Mike 'Enoch' Peinovich, Upper East Side Neo-Nazi, Helped Lead Charlottesville Rally

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — One of the leaders of the deadly "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend was Mike Peinovich, aka "Mike Enoch," a popular neo-Nazi blogger and podcaster who was outed back in January as an Upper East Side software developer with a Jewish wife.

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After his identity was exposed last winter, Peinovich separated from his wife, according to a co-host on his unabashedly racist and anti-Semitic podcast, sarcastically named "The Daily Shoah." Peinovich also hinted on the podcast that he'd lost his day job when his employer got wind of all of this.

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Patch has not been able to confirm whether Peinovich still lives in the apartment he and his wife once shared on East 82nd Street between York and East End avenues. (Although the Southern Poverty Law Center does still list him as an NYC resident.)

"I don't discuss personal,details of my life [stet]," Peinovich said in an email Monday afternoon. We've also contacted his building managers and will update this story with anything else we find out.

In the weeks leading up to Saturday's white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, where counter-protester Heather Heyer was allegedly killed by a white nationalist who rammed his car into a large group of people, Peinovich urged his thousands of listeners to bring weapons to the rally.

"Do what you need to do for security of your own person," Peinovich said, adding: “We don’t want those people to have the impression that we are going to show up unarmed."

Rally-goers heard him loud and clear. According to Mother Jones, the hundreds of self-identified white nationalists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members who showed up Saturday "did indeed come prepared for violence. Many wore helmets and carried clubs, medieval-looking round wooden shields, and rectangular plexiglass shields, similar to those used by riot police." Some also carried guns.

Here's video of Peinovich speaking in Charlottesville. (He's the slightly larger guy with the dark beard. And the other guy, standing next to him, is David Duke, the former leader — or "imperial wizard" — of the KKK.)

In his speech at McIntire Park, Peinovich said leftists protesting the rally were acting like "animals" and "savages."

"The sheer hatred — the sheer contortions of their face — I've never seen such hatred," he said. "Their empty, vacant, blank eyes."

He then went on to address "white genocide," or "the deliberate and intentional displacement of the white race," to roaring applause.

Here's another video spiel he and Duke recorded over the weekend:

And on Sunday, in the rally's aftermath, Peinovich returned to the studio to relive his big day in Charlottesville on a special "little after-action" edition of the Daily Shoah.

Peinovich blamed Virginia police for the violence and chaos on Saturday and said he suspected cops were "in some kind of collaboration with the counter-protesters" to ensure he and other right-wing speakers never made it to the podium in Emancipation Park. (White supremacists had gathered there that day to defend the park's statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee after city officials announced plans to tear it down.)

Police had clearly received orders, Peinovich said on the podcast, to "funnel us through a gauntlet of the protesters and then abandon us and not protect us, should they attack."

Once he had made it past screaming lefties and into the park Saturday morning — dodging pepper spray, "piss bottles" and other hard objects — he said "cops were sitting there with smug looks on their faces, just not letting us near the PA system."

Peinovich continued: "Like, they were in on this, OK? I don't know the best word for it. But I'm saying this was a setup. This was a f---ing setup. They were never going to allow us to speak."

He said he even heard cops laughing as they evacuated the white-power crowd from Emancipation Park.

"I distinctly remember, as we were ushered out of the park, the police officer on the megaphone... at one point started cracking up," Peinovich said. "... Then a whole bunch of state troopers who were standing on somebody's lawn on the side also started laughing."

And regarding the car attack that killed Heather Heyer at the end of the protest, which many U.S. officials have called an act of domestic terrorism, Peinovich said, "As far as the cat lady that was killed... this is the police's fault for failure to control their own streets."

He added: "I don't give a s--t about this dead cat lady. Whatever. The world is a better place. But the murderer is not the driver of the car. ... He did nothing wrong. Frankly, he should get a medal. Let's be honest. But legally he did nothing wrong."

Two Virginia State Police troopers who were helping monitor Saturday's chaos from the sky were also killed when their helicopter crashed into a nearby forest. At least 19 others were injured in clashes downtown.

Here's the full story on Peinovich's outing last winter, which he said left his life "in wreckage." And you can read more about Peinovich's rise to become "one of the most recognizable white nationalist voices" in America on the Southern Poverty Law Center's website.

Also: Newsweek posted a good who's-who on some of the other organizers and leaders of the Charlottesville rally.

For what it's worth, Peinovich took issue with Patch's characterization of him as a "neo-Nazi" in an email exchange back in January. "Why did you report that I was a neo-nazi without getting confirmation?" he asked.

But again, for what it's worth, Peinovich has been photographed giving the Nazi salute in public; is credited with inventing the (((echo))), a method of identifying Jews on social media by enclosing their names in parenthesis, yellow-star style; rarely records a podcast without at least one Holocaust joke; often reiterates his belief that American Jews are controlling and brainwashing the mainstream media, the education system and the political left, to the detriment of the nation; and fantasizes on-air about the creation of an all-white, non-Jewish utopia.

This story has been updated. Photos by Patch