Why American racists just had another awful week
The most notorious racist hate site on the web, which had been kicked off their Web host and had their registration cancelled, thought they had a new home. They were wrong.
The Daily Stormer’s days on an Icelandic web address appear to be numbered after the infamous neo-Nazi website disappeared Friday from its latest domain amid a row between its publisher and registrar.
The notorious white supremacist site could no longer be reached Friday afternoon at its most recent web address, dailystormer.is, hours after the Reykjavík Grapevine reported that ISNIC, the registry company that oversees dot-is domains, intended to give it the boot.
“Our terms of service are very clear,” [Jens Pétur Jensen, the firm’s CEO,] said. “All registrants must provide proof of who they are, and where they are physically located. [Mr. Anglin] doesn’t want to do that.”
The website’s publisher didn’t want to provide information because he correctly assumed it would given to law enforcement, Mr. Jensen said, according to told the newspaper.
Mr. Anglin, 32, did not immediately return emails seeking Friday concerning his website, but said on social media that he was “trying to get this fixed.”
Anglin has been evading service of papers in at least two lawsuits (see here and here).
Meanwhile, America’s oldest racist Web site, which was shut down in August, tried to hold their annual summit this weekend. It rapidly declined into a Fyre-Festival-style fiasco.
The annual summit of a white supremacist group got off to a rocky start in Crossville.
A local restaurant, The Beef and Barrel Restaurant & Lounge, cancelled the group’s reservation for a meet-and-greet Friday evening, and officers were reportedly on-site to turn the attendees away. The group eventually reconvened at Shoney’s.
Confusion continued Saturday morning after the group changed its conference location from a restaurant at the Cumberland Mountain State Park to the park’s recreation lodge up the hill.
The leader of the white nationalist Traditionalist Worker’s Party was seen leaving the original restaurant – where a baby shower was actually occurring – early in the morning and driving down to the lodge.
Even in the heart of Klan country, proprietors know racism is bad for business. Sadly [not!], the new gathering point didn’t stay secret for long.
Protesters eventually gathered outside the new location, and police had created a designated protest area across the parking lot.
There, Chris Irwin, who organized the protest, harassed attendees over a megaphone as they got out of their cars and walked to the front door of the lodge.
“Hello master race!” he called. … “You wanted to keep this a secret, Nazis, and then you did something stupid and you put it in a public park so we could come,” Irwin shouted over the megaphone. …
The actual summit did continue behind closed doors, however. Park rangers stood in front of the doors to the recreational lodge to keep the groups separate, and escorted protesters to the facility bathrooms so the groups would not come in contact with each other. …
Several people known to have engaged in violence in Charlottesville, including Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Workers Party, came to the conference.
“It tells you exactly what they’re planning,” Irwin said. “They brought shields. These are the people, the name of (Roper’s) blog is Shieldwall network. The only way they could be more clear about what they’re doing is to spray paint swastikas.”
Despite the prevalence of swastika and Schutzstaffel patches on the garb of younger attendees and the group’s black-clad, masked “security,” Roper, Robb and other seniors in the group wearing suits and ties insisted they were not Nazis. They kept a tight hand on the younger attendees and those who did not appear to be ranking members.
The KnoxNews.com article also has plenty of photos that identify the racist attendees.
These two stories follow the news that a second planned tiki-torch fascist rally has been cancelled as leaders of the various factions that had been organizing the hatefest began to turn on each other like Siamese fighting fish.
In what is becoming something of a pattern, a far-right event slated to take place just after Christmas in Charlotte, North Carolina lost support even before planning really got underway.
Infighting, mistrust and the dark stain of August’s deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia appears to have derailed a “March Against Communism” rally scheduled for Dec. 28. At least one slated headliner already pulled out earlier this week, while other white nationalist figureheads warned their followers not to participate.
On Thursday morning, just two days after telling TPM it planned to move ahead with the event, the group Anti-Communist Action (Anticom) announced the rally was cancelled due to “safety concerns.”
“In light of safety concerns, we’ll no longer be holding an event in Marshall Park,” the group said in tweet pinned to the top of its page. “This was agreed upon by both organizers and guests.”
An Anticom spokesman who identified himself only as Seth declined to elaborate on the tweet, saying the group wanted to “keep future planning private.” On Tuesday, he had described his high hopes for the rally to TPM.
“A good way to describe this is what ‘Unite the Right’ should have been, in the non-violent sense,” Seth said, referring to the Charlottesville rally.
Though the spokesman acknowledged he was “sad to see” white nationalist leader Richard Spencer, whose name was listed on an initial announcement circulated by Anticom, pull out of the event, he expressed confidence that his relatively low-profile group could still draw a big coalition of white nationalists, militia groups, libertarians and far-right icons to North Carolina.
The only downside to the cancellation will be the inability of activists to photograph and publicly identify attendees. Communities, employers, and law enforcement officials need to know the names of terrorists in their midst.
