Michael "Enoch" Peinovich

Mike Peinovich, more commonly known by his pseudonym “Mike Enoch,” is the founder of The Right Stuff (TRS) and a co-host of the Daily Shoah, a seminal podcast of the Alt-Right. Peinovich was doxed in January of 2017 and has since become one of the most recognizable white nationalist voices, regularly traveling around the United States and abroad to participate in public speaking events.

In his own words:

“Diversity means you’re next white people. Your heads are on the chopping block.” —Freedom of Speech rally, Washington, D.C., June 25, 2017.

“White privilege is an anti-white conspiracy theory that is meant to facilitate white genocide.” — Texas Belongs to Us rally, Austin, Texas, June 17, 2017.

“We are not going to back down to this Jewish, cultural Marxist brainwashing that you have been indoctrinated with in order to be useful idiots for the systems of international finance, capitalism and war, which you are representing whether you know it or not. ... That’s why you are here fighting us who simply want to stand for working class white people, our rights, and our nation.” — Traditionalist Worker Party rally, Pikeville, Kentucky, April 29, 2017.

“Racism is hardly a problem in present day Western society. The remaining gaps we see between whites and black are the result of natural inclinations and abilities and can never be corrected for.” — “Anti-Racism: It’s a White Thing,” The Right Stuff, August 10, 2013.

Background

Before founding TRS and fully committing to the Alt-Right, Peinovich ran in libertarian circles. His radicalization followed a familiar trajectory among those affiliated with the Alt-Right. Peinovich progressed from the libertarian fringe to race realism and eventually extreme anti-Semitism, which he partially ascribes reading Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique.

In late 2009, he registered the domain theemptiness.info where he authored nearly 50 posts between January 2010 and April 2011. The site’s mission statement reads, “The purpose of this site is to deconstruct empty social constructs. It is also to show how people themselves become empty when they enslave themselves to these empty social constructs.”

While writing at The Emptiness, Peinovich demonstrated an anti-war streak common among those on the Alt-Right.

“The military, and all the members of the enforcement wing of the state, represent a direct threat to my well being. The military is funded through taxes and debt that is backed up by taxes. ... The military cannot protect me and fund itself by stealing my money at the same time,” Peinovich wrote. “The actions the military takes in foreign countries are precisely the reason that there are terrorists that hate America. You can’t protect me from terrorism by stoking up terrorism and attacking and occupying foreign countries.”

Almost prophetically, given his future role in the Alt-Right as a propagandist indoctrinating the young and naïve with white nationalistic bluster, Peinovich concluded, “The best that can be said of soldiers is that they are young and naïve and duped by propaganda. Let’s not add to it by continuing to praise the role of soldiers while we criticize the wars. ... This is hard and breaks a lot of social taboos, but let’s show some real courage, not just empty nationalistic bluster.”

During this period, Peinovich published an article titled “Burning Down the House” under his byline in the Mises Daily, a publication of the Ludwig von Mises Institute — a think-tank based in Auburn, Alabama, dedicated to Austrian economics and the principles of Anarcho-Capitalism.

On October 4, 2012, Peinovich registered his flagship project, TRS. At the time the “About Us” section read, “The Right Stuff is a political and cultural blog dedicated to the promotion of a post-Postmodern mindset. You are miserable because you are freeTM. You will find that we are not like most of the ‘alt-right’ blogging community ... We don’t play echo chamber, we don’t care if we butt heads with fellow ‘reactionaries’ ... Neither are we content with simple deconstruction. One of our favorite things to do here is re- appropriating and redirecting the modern narrative. The Right Stuff argumentation style that results is refreshing to some, infuriating to most.”

In his site biography, Peinovich describes himself as raised in an upper middle-class, white, liberal protestant household in the northeast.

“I became attracted to right-wing politics initially as a rebellion against my ‘more progressive than thou’ WASP upbringing,” he writes. “I was a libertarian for years, exploring various factions such as paleo-conservatism, anarcho-capitalism and voluntaryism before I came to the unsettling realization that ‘freedom’ and markets do not necessarily lead to the best outcomes for all people all the time. Slapped in the face by human bio-diversity, I had to come to grips with the fact that libertarianism isn’t going to work for everyone, and the people that it isn’t going to work for are going to ruin it for everyone else.”

Peinovich also mentioned that he was a software engineer and responsible for technical support on the TRS website.

In late 2013, roughly a year after the TRS blog began producing content, Peinovich penned several articles at a distinctly more ethnocentric publication named Theden.

“A thede is any group of people you identify with. Your clique, your club, your ingroup, your subculture, your tribe, your ethny, your nation, your race, your faith — these are all thedes. ... Westerners in general tend to reject an explicitly Western identity. They can be metalheads, weeaboos, wiggers — but White? They’d rather not draw attention to that. ... You can identify with a subgenre of music, with a chemical, with a sect, with a logo, with a piece of cloth — but identifying with your ancestors’ culture? That’s bigotry!, we hear. Thedening the West, then — reestablishing group identities — is of high import. Welcome to Theden,” reads the sites introductory post, “Why Theden.”

In an article titled, “Public School as Redemption of the Poor (and Black),” Peinovich argues that liberals are as racially conscious as conservatives and use public schools for, “the redemptive transformation of society itself.”

“The idea that Blacks can be improved by simply exposing them to Whites in the schools has been a part of liberal educational canon ever since school desegregation in the 1960s,” Peinovich writes. “Indeed, it seems that liberals treat exposure to Blacks for White children in the schools not as a growing experience, but rather as a form of penance for the original sin of White privilege. No doubt some kind of proxy punishment for the Southern sin of resistance to integration during the Civil Rights era is at play here as well. Liberals will never tire of punishing Southern Whites.”

In another piece titled, “The Pretense of Powerlessness: Knockout Edition,” Peinovich claims that so-called race realists rather than minority groups are the truly oppressed because they are ostracized for their racism.

On August 3, 2014, TRS posted the first episode of its signature radio program, The Daily Shoah. The show’s hosts are collectively referred to as a “death panel” — most frequently including Peinovich, the show’s sound engineer Jesse Craig Dunstan (AKA Seventh Son), Van Bryant II (AKA Bulbasaur), and Cooper Ward (AKA Ghoul), as well as guests from the broader white nationalist movement.

Bryant and Ward both quit the Daily Shoah after being doxed in late 2016.

Peinovich began appearing at other outlets on the racist right in late 2014. Most notably, he was a guest on the December 29, 2014, episode of the Alternative Right podcast, “2014 Year of the Dindu,” with Richard Spencer, Colin Liddell and Andy Nowicki.

Delivering an emblematic aside, Peinovich discussed his role popularizing the term “dindu,” a racist term for African-Americans.

“One of the things I came up with to call 2014 was the ‘year of the dindu’ — as in ‘dindunuffin,’ the nickname that was given to Michael Brown in the wake of his robbery,” Peinovich told his co-hosts.

“It comes from every time a similar story happens where a ‘youth’ does something and then is shot, or punished, or arrested. Inevitably there will be a shot of his mother, his grandmother, or his aunt on the news crying, ‘He dindunuffin. He good boy. He was just getting his life together.’”

“We used it early,” he continued. “We were bouncing it around back and forth on Facebook. Michael Brown reading urban poetry as the racist cop steps out of his car and executes him in cold blood. It was pretty funny.”

Seven months later, Peinovich appeared with Spencer again on his Radix Podcast to discuss the c---servative meme and Donald Trump.

Peinovich is credited with creating the anti-Semitic (((echo))) meme that originates from the reverb effect applied when hosts of the Daily Shoah mention Jewish individuals or institutions. Members of the Alt-Right began to affix three sets of parentheses around names to denote Jewish influence — most commonly on social media platforms.

The Right Stuff and Peinovich solidified their position in the world of white nationalism during this period. Links to Alternative Right began showing up more frequently in the citations of Peinovich’s articles. In his December 28, 2014 article, “Race and Dildos in Disney’s ‘Frozen,’” Peinovich cited Liddell while discussing the concept of “cultural welfare.”

“It sucks that POC generally and black people particularly lack the creative intelligence and cultural history to provide them with a mass of compelling characters and icons from which to draw a rich tradition of stories, myths, legends and folktales, but that is not our problem,” Peinovich complained. “Nor should we pollute our myths by offering them up as cultural welfare pieces for lesser peoples, arbitrarily switching their race to make others feel better.”

That same month, Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents claims he met Peinovich at an NRx gathering in New York.

“I believed that [TRS’s] combination of satire and serious analysis could reach a large audience, and since the Death Panel consisted of ex-Libertarians who were evolving in the direction of racial nationalism — and bringing their audience along with them — I believed the Shoah was performing a valuable educational function,” Johnson wrote. “At the time, the Death Panel did not really identify as White Nationalists, but they were wise to race and the Jewish question, and given their trajectory, I knew it was only a matter of time.”

According to Johnson, Peinovich attended the annual American Renaissance conference seven months later and began publicly identifying himself as a white nationalist.

Peinovich’s peers also began to recognize him as a white nationalist ideologue. Responding to Peinovich at Alternative Right in January of 2015, author Duns Scotus claims, “From his other writings and podcasts, [Peinovich] could be fairly described as a race realist.”

Peinovich debuted as a leader of the Alt-Right with his appearance alongside Richard Spencer of AltRight.com and Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer, for “The First Triumvirate.” The discussion, which took place on the “Between Two Lampshades” podcast — named for the post-World War II myth that the skin of victims of the Buchenwald concentration camp was used to make lampshades — came in the wake of the controversy over Richard Spencer’s toast at the 2016 National Policy Institute conference in Washington, D.C., which was met with stiff armed salutes from a handful of conference attendees. The recording amounted to a public relations effort for Spencer, brokered by Peinovich, after his preferred co-leaders of the Alt-Right, Jared Taylor of American Renaissance and Peter Brimelow of VDARE, disparaged him over the NPI controversy.

Peinovich was doxed in January of 2017 by members of 8chan’s /pol/ board. Along with his identifying personal information, it was revealed that he had been married to a Jewish woman for the past decade.

“As I am sure you all know, I was doxxed and an ill- advised attempt to fool the media about my identity led me to not talk to you people and try to simply ride it out by being silent,” Peinovich wrote on the Right Stuff’s 504um. “Yes my wife is who they say she is. I won’t even bother denying it. ... Don’t lie for me. Don’t try to defend me to those attacking me. Don’t jeopardize your own reputation by defending things that you don’t think you can. ... I am just a guy that puts ideas out there on the internet. I want to save Europe, America and the white race. We are going to continue and not let this thing die.”

Reactions from Alt-Right leadership, including Peinovich’s fellow triumvirate members, were generally supportive despite the massive scandal.

“I respect, like, and admire Mike Enoch,” Richard Spencer tweeted in the wake of the controversy. “He will continue to be a force on the Alt Right in the future.”

In a post titled, “Here’s the Thing,” Anglin wrote, “As most of you probably already know, we’ve had a minor crisis in the Alt-Right. As the k--- dox squad continues their rampage, Mike Enoch of The Right Stuff was doxed. And here’s the thing: Jew wife.”

Anglin continued, “Mike and TRS have been at the forefront of exposing the Jewish problem. ... He was obviously dishonest on some level, but if we look at his contribution, and ask ourselves ‘Did this forward the 14 words?’ we will see that it did and the weirdness in his personal life doesn’t change that. Tens of thousands — maybe even hundreds of thousands — of men have been brought into the movement through TRS and Mike’s work, and nothing can or will change that.”

Despite rumors that Peinovich would resign from TRS following his dox, he returned to the Daily Shoah and emerged as an outspoken public figure in the Alt-Right. Peinovich now travels the country to attend public and private gatherings and is frequently a headliner at events. He has notably spoken at events at Auburn University, Alabama, Pikeville, Kentucky, Washington, D.C., and Austin, Texas.