Andrew Anglin, the guy behind The Daily Stormer, is one of the worst people in the world. That was amply established long before the horrific events in Charlottesville, Virginia two weekends ago. He and his fellow neo-Nazis made a name for themselves by trolling innocent people. Last year, for instance, Anglin sicced his goons on Aubrey Perry after she spoke out about her parents turning into rabid Donald Trump supporters.
This was one of many things that should have long since gotten Anglin bounced offline before numerous providers cut ties with Daily Stormer after it saw fit to trash Heather Heyer, the woman who was murdered when a white supremacist plowed his car into a crowd. Well, on Sunday, Anglin may have proven why his site’s effective blackholing was long overdue. Apparently he thinks that mass murder is a legitimate subject for satire.
After GoDaddy cut ties with Daily Stormer on August 13, Daily Stormer tried to move its domain to Google Domains, then to Tucows–only to be canceled each time for inciting violence. Anglin then moved Daily Stormer to the dark web, and it was only accessible via Tor. It briefly returned to the open Web on Thursday with a .ru domain, but was bounced off that domain hours later after Russian authorities found it violated the country’s hate-speech laws.
On Friday, Daily Stormer managed to slink back online after convincing the budget registrar Namecheap to give it a .lol domain. Along with the new domain came a new proxy and DdDoS protector, a startup called BitMitigate. Its previous proxy provider, Cloudflare, had torn up its contract amid Anglin’s claims that Cloudflare supported its cause.
As early as Saturday mornig, Namecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall defended his decision to take Anglin on.
The suppression of freedom of speech also opens the door to tyranny. Freedom of speech is one of the cornerstones of democracy.
— Richard Kirkendall (@NameCheapCEO) August 19, 2017
But by Saturday night, Kirkendall had a change of heart.
Read our decision regarding the hate site https://t.co/jOOVc2vakw https://t.co/dKqfvN7Hsi
— Namecheap.com (@Namecheap) August 20, 2017
Kirkendall wrote that after further review, there were numerous posts on the cite that crossed the line from protected speech into incitement of violence. One quote in particular was the tipping point.
“It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in mathematics to understand that White men + pride + organization = Jews being stuffed into ovens.”
To Kirkendall’s mind, there was no other way to interpret that post other than “endorsement of a very violent eventuality,” and that alone demanded that the domain be canceled.
Later on Sunday, Anglin fired off a post on Gab, a social media site which has somewhat looser tolerance for hate speech, porn, and the like than Facebook and Twitter–so much so that both Google Play and the iOS App Store deleted its accompanying mobile app. In just 300 words, Anglin revealed just what kind of person he really is.
“Namecheap quoted this:
>It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in mathematics to understand that White men + pride + organization = Jews being stuffed into ovens.
This is satire, mocking the assertion of the Jews that any form of white identity leads to a Holocaust. They don’t give the context. Of course.”
Come off it, Andrew. The mass execution of millions of people is not something to be joked about, and you know it. If you seriously expect us to believe you were joking when you said white empowerment meant slaughtering Jews, there’s a bridge in Lagos–or wherever you are–we’d like to sell you.
Kirkendall later updated his post to say that domain registrars need to have the ability to stay neutral on content matters, as well as “a clear judicial process” to decide on potential TOS violations. He’s right in one respect. While there is no doubt that Daily Stormer is engaging in content that is not protected by even the strongest protections of free speech, there are matters that are not as clear cut–which is why hate speech laws are not the answer. However, Charlottesville proved beyond any doubt that the status quo is not acceptable. It’s past time for a national conversation on this issue–and it shouldn’t have taken Charlottesville to trigger it.
But if there was any doubt that blackholing Daily Stormer was the right decision, Anglin put that to rest with his Gab post.
(featured image courtesy Southern Poverty Law Center)
