Last Friday, an anonymous post on Medium doxxed the man behind the podcast “The Daily Shoah” of The Right Stuff, a website the Anti-Defamation League calls “virulently anti-Semitic”—revealing his Manhattan address and claiming that his own wife was Jewish.
Now some in the alt-right are fighting over who exactly outed “Mike Enoch,” whose real name is Mike Peinovich, in an increasingly vicious war of accusations.
Ahead of an inaugural event called The Deploraball, a celebratory gathering organized by alt-right figures and allies set to take place in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Peinovich spoke about his future in the movement in an interview on his own “Right Stuff Radio.”
“My wife is Jewish, OK, that’s the fact of the matter,” Peinovich said in a segment which aired on Wednesday. “There’s no hiding from it. Everybody knows now. And I understand that there’s people who can’t have me as leader. I hope that they can have me as a podcast host.”
Since his identity was revealed, Peinovich first denied the claims and then decided to face the music as it remained unclear just who was actually responsible for this revelation.
The post that revealed Peinovich’s identity, which has since been taken down, was published by an account named “counter countersignal.” It leaked Peinovich’s address, work details, and phone number and made the claims about the identity of his spouse.
Shortly after the article went up, Peinovich emailed The Daily Beast and dismissed the purported facts of the piece.
“The article has already been removed from medium for violating the rules,” he initially wrote. “I haven't been in touch with the right stuff in 4 years. I am a libertarian, as you can see from literally all my other writings on the web. The Right Stuff used to be a quasi libertarian blog but I left when it became too much for me. My wife is a jew for Christ sakes. Why do you automatically believe these fucking communists? Great journalism. And now I'm being harassed for shit I have been out of for years and frankly forgot about. I hope you're proud of yourself.”
The Daily Beast never had any previous contact with Peinovich or anyone affiliated with The Right Stuff, his outfit for podcasting and networking—or with The Daily Shoah, a program which popularized the use of parentheses to indicate Jewish names on social media.
Over the weekend, the story took even another turn.
First, Peinovich conceded that the information in the Medium post was correct, writing in a forum on The Right Stuff:
“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 to try to simply ride it out by being silent,” he wrote, as first documented in a Salon story. “This was irresponsible and a disservice to all of you. Yes my wife is who they say she is, I won’t even bother denying it, I won’t bother making excuses. If this makes you want to leave the movement, or to have nothing to do with TRS, then I understand.”
He then implored supporters to not “try to defend me to those attacking me.”
“Don’t jeopardize your own reputation by defending things that you don’t think you can,” he wrote. “I could try to explain my whole life for the last ten years to you but what difference at this point would it make. Life isn’t perfect.”
Then a theory emerged, detailed here, that two Donald Trump supporters—Mike Cernovich and Bill Mitchell, who have recently tried to distance themselves from people in the alt-right who they perceive to be anti-Semites—had provided journalists, including The Daily Beast, with Peinovich’s private information. (The Daily Beast never received doxxing information from Cernovich or Mitchell.)
Cernovich and Mitchell came under suspicion because they had begun to criticize figures who they deemed to be causing a problem for their loosely organized movement, typified by a Washington, D.C., event organized by white nationalist Richard Spencer in which people were caught on camera making Nazi salutes.
After those accusations started flying around, Mitchell and Cernovich both claimed that they weren’t involved in Peinovich’s doxxing. The Daily Beast has not been able to definitively identify the person or persons who wrote the Medium post.
“Who is the Right Stuff guy? Never heard of him?” Mitchell said in a direct Twitter message on Monday. “Other than Cernovich, I don’t know any of those people.”
Cernovich, for his part, did seem to allude to Peinovich, or at least someone who sounded like him, in a December Periscope broadcast.
“Did you know that one of the leaders,” Cernovich said making quotation marks with his fingers to the camera, “in the alt-right—I’m not going to doxx him—one of the leaders of the alt-right who’s anonymous—[is] morbidly obese and is married to a Jewish woman, which I find fascinating.”
He called it “hilarious” that this anonymous individual would not reveal his wife’s background.
On Tuesday, Cernovich told The Daily Beast that he was sent Peinovich’s private information by an anonymous account a while ago, but said he never posted it.
“Anons [or anonymous Twitter users] sent me the dox a couple of months ago,” he told The Daily Beast in a direct message. “I never posted it and would never have posted a home address—which is beyond the pale even by my standards.”
He said that Peinovich’s doxxed information was direct messaged to him by a “burner account.”
Asked specifically about the Periscope in which Cernovich seemed to allude to Peinovich, his defense was that The Right Stuff crew started the beef between them.
“He sent his crew to troll me, which struck me as ironic given his own situation,” Cernovich told The Daily Beast. “That said I never mentioned him by name. Nor did I spread his dox to anyone. We all have lines and I draw mine at posting an anonymous writer's full name, and I sure as fuck wouldn't give out a home address given the feral nature of the alt-left.”
After Cernovich’s December broadcast, however, users on 8chan began to dox other members of The Right Stuff, including “Bulbasaur” and “Seventh Son,” who were both involved with “The Daily Shoah.”
By Jan. 7, users on the subreddit r/altright were concerned that 8chan had been compromised and that the doxxing was being conducted by anti-fascist and “communist sympathizers.”
Since 8chan users are anonymous—just like the poster on Medium who doxxed Peinovich—it was hard to ascertain who was actually behind the doxxing of The Right Stuff crew.
According to NYC Antifa, an anti-fascist organization that heralded the Medium post as a success and initially tweeted the story, the group is unaware of counter-countersignal’s actual identity.
“They're an antifascist research group in the New York area that found info about the two TRS [The Right Stuff] hosts who were doxxed by other white nationalists last week, did some more research, and found Enoch,” a source familiar with the leak told The Daily Beast in an email. “When they confirmed the intel they made the Medium post.”
As for what happens now, hosts of “The Daily Shoah” had previously intimated that Peinovich was separating from his wife, but that the show would go on.
Peinovich declined to be interviewed for this article.