By Ron Unz
May 4, 2026
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.
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:
Mission Accomplished
I wrote this internet website to agitate for change in the United States, Europe, and the world, with an aggressive focus on the Jewish problem.
Many people are now saying all the things I said a decade ago. They’re not saying them all that well, it’s not how I would do it. But no one can deny this Jewish thing anymore. No one really even tries to at this point. Every popular, relevant right-wing commentator now sounds like some glitched out version of me. It’s surreal. Wherever it goes from here, I have no shame about calling this a massive personal and professional victory. We are living in a new paradigm of which I was the primary pioneer.
Despite abandoning his website, he has continued to write on a social media platform called Primal, and we will occasionally republish his longer posts as they appear.
A couple of weeks ago, the first of these provided his own rather pessimistic take on Donald Trump’s current Iran War. He opened the piece by emphasizing that our main sources of alternative information on that conflict and many other important topics had increasingly shifted away from blogs to podcasts:
Most of us are getting our information and analysis about the Iran War from podcasts. The mainstream news is useless, and to my personal regret, the days of blogging are mostly over. Alternative voices prefer podcasts.
Judge Napolitano, Glenn Diesen, Danny Davis, that Uzbek guy, they are all running the same commentators in a loop, creating enough content to listen to every waking hour. (Given that this is all allowed on YouTube, and becoming very popular, one has to wonder if there is something more nefarious at work, though most of the people appear to me honest, so if it is a psyop, most of them are not in on it.)
Tucker Carlson, the podcast beast, has a bigger variety of guests, and also gives his own commentary.
I would certainly second that same media conclusion. Although I still read my newspapers and other mainstream publications, and regularly follow the useful analyses and links provided by alternative bloggers and websites such as Simplicius, Naked Capitalism, Moon of Alabama, and Larry Johnson’s Sonar21, I spend far more hours each week listening to the podcast interviews on the channels that Anglin cited as well as a few others. Taken together, the videos that they provide probably draw many millions of views every day, totally dwarfing the readership of the written alt-media pieces covering these same topics.
Although some of this may be ascribed to the easier aspects of passively watching rather than reading content, I think that other factors are more significant.
A knowledgeable expert would require considerable time and effort to produce an article summarizing his current views, especially if he wanted to publish a polished piece written to his own standards. But given the rapid pace at which new developments might be unfolding, the shelf-life of such commentary would probably be measured only in days or even hours, so the result would hardly seem worth the effort.
An hour-long discussion probably runs at least 7,000 or 8,000 words, but writing an article of such length would certainly require days of work.
Meanwhile, a podcast interview would allow him to provide the same sort of analysis with only a tiny fraction of the time and effort, and it could easily reach an audience of millions rather than merely the low tens of thousands. So that format seems a much more cost-effective means of providing commentary on transient current events to an potentially enormous worldwide audience.
Podcast interviews also open the door of communications to those individuals who may possess important information but who lack the writing skill to effectively present their views in that format.
This relatively new informational ecosystem of courageous podcast interviewers had provided a powerful platform for perhaps a couple of dozen regular guests, most of them solidly or even very highly credentialed.
John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs are two of our most distinguished academics, while Chas Freeman holds a similar rank among American diplomats. Former CIA Analyst Ray McGovern had headed our Soviet Research Group and served as the morning intelligence briefer to a half-dozen American presidents, then became one of our strongest public critics of President George W. Bush’s misbegotten Iraq War. Col. Larry Wilkerson was the longtime chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and eventually revealed that he had been the one who leaked to the media that Saddam Hussein possessed no WMDs.
In a less corrupt era, all of these individuals would be honored guests on our leading electronic media channels, but instead they have been entirely blacklisted in those venues. This helps to explain why the cable news networks have been suffering such a severe decline, with most of their audience now reduced to the elderly, the gullible, and those sitting in airline terminals or dentist offices.
Consider the sheer number of these credible figures advancing a perspective so radically different than that uniformly presented by our political and media establishment. If only one or two individuals were doing so, we would naturally be skeptical regardless of how well-credentialed they might be. We can easily imagine a couple of people becoming deluded or irrational.
But these same doubts dissipate when such a critical mass has been achieved and the arguments they advance seem logical. They may be mistaken in some of their points and I’m sure they occasionally are. But they appear quite honest and forthright and I see no plausible reason why they would be trying to deceive me, especially given the overwhelming weight of funding and political power that lies with the establishmentarian position.
I’d naturally be very interested in hearing the other side of the argument if it can be cogently made, but it hardly seems to exist. As far as I know, the sort of people that the media puts front-and-center to support the official narrative neither have much serious credibility nor can provide any logical arguments. For example, I’ve sometimes seen clips of Jack Keane, a very elderly retired four-star general making regular appearances on FoxNews in support of the victorious Trumpian narrative of the Iran War, but his factual claims seem absolutely ridiculous. Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the Senate’s fiercest Neocons, behaves in similar fashion, as do various other elected officials, hardly surprising given the enormous political clout of the establishment, its thinktanks and its donors.
Moreover, as an important benefit to their audience, individuals may sometimes make important statements in a casual podcast that they would have probably been much more reluctant to do in cold print.
For example, Col. Wilkerson had spent decades as a pillar of the government establishment and a participant in the innermost circles of national security matters. Over the last year or two, he has become extremely critical of Israel, its behavior, and the subservience of our own government to its dictates and its American advocates. In an interview with Andrew Napolitano a few days ago, he declared that he was absolutely certain that Israel had killed Charlie Kirk in order to clear the path for the Iran War that it sought from President Trump, and he indicated that the same country had also played a central role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Although that latter belief has become increasingly widespread in mainstream circles, with Prof. Sachs and many others having recently suggested the same thing, this latest statement by so respectable and mainstream a figure as Wilkerson considerably accelerated this trend.
This media landscape has constituted a central source of information for my own analysis of President Donald Trump and his conduct of our Iran War, which has now lasted more than two months.
Following the massive initial surprise attack by American and Israeli forces at the end of February, the next few weeks were filled with more than 20,000 airstrikes against Iranian targets, while Iran responded with many thousands of retaliatory strikes by its huge arsenal of ballistic missiles and powerful drones. Even more importantly, the Iranians also closed the Strait of Hormuz to most oil tankers and other cargo vessels, thereby demonstrating the major stranglehold they possessed over the world economy.
This initial, heavily “kinetic” phase of the war has now been followed by nearly a month of a fragile and incomplete ceasefire. This second phase was marked by an early round of unsuccessful negotiations in Islamabad. That failure led Trump to declare his own counter-blockade of Iran, ordering his naval forces to interdict and seize any Iranian oil tankers, believing that the loss of Iran’s revenue and its inability to store its unsold oil would force the country to capitulate.
As the Wall Street Journal reported last week, Trump declared that he intended to maintain that blockade for an extended period, believing that time was on his side.
President Trump has instructed aides to prepare for an extended blockade of Iran, U.S. officials said, targeting the regime’s coffers in a high-risk bid to compel a nuclear capitulation Tehran has long refused.
In recent meetings, including a Monday discussion in the Situation Room, Trump opted to continue squeezing Iran’s economy and oil exports by preventing shipping to and from its ports. He assessed that his other options—resume bombing or walk away from the conflict—carried more risk than maintaining the blockade, officials said…
For now, Trump is comfortable with an indefinite blockade, which he wrote Tuesday on Truth Social is pushing Iran toward a “State of Collapse.” A senior U.S. official said the blockade is demonstrably crushing Iran’s economy—it is straining to store its unsold oil—and sparked fresh outreach by the regime to Washington.
But the Journal noted that outside observers were much less confident about which side held the upper hand in this situation.
“Both sides seem to believe that they have calculated this right and that time is on their side,” said Nico Lange, director of Germany’s Institute for Risk Analysis and International Security and a former chief of staff at the German defense ministry.
Indeed, there are very strong reasons to doubt that Trump’s blockade would be effective in the way he has assumed. Earlier in the war, the Trump Administration had become so desperate to maintain plentiful world oil supplies that it had lifted all sanctions on Iranian oil, thereby allowing Iran to quickly sell around 140 million barrels that had already been pumped and exported, but that had previously remained unsold. This surprising decision provided the Iranian government with an enormous injection of additional revenue.
Furthermore, during the weeks that followed, the rise of Iranian oil exports and its sale at much higher prices had roughly tripled ongoing Iranian revenues.
Energy industry insider in Iran tells me the following, and it is STUNNING:
— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) March 23, 2026
Before the war, Iran produced just shy of 1.1mn barrels of oil per day, and sold it at $65 per barrel minus $18 discount (i.e. $47)
Today, it produces 1.5mn barrels a day, and sells it at $110 with…
Taken together these two huge boosts in Iranian oil revenues far outweighed any current reduction imposed by the blockade.
Meanwhile, Trump’s apparent belief that the Iranians will now be forced to stop pumping oil for lack of storage and this will permanently damage their oil fields seems quite doubtful. This was emphasized in a post by former CIA Analyst Larry Johnson, who noted that Iran had successfully coped with such previous extended reductions in exports.
Iran’s Speaker of the Parliament had also ridiculed this theory.
3 days in, no well exploded.We could extend to 30 and livestream the well here.
— محمدباقر قالیباف | MB Ghalibaf (@mb_ghalibaf) April 29, 2026
That was the kind of junk advice the US admin gets from people like Bessent who also push the blockade theory and cranked oil up to $120+. Next stop:140. The issue isn't the theory, it's the mindset.
Continue reading at https://www.unz.com/runz/has-president-donald-trump-lost-his-mind/
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