Paul Miller and Brandon Martinez’s immaturity is featured front and centre in their online streams. Yet while Miller and Martinez complain of isolation to a growing fanbase, their true nature is revealed as vicious serial harassers and trolls.
By Peter Smith
Canadian Anti-Hate Network
On a screen filled with scrolling text, emojis, and frantically animated gifs, two separate webcam feeds flicker on.
In the first, two girls sit in a bedroom, teenage posters and books line the wall behind them.
In the other window, a man appears. Clad in a red suit jacket and white face paint, he’s a passable imitation of Cesar Romero’s Joker. In his background a confederate flag hangs on the wall, with Celtic crosses in place of the stars. On his other side, the sonnenrad -- a common stand-in for the swastika -- is framed behind him.
“I like your makeup,” one girl says. “Are you guys f****ts?” the clown asks.
The girls say they’re 14.
The same scenario has played out hundreds if not thousands of times, as a dark and immature trend continues to form in fringe circles. A fast way to draw clicks and subscribers to the ever-increasing pool of streaming and social media networks. Popularized by clown and disgraced fighter Paul Miller, the practice has been picked up by a cast of despicable characters, including former Canadian propagandist for Iran and vicious neo-Nazi troll, Brandon Martinez.
Their schtick is not particularly cerebral.
In his videos, Miller, who appears to be the one who popularized the Nazi troll video stream, chooses from his wardrobe of costumes, ranging from The Joker to neo-Nazi Terrorgram style gear -- complete with a swastika adorned plate carrier and half skull mask -- to a simple lab coat and clipboard. Once in character, Miller enters himself into the roulette-style video chat matching service called Omegle.
On Omegle, users are connected to random streams from webcams around the globe. At any given moment it’s connecting adults, teenagers, and adolescents to each other.
Miller has carved a niche out for himself using the platform to berate people of colour, LGBTQ2S+ peoples, Jews, and anyone he comes across that does not fit into his specific National Socialist mould.
“You’re a f****t n****r lover,” Miller shouts as another group of teens throw insults at him. Later, after one of them tells him she is a lesbian, he offers her a gun through the screen to kill herself.
Miller often encounters children. Over the hours of his content, a pattern has emerged. He often asks the age of younger-looking matches, and sometimes he passes on people in the low teens, but often he pursues anyway.
Source: YouTube
When one boy appeared on the screen, already crying, and claiming to have just been bullied for being gay, Miller laughed.
“Well, it’s about to happen again,” he said through the stream, cackling. The clip is older than much of the available content on his channel, but remains a meme shared by his fans.
“Get back in the oven, Jew,” Miller shouts at another victim.
Over and over, the scene plays out in hours-long streams, only later to be edited into clips and sent out to his almost 40,000 followers.
Sometimes Miller engages slowly, basking in compliments about his many costumes or his makeup. Other times he screams a barrage of insults before his new match has a chance to respond. It’s also common to come across members of his fanbase, who both troll the streaming service for Miller himself and post videos of them subjecting others to the same abuse.
Many are very young.
In a recent stream, a male clad in a ski mask burned a rainbow flag while Miller clapped along, laughing hysterically.
The tactics are juvenile but have nonetheless garnered him attention, and a following. It hasn’t gone unnoticed by other neo-Nazis. Many scorn Miller as a pretender, merely dressing up and shouting at children, while others point to his Roma heritage as disqualifying him as part of the white power movement he so desperately courts.
Source: Screenshot taken from Paul Miller's stream.
An amateur Muay Thai fighter in the early 2010s, he fought under the name Paul “Gypsy” Miller. Competing for several amateur titles, it would be combat outside the ring that eventually garnished him media attention.
Making national news after a New York City street fight with, as he claims, 10 anti-fascist activists in 2017, he is often misidentified as a Proud Boy, who also fought with protesters outside the Metropolitan Republican Club, where Gavin McInnes was giving a talk.
"They tried to kill me," Miller told Newsweek, two days after a street brawl outside the Republican Club. "These were terrorists."
Despite the publication calling him an independent journalist, NBC News noted at the time that Miller’s own statements from his stream on a now-deleted YouTube channel showed him before the brawl saying, “I wanna go over there and instigate it but the cops are here so we’ll be nice.”
“I wanna fuck them up real bad, but the cops are here.”
Source: Screenshot taken from Brandon Martinez's stream.
As a flood of Miller’s videos continue to flow into Nazi spaces, its influence has spilled over into the content of other influential hate mongers.
Other Omegle adopters include America’s fierce antisemite Handsome Truth and Australia's misogynistic troll CatBoyKami. Canada has churned out neo-Nazi Brandon Martinez - a propagandist, former writer for a state-owned Iranian news site, and a prolific producer of antisemitic, misogynistic, and racist material over nearly a decade. His books, all detailing conspiracy theories about Jews, are available on Amazon.
Martinez mimics Miller's tactics, including harassing children.
Martinez identifies as “alt-right,” a now largely out of use term popularized by American neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. Martinez’s website URL is only a hyphen away from Spencer’s. He’s also referred to his short cut hair as the “alt-right haircut.”
On his livestream, Martinez produces a regular commentary of vlogs that see him doing the work to “wake people up” and “expose the agenda” of the Jews -- his favourite target for blame and derision.
He views all non-Europeans as “shock troopers” of the replacement. He rejects the title of “ethnonationalism” in exchange for a convenient “racial nationalism,” which views the different cultures of Europeans as potentially divisive.
“Not enough white people support what we support for us to be so petty about it,” he told his viewers during one question and answer session. His followers are regularly able to interact with him and engage during the streams.
His actual beliefs are an unoriginal collection of reinterpreted fascist history. He regularly dives into a near-obsession with his father’s nationality, calling him a “pure Spaniard,” and his adoration of the dictator Francisco Franco. He has discussion channels for members who speak English, Spanish, and Russian, and one purely dedicated to housing his videos.
After the events at the US Capitol on January 6, the comment history was wiped from some of his chats. Years of written content was also recently purged from Martinez’s website, though it is still viewable through archives. He has claimed to have been banned from social platforms in 10 European countries for “illegal content.”
His videos lack the flair, emotion, or marketing ability of Miller. Instead of short clips meant to catch attention while stoking intense outrage from the unalligned, Martinez favours long clips filled with vacant stares, monotone berating of repetitive talking points, and the endless shouting of slurs at those who deigned to appear on his screen without being white.
Miller’s videos are a regular feature on many of Martinez’s channels, including raids -- the act of flooding a business’ phone or social media with derogatory calls and comments -- directed against a variety of victims, including one Canadian immigration firm, all due to a TikTok video featuring a person of colour advertising their business. Martinez’s content has made it onto Miller’s channel.
Martinez doesn’t often dress up beyond what now appears to be a signature black shirt. The most animated he becomes is on the rare occasions when his subjects are able to infuriate him. Videos more typically focus on issues de jour, any of which Martinez can spin into denigrating Black people, the LGBTQ+ community, women, and of course Jews -- the apparent architects of all the world’s issues.
One of his latest streams opens with electronic music that includes edited audio of Donald Trump calling for the destruction of Israel as Martinez holds up the flag of Francisco Franco’s Spain.
It isn’t known exactly where Martinez lives. By his own telling, he was born and raised in Canada. He has claimed in interviews to not be in the country, but refuses to say where he is located, citing the potential criminal penalty for his work.
“We must constantly hide our true power level,” he said during a stream where he complained about an inability to connect to people who do not share his white-only worldview. He claims to have come to the ideology young, absorbing books that contained “alternative history,” specifically about the Second World War.
Interestingly enough, his notions about race never prevented him from working for PressTV, Iran’s government-run English-language news network.
At the time, his writing focused on Israel and foreign policy.
Martinez’s work appears to have been removed from the site, but according to the ADL, in his article “Scrutinizing Israel role in 2001 anthrax attacks [sic],” he claimed that the anthrax mailed to locations across the US came from Israel’s biological and chemical industry. He also implied the existence of a “nefarious collaboration between the Israel and the Bush administration to carry out the attacks.”
His Amazon author’s page also confirms this detail of his resume.
What, if anything, will ever shut men like Martinez and Miller is unknown. Scorn from the public, their communities, authorities, and even other neo-Nazis has done little to dissuade them.
After the location of Miller’s New Jersey family home and business was exposed, he claims to be living in Florida and accepts small donations through another streaming service. Martinez has gone completely to ground, hiding his location and accepting bitcoin payment on his, and other, websites.
Brandon Martinez did not respond to requests for comment.
Follow Peter Smith on Twitter @misterEpete.
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