Apologies for the slightly politisperg tangent but I've come to the conclusion the original deplatforming of The Daily Stormer in 2017 by Cloudlfare was a historically significant event for reasons that extend beyond Anglin himself.
Before this event, you really had to try hard to be deplatformed from web services for "hate speech alone". I remember prior to 2017 finding uncensored Moonman songs, uncensored Murdoch Murdoch episodes, old Johnny Rebel and Walt Mismark racist songs, and other Gamer-word riddled content freely on YouTube, FaceBook, etc. The only way you really could get deplatformed for "Hate Speech" is is you deliberately went out of your way to be SIEGSEV tier and said something akin to "I despise Der Juden- and thus at this specific time at this specific date at this specific synagogue I am going to do something specifically horrible". As Null has mentioned multiple times, prior to this event Cloudflare in particular wouldn't even deplatform websites hosting blatantly illegal content like ISIS sites and websites marketing child and animal abuse.
I realize after the election of Donald Trump there was some kind of shakeup within the bowels of Silicon Valley that paved the way for this- but I firmly believe at somepoint in early 2017 there was a discreet meeting in some cigar-smoke filled, dimly lit room between all the who's-who in Silicon Valley, Intelligence Officers from all the Alphabet Soup agencies, and State Department planners that came to a mutual arrangement where, because (at least in the US), the State Apparatus is constrained from openly black-bagging people for controversial yet legal speech alone to a certain "inconvenient" degree, the US Federal Government would both 1. financially incentivize and reward private tech companies for deplatforming events of ideological enemies-of-the-state and 2. not enforce existing US law when said individuals are targeted by criminal acts- such as DDOSing, etc. I believe in later years, specifically post-2021, actual evidence of these sorts of agreements got leaked in relation to Coronavirus "misinformation"- and I would imagine a similar sort of meeting/arrangement happened within the financial sector with banks and payment proccessors.
But how exactly do you get away with setting a new precedent like this from a PR perspective? If you try pulling a stunt like this too quickly and against too popular of targets folks are going to catch on and might resist. Simple! Find the most unlikable, vehemently repugnant, drooling imbecile toothless shit-for-brains Skinhead this side of the western hemisphere! To prevent people from recognizing Martyrs- just make your first crucifixion be somebody even the most die-hard posters on Stormfront will have no sympathy for! Here is where Andrew Anglin comes in- and thus a significant historical pretext he inadvertently set.
As far as I recall the "official" reason for his crucifixion was he made a minorly mean-spirited joke at the expense of a morbidly obese Antifa protestor who died at Richard Spencer's Tiki Luau in Virginia. Nothing SIEGSEV tier- just a mean-spirited catty joke perhaps at a "too soon" time. Hence the deplatforming begins... and the reasoning given is "This motherfucker is just such a unhinged Neo-Nazi we HAVE to do this! It's just gonna be the Nazis, don't worry!". But it doesn't exactly stop there- now does it? Next 8chan goes off the chopping block due to their version of /pol/ being a "Neo-Nazi Hate Board running out of control!"- despite the fact they apparently had several completely apolitical and unrelated boards that were thriving on the website at the time...okay, fair enough.
But then GAB gets taken down too- "NAZI TWITTER! WE GOTTA STOP IT!"- Keep in mind this occurred at a point in time *before* Andrew Torba had something akin to a "moral-event Horizon" and openly embraced Antisemitism- at the time he was a Quasi-Libertarian Unironic Zionist MAGA Stooge. Then when coronavirus occurs completely apolitical (and alot of times even leftist-leaning in the Wholefoods Hippie sense) "misinformation" websites get taken down left and right- for having the gaul to suggest maybe we shouldn't nosedive the economy like 1929 and go full Pandemic 2 Madgascar mode over a spicy cold with a 99% survival rate. And finally we see this very website we're on at the moment be systematically targeted and taken down- a completely apolitical gossip site that's more akin to an edgy version of Lipstick Alley than anything else.
Tl
R - Andrew Anglin, through just being as vile and repugnant of a lolcow and caricature of a Neo-Nazi as he could possibly muster in the "early days" of The Stormer's lifespan, inadvertently became the perfect scapegoat for some of the most egregious forms of censorship in US History, kind of like how some 1950's Greaser Movies became the perfect scapegoat for the Government to ban the possession of Switchblades in most of the US
