Stormfront's National Alliance "Soap Opera" Turns Ugly
In the hierarchy of cultural influence within America's radical right, Stormfront.org is generally viewed as the dumpster out behind the Drudge Report drive-thru. Most people don't even notice it.
Some people pay to eat out of it.
Last Thursday, June 11, neo-Nazi National Alliance (NA) chairman, Will Williams, 68, made a $250 donation to the worlds' largest hate site. And he got his money's worth. Within 24 hours, Williams broke the rules and cleverly outed a key NA member turned critic who had resigned from the Alliance less than a month ago and was questioning Williams' "personal integrity" on the racist forum.
Even after the man advised he needed to remain anonymous on Stormfront because he had a sensitive job and a wife and child to support, Williams continued to attack him with hints and disclosures that eventually made it clear to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) who the Stormfront poster really was.
The attack was diabolical. First, Williams responded to the critic, Paul Vogel, by putting his last name in quotation marks, hinting that “Vogel” was not the man's real name. Williams wrote:
“The ball is in my court, Mr. ‘Vogel,’ and you will remain on the sidelines, out of the game."
Then, on Saturday, after attempting unsuccessfully to have Vogel's critical comments removed from the thread by Stormfront moderators, Williams provided the SPLC a more useful clue when he accused Vogel of communicating with former NA accountant, Randolph Dilloway, after Williams had fired him. Williams wrote:
"Since Stormfront mods won’t curb your tedious, off-topic personal beef with me in this thread, I have just put you on Ignore. No more Paul ‘Vogel.’”
"Back on topic: Explain to the good folks at Stormfront why you were emailing Randolph Dilloway after I had fired the SOB."
It took Dilloway less than a minute to look at his inbox for recent emails from someone named "Paul." There were only two, both from a Paul Parnitzke. One announced his resignation from the National Alliance on May 20th and a second was in regards to Dilloway's recent interview with the SPLC.
What remains unclear is why Williams compromised Paul Joseph Parnitzke, of Burnsville, NC, in the first place. Parnitzke, 53, AKA "Paul Vogel" online, has been among the most outspoken and active advocates of Cosmotheism on the Web for more than a decade. He had also been a good recruiter for the new NA.
The ideological centerpiece of Williams' new National Alliance, Cosmotheism is a "religion" created by NA founder, William Pierce, more than 40 years ago in a failed attempt to obtain a non-profit tax-exemption for the National Alliance.
Under the names "Paul Vogel," "needle," and "nitzke@hotmail.com," Parnitzke's argumentative advocacy of Cosmotheism online resulted in him being banned from Wikipedia and eventually earned him an entry in the "List of Internet Kooks" on RationalWiki. His entry begins:
"Paul Vogel: Probably a pseudonym; cosmotheist; blind fanatic; "
Troll Army Infighters
The definition of a bully is "a person who uses strength or power to harm or intimidate those who are weaker." Williams' donation to cash-strapped Stormfront last week put him a position of strength and power to bully Parnitzke off of the board and publicly out him without moderator interference.
Reading through the NA thread suggests this was a fight Williams could have avoided. Parnitzke's posts as Paul Vogel on Stormfront prior to Williams attacking and outing him were mildly critical, but mostly friendly towards the Alliance. Indeed, last Wednesday, June 10, Vogel made two positive posts about the NA.
The thread languished for a couple days after Vogel's posts, with no further comments, causing it to end up way back on page six of Stormfront's "Newslinks" section.
With all the drama and conflict in the thread, it would have seemed sensible for Williams and other NA partisans to simply let it fade into the background. Instead, Williams made a $250 donation to Stormfront on the 11th and came back on Friday the 12th with a small National Alliance "troll army" supporting him. Williams quickly turned the conversation into a knife fight, attacking and outing Vogel, picking fights with another former NA critic and then arguing with one of Stormfront's "Buggsers" who advocate on behalf of Robert Whitaker's racist "Mantra.
Of course, a thread title on a racist forum that includes the term "soap opera" is the ultimate clickbait for drama-hungry neo-Nazis. By late Monday, the thread had reached more than 25,000 views and Stormfront moderators seemed to have had enough. They moved the thread over to the "Strategy and Tactics" section of the forum, removed most of Vogel's critical posts and banned him from the board. All these actions were likely done at the request of Will Williams.
An NA member who increased his profile and credibility with Williams during the week-long Stormfront battle with Paul Parnitzke goes by the name "Michael Olanich" on the forums. Now the NA Webmaster, he introduced himself on the "White Biocentrism" forum last year claiming he has been a supporter of the National Alliance since 1999, when he was 15 years old.
Olanich, whose real name is Michael Oljaca, 31, of Ridgewood, N.Y., has demonstrated unquestioning loyalty to Williams and mixed it up with Vogel on VNN and Stormfront at Williams' direction. After VNN founder, Alex Linder, grew tired of National Alliance advocacy and promotion on his forum and began to prohibit links to the NA on his site last month, Olanich admitted in reply that he has posted articles on VNN at Will Williams’ direction several times in the past.
The "friends" featured on new NA webmaster, Michael Oljaca, AKA "Michael Olanich's," MySpace page suggest his claims of lifelong advocacy of racial separatism may be somewhat exaggerated.
Williams has been permanently banned from the VNN Forum for years.
Though these days Oljaca appears intensely loyal to Will Williams, some of his fellow neo-Nazis have questioned the "racial purity" of his personal life. Oljaca's Myspace page, for example, includes several people of color among his friends.
For his part, Will Williams described Oljaca as a "solid team player ...who is never insubordinate, always cooperative, never a problem."
Williams, on the other hand, is seldom cooperative, almost always confrontational and usually a problem for moderators on the racist forums. Though he has been banned from Stormfront at least once before, Williams may have "cracked the code" by dropping some cash in the till for the struggling hate site.
Though both were given an opportunity to comment, neither Parnitzke nor Oljaca replied to phone messages or email inquiries for this report.
Parnitzke, however, forwarded our email inquiry to Will Williams and also carbon copied (cc'ed) it to National Alliance attorney Tim Kalamaros, Kevin Alfred Strom and about a dozen others. His brief message states that, unlike Will Williams, Parnitzke would never talk to anyone with the SPLC. He ends his email to Williams with:
"Thanks for betraying all of my original trust in you!"
Stormfront's detractors have long complained that the so-called "free speech forum" for the "embattled white minority" is only really free to those who give money to Don Black, its owner. But when they do, donors like Will Williams are allowed wide latitude to bend the rules, out their opponents and disrupt the board with their caustic arguments without interference from moderators.
The only caveat to that unwritten rule seems to involve criticism of former Klansman David Duke. Any Stormfront user, regardless of his or her level of financial support, will be banned permanently if they express even the slightest disapproval of Duke.
Other online racist forums are generously populated by those who have been ejected from Stormfront. Over on VNN, the fact that critics of David Duke are summarily banned from Don Black's site was illustrated a couple months ago with a coarse cartoon evidently created by an angry, recently-ejected Stormfront user.
Regardless of how long Will Williams is allowed to cleverly out users and disrupt the largest and most lucrative hate site in the world, one fundamental Stormfront shibboleth will likely continue to go unchallenged.
Unlike "Chairman Williams" and hundreds of other registered users who have to "pay to play," David Duke will probably always be allowed to eat out of the dumpster for free.
