Charlottesville was a turning point. White supremacists and Nazis crawled out of their sewers long enough to show the country who they really are. The internet has responded by banning their websites and ability to fundraise. Further, many of them have been personally identified. Some have lost their jobs, others are in hiding because there are warrants out for their arrest or lawsuits against them.
Daily Stormer is dead. No one, including Russia will touch it. It was the first site that Cloudflare banned, and without Cloudflare, it would be crushed by DDOS attacks. Cloudflare says they want to work out a system for banning such sites, a responsibility they do not take lightly. Other hate sites are facing similar internet death sentences. PayPal just banned over 30 or them. This kills their ability to fund raise easily. The ACLU now says they will no longer defend any hate group that is armed.
Another fine tactic would be to boycott Trump properties. Three fundraisers have already been cancelled at Mar-a-Lago, with many more cancellations expected.
PayPal, Patreon, Facebook, Squarespace, Spotify, Google, GoDaddy, Texas A&M University, the University of Florida, Michigan State University, and a mountain resort in Colorado are among the companies removing white nationalists’ accounts and venues canceling their planned events in the wake of violent street clashes that left three people dead and dozens injured on Saturday. By eliminating both the physical and virtual platforms that white nationalists use to promote their ideas, those companies and institutions have curtailed the avenues by which they could grow their reach.
“I can’t think of another incident to which the backlash has been nearly so widespread,”
The extent to which white nationalist groups were affected by service denials and account terminations this week varied depending on their size, reach and how violent and virulent their views are. Andrew Anglin’s neo-Nazi website, The Daily Stormer, was essentially wiped off the mainstream internet after GoDaddy, Google and CloudFare stopped providing domain registration in quick succession. Anglin has since relocated the site to the dark web, where it is only available via use of a Tor network, radically restricting his audience.
“His site is all he has,” the ADL’s Pitcavage observed. “He can’t even show his face ’cause he’ll get served with lawsuits. So his site is basically his voice.”
Mar-a-Lago may soon find itself to be a pariah.
Three fundraising giants decided to pull events from President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, on Thursday, signaling a direct blowback to his business empire from his comments on Charlottesville’s (Virginia) racial unrest.
But the Florida club may face an even deeper crisis of confidence from the local business community. The head of the Palm Beach Chamber of Commerce, of which Mar-a-Lago is a member, called the business “morally reprehensible” on Thursday and said she expected more charities to defect.
“The glitter, the shine has gone from the club,” chamber executive director Laurel Baker said, “and I can’t help but think there will be more fallout from it.”