Co Runner of Daily Stormer is of Jewish descent

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Reclusive Neo-Nazi who co-runs the white supremacist Daily Stormer website, and recently said Jewish children "deserve to die," has Jewish relatives on "both sides of his family," his mother told Newsweek.

Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer, who handles the technical side of Stormer alongside editor Andrew Anglin, said on a podcast last month that Jews were to blame for the website's loss of its dot com address after a white man allegedly killed peaceful protester Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August. Subsequently, the site has been forced to jump around the internet.

"Someone has to step in," Auernheimer, 32, said on the podcast Radical Agenda, hosted by Christopher Cantwell, one of the white nationalists who attended the deadly Charlottesville rally. "If you don't let us dissent peacefully, then our only option is to murder you. To kill your children. To kill your whole families. There is only one thing absent free speech that we can do to express our dissent and that's to slaughter you like dogs, and you're gonna have it coming and your children will deserve to die."

The audio was published on both Cantwell's website and the Daily Stormer, which primarily posts Jewish conspiracy theories and memes celebrating physical violence against Jews, women and people of color.

Newsweekhas been unsuccessful in contacting Auernheimer, who is allegedly living in Ukraine after serving jail time over a computer-hacking incident. Auernheimer's Jewish heritage was first reported by Gawker in 2012, though Auernheimer denied the report. Adrian Chen, the author of the story, told Newsweek that the infamous troll volunteered the information about his Jewish ancestry during an interview.

And his mother has confirmed it. Alyse Auernheimer told Newsweek that she was saddened that her son had wished death on children. She added that she has been estranged from him for over a decade.

"He doesn't like us," she said, adding that her son comes from a "large, mixed-race family" with Native American heritage, and that he most certainly has Jewish lineage "on both sides of his family."

Still, Auernheimer's "repulsive and hateful" words are likely protected speech because they may not present a "clear and present danger," said Sahar Aziz, a law professor at Rutgers University.

"The language is couched in conditional terms, perhaps purposely so," Aziz said. "Auernheimer's calls to kill Jews is conditioned on whether he and his followers can express dissent."

Auernheimer's Jewish heritage will likely hurt him in some white nationalist circles if it becomes more widely known. To protect him, The Goyim Know, a separate website that functions as a comment section for Daily Stormer, has threatened people who accuse Anglin or Auernheimer of having Jewish lineage with a "permanent ban," according to the site's rules. It's something that cuts in contrast to Daily Stormer's stated emphasis on being a pro–free speech outlet.