Does anyone remember that #AnimeRight nazi guy “Zanting” who was an admin for Anime Right News? Lets all meet Christopher Reinders (33) aka Zanting of Hubley, Nova Scotia!
We had forgotten about him until he showed up a couple months ago with a hit list targeting over 100 researcher and anti-racist accounts. Not the brightest move in our opinion, but I guess he wanted some attention.
Before diving into the details on some of the awful things Chris Reinders was up to between 2015 until Twitter suspended him a few times, let’s confirm… Are we sure we have the right guy? Is this really Zanting? Let’s take a peek…
A Lesson in #OSINT
First we searched Zanting’s Twitter account for clues. In his earliest Twitter exchanges, Zanting had replies from two people from Canada. One who seemed to know him called him “Chris,” and she is from Nova Scotia. Not much to go off of, but it’s a start.
We looked further into the username “Zanting” as it was uncommon, and located him on Google Chat, verifying his contact information. Here his Google account had the same profile image as his Gab account in December 2022.
We then searched for him on Myspace, which had a match for a person named “Kris Reinders.” Most of the media was broken on Myspace but you could still see the photo captions. We’ll come back to this.
Zanting is a gamer, and as such has a history on Twitch. He mentions playing Battlezone, liking electronic music, and notes his gaming gear. A 2015 Twitch archive contained additional info… He’s from Canada, with a Speedtest result indicating Nova Scotia.
More gamer stuff to fill in Zanting’s timeline can be found for Steam.
He has logged many hours of gaming on the same Steam account since 2009, and he has plenty of salty gamer comments filled with threats, hackusations, and antisemitism on FFBans. Zanting’s Steam account also listed a Halifax location.
On YouTube we located a public “7anting” account with videos of Battlezone gaming sessions and car drives set to electronic music. Listed information contained Zanting’s Twitter account, a website he created called “Six Dragons,” and that he’s a 6’5″ Libertarian near Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The Six-Dragons website from the YouTube account also confirmed that we had the correct contact info. The same Google account that currently has Zanting’s profile image was listed on the Six-Dragons forum members page.
As we were researching, we stumbled across someone else who dug into Zanting previously. They actually still had screenshots from the Kris Reinders Myspace account from when the images still worked. All of the images provided matched up with image captions currently on the album, plus an additional Facebook image from his mother with a photo of the same deck.
(Note: people tend to save these things when you’re perpetually irritating online.)
While we didn’t locate an active Facebook for Chris Reinders himself, his mother had posted an old photo of him and his brother. Chris’s brother had a Facebook account as well, where he advertised a car repair group that he and Chris were visited by…
Hello, Chris Reinders aka Zanting! We found you!
Chris Reinders under his Zanting pseudonym was well known by the alt-right and nazi Twitter as a writer and admin for the Anime Right News website, where he would take topics and regurgitate them into tabloid pieces. His content ranged from shitposts to conspiracy theories to glowing endorsements of white supremacy.
What Was the #AnimeRight?
The “Anime Right,” while nebulous in its beginnings, was an effort to tap into the existing reactionary and anti-politically correct online culture (see: Gamergate) and weaponize this extremely online demographic of primarily young white men for right-wing politics.
By 2017 the #AnimeRight became more organized with the formation of Anime Right News, a Buzzfeed styled platform created with the intent to “redpill the normies.” This intent was explicitly stated by ARN site creators PTT and Trigger Bait in an interview with Pilleater in March 2017.
Among right-wing extremists, “red-pilling” very specifically means converting someone to fascist, racist and anti-Semitic beliefs. This is exactly what the #AnimeRight was aiming for: to normalize far-right extremist ideas. And, as you can witness from the archives of the Anime Right’s Twitter presence, they made no effort to conceal that they were, indeed, nazis.
Chris Reinders, in line with the #AnimeRight, was very pro-Hitler across various platforms. He celebrated the birthday of Hitler on ARN and joined several groups adorned with swastika images on the WrongThink social networking site.
Platform manipulation was even worse on Twitter before they implemented API restrictions in 2019. Bots were used to spread content from Zanting and ARN, and you can see them memeing about the accusations of being Russian interference with Russian-themed anime accounts.
Zanting did repurpose an abandoned Russian Twitter account, but this was in line with the running memes about Russia at the time. While Russian interference in US politics is a very real thing, people tend to dismiss how many true-believers exist within and near the US itself.
Reputation and Attention-Seeking Behavior
When we say Zanting is well-known, we mean it. Here’s a shout out for him in a list of names containing at least two who have been arrested for efforts to undermine the US electoral system.
Zanting frequently mingled with and wrote about these Twitter personalities.
During the He Will Not Divide Us (HWNDU) livestream in 2017, Baked Alaska gave a shout out to Anime Right and Zanting by name.
Chris Reinders had a habit of harassing people online, irritating enough for him to create a post about “30 People I’ve Triggered On Twitter” listing various accounts that blocked him. He frequently tagged personalities, journalists, and researchers.
Reinders still periodically thrusts his hands into drama and claws for credit for his “previous work.”
Zanting and US Politics
While the Anime Right was where “Zanting” gained a name, it was not the first place that began his political posting. Reinders was a promoter of “Pizzagate” and other conspiracy theories, to the point that he credits himself with causing QAnon.
Reinders’ influence on Q is questionable, but his dedication to spreading garbage online was undeniable. Reinders spent much of 2016 tweeting content to help Trump’s political campaign, with many tweets consisting of “#CrookedHillary” and “#NeverHillary ” political memes.
If “Crooked Hillary” sounds familiar, this is the branding tactic that Cambridge Analytica built for the 2016 Trump campaign, as revealed by the Channel 4 News investigations in 2018.
(Video: Channel 4 News | The Great Hack)
The Cambridge Analytica tapes revealed how a massive operation to harvest data of Americans and target them with political propaganda operated. While their main focus was Facebook, the created campaigns traveled across various social media platforms.
Spreading content across Twitter is something that could be easily done via a network of group chats and a few bots. Pseudonymous Twitter user ‘Microchip’ spoke about what that looked like in an interview in 2017.
We found it curious that, as a Canadian, Chris Reinders took the US political campaign and ran with it. Reinders was also connected with a demographic that Steve Bannon was targeting at the time: “incels,” because they are ‘easy to manipulate’.
While Chris Reinders was careful with his Twitter wording and imagery for the most part to allow plausible deniability, he did extensively use Nazi symbolism across other social media platforms. Reinders, through all of this, was an adult with agency who worked to spread misinfo and help radicalize young white men into the alt right. He networked, created, and shared hateful content online to normalize far right extremist ideologies.
After being deplatformed from Twitter numerous times and denied Twitter reinstatementChris Reinders still maintains a presence on Gab. He recently toned down his content and laments that the right has “never cared about [him].”
Anyone can utter the words “I’m not a Nazi,” but if you’re going to remain networked with nazis and aren’t trying to undo the years of harm caused online, it means absolutely nothing.
:
We probably would have never looked into you had you not decided to make a “hit list” of accounts that included many of our talented researcher and activist friends.
But you did.
Enjoy your sip of #FAFO !!!!!!!!!!!!! 😉
#WeProtectUs
