Racist Talk Radio Host Hal Turner Was the First Victim of an Anonymous Raid — Where Is He Now?

In an archived blog post dated June 4, 2007, talk radio host Hal Turner claims that official records from the International Red Cross had been unearthed and they proved the Holocaust never happened. He refers to it as the "greatest lie ever told," and alleges that "millions of dollars have been paid out to 'holocaust survivors' and their descendants for something that DID NOT HAPPEN." When it comes to hateful conspiracy theories, this one is a classic.

The far-right political commentator had been circling the conservative drain since the early 1990s when he would call into Sean Hannity's show on WABC. According to The Nation, he was known as "Hal from North Bergen" and was a staple of the right-wing show. When he began broadcasting his own radio program, Turner's bigotry only grew worse. At one point he drew the vengeful ire of Anonymous, the digital activist group that specialized in cyber attacks. They took him down. Where is he now? Still at it.

Turner can still be found via his website where the First Amendment affords him all the air-time he wants. The Hal Turner Radio Show is broadcast Monday through Friday, from 9:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. both online and via three terrestrial radio frequencies. While we haven't listened to any episodes, we did read some posts from his news section. Compared to what he used to write, they are fairly tame though we haven't gotten through all of them.

Nowadays it seems as if Turner posts a few paragraphs about a news story that interests him. We only perused a few, but didn't see any wild opinions tacked onto them. Of course there's a Premium Content option that's only available to subscribers. Could that be where the New World Order style rants and raves live? We aren't going to pay, so we'll never know.

In December 2006, Anonymous decided that it was time to do their first raid in the real world. They chose Turner as their target because the vile prejudiced radio host was a blight on humanity. In the Netflix documentary The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem, Anonymous co-founder Aubrey Cottle, aka Kirtaner, said they had a desire to "enact retribution toward someone or something that we felt deserved it." They decided Turner was someone who deserved it.

Turner posted a phone number on his website for people to call-in, so Anonymous took advantage of that. "We did a lot of prank calls," said Cottle. He was inundated by calls, which ultimately enraged Turner. Most of his time on-air was spent hanging up on these pranksters. This went on for months. They jammed up his server and kept the show offline for two weeks. Then things took a serious turn.

Anonymous hacked into Turner's email account and discovered he was a paid FBI informant who was feeding them information about extremist groups, via NJ.com. After going through all of the emails exchanged between Turner and his FBI handler, they outed. This resulted in Turner being "ostracized from the white supremacist community," said Cottle.

Perhaps this was the beginning of the end for Turner who was sentenced to 33 months in prison in December 2010 for "threatening to assault three federal appeals court judges in Chicago in retaliation for their 2009 ruling upholding handgun bans in Chicago and a suburb," per the FBI. While in prison, Turner's wife filed for divorce.