for almost eight years.

My Posting Career => 2596827180

One of the older alt-right message boards, My Posting Career was an early stamping ground for several of today’s thirtysomething neo-Nazi leaders, such as Matt Parrott, Andrew Anglin and Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, the webmaster for the Daily Stormer and The Right Stuff. A sewer of racism and anti-Semitism that Jack Dorsey has welcomed on his platform since 2014, MPC is believed to be the site where the term “cuckservative” was first used .

Arktos Media => 230450929

Arktos Media has made a name for itself as the world’s largest distributor of alt-right books and for its partnership with Richard Spencer, who called the publishing house a “very important development” in the international spread of far-right ideas. Arktos, which is run by Daniel Friberg, a Swedish neo-Nazi criminal and mining executive , also translates many seminal alt-right books into English, including the works of Russian ethnonationalist Alexander Dugin, who is said to have the ear of President Vladimir Putin. Twitter has platformed Arktos for almost nine years.