Pan­do has an inter­view of ‘weev’ from his new home in Beirut. He’s still as charm­ing as ever:

Pan­do Dai­ly
‘weev’ in Beirut: I can’t go home until “most of the agents of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment are dead.”

By Dan Raile
On Novem­ber 21, 2014

“The only hope I have of return­ing to the land I love, where I was kid­napped at gun­point and had my house bull­dozed, is if there is a such a con­sis­tent lev­el of change that most of the agents of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment are dead. I want to go home but I can’t.”

It’s late on a Tues­day evening and I’m sit­ting with Andrew Auern­heimer in the posh envi­rons of east Beirut’s Achrafieh neigh­bor­hood. The man most peo­ple know by his online han­dle, “weev,” is seat­ed across from me at a cozy cafe just down the street from the city’s flag­ship West­ern-style shop­ping mall. Auern­heimer, 29, is explain­ing why he’s been liv­ing in Beirut for the past month, and why he can’t return home to Amer­i­ca.

Weev’s road to Lebanon began in a New York City bar in May. He was just a few weeks out of fed­er­al prison, sprung on appeal after 14 months of incar­cer­a­tion and years of legal and pub­lic spar­ring with the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment over hack­ing charges. Weev want­ed to catch the tele­vised spec­ta­cle of NASCAR dri­ver Josh Wise rac­ing around the track at Tallede­ga in a car embla­zoned with the head of the celebri­ty Shi­ba Inu, Doge, and the name of its hon­orary cryp­tocur­ren­cy, Doge­Coin. As a native of Arkansas and the inter­net, Auern­heimer says he couldn’t miss it.

We’ve tells me how he’d met his girl­friend that night. A Syr­i­an Alaw­ite and a tat­too artist, she has intro­duced Auern­heimer into her cir­cle in Lebanon and cov­ered a sig­nif­i­cant amount of him with Norse sym­bol­o­gy in per­ma­nent black ink.

The mass-mar­ket appeal of their whirl­wind mod­ern romance is com­pli­cat­ed by the fact that one of those tat­toos is a painstak­ing roco­co swasti­ka over his chest. (Thank­ful­ly, Gawk­er has already cov­ered that exten­sive­ly – it got me off the hook when Auern­heimer offered to show it to me.)

The star-crossed love angle goes part of the way toward answer­ing the ques­tion that had com­pelled me to seek out Auern­heimer dur­ing a recent trip to Lebanon. Name­ly, why in hell would an avowed white nation­al­ist super-troll and hack­er be liv­ing in Beirut?

Inter­net con­nec­tiv­i­ty is pret­ty atro­cious in Lebanon, not to men­tion the fre­quent elec­tri­cal out­ages. I hard­ly need to men­tion that the Mid­dle East isn’t entire­ly rec­on­ciled to the idea of West­ern suprema­cy, or that the cur­rent vogue of right-wing nation­al­ist move­ments through­out Europe (which weev describes as “promis­ing”) is antag­o­nism toward immi­grants from the for­mer lands of the Ottoman empire.

Over the course of a cou­ple of hours, cof­fee, cig­a­rettes and a plate of french fries, the pieces of an expla­na­tion come togeth­er.

Auern­heimer describes him­self as the “point per­son for the press” for the loose­ly orga­nized crews of which he is mem­ber, and has writ­ten that “I make art… I see fed­er­al courts, finan­cial mar­kets, world media and the very act of human per­cep­tion as the can­vas.” Per­haps by meet­ing Weev and report­ing our con­ver­sa­tion, I’m act­ing as a con­duit for the expres­sion of this sort of “art.” If so, I’m tak­ing in mind the words of one of my favorite authors, Oscar Wilde:

“We can for­give a man for mak­ing a use­ful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for mak­ing a use­less thing is that one admire it intense­ly. All art is use­less.”

By this token, the cyber-activ­i­ty of weev is either use­less art or unfor­giv­able, harm­ful provo­ca­tion and quite pos­si­bly both.

He says he’s encour­aged by recent mili­tia move­ments like that of Neva­da ranch­er Cliv­en Bundy, but that they don’t have their pri­or­i­ties straight. He tells me that he views Okla­homa City bomber Tim­o­thy McVeigh as a hero, and explained his vision of send­ing tiny drones laden with high explo­sives to the per­son­al res­i­dences of US fed­er­al gov­ern­ment employ­ees.

“We are close to hav­ing atom­i­cal­ly pre­cise engi­neer­ing for asym­met­ric war­fare. Cheap, 3D-print­ed drones. The tech is sim­ple. The drones that the US uses for airstrikes are crap. Sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions behind. Pret­ty soon any­one who wants will be able to have some­thing bet­ter.”

“Some­how we need to get the ‘sol­dier types’ con­nect­ed with the peo­ple who have the ideas about who should be tar­get­ed and how,” he says. “It’s about the ide­o­log­i­cal prepa­ra­tion of a seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion.”

Auern­heimer was freed from prison when his con­vic­tion was over­turned as uncon­sti­tu­tion­al in vio­la­tion of his 6th amend­ment rights to a fair tri­al in the juris­dic­tion where an alleged crime takes place. But he doesn’t get misty-eyed about the ben­e­fits of America’s rule of law.

“I’m pro-con­sti­tu­tion. I think it’s prob­a­bly the great­est polit­i­cal doc­u­ment ever writ­ten. But it’s been total­ly and sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly cor­rupt­ed. It’s not rule of law, its rule by lawyers. The only lan­guage the gov­ern­ment under­stands now is fear and vio­lence. And if you’re will­ing to go far enough, they’ll lis­ten. There was no Waco after Waco. They blinked.”

...

Lebanon has no extra­di­tion treaty with the Unit­ed States. Weev says that was a cru­cial cri­te­ri­on for him in choos­ing a new home. Oth­er can­di­date coun­tries were Ser­bia and Andor­ra, which he says is still his first choice, if he can ever afford it. He also tells me that he would pre­fer to live in Syr­ia, but is wait­ing, con­fi­dent­ly, for things there to “cool down.”

* * *

Of course, trolling doesn’t work unless it elic­its pro­found reac­tions of dis­gust, hate or anger. And weev is one of the internet’s most famous trolls. He is also, some­what uncom­fort­ably, a dandy of dig­i­tal civ­il lib­er­tar­i­ans due to his intran­si­gence in the face of fed­er­al harass­ment, out at the bleed­ing edge of the first amend­ment.

Weev’s three-year scrap with the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment has been chron­i­cled in great detail in the media and through his own chan­nels (here’s the 2010 Gawk­er arti­cle that start­ed it.) It’s a thorny sto­ry with no sym­pa­thet­ic pro­tag­o­nist, and all sorts of legal, tech­no­log­i­cal and social impli­ca­tions. It was a promi­nent bat­tle in the so-called “hack­er-wars,” and he has received sup­port, on civ­il rights grounds, from the EFF and Glen Green­wald.

Recent­ly, weev has jumped into the fray of the online brouha­ha around Pan­do reporter Yasha Levine’s report­ing on the ori­gins and fund­ing of Tor, a con­fus­ing mias­ma of alliances that has seen Tor evan­ge­lists claim­ing they are under­paid by the gov­ern­ment and a promi­nent ACLU Speech, Pri­va­cy and Tech­nol­o­gy Project staffer invok­ing the Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion.

Auernheimer’s swasti­ka tat­too is not a rhetor­i­cal device. Nor is his relo­ca­tion to Beirut a sim­ple farce. I can attest that the sort of vit­ri­ol weev reg­u­lar­ly writes on the inter­net springs as read­i­ly from Auernheimer’s lips as his key­board.

“Amer­i­ca doesn’t have a gun vio­lence prob­lem, it has a minor­i­ty prob­lem,” he says.

...

One aspect of the cul­ture that weev obvi­ous­ly enjoys is the con­cept of “wasta,” an entrenched orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ple in Lev­an­tine neigh­bor­hoods, economies and polit­i­cal life, which rough­ly means “clout” or “influ­ence” or “who you know.” It also sig­ni­fies pro­tec­tion.

“I’ve got some wasta,” weev says. “Enough to mit­i­gate a con­trolled kid­nap­ping sit­u­a­tion. But there is a much greater risk that the US gov­ern­ment could just kill me.”

He refers to wasta fre­quent­ly through­out our talk, and clear­ly rel­ish­es the idea of a net­work of pro­tec­tion that doesn’t cave to threats of pros­e­cu­tion or vio­lence. He says he owes his wasta to his girlfriend’s fam­i­ly ties in Beirut.

“In Arkansas, where I was born and raised and the only home I’ve ever real­ly known, no one was will­ing to step up for me,” he says.

Weev has writ­ten of his own par­ents, who coop­er­at­ed with inves­ti­ga­tors in his case, that they “are per­fect exam­ples of how sec­u­lar lib­er­al­ism destroys fam­i­lies and will rot out the foun­da­tions of our very civ­i­liza­tion,” and that he pities his moth­er as “a brain­washed drone of a state gone mad.”

...