Hatewatch identified and compiled over 600 cryptocurrency addresses associated with white supremacists and other prominent far-right extremists for this essay and then probed their transaction histories through blockchain analysis software. What we found is striking: White supremacists such as Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents, race pseudoscience pundit Stefan Molyneux, Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer and Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer, and Don Black of the racist forum Stormfront, all bought into Bitcoin early in its history and turned a substantial profit from it. The estimated tens of millions of dollars’ worth of value extreme far-right figures generated represents a sum that would almost certainly be unavailable to them without cryptocurrency, and it gave them a chance to live comfortable lives while promoting hate and authoritarianism.

• Updated:List of cryptocurrency addresses used by extremists

Less than a quarter of Americans presently own some form of cryptocurrency as of May 2021. But those numbers increase substantially within fringe right-wing spaces, according to Hatewatch’s findings, approaching something much closer to universal adoption. Hatewatch struggled to find any prominent player in the global far right who hasn’t yet embraced cryptocurrency to at least some degree. The average age of a cryptocurrency investor is 38, but even senior citizens in the white supremacist movement, such as Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, 69, and Peter Brimelow of VDARE, 73, have moved tens of thousands of dollars of the asset in recent years.

Cryptocurrency, or a group of digital moneys maintained through decentralized systems, has grown into a billion-dollar industry. A growing swath of Americans embrace the technology. Nothing is inherently criminal or extreme about it, and most of its users have no connections to the extreme far right. (One of the authors of this essay owns cryptocurrency, as disclosed in an author’s note at the end.) However, the far right’s early embrace of cryptocurrency merits deeper analysis, due to the way they used it to expand their movement and to obscure funding sources. It is not uncommon for far-right extremists to seek to hide their dealings from the public. The relative secrecy blockchain technology offers has become a profitable, but still extraordinarily risky, gamble against traditional banking.

“There are a lot of Bitcoin whales from pretty early [on in its history],” futurist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier told the Lex Fridman podcast in September. (People use “whales” to describe those who hold large sums of cryptocurrency.) “And they’re huge, and if you ask, ‘Who are these people?’ there’s evidence that a lot of them are not the people you would want to support.”

‘A huge tolerance for unreality’

Johnson of Counter-Currents, an influential figure in the white nationalist movement due to his outspoken support for the creation of an “ethnostate” serving only white, non-Jewish people, first picked up Bitcoin on Jan. 19, 2012, Hatewatch found, making him the first known figure in the movement to invest. Hatewatch could not determine how Johnson generated just shy of 30 Bitcoin on that Thursday in January 2012 – whether he mined it or purchased it, or someone merely sent it to him – but the date falls just a year-and-a-half after the first known commercial cryptocurrency transaction took place.

Johnson obtained the 29.82 Bitcoin on a date when prices for the asset sat between five and 10 dollars. Hatewatch found that Johnson flipped the Bitcoin from that first transaction and additional ones into over $800,000 worth of value. He has turned his website Counter-Currents into a hub for cryptocurrency discussion in the movement and solicits donations in digital tokens, or cryptocurrency “coins,” such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Monero, Bitcoin Cash, Tether, Cardano, Ripple, Dash, Neo, Stellar Lumens and Basic Attention Token. Hatewatch reached out to him for a comment on this essay, but he did not respond.

“If any of you haters out there have any Bitcoin and you just want to get rid of it, send it to Counter-Currents, we have a Bitcoin address,” Johnson said on a Jan. 5 edition of his livestream, referring to those who perceive cryptocurrency as lacking in real world value. “I’ll hold it, I’ll stack it, I’ll keep it … I have a huge tolerance for unreality.”

Johnson often platforms on his site an antisemitic white nationalist personality who goes by the pseudonym Karl Thorburn. As Thorburn, the author advises people in the movement to purchase and hold Bitcoin as an investment. He wrote through his Telegram account that he advertises for Bitcoin so white nationalists can have money they “can travel with, that bad people can’t seize/inflate, and that will allow [them] to live in a safer, White neighborhood and start a family.”

A full-sized PDF of this chart is available by clicking the image.

Thorburn also advises people in the movement on how to donate cryptocurrency to white nationalist causes without exposing their identities, highlighting one of key reasons that the assets appeal to them.

“Just transfer the [Bitcoin] from your exchange account to another wallet you control, and later move the [Bitcoin] from that wallet to the donor’s address. This creates plausible deniability because you aren’t sending the [Bitcoin] directly from your exchange account to a publically [sic] known nationalist,” he wrote for Johnson’s site in a post published on Nov. 26, 2020.

Matt Gebert, a State Department official Hatewatch identified as a white nationalist organizer in 2019 (the government suspended him after we published the story), also has contributed material to Johnson’s Counter-Currents. In April, Gebert brought the person behind the Thorburn pseudonym onto a podcast. Explaining how he got interested in white nationalism, Thorburn said that he “went into the Stefan Molyneux thing, where it was hardcore atheism, and hardcore anarcho-capitalism” before becoming a white nationalist. A significant number of people who started in libertarian online spaces adapted to the pro-fascist ideology of the “alt-right” movement during the rise of Trump.

“And in fact that’s what really led me into Bitcoin,” he said of Molyneux’s influence.

David Gerard, a cryptocurrency analyst and author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, told Hatewatch that the cryptocurrency community denies that extremists have immersed themselves in their subculture.

“Bitcoin started in right-wing libertarianism,” Gerard said in an email. “This is not at all the same as being a neo-Nazi subculture. That said, there’s a greater proportion of Nazis there than you’d expect just by chance, and the Bitcoin subculture really doesn’t bother kicking its Nazis out. … Bitcoiners will simultaneously deny they have Nazis (which they observably do), and also claim it’s an anti-bitcoin lie, and also claim it’s good that anyone can use Bitcoin.”

‘At the expense of the parasites’

Molyneux, a self-described moral philosopher who started his career as a libertarian pundit, denies being a white supremacist despite repeatedly and falsely claiming that non-white people are predisposed to be of lower intelligence. He started to embrace white nationalism around 2018 during a trip to Poland. (Hatewatch obtained leaked video of Molyneux calling a monologue he filmed at that time his “white nationalism speech.”) He never responded to a request for comment about that incident.

YouTube, and even typically more lenient Twitter, suspended Molyneux’s access to their websites in 2020 after years of his using the platforms to denigrate women and non-white people. Molyneux, relegated to fringe websites, saw his website traffic and his ability to raise funds plummet. One of his associates implied that Molyneux could survive the change because of Bitcoin.

“Stefan Molyneux was in Bitcoin at $1. He is more than ok,” Mike Cernovich, known primarily for pushing the #Pizzagate conspiracy theory in 2016, posted to Twitter in June after Molyneux was removed.

Molyneux may have obtained Bitcoin prior to 2013, but the earliest existing wallet of his identified by Hatewatch pulled in Bitcoin for the first time on Jan. 25, 2013, roughly a year after Johnson received his donation in January 2012. Molyneux's experience with Bitcoin stands out alongside the other extremists Hatewatch studied. Not only did he invest long-term in Bitcoin, holding the asset through periods of volatility rather than cashing out, but his donors bestowed him with 1250 Bitcoin tokens, far more than anyone else Hatewatch studied. (The price of one Bitcoin has ranged between roughly $30,000 and $68,500 U.S. dollars in value during 2021.)

Hatewatch found that an anonymous “mega-whale,” someone who controls thousands of Bitcoin tokens, gave large donations from that sum to multiple wallets in 2020, including one operated by Molyneux. On Oct. 11, this anonymous individual doled out 50 Bitcoin in total to such causes as the Ron Paul Institute, the Free Software Foundation and the American Institute for Economic Research. They gave Molyneux 10 Bitcoin, which is today worth nearly half a million U.S. dollars. Whoever operated the account held onto their Bitcoin since 2010, underscoring Molyneux’s importance to Bitcoin’s community of early adopters and libertarian devotees.

Molyneux generated million-dollar profits in less than a decade through his donations, flipping $1.67 million worth of value into at least $3.28 million. In February 2021, he described the value of cryptocurrency using tropes commonly associated with antisemitism.

“Bitcoin is a currency that serves the people at the expense of the parasites, rather than the currency which serves the parasites at the expense of the people,” Molyneux said of the cryptocurrency on his independent radio show. “Bitcoin is rescuing your precious labor from being hoovered up endlessly by the invisible vampire mosquitoes of central banking.”

Molyneux responded to a request for comment by telling Hatewatch that by “parasites,” he was likely referring to his “deep moral opposition to imperialistic governments and wars of aggression” and his belief that “Bitcoin can put an end to such wars.” (Hatewatch has elected to publish the full comment of Molyneux, who disputes that he is “far right,” here.)

‘The dollar is going to collapse’

Neo-Nazis promote propaganda claiming that Jewish people control the banking industry for the purpose of deliberately harming or undermining the ambitions of non-Jewish white men. They also often openly cheer for the destruction of the U.S. as we know it – portraying the collapse of the government and financial system as an inevitability. This dystopian worldview primed neo-Nazis to embrace cryptocurrency’s promise early. The Daily Stormer lays out these beliefs in explicit terms.

“Bitcoin is going to become the new gold. Because of that, if you don’t buy any now you’re doing yourself a disservice. So buy some when the price goes down again, and when you do consider donating to us here at Stormer so we can continue to fight the Jew-owned banking empire,” a Daily Stormer post from Oct. 24, 2017 claims.

Daily Stormer editor Andrew Anglin, who in recent posts to his site advocated for the legalization of gang rape and called the COVID-19 pandemic a hoax, and Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, a man known for hacking,praising far-right terrorists and providing technical support to Anglin, started promoting cryptocurrency to their audience as early as 2015. Auernheimer’s first known Bitcoin address issued transfers in May 2014, roughly a month after he celebrated his release from federal prison and demanded 28,000 Bitcoin from the U.S. federal government as restitution. As of Dec. 1, 20 of the largest and oldest Bitcoin addresses known to belong to Auernheimer pulled in payments totalling $886,345 and transferred out roughly $1,069,395. Anglin, who appears to have adopted cryptocurrency soon after Aurnheimer in December 2014, has moved around at least 1 million U.S. dollars in Bitcoin, as Hatewatch previously reported .

“We know as an absolute matter of fact that the dollar is going to collapse, and presumably every other fiat currency on the planet is going to get dragged down with it. Maybe property or metals are better than crypto. Maybe even the stock market is better than crypto – I am not a financial advisor and I have no idea. But what we know as a matter of fact is that you want your money somewhere,”Anglin wrote in 2020 of cryptocurrency.

Daily Stormer published a post in December 2017 under the byline “Tim Hort” that links their interest in cryptocurrency directly to their genocidal ideology. The post embeds a clip from Russia Today host Max Keiser asking his viewers to “imagine [JP Morgan Chase CEO] Jamie Dimon being sucked through a straw … imagine [Goldman Sachs Banker] Lloyd Blankfein being sucked through a garden hose … imagine Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein being spaghettified as they are sucked into the Bitcoin black hole.” Keiser is a self-described “Bitcoin maximalist,” meaning he believes the token is destined to become the dominant form of future money, even among other cryptocurrencies. Daily Stormer interpreted his words as a call to first destroy the financial system and then kill Jewish people.

“Max Keiser is explaining how Bitcoin will finally allow us to break free of the Jewish control of our finances,” the post claims. “When we can finally control our own finances without needing to rely on the central k*** banks, we can start repairing. And start up the ovens of course.”

Hatewatch reached out to Keiser through Russia Today’s press email, but no one replied.

In Hatewatch’s analysis of Daily Stormer’s Bitcoin transaction history, we found transactions that resemble the types of payments employers give to employees. Cryptocurrency wallets known to be controlled by Anglin regularly transferred Bitcoin, worth a market rate of between $2,000 to $3,000 U.S., into Auernheimer's most active wallet on the first or second day of every month. Between Aug. 1, 2018, and Dec. 1, 2021, Anglin transferred a total of $91,920.56 to Auernheimer across 38 separate monthly transactions.

The Associated Press and PBS Frontline collaborated on a report in September showing that Anglin supporters have sent him at least $4.8 million in Bitcoin, based upon data pulled from Chainalysis, a cryptocurrency analytics firm. 

​​‘It’s really good for anonymous transactions’

Anglin and Auernheimer likely have more money than Hatewatch can report. Both men pushed their audience toward the privacy-focused token Monero in the years following its release in 2014. Researchers cannot yet trace Monero due to its relative anonymity, as Hatewatch previously reported. Monero’s website describes their product as “a private, decentralized cryptocurrency that keeps your finances confidential and secure.” Critics note the degree to which law enforcement and other government officials so far struggle to see what people are doing with it.

The criminal underworld has reportedly employed Monero at a growing rate. The Financial Times noted in June that Monero has become “an increasingly sought-after-tool for criminals such as ransomware gangs.” In August, when comedian John Oliver ran a segment on his show depicting Monero’s advertising as subtly winking at criminals, an outreach organizer for the token defended their technology on grounds that it fights back against “a society of ever-growing mass surveillance.” Monero has elsewhere argued that it enables commerce and does not promote secrecy, or crime, any more than cash.

The cryptocurrency-focused website The Block reported in August 2020 that 45% of illegal darknet markets, which traffic in things like stolen credit card information, ransomware, drugs and hacked passwords, support Monero. The number has likely only risen, due to Monero’s increasing name recognition and availability. Anglin appears to have transacted with Russian darknet markets that traffic in illegal wares, according to analysis previously conducted by Hatewatch based on his Bitcoin usage. (Anglin later denied the existence of the payments by writing on his forum: “This is totally fake. I don't even know what any of this is about. I never bought any Russian darknet drugs lol.”) Due to Monero’s current untraceable nature, Hatewatch cannot yet see if he’s also used that token in a similar manner.

Auernheimer publicly described his enthusiasm for Monero on a podcast with embattled white supremacist Christopher Cantwell in December 2017. Auernheimer, who is believed to be living in Eastern Europe, has involved himself in the promotion of at least one hack-and-leak effort launched by Russian military intelligence, among other stunts. A judge sentenced Cantwell to 41 months of prison in February on charges related to extortion and threats made against a fellow extremist.

“They’re trying to shut me out of the financial system,” Cantwell said of why he wants to get his audience involved in cryptocurrency on that December 2017 podcast. “People want to throw money at me and I’m like, ‘I’d love to take it, but I have no way to take it from you right now.’”

Auernheimer responded to Cantwell by saying that he recently sold off some of his own Bitcoin, taking profit from it. Hatewatch identified Auernheimer as having sold off large amounts of Bitcoin roughly a month before the podcast aired – on Nov. 13, 2017.

“I hold a lot of Monero though. That’s my big thing now. I’m way into Monero. I hold a significant amount,” Auernheimer said. He went on after describing the difficulty to obtain Monero: “It’s really riding on the virtues of its technology. It’s really good for anonymous transactions. … It seems like a good idea.”

Anglin has described Monero as a tool to work around “spies from the various ‘woke’ anti-freedom organizations.” Other far-right extremists have followed Daily Stormer’s lead. The white supremacist group National Justice Party, which is linked to a pro-Kremlin propagandist who relocated to Moscow after attending the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection, accepts donations on their website in only two cryptocurrencies today – Bitcoin and Monero.

‘Do you know how much I fucking hate the government’

National Justice Party founder Michael Peinovich is among a group of extreme, far-right fringe activists who now install a system called BitPay that automates the creation of new Bitcoin wallets to coincide with each new transaction. Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, embraces a similar technique. So does Nick Fuentes, the pundit whose vocal support for the Stop the Steal movement generated large crowds of young white nationalists and neofascists at events in the runup to the violence on Jan. 6. In each case, the BitPay system makes donations difficult to track.

Fuentes accepts payments on his site through Litecoin, a so-called fork of Bitcoin that trades at a fraction of its value per token. French computer programmer Laurent Bachelier, who also donated to Anglin of the Daily Stormer and the white nationalist non-profit VDARE, gave 13.5 Bitcoin to Fuentes before killing himself through an intentional drug overdose on Dec. 8, 2020. Fuentes has claimed that the government has seized some of the money he received in donations.

“I don’t like to brag or anything, but if you knew how much money they took – do you know how much I fucking hate the government because I woke up and one of my checking accounts – one of my checking accounts, which has lots and lots and lots of money in it, had zero dollars,” Fuentes said on one of his livestreams in April.

Fuentes has not received or spent any Bitcoin at that address since Dec. 16, 2020, when he withdrew all 13.73371697 Bitcoin in his account, worth $266,392.40. Customers at his website are directed to pay for merchandise emblazoned with slogans like “Radical Extremist,” “White Boy Summer” and “Hate Speech Enjoyer” using dynamically generated Litecoin addresses or by making regular credit card payments through Visa and Mastercard.

Similarly, Peinovich’s main donation address had received 37.65076951 Bitcoin over its lifetime, for a total of $28,668.10 in donations, but went quiet once he switched to dynamically generating addresses in BitPay. The balance in the account is currently 0.06546048 Bitcoin, currently worth about $3,307.06. Hatewatch reported on Peinovich’s collaboration with the extremist Glen Allen, who acted as a shadow lawyer in his defense during the Sines v. Kessler trial, which focused on violence stoked by white supremacists at the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Leaked emails show Peinovich offering to compensate Allen through Bitcoin, demonstrating how white supremacists use the currency to organize in secret.

“Let me know how I can send you some cash or some more bitcoin,” Peinovich writes in an email to Allen.

Allen did not respond to a request for comment about his emails with Peinovich.

‘A place that doesn’t hate us’

In the aftermath of the violence on Jan. 6, a gaming video livestreaming site called DLive banned Fuentes. Their decision further isolated the 23-year-old extremist, who had up to that date used nightly live video appearances on the site to influence crowds of young men to attend Stop the Steal rallies. People donated to white supremacists and neofascist livestreamers in substantial amounts on DLive, as Hatewatch has previously reported. The company permanently removed a number of extremists beyond Fuentes after Hatewatch reported on them, including the antisemitic performer Owen Benjamin and Jan. 6 participant Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet.

“We feel better being in a place that doesn’t hate us,” Benjamin said affectionately of DLive in the months before they suspended his account.

DLive uses a blockchain-based system to distribute donations to its livestreamers, meaning it functions like an under-regulated cryptocurrency market. Sites like these, particularly those operated by ideologically driven libertarians, have become easy ways for extreme far-right figures to promote their propaganda and earn a living. Another blockchain-themed video site that traffics in an in-house currency is Odysee, which has in recent months given platforms to hateful propagandists banned from conventional sites, such as Fuentes, Peinovich and David Duke, among hundreds of others. Odysee’s situation may portend trouble for websites built on this model.

Critics of blockchain-based sites note the degree to which they operate outside of the rules of banks, despite in some cases issuing money for people and storing it. The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Odysee’s parent company LBRY, not for issues related to the hateful content promoted on their site, but for offering unlicensed securities. The SEC claims that LBRY promoted their cryptocurrency as a security without being licensed to do so. LBRY denies the government’s allegations. That case, filed in March 2021, is pending in federal court.

‘The music will eventually stop’

When the Australian bank Westpac cut ties with Hitlerite, anti-Muslim extremist Blair Cottrell, his supporters, and many libertarians who may feel ambivalent about his hateful beliefs and simply love cryptocurrency, hyped his situation as an ideal reason for Bitcoin’s existence. These advocates suggested that if banks agree to cut ties with far-right extremists, those who are affected should respond by converting their fiat money (money issued by a government) entirely into cryptocurrency. This way of seeing the world, layered with dreams of big payoffs in passive income and understandable fears of government intrusion, has taken hold on the far-right fringe. But converting your money entirely into cryptocurrency carries undeniable risks.

“Regulators want to crack down on fraud,” financial analyst Jacob King told Hatewatch of the cryptocurrency space. “While this is great news in the long run, it will have a disastrous impact on the price of Bitcoin and many altcoins as they are dependent on price manipulators like Tether and Binance.

By “altcoins,” King refers in a general sense to cryptocurrencies that are not Bitcoin, running the gamut from more universal tokens such as Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin, to much more obscure offerings. His point of view runs contrary to the propaganda churned out on a regular basis by the cryptocurrency industry, which has become notorious for publishing quixotic assessments of their space. He mentions two potential looming dangers for cryptocurrency prices in Tether and Binance. 

Tether, a so-called “stable coin,” which is in theory ‘tethered’ to the price of the U.S. dollar, plays a critical role in cryptocurrency, enabling investors to shift funds between tokens on exchanges, or pull them out temporarily, without completely exiting and putting money back into fiat currency. As Bloomberg noted in July, “Tethers in circulation are worth about $62 billion and they underpin more than half of all Bitcoin trades.” The thesis of that article helps underscore King’s concerns about what Tether could in theory do to tank the value of other cryptocurrencies. It notes that the DOJ is investigating whether Tether hid from banks the fact that transactions were tied to cryptocurrency. The Tether investigation also deals with possible market manipulation:

In the course of its years-long investigation, the Justice Department has examined whether traders used Tether tokens to illegally drive up Bitcoin during an epic rally for cryptocurrencies in 2017. While it’s unclear whether Tether the company was a target of that earlier review, the current focus on bank fraud suggests prosecutors may have moved on from pursuing a case tied to market manipulation.

The feds are also allegedly probing Binance, cryptocurrency’s most trafficked exchange, in an investigation led by government officials who investigate money laundering and tax evasion, according to a Bloomberg report published in May. Bloomberg reported that “the specifics of what the agencies are examining couldn’t be determined” but noted that U.S. investigators have long expressed concern that such exchanges could be used for illicit finance. Binance indicated to Bloomberg that it does not comment on specific matters but touted its “robust compliance program” and asserted it takes its “legal obligations very seriously.”

In addition to investigations such as these, so-called exit scams, which prey on trusting investors, incidents of hacking and hoaxes intended to pump up prices, all point to the possibility that the profitability such early investors as Greg Johnson saw last decade may not be as easy to find in the future. This scenario would prove even more risky if extremists choose to eschew traditional banking altogether or if traditional banks choose to cut them off.

“Neo-Nazis have mainly used cryptocurrencies to escape the traditional financial system,” King added. “While that may have worked for the last few years, we’re seeing a huge pushback from regulators. The crypto markets are like a giant game of musical chairs. The music will eventually stop, and millions will be subjected to major losses as the prices tank back to their true values.”

Hatewatch reached out to Tether and Binance for a comment on this story and King’s depiction of them as “price manipulators.” Tether did not reply. Two different spokespersons for Binance responded to Hatewatch's request for comment to push back on King's depiction of the company, calling it “absolutely false” and “wildly inaccurate.” They also noted that any investigation of Binance may not lead to official actions against them.

Jay Cassano, the CEO of Cointelegraph, one of the biggest publications covering the cryptocurrency community industry and community, expressed a different point of view about the impact of regulation on cryptocurrency prices to Hatewatch.

“While there are certainly sections of the crypto community that are opposed to any form of regulation, the belief that crypto prices will fall in response to increased regulation is overly simplistic,” Cassano wrote in a text message. “On the contrary, there is widespread belief among cryptocurrency enthusiasts that a lack of regulatory clarity is slowing more widespread adoption. There are also those who actively want cryptocurrency to become part of the regulated economy, if only so that it will stop being viewed as criminal.”

The publicly traded cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has already taken steps to remove some extreme far-right users from its service, which could become a larger trend if politicians pass regulations on the industry.

In addition to concerns about crashes, investors sometimes lose access to their cryptocurrency due to missing passwords or other blunders, rendering millions of dollars of value useless. Such may be the case of James Allsup, a white supremacist who associates with Peinovich. Known for his participation in the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” march on Charlottesville, Virginia, Allsup may have abandoned a wallet with 1.00586899 Bitcoin sitting in it right now, Hatewatch found. Allsup has not interacted with the wallet since 2018 but he has opened up new ones, suggesting that his money may have been rendered inaccessible. Hatewatch attempted to call numbers believed to be associated with Allsup to ask about this dormant Bitcoin wallet but failed to connect.

‘More valuable than gold’ or ‘close to nothing’

The “true values” of cryptocurrencies, as King put it, depends on who you are asking, and opinions vary in the extreme. What happens to digital currencies from here is likely to have a profound impact on the far right due to the degree to which extremists have adopted the technology relative to the population as a whole.

“Bitcoin is not new. It’s been around for a while. I’ve been watching it closely. I’ve not seen one example of it creating economic growth,” the computer scientist and futurist Lanier said on a September episode of the Lex Fridman podcast.

Balaji Srinivasan, a former Chief Technology Officer for the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, who has developed a reputation for speaking in bullish, quixotic terms about the space, compares Bitcoin and Ethereum to a future version of gold and oil.

“Thesis: the crypto version of any product ends up being far more valuable than the original,” he tweeted in January. “Bitcoin is already more valuable than PayPal and will eventually be more valuable than gold.”

For the risk analyst and author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the true value of Bitcoin may be zero. He opined about its value in a recent paper:

Few assets in financial history have been more fragile than bitcoin. The customary standard argument is that ‘bitcoin has its flaws but we are getting a great technology; we will do wonders with the blockchain’. No, there is no evidence that we are getting a great technology – unless ‘great technology’ doesn’t mean ‘useful’. And at the time of writing – in spite of all the fanfare – we have done still close to nothing with the blockchain. So we close with a Damascus joke. One vendor was selling the exact same variety of cucumbers at two different prices. ‘Why is this one twice the price?’, the merchant was asked. ‘They came on higher quality mules’ was the answer. We only judge a technology by how it solves problems, not by what technological attributes it has.

Either way, those who invest in cryptocurrency have already experienced price volatility in the extreme, demonstrating the degree to which funds can evaporate overnight. A neo-Nazi who purchased Monero at the time Auernheimer endorsed it on Cantwell’s podcast in November 2017 would have seen their money rise to five times its value as of May 2021, only to see it shed roughly 60% of that amount just two months later. Bitcoin has somewhat infamously lost nearly all value during different market crashes throughout the years, only to see it skyrocket back up. 

“The current price pump is artificial, and bubbles always pop,” the author Gerard told Hatewatch.

Editor’s note: A co-author of this essay, Michael Edison Hayden, has at times owned cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano and Algorand. He currently owns only one cryptocurrency, which is Ethereum.

Photo illustration by SPLC

Neo-Nazi Internet forum and hate website

For the Nazisupervillaincharacter named after the website, see Stormfront (character).

Type of site	White supremacist, white nationalist, neo-Nazi, Holocaust denial, antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Hinduism, anti-feminismanti-LGBT, Islamophobia, forum
Available in	English, with sub-forums in multiple languages
Owner	Don Black
Created by	Don Black
URL	stormfront.org
Commercial	No
Registration	Required to post (except in open sub-forums)
Launched	November 1996; 25 years ago (1996-11)[1]
Current status	Online

Stormfront is a neo-NaziInternet forum, and the Web's first major racial hate site.^[2][3] The site is primarily focused on propagating white nationalism, antisemitism, islamophobia, anti-Hinduism, anti-feminism, homophobia,^[4]transphobia, Holocaust denial, anti-Catholicism, and white supremacy.^{[5][6][7][8][9][10]} In addition to its promotion of Holocaust denial, Stormfront has increasingly become active in the propagation of Islamophobia.

Stormfront began as an online bulletin board system in the early 1990s before being established as a website in 1996 by former Ku Klux Klan leader and white supremacistDon Black. It received national attention in the United States in 2000 after being featured as the subject of a documentary, Hate.com. Stormfront has been the subject of controversy after being removed from French, German, and ItalianGoogle indices; for targeting an online Fox News poll on racial segregation; and for having political candidates as members. Its prominence has grown since the 1990s, attracting attention from watchdog organizations that oppose racism and antisemitism.

In August 2017, Stormfront was taken offline for just over a month when its registrar seized its domain name due to complaints that it promoted hatred and that some of its members were linked to murder.^[11][12] The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law claimed credit for the action after advocating for Stormfront's web host, Network Solutions, to enforce its Terms of Service agreement, which prohibits users from using its services to incite violence.^[13][14]

History[edit]

Early history[edit]

Stormfront began in 1990 as an online bulletin board supporting white nationalist David Duke's campaign for United States senator for Louisiana. The name "Stormfront" was chosen for its connotations of a political or military front (such as the German Nazi Sturmabteilung (also known as storm troopers or SA)) and an analogy with weather fronts that invokes the idea of a tumultuous storm ending in cleansing.^[15] The Stormfront website was founded in 1996 by Don Black, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s and a member of the National Socialist White People's Party.^[16][17] Black first received computer training while he was imprisoned for his role in an abortive 1981 attempt to overthrow the government of Dominica.^[18][19]

Although Stormfront became the first website associated with white supremacy, its founding as a private cyberspace medium for white supremacy was based on the earlier online bulletin board systemLiberty Net.^[20][21] Liberty Net was implemented in 1984 by Klan grand dragonLouis Beam and protected by four password-protected computers that took the FBI two years to decrypt.^[22] Liberty Net's code-accessed message board contained personal ads along with recruitment material and information about the white power movement.^[22] Liberty Net's success as a computer platform led to Stormfront's establishment and later conversion into a website.

Until this point, attempts at using the Internet as opposed to bulletin boards have had limited success for the white pride movement,^[23] but Stormfront developed a following with the growth of the Internet during the 1990s.^[15][24] By 1999, nearly 2,000 websites associated with white supremacism existed, with the recruitment power of reaching millions across the United States.^[25]

National attention[edit]

The website has received considerable attention in the United States, given that, as of 2009, it had over 120,000 active members.^[26]

The 2000 CBS/HBO TV documentary special Hate.com focused on the rise of hate groups online and included input from Don Black, the founder of Stormfront.^[27] Narrated by Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), it featured interviews with Black and his son Derek as well as interviews with other white nationalist groups and organizations.^[27] Black had participated in the hope that the broadcast would show some sympathy towards the white nationalist movement, but Hate.com focused exclusively on the group's tactics and not its grievances.^[25]

Controversies[edit]

In 2002, Google complied with French and German legislation forbidding links to websites which host white supremacist, Holocaust-denying, or historical revisionist material by removing Stormfront's website from their French and German indexes.^[28]

Stormfront returned to the news in May 2003, when Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly reported on a racially segregated prom being held in Georgia and posted a poll on his website asking his viewers if they would send their own children to one. The next night, O'Reilly announced that he could not report the results of the poll as it appeared Stormfront had urged its members to vote in the poll, thus skewing the numbers.^[29]

Doug Hanks, a candidate for the city council of Charlotte, North Carolina, withdrew his nomination in August 2005 after it was revealed that he had posted on Stormfront. Hanks had posted more than 4,000 comments over three years, including one in which he described black people as "rabid beasts".^[30][31] Hanks said his postings were designed to gain the trust of Stormfront users to help him write a novel: "I did what I thought I needed to do to establish myself as a credible white nationalist."^[30]

In 2012, Italian police blocked the website and arrested four people for inciting racial hatred.^[32] The measure was taken after the publication of a blacklist of "prominent Jews and people who support Jews and immigrants" on the Italian section of the website. The list included possible targets of violent attacks, including gypsy camps.^[33] The subsequent year, in November 2013, Italian police raided the homes of 35 Stormfront posters. One man who was arrested in Mantua had two loaded weapons, a hand grenade casing, and a flag with a swastika in his possession.^[34]

According to a 2014 two-year study by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)'s Intelligence Report, registered Stormfront users have been disproportionately responsible for some of the most lethal hate crimes and mass killings since the site was put up in 1995. In the five years leading up to 2014, nearly 100 people were murdered by members of Stormfront.^{[35][36][37][38]} Of these, 77 were massacred by one Stormfront user, Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian terrorist who perpetrated the 2011 Norway attacks.^[39]

Public profile and later history[edit]

The total of registered users is just shy of 300,000, a fairly astounding number for a site run by an ex-felon and former Alabama Klan leader. And that doesn't include thousands of visitors who never register as users. At press time, Stormfront ranked as the Internet's 13,648th most popular site, while the NAACP site, by comparison, ranked 32,640th. – The Year in Hate and Extremism, 2015^[40]

In a 2001 USA Today article, journalist Tara McKelvey called Stormfront "the most visited white supremacist site on the Net."^[19] The number of registered users on the site rose from 5,000 in January 2002 to 52,566 in June 2005,^[41] by which year it was the 338th largest Internet forum, receiving more than 1,500 hits each weekday and ranking in the top one percent of Internet sites in terms of use.^[42][43] By June 2008, the site was attracting more than 40,000 unique users each day.^[44] Operating the site from its West Palm Beach, Florida headquarters is Black's full-time job, and he was assisted by his son and 40 moderators.^[16][44][45] The public profile of the site attracted attention from groups such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).^[46] The ADL describes Stormfront as having "served as a veritable supermarket of online hate, stocking its shelves with many forms of anti-Semitism and racism".^[47]

In 2006, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reported a discussion on Stormfront in which white nationalists were encouraged to join the United States military to learn the skills necessary for winning a race war.^[48][49] The 2008 United States presidential candidacy of African-American DemocratBarack Obama was a cause of significant concern for some Stormfront members:^[44] the site received 2,000 new members the day after Obama was elected as president, and went offline temporarily due to the increase in visitors.^[50] Stormfront posters saw Obama as representing a new multicultural era in the United States replacing "white rule", and feared that he would support illegal immigration and affirmative action and that he would help make white people a minority group.^[44]

During the 2008 primary campaigns, The New York Times mistakenly reported that Stormfront had donated $500 to Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul;^[51] in fact, it was site owner Don Black who had contributed the money to Paul.^[52] Following an April 2009 shooting, Richard Poplawski, a poster on the site, calling himself Braced for Fate, was charged with ambushing and killing three Pittsburgh police officers and attempting to kill nine others.^[53]

During the 2016 election season, site founder Don Black said that the site was experiencing huge spikes in traffic corresponding to controversial statements by Donald Trump, who is popular among white supremacists. In response, Black upgraded the site's servers.^[54]

Black's son Derek, who was a long-time participant in the site, has disavowed the beliefs held by his father and family and the Stormfront site. Through his years in college, Derek Black came to feel that white nationalism is not supportable. His story was captured in the book, "Rising Out of Hatred" by Eli Saslow.^[55][56]

In August 2017, Stormfront's domain name was seized by its registrar for "displaying bigotry, discrimination or hatred."^[13]

The site came back online on September 29, 2017. As of October 2017, services to keep the site online were provided by Tucows, Network Solutions, and Cloudflare.^[57]

Content[edit]

Stormfront is a resource for those courageous men and women fighting to preserve their White Western culture, ideals and freedom of speech and association—a forum for planning strategies and forming political and social groups to ensure victory.

— Stormfront mission statement.^[58]

Stormfront is a white nationalist,^[5]white supremacist^[7] and neo-Nazi website^[2] known as a hate site.^[3]

It is a site on which Nazi mysticism and the personality cult ofAdolf Hitler are sustained and Nazi iconography is used and accepted.^[59] The Stormfront website is organized primarily as a discussion forum with multiple thematic sub-forums including "News", "Ideology and Philosophy" ("Foundations for White Nationalism"), "Culture and Customs", "Theology", "Quotations", "Revisionism", "Science, Technology and Race" ("Genetics, eugenics, racial science and related subjects"), "Privacy", "Self-Defense, Martial Arts, and Preparedness", "Homemaking", "Education and Homeschooling", "Youth", and "Music and Entertainment".^[41][44] There are boards for different geographic regions, and a section open to unregistered guests, who are elsewhere unable to post, and even then, only under heavy moderation.^{[citation needed]}

Services[edit]

Stormfront's logo, featuring a Celtic cross surrounded by the motto "white pride world wide".

The Stormfront website hosts files from and links to a number of white nationalist and white racist websites,^[20] an online dating service (for "heterosexual White Gentiles only"), and electronic mailing lists that allows the white nationalist community to discuss issues of interest.^[23][46][60] It features a selection of current news reports, an archive of past stories, live streaming of The Political Cesspool radio show,^[61] and a merchandise store featuring literature and music.^[58] Stormfront has reportedly published stories aimed at children.^[59]

A 2001 study of recruitment by extremist groups on the Internet noted that Stormfront at that time came close to offering most of the standard services offered by web portals, including an internal search engine, web hosting, and categorized links, and lacking only an Internet search engine and the provision of free email for its members (though a limited email service was available at the price of $30 a month).^[59]

Design[edit]

Prominently featured on the homepage is a Celtic cross surrounded by the words "white pride world wide." A mission statement praises courage and freedom. Stormfront states it discourages racial slurs, and prohibits violent threats and descriptions of anything illegal.^[41][59] Others state that blatant hate and calls for violence are only kept off the opening page.^[58][62]

The site uses the Fraktur font,^[63] which was the favored font of the Nazi Party when it emerged in the early 1920s. Official Nazi documents and letterheads employed the font, and the cover of Hitler's Mein Kampf used a hand-drawn version of it.^[64]

Purpose and appeal[edit]

Don Black has long worked to increase the mainstream appeal of white supremacy.^[41] Black established Stormfront to heighten awareness of perceived anti-white discrimination and government actions detrimental to white people,^[65] and to create a virtual community of white extremists.^{[15][44][59][66]} Black owns the site's servers, so he is not dependent upon website hosting providers.^[43]

Black's organization inculcated enough white pride to make "its worldwide aspirations meaningful and socially significant".^[58] Stormfront keeps the rhetoric in its forums muted, discourages racial slurs, and prohibits violent threats and descriptions of anything illegal.^[41][59] Site moderator Jamie Kelso was reportedly "the motivating force behind real community-building among Stormfront members" due to his energy and enthusiasm in organizing offline events.^[67] Black's positioning the site as a community with the explicit purpose of "defending the white race" helped sustain the community, as it attracts white people who define themselves in opposition to ethnic minorities, particularly Jews.^[41]

Stormfront established MartinLutherKing.org to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr.^[68] In a 2001 study of white nationalist groups including Stormfront, academics Beverly Ray and George E. Marsh II commented: "Like the Nazis before them, they rely upon a blend of science, ignorance, and mythology to prop up their arguments".^[59][69]

Ideology[edit]

Stormfront presents itself as being engaged in a struggle for unity, identifying culture, speech and free association as its core concerns,^[58] though members of Stormfront are especially passionate about racial purity.^[67] It promotes a lone wolf mentality, which links it to white nationalist theorist Louis Beam's influential work on leaderless resistance and offers a sympathetic assessment of Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, a white supremacist who committed suicide after a racially motivated killing spree in July 1999.^[59] Violet Jones notes that Stormfront credits its mission to "the founding myth of an America created, built, and ideologically grounded by the descendants of white Europeans."^[70] Don Black has specifically compared his views to those of the Founding Fathers, whom he asserts "did not believe that an integrated black and white society was possible in America."^[71] Asked in 2008 by an interviewer for the Italian newspaper la Repubblica whether Stormfront was a 21st-century version of the Ku Klux Klan without the iconography, Black responded affirmatively, though he noted that he would never say so to an American journalist.^[72] In addition to its promotion of antisemitism and Holocaust denial, Stormfront has increasingly become active in the propagation of Islamophobia.^[73]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

White Date is an all-white dating website that “invite[s] descendants of Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Finno-Ugric, Baltic, and Italic folks worldwide [to] find a traditionally minded partner online.” Talia Lavin has written an extensive exposé about this site in her book Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, but even a glance at White Date’s front page reveals a predictable mix of thinly-veiled misogyny and racism, with messages such as “We follow classic roles, where strong men take the lead and graceful women play the game…wisely” and, “We are exclusive, not discriminatory. To learn about the difference, ask your local Country Club.” And although the site inclines toward a neo-Volkisch white supremacy that favors Vikings and Stonehenge as historical symbols, ancient Greece and Rome can be found on the site as well.

White Date is nothing less than an internet-age attempt to build a racial eugenics program to try to protect white people from the supposed extinction that white supremacists believe they face. It uses a range of techniques to disguise its similarity to less marketable versions of the same kinds of eugenic plans, such as Hitler’s awards for mothers of four or more children or his regime’s creation of special hospitals for “racially valuable” women to give birth in. One of these techniques is its use of antiquity to make whiteness seem ancient and eternal (and not a concept invented to justify violence against Africans), as the following examples illustrate:

• White Date’s“Who We Are: The Question of White Identity” begins with a video very similar to the one produced by Richard Spencer, trying to convince viewers that the supposed accomplishments of the “white race” in architecture, technology, and the arts were only possible because white people maintained racial purity. One of the images in the video is an photograph of the Roman theater in Cartagena, Spain. From this video one would never know that there is a huge body of historical work that attributes the divergence of European economies from those of the rest of the world to colonialism, violence, and a large number of other factors, none of which includes racial superiority.
• The same page reproduces a map of “Europes Tribes” in 52 BC taken from the website History Files, which claims to “cover just about all the possible tribes that were decoumented in the first centuries BC and AD, mostly by the Romans and Greeks.” White Date’s use of the map misleadingly implies that these groups of people believed they shared a racial identity (the concept of race as it is meant by White Date did not exist in antiquity) but even within the racist logic of the site strikes an odd note because its focus on non-Roman groups appears to exclude vast areas of modern Europe from White Date’s purview, including Spain, Italy, Ireland, and Greece. In this it conforms to a “Nordicist” form of white supremacy that views Germanic and Celtic ancestry as more purely “white” than other forms whiteness. Such white nationalist infighting is good to see but this position is also one which has been highly influential in United States immigration history and racial politics.
• The site includes a “Good reads for white people,” which recommends a book entitled “Prometheus Rising: Take Back Your Destiny.” The author, Jason Köhne, is the host of a number of podcasts for the influential white nationalist media company Red Ice. The mythological figure of Prometheus, whom Zeus punished for giving fire to humans, recurs frequently in white nationalist discourse as a model for what they believe is the uniquely innovative and dynamic white spirit.
• White Date has been banned from mainstream social media but continues to operate a Telegram Channel along with numerous other white supremacists that Pharos hasdocumented. White Date’s channel, besides promoting racist pseudo-archaeology about Atlantis, also occasionally posts material from Greco-Roman antiquity, such as a commemoration of the Battle of Aquae Sextiae between the Romans and the Teutones and Ambrones. But White Date doesn’t admire this battle because it represents a decisive Roman victory but because it represents a touchstone, they believe, of ancient white female heroism. According to Plutarch’s Life of Mariusand a letter of St. Jerome (the details are slightly different), the women of the Teutones and Ambrones, when they learned of the Roman victory, killed their kinsmen who had fled the battled, strangled their children, and finally killed themselves. What should be a reminder of the way the violence of colonialism engulfs entire communities becomes, in the hands of white nationalists, a source of inspiration. “These German women,” the Telegram post concludes, “understood the eternal and unchanging spiritual Virtue of ‘Death before Dishonor’ – a concept which unfortunately is no longer understood by most modern ‘men.’”

White Date advertises on white supremacist websites. One of their ads, which for a long time appeared on a site whose racist and homophobic essays Pharos has documented, used a detail of “Spring,” a classicizing painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

The classical context is implied in the ad by the busts at lower left and the column in the background. Potential clients are invited to assume that the women portrayed in the image are eagerly seeking a nice white husband, which is ironic because the painting actually portrays them observing a procession of women and children carrying a banner bearing a fragment attributed by a Latin grammarian to the Roman poet Catullus concerning the dedication of a grove to Priapus, a divinity almost always represented in antiquity with an outsized erection. It’s a context that jars somewhat with the site’s dating advice to women that includes “avoid cheap or flirty language,” “avoid provocative dressing,” and “avoid physical contact like touching his shoulder when he makes you laugh.”

On the one hand White Date is just more of the same: the fantasy of a racial identity connecting those who are racialized as white in modern times to the ancient world, fear-mongering about changing demographics, and veiled gestures to the white supremacist belief that white people are in danger of extinction. The site provides a forum section that is intended to “build the white diaspora,” a term ordinarily used to describe groups of people dispersed by racism, violence, and colonialism, and in an article for the white supremacist website American Renaissancethe founder of White Date justified the need for the site with a paraphrase of the neo-Nazi “14 words,” writing that the site aims to “build a safe, prosperous, and beautiful environment for our descendants.”

It may surprise some readers that White Date is run by a woman. Despite the hypermasculinity of the public-facing side of white nationalism, there are — and alwayshavebeen — many women involved in the movement. “Ladies, here is why women should choose trad life,” is one of the headlines on the White Date blog, in which “trad life” refers to the supposed virtues of a “traditional life” (other messaging uses the term “trad wife”), a concept being promoted by white nationalist women in order to sanitize the patriarchal and racist politics behind the concept. White Date is part of this ecosystem. It’s a good reminder that women are present and active in white nationalism even if we don’t see them in the news, and, for Pharos, that they find ways to take inspiration from even so patriarchal and exclusionary a period of history as Greco-Roman antiquity.

To judge from the desperation on the site, White Date hasn’t been very successful. The headline in the “Guerilla Marketing” section of the site is “Invite especially women!” and that same page attempts to put a good spin on the community’s gender ratio by claiming that “Men are vanguards and it is reflected in the ration between men and women on WhiteDate” before urging “gentlemen” to “invite white ladies in real life who display trad potential.” But whatever the success of this specific site, it stands as a reminder of both the surprising diversity of white nationalism, and the movement’s continuous development of new tools and rhetorics of recruitment. And even if White Date is easy to mock, mainstream politicians and journalists are spreading the same fears about declining white birthrates that White Date does.

We have linked above to archived images of White Date to avoid directing traffic to the site but if anyone wants to explore a community where, as Talia Lavin reported, a man will consider you “the most beautiful woman in the world” if you use the term “kikes”, then you may do so here.

SAN FRANCISCO — Dating service OKCupid says it has banned a white supremacist for life. And it's asking its members to report other OKCupid members who belong to hate groups.

OKCupid joins a growing corporate backlash against neo-Nazis in the U.S. after the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. Technology companies that once tolerated white supremacists are now booting them from their services.

The latest rally participant to see his digital footprint erased is Christopher Cantwell, a white nationalist and Web commentator who was filmed by Vice in Charlottesville. Facebook and Instagram removed accounts belonging to Cantwell and his YouTube account appears to have also been shut down. Now even his dating life is being targeted.

"We were alerted that white supremacist Chris Cantwell was on OkCupid. Within 10 minutes we banned him for life," OK Cupid tweeted. "There is no room for hate in a place where you're looking for love. If any OkCupid members come across people involved in hate groups, please report it immediately."

Reached by email, Cantwell wrote: "Hahaha! Okcupid shut me down? These k---- will stop at nothing!"

On his personal blog in 2014, Cantwell wrote about his thoughts on romance: "8 Online Dating Tips, for the Ladies."

No. 8: "If all I can see is your face – you’re a fat girl."

No. 7: "I’m here for you, not your kids" ("Now put the little brat to bed and show me a photo of you by yourself.")

No. 5: "In a photo of you and a friend, I assume you are the ugly one."

From social media platforms Twitter and Facebook to web hosting services Google and GoDaddy, to music service Spotify and security firm Cloudflare, tech companies are severing ties with hate groups and removing material that they say spreads hate and violates their terms of service.

The crackdown resulting from Charlottesville reflects a dramatic reversal for technology companies that for years have taken a more hands-off approach to freewheeling debate on their services. 

The more aggressive stance is being applauded by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors the activities of hate groups and has pressed Silicon Valley to take action.

While tech companies have removed accounts belonging to the Islamic State and other terrorist groups under growing political pressure, tech companies until now have not been as aggressive in policing hate groups in the U.S.

Dating apps have become an essential part of life, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, as individuals have limited face-to-face interactions. On apps such as these, individuals can connect with individuals they share commonalities with or just exchange messages with other users. However, extremists have realised that using these communication methods can be a new easy method to recruit and find a significant other. As a result, mainstream platforms such as Tinder, Bumble, and OkCupid are frequently exploited. In contrast, others have turned to places such as Patriot Peer, Trump Singles, White Date, MyMilitia, and WASPLove to connect with other White Race members. While these platforms have been around for quite some time, it was not until the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the 2021 Insurrection in Washington, DC that people began to pay close attention to a large number of extremists on apps aimed at making personal connections.

The number of users on apps is constantly changing as users change their preferences and purpose of being on the app. Depending on the level of connection a person seeks depends on the platform they choose to interact. Violence on these platforms is not a new phenomenon, as Maegan Tapley was killed after her Tinder date; while the man does not have any ties to an extremist group, it shows that these platforms can be misused and can result in violence. Extremists can target one another the same way as users looking to date by changing their interests to match other users they are seeking. Recently, a man on Grindr was assaulted and robbed because of his sexuality, which resulted in the perpetrator pleading guilty to hate crimes. These examples show that dating apps have a history of violence, and people continue to use them cautiously because of their dark history. Extremists use the platforms for the same reasons normal users congregate on the platform. They can reach users across the globe by changing their location, forging bonds, and communicating with one another before exchanging personal information.

Extremists use these apps mainly for recruitment and dating to increase organisation membership and find users who share far-right interests, such as preserving the white race and wanting a white family. Similarly, Islamic State (IS) used similar tactics to encourage women to fulfill gendered roles such as wives and homemakers, but also recruiters. IS and the far-right can recruit individuals on these platforms because they promise a better life and a sense of camaraderie. After both users ‘swipe’ or ‘like’ one another, they can begin communicating on the platform immediately in a 1-on-1 setting without being moderated or without the public being able to see them tweeting one another like on Twitter. Once they virtually connect, they already have something about one another that they are interested in, which is why they chose to connect. An extremist can ask questions on the app to get to know them and determine if they are worth investing time into by communicating with them further offline on an encrypted network or introducing them to another recruiter before officially being invited to join the organisation for an interview process. The information to the encrypted communication platform is only provided to users that share their ideologies and firm believers in preserving the white race by any means necessary. There is not a shortage of users to choose from as there are thousands of users that use these platforms daily.

In addition to recruitment, platforms such as White Date and WASPLove specifically target the white race. They are for connecting white singles to preserve the white race by matching white singles with one another. Due to them catering to the white race already signals their motives and beliefs as they chose not to be on a dating app such as Bumble that caters to all demographics. The platform advertises itself for whites looking for other whites, which makes it unique. It is easy for users to flaunt their beliefs without risking being banned or reported because other users likely share the same ideals. Bad-mouthing other individuals help forge bonds and make connections, which can potentially turn into them continuing to maintain the vision of David Lane.

Signalling and credible commitments are a large part of extremists using dating apps to recruit and look for love because they have to ensure they are speaking to the authentic person behind the profile. One of the tactics extremists can use to determine the authenticity of a profile is not by ‘liking’ every white person the app shows them but by viewing their profile biography and profile picture. Incorporating numbers, letters, and hand signs can display their level of commitment. Posting a profile picture wearing a swastika or writing 1488 in their biography would be too obvious and result in being reported immediately. Therefore, app users and recruiters must show their commitment by using other tactics such as posting profile pictures of themselves, creating a ‘P’ with one hand and a ‘W’ with the other hand to signify peckerwood. Another way to signal is by incorporating ‘ROA’ (Race overall) in their bio or ‘FGRN’ (For God, Race, and Nation). A regular user may overlook the symbols being used; however, an extremist can identify the meaning quickly. The racism that occurs on these platforms also comes in the form of trolling, where extremists will occasionally match with someone they have no intentions of forming a connection with to spew racist slurs at them and use dehumanising language. It is difficult to moderate these platforms because profile pictures and bios do not go through a formal approval process, allowing users to go undetected by using coded language and hand symbols. Many apps depend on users to report extremist content and racism on their platforms, which is not enough for extremists to increase their presence on dating apps.

In the aftermath of the Insurrection and Unite the Right Rally, mainstream dating platforms such as Bumble and OkCupid have banned extremists from their platforms and taken a strong stance against using hateful rhetoric. On the dating platform OkCupid, a known white nationalist and attendee of the Unite the Right Rally, Christian Cantwell explicitly stated his dating preferences by providing several items that were non-negotiable for him to have in a partner on his blog. After OkCupid learned of Cantwell’s presence, they quickly banned the white nationalist. Women on Bumble took it upon themselves to report users bragging about attending the Insurrection by matching with them and listening to their incriminating statements. Bumble has even partnered with the Anti-Defamation League to educate themselves and actively continue their stance against banning hate on their platform. Individuals that dislike similar things can form bonds faster because the shared antipathy can build trust. Recently, the platform Hater has become a new place for individuals who hate similar things to match with other users who share dislikes. While this may be a quick way to form connections, it can also bring users who hate things that can match them with users on the far-right end of the spectrum. Once extremists are de-platformed from one platform, they move to another app to continue to reach the masses. Dating apps should be knowledgeable of the issues occurring on their platform, but simply moderating is not enough when there are apps that specifically cater to the white race and others that have not taken a stance against racism and banning extremists.

The cover image is owned by Online For Love.

He describes himself as a white nationalist catholics online free dating site says he likes traditional values and dislikes degeneracy. “White identity is very important to me. I guess I would hope to find someone who shares those morals and views.” Ideally, he wants to be in a marriage based on Christian values, although he admits to being agnostic.

“I love Christian values and would always look to apply them to my life and marriage, regardless of whether or not I have faith. Maybe one day I will find faith.”

“How did you end white nationalist dating site on WASP Love?” I ask. He tells me that he simply Googled “dating site for whites”, as he was looking for a place to find like-minded potential partners, something the “mainstream” dating apps don’t necessarily offer. “I’m sure it’s gonna get much bigger,” he tells me. “As more people start to realise that we’re doomed, they will come to places like this.”

“Have you met anyone else yet over WASP Love?” I ask.

He looks down, a little embarrassed. “Not in person, no. But it’s good to connect with people from across the world there.”

We agree that Cambridge is a lovely place. “Even with the rain, even with all the liberal students,” he says. He suggests we go for a walk after the tea but I tell him that I’m too cold and have to go back to the hotel. He puts on his Hollister jacket and we walk together towards his car.

“So when will you be back?” Never, at least not as Claire.

Others had more successful dates. “I want to announce that I met my wonderful husband here on WASP.LOVE!” one user writes. “I am thrilled and so very happy. Do not give up hope […] Your other half is looking for you. God bless you all!”

WASP Love is only one of many alt-dating sites: for example, there are also White Date for European Singles and Trump Singles or Farmers Only for Americans. The motto of Trump Singles is “Making Dating Great Again”, while the promotion of White Date says, “We follow classic roles where strong men take the lead and graceful women play the game.”

White Date even asks you for your IQ and your personality type when you sign up. It lets you filter partners according to your hair-colour preferences, from Rapunzel to Venetian blonde – what a spectrum! You can also choose preferred ancestry markers: from Afrikaner to Welsh and Cornish. Having said that, there are only a total of eight Welsh and Cornish men between the ages of 18 and 80 on the app.

Far-right Identitarian movement Generation Identity developed its own encrypted application that has been dubbed “Tinder for Nazis”. But the app, called Patriot Peer, is about more than dating. It is about connecting white nationalists in romantic and white nationalist dating site ways.

“No one knows what the person sitting next to you on the bus, in a café or at university is like,” writes an Identitarian promoting the app. “In a faceless crowd, patriots don’t stick out.”

Harsher anti-hate-speech measures imposed by mainstream social media companies have provoked extremists to move to other platforms.

The goal of the Identitarian tool is “to motivate users to network and work together for a patriotic turning point”. Taking part in patriotic events and connecting with fellow Identitarian sympathisers is rewarded with social credits; you can become the perfect patriot.

“This App will disrupt the firewall of fear. It features a radar for Patriots, and a gamification for activism.” The altright.com website of American white nationalist Richard Spencer features a special profile of Patriot Peer to promote the app internationally.

Alt-dating is just one dimension of an emerging alternative online universe created by and for extremists. Harsher anti-hate-speech measures imposed by mainstream social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have provoked extremists to move to other platforms and establish substitute
channels to network, coordinate and crowdsource their activities.

Many controversial activists – on the right, the left and the religious extremist fringes – white nationalist dating site moved to alternative platforms: “I’d rather have Putin have my data than one of those SJW [Social Justice Warriors] in Silicon Valley,” wrote Generation Identity leader Martin Sellner in 2018.

Extremists who were kicked off popular social media due to their violent language have replaced Twitter with Gab, Facebook with VK or Minds, white nationalist dating site, and crowdfunding platform Patreon with Hatreon. Gab, the alt-right’s Twitter equivalent, gained more than 400,000 users in just 18 months.

While on Metapedia the Holocaust new free dating sites took place according to “politically correct history”, BitChute, DTube and PewTube offer “censorship-free alternatives” to YouTube, attracting in particular conspiracy theorists and Holocaust deniers. “I came to BitChute to escape JewTube,” one of the users writes after telling me that he believes “YouTube is run by the Jews”.

There are three types of alt-tech platforms: those, such as WASP Love and Hatreon, created for extremists and used by extremists; ultra-libertarian platforms, platforms created by libertarians or commercially driven developers, which tend to operate in the name of free speech and tolerate extremist content such as Gab, Minds and 8chan; and third, white nationalist dating site, hijacked platforms, platforms such as Discord, Telegram and JustPasteIt created for entirely different purposes that have been hijacked by extremists but proactively work with the authorities to ban these from using their services.

In the wake of the neo-Nazi rally held in the American city of Charlottesville, Virginia in the US summer of 2017, Twitter shut down hundreds of white supremacist accounts, the gaming app Discord closed several related channels, and the world’s most prominent neo-Nazi web page, Daily Stormer, received 24 hours’ notice before losing its domain.

A #dailystormerneverdies campaign was sparked on Twitter and a mass exodus started. Permanently banned users and libertarian developers have formed alliances and started a coordinated attempt to build a parallel social media ecosystem to put an end to Silicon Valley’s hegemony.

“This is war […] The Free Speech Tech revolution has begun,” announced the Alt-Tech Alliance in White nationalist dating site 2017. The movement self-identifies as “a passionate group of brave engineers, product managers, investors and others who are tired of the status quo in the technology industry”. Its members frame themselves as the sole defenders of “free speech, individual liberty and truth”.

Their unique selling proposition is that – unlike Facebook and Twitter – they condone racist, inflammatory and even violence-inciting posts: an offer that has made them an appealing place of refuge for extremists whose accounts were removed from mainstream platforms, but also for freedom-of-speech warriors who are upset with the take-down measures of the big Silicon Valley companies.

In the weeks leading up to the creation of the Alt-Tech Alliance, it was not only Charlottesville’s neo-Nazis who faced a crackdown white nationalist dating site the social media companies. Figures with more appeal white nationalist dating site mainstream audiences, such as the prominent British anti-feminist YouTuber Sargon of Akkad, were temporarily suspended from Twitter, causing outrage among libertarians and some conservative sympathisers.

The libertarians of the Alt-Tech Alliance wrote: “If White nationalist dating site 2017 has proven anything, it is that we are in a war to speak freely on the internet.”

Tensions came to a head when Google engineer James Damore was fired after he drafted a memo entitled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”, which white nationalist dating site that the firm’s diversity policies led to discrimination against white male conservatives.

The libertarians of the Alt-Tech Alliance seized the moment to write: “If August 2017 has proven anything, it is that we are in a war to speak freely on the internet. The Free Speech Tech revolution has begun. There is no more dancing around this subject anymore. Silicon Valley companies are being propped up with billions of dollars from foreign interests. They are extraordinarily hostile to any form of conservatism, populism and nationalism among other ideologies. Their employees, executives and their users are all afraid to express themselves for fear of being fired or shamed by a dishonest and disgusting establishment media oligarchy.”

They have picked a strong opponent. Facebook counts two billion monthly users, has purchased more than 50 companies and holds more than 70 per cent of the market share. Sounds like a monopoly?

“It certainly doesn’t feel like that,” Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told Senator Lindsey Graham during his 2018 US Senate hearing into the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. His response raised much laughter, although it wasn’t entirely wrong: there is indeed a growing niche audience that is exploring alternative solutions.

As the big tech firms come increasingly under fire – whether in the United States Senate, the European Union, the British Home Office or the German Ministry for Justice – non-state actors ranging from radical libertarians to extremist users spot a unique chance to woo away unhappy clients.

In 2018, the data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica was revealed to have harvested the personal Facebook data of millions of people without their consent for political campaigns. The leaks about the data breach sent the tech giant’s shares tumbling and caused thousands of users to
participate in a #deletefacebook campaign, which was strongly encouraged on competing platforms that welcomed dissatisfied users with open arms.

Even the most extreme users found ways of keeping their online presence. The account of the White nationalist dating site terrorist organisation National Action is blocked on Twitter in the UK but can be accessed via a virtual private network (VPN). Whitesingles.com redirects to the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront. And the Daily Stormer is still live, even after being banned from literally every country’s domain including the Chinese “.wang” and the Icelandic “.is”.

It is unsurprising that US white nationalist Richard Spencer labelled bitcoin the “currency of the alt-right” long before the bitcoin craze started.

No doubt extremists have been skilful in using tech to circumvent laws: from VPNs and redirect mechanisms to Tor services on the Dark Net and
private domains such as “.name”.

If you engage in extremist activities, keeping your information transfers independent and secure is worth nothing if your money transfers aren’t. “Fintech is the solution!” one user on Stormfront euphorically explains to me. He believes instagram profile adult dating website scam cryptocurrencies “are secure, instant and anonymous”.

Using the decentralised, unregulated currency to evade traditional financial services is more than a pragmatic solution to extremists, white nationalist dating site. “It’s also a political statement,” says American cyber-security expert John Bambenek, who built a tool that tracks neo-Nazi bitcoin transactions. “If you believe the banks are part of the Jewish world conspiracy nonsense, well, then there are only two ways to make financial transactions: it’s either cash or it’s bitcoin.”

Against this background, it is unsurprising that American white nationalist Richard Spencer labelled bitcoin the “currency of the alt-right” long before the bitcoin craze started.

After prominent alt-right figures were banned from mainstream crowdsourcing platforms such as Patreon and GoFundMe, and blocked by online payment providers such as PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay, some switched to Hatreon.

The alternative crowdsourcing platform was used to fund anti-democratic projects such as the maintenance of the world’s biggest neo-Nazi platforms Daily Stormer and Stormfront and hacking activities of the neo-Nazi white supremacist Weev.

For example, Weev received $US1.8 million in cryptocurrency donations to his visible wallet address, which was tracked by Bambenek. He may have accumulated additional sums in his non-public wallets.

Likewise, jihadists have white nationalist dating site large sums through cryptocurrency donations. A pro-Islamic State group was even able to generate enough money to reward its “cyberjihadists”. “We have exchanged parts of our bitcoins to equip the brothers who helped in our last missions with computers,” white nationalist dating site of the group’s members wrote in their private chat group in December 2017.

The danger for these far-right echo chambers to act as worldwide radicalisation accelerators and incite violence against minorities is real.

On Telegram and the Dark Net, terrorists have increasingly called on their sympathisers to donate in cryptocurrencies. For example, the al-Qaeda-linked organisation al-Sadaqa campaigned for bitcoin donations in November 2017, while Indonesian White nationalist dating site State leader Bahrun Naim used the cryptocurrency to transfer money to his followers.

Bitcoin transactions, however, can be tracked, and wallets are easily traced back to their owners due to the highly transparent blockchain technology this cryptocurrency is built on. As a result, many extremists have resorted to anonymous cryptocurrencies such as Monero, white nationalist dating site, “which best maintains our privacy”, as neo-Nazi hacker Weev put it.

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From alternative social media and news channels to extremist messaging apps and cryptocurrencies, the changes that new media ecosystems are undergoing resemble those that are underway in the political landscape. The loss of trust in the mainstream benefits the radical fringes: an increasing number of users turn their backs on established social media outlets.

On the one hand, there are those who quit social media altogether to express their discontent or disillusionment with the platforms. On the other hand, there are those who migrate to other platforms in protest.

Due to the network effect, every new user significantly enhances the value of a white nationalist dating site, and every lost user exponentially decreases its value. This means that platform migration dynamics set in motion by takedown policies could significantly change the social media landscape in years to come.

At this point, it may be worth asking whether we why dating doesnt work for women see a decline of the big tech platforms to the benefit of their ultra-libertarian rivals. Have we perhaps reached peak Silicon Valley?

The creation of this parallel alt-tech universe is a dynamic that might challenge the hegemony of the big social white nationalist dating site firms. In the long run, it may also change existing power relations on the internet and revolutionise the way our societies connect and network. One of the risks the emerging safe havens entail is the carte blanche they offer to those seeking to promote counterfactual, anti-science and conspiratorial narratives.

Too much is at stake to ignore the spread and rising influence of far-right ideologies online. Ending up with a white supremacist date might seem scary enough. But, as the recent wave of deadly far-right terrorist attacks in New Zealand, the US and Germany demonstrated, the danger for these far-right echo chambers to act as worldwide radicalisation accelerators and incite violence against minorities is real.

Edited extract from Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists (Bloomsbury, $30), by Julia Ebner, out March 3. Ebner is a research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London, where she leads projects on online extremism, disinformation and hate speech. Her book is a result of two years spent undercover in the alt-right online world.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page atThe Sydney Morning Herald,The Age andBrisbane Times.

OkCupid, which is owned by InterActiveCorp IAC, is just the latest company to publicly take a stand on last week’s events in Charlottesville, Va. during which a white supremacist rally turned violent resulting in one death and 19 injuries. Some credit-card companies, web hosts and fundraising pages shut down white-nationalist white nationalist dating site and banned racist content throughout the week. Bumble, another dating app, announced last Thursday it had partnered with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to ban all forms of hate speech from the platform, including text and photos.

“Hate speech, racism, and bigotry are intolerable realities that we must all come together to take action against,” Bumble Founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe said in a statement. “Bumble is a community of kindness and empowerment.”

While this is good news for online daters who don’t want to swipe right on a person who supports and or espouses hate speech, Tom Rogan, a writer at the Washington Examiner, worried it will further isolate troubled people. “Nazism does not arise from a position of personal self-worth. On the contrary, if you’re a grown man who runs around America with plastic shields saluting an ideology that murdered tens of millions,” he wrote, “you’ve got some issues. Promoting happiness and offering a positive distraction, dating might even offer a remedy to those issues.”

Sectioning off daters may create a bubble where they are less likely to meet other people who could help them reject caught my girlfriend on a dating site speech. Christian Picciolini, a former neo-Nazi, told NPR white nationalist dating site was “lost and lonely” when he was recruited by a white nationalist group. “Because there are so many marginalized young people, white nationalist dating site, so many disenfranchised young people today with not a lot to believe in, with not a lot of hope, they tend to search for very simple black-and-white answers,” he said.

Don’t miss:These are all the companies are trying to stop white supremacists from raising money

Most apps ban hate speech as part of their terms of service. Tinder has a zero-tolerance policy. “Any content that promotes or condones violence against individuals or groups based on race or ethnicity, religion, disability, gender, age, nationality, sexual orientation or gender identity is strictly forbidden and may result in you being permanently banned,” the company told MarketWatch. OkCupid and Bumble, however, have gone one step further singling out participants in last week’s white nationalists rally in Charlottesville.

However, it’s unlikely these bans will prevent white supremacists from finding each other, said Eric Resnick, a dating expert at ProfileHelper.com, noting that there are a number of websites that cater to people who only want to date people with similar views. One site, called WASP Love, caters to “white nationalism” and “confederate” singles. “The vast majority of people are not going to be impacted by this new set of actions,” he said. When [white supremacists] aren’t chatting each other up at rallies, actually good dating apps will also end up using niche sites.”

Such bans by dating apps come as dating guys from the midwest of a broader trend of companies taking moral stands -- an increasingly important measure when appealing to young customers, said Chelsea Reynolds, an assistant professor of communications at California State University, white nationalist dating site, Fullerton, who researches dating behavior.

“OkCupid and Bumble are responding to their clients’ ethical beliefs, just like any business practicing corporate white nationalist dating site responsibility,” Reynolds said. “We will see more and more companies, including dating apps and traditionally non-partisan news media, take explicit political positions during the Trump era. OkCupid and Bumble are leading a trend.”

Dating apps have become an essential part of life, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, as individuals have limited face-to-face interactions. On apps such as these, individuals can connect with individuals they share commonalities with or just exchange messages with other users. However, extremists have realised that using these communication methods can be a new easy method to recruit and find a significant other. As a result, mainstream platforms such as Tinder, Bumble, and OkCupid are frequently exploited. In contrast, others have turned to places such as Patriot Peer, Trump Singles, White Date, MyMilitia, and WASPLove to connect with other White Race members. While these platforms have been around for quite some time, it was not until the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the 2021 Insurrection in Washington, DC that people began to white nationalist dating site close attention to a large number of extremists on apps aimed at making personal connections.

The number of users on apps is constantly changing as users change their preferences and purpose of being on the app. Depending on the level of connection a person seeks depends on the platform they choose to interact. Violence on these platforms is not a new phenomenon, as Maegan Tapley was killed after her Tinder date; while the man does not have any ties white nationalist dating site an extremist group, it shows that these platforms can be misused and can result in violence. Extremists can target one another the same way as users looking to date by changing their interests to match other users they are seeking. Recently, a man on Grindr was assaulted and robbed because of his sexuality, which resulted in the perpetrator pleading guilty to hate crimes. These examples show that dating apps have a history of violence, and people continue to use them cautiously because of their dark history. Extremists use the platforms for the same reasons normal users congregate on the platform. They can reach users across the globe by changing their location, forging bonds, and communicating with one another before exchanging personal information.

Extremists use these apps mainly for recruitment and dating to increase organisation membership and find users who share far-right interests, such as preserving the white race and wanting a white family. Similarly, Islamic State (IS) used similar tactics to encourage women to fulfill gendered roles such as wives and homemakers, but also recruiters. IS and the far-right can recruit individuals on these platforms because they promise a better life and a sense of camaraderie. After both users ‘swipe’ or ‘like’ one another, they can begin communicating on the platform immediately in a 1-on-1 setting without being moderated or without the public being able to see them tweeting one another like on Twitter. Once they virtually connect, they already have something about one another that they are interested in, white nationalist dating site is why they chose to connect. An extremist can ask questions on the app to get to know them and determine if they are worth investing time into by communicating with them further offline on an encrypted white nationalist dating site or introducing them to another recruiter before officially dating a gypsy girl invited to join the organisation for an interview process. The information to the encrypted communication platform is only provided to users that share their ideologies and firm believers in preserving the white race by any means necessary. There is not a shortage of users to choose from as there are thousands of users that use these platforms daily.

In addition to recruitment, platforms such as White Date and WASPLove specifically target the white race. They are for connecting white singles to preserve the white race by matching white singles with one another. Due to them catering to the white race already signals their motives and beliefs as they chose not to be on a dating app such as Bumble that caters to all demographics. The platform advertises itself for whites looking for other whites, which makes it unique. It is easy for users to flaunt their beliefs without risking being banned or reported because other users likely share the same ideals. Bad-mouthing other individuals help forge bonds and make connections, which can potentially turn into them continuing to maintain the vision of David Lane.

Signalling and credible commitments are a large part of extremists using dating apps to recruit and white nationalist dating site for love because they have to ensure they are speaking to the authentic person behind the profile. One of the tactics extremists can use to determine the authenticity of a profile is not by ‘liking’ every white person the app shows them but by viewing their profile biography and profile picture. Incorporating numbers, letters, and hand signs can display their level of commitment. Posting a profile picture wearing a swastika or writing 1488 in their biography would be too obvious and result in being reported immediately. Therefore, app users and recruiters must show their commitment by using other tactics such as posting profile pictures of themselves, creating a ‘P’ with one hand and a ‘W’ with the other hand to signify peckerwood. Another way to signal is by incorporating ‘ROA’ (Race overall) in their bio or ‘FGRN’ (For God, Race, and Nation). A regular user may overlook the symbols being used; however, an extremist can identify the meaning quickly. The racism that occurs on these platforms also comes in the form of trolling, white nationalist dating site, where extremists will occasionally match with someone they have no intentions of forming a connection with to spew racist slurs at them and use dehumanising language. It is difficult to moderate these platforms because profile pictures and bios do not go through a formal approval process, allowing users to go undetected by using coded language white nationalist dating site hand symbols. Many apps depend on users to report extremist content and racism on their platforms, which is not enough for extremists to increase their presence on dating apps.

In the dating site for cigar smokers of the Insurrection and Unite the Right Rally, mainstream dating platforms such as Bumble and OkCupid have banned extremists from their platforms and taken a strong stance against using hateful rhetoric. On the dating platform OkCupid, a known white nationalist and attendee of the Unite the Right Rally, Christian Cantwell explicitly stated his dating preferences by providing several items that were non-negotiable for him to have in a partner on his blog. After OkCupid learned of Cantwell’s presence, they quickly banned the white nationalist. Women on Bumble took it upon themselves to report users bragging about attending the Insurrection by matching with them and listening to their incriminating statements. Bumble has even partnered with the Anti-Defamation League to educate themselves and actively continue their stance against banning hate on their platform. Individuals that dislike similar things can form white nationalist dating site faster because the shared antipathy can build trust. Recently, the platform Hater has become a new place for individuals who hate similar things to match with other users who share dislikes. While this may be a quick way to form connections, it can also bring users who hate things that can match them with users on the far-right end of the spectrum. Once extremists are de-platformed from one platform, they move to another app to continue to reach the masses. Dating apps should be knowledgeable of the issues occurring on their platform, but simply moderating is not enough when there are apps that specifically cater to the white race and others that have not taken a stance against racism and banning extremists.

The cover image is owned by Online Open minded dating site reviews Love.

Hatewatch identified and compiled over 600 cryptocurrency addresses associated with white supremacists and other prominent far-right extremists for this essay and then probed their transaction histories through blockchain analysis software. What we found is striking: White supremacists such as Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents, race pseudoscience pundit Stefan Molyneux, Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer and Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer, and Don Black of the racist forum Stormfront, all bought into Bitcoin early in its history and turned a substantial profit from it. The estimated tens of millions of dollars’ worth of value extreme far-right figures generated represents a sum that would almost certainly be unavailable to them without cryptocurrency, and it gave them a chance to live comfortable lives while promoting hate and authoritarianism.

discreet dating approval site Early Adopters of Bitcoin">

• Updated:List of cryptocurrency addresses used by extremists

Less than a quarter of Americans presently own some form of cryptocurrency as of May 2021. But those numbers increase substantially within fringe right-wing spaces, according to Hatewatch’s findings, approaching something much closer to universal adoption. Hatewatch struggled to find any prominent player in the global far right who hasn’t yet embraced cryptocurrency to at least some degree. The average age of a cryptocurrency investor is 38, white nationalist dating site, but even senior citizens in the white supremacist movement, such as Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, 69, and Peter Brimelow of VDARE, 73, have moved tens of thousands of dollars of the asset in recent years.

Cryptocurrency, or a group of digital moneys maintained through decentralized systems, has grown into a billion-dollar industry. A growing swath of Asian dating click ads the technology. Nothing is inherently criminal or extreme about it, and most of its users have no connections to the extreme far right. (One of white nationalist dating site authors of this essay owns cryptocurrency, as disclosed in an author’s note at the end.) However, the far right’s early embrace of cryptocurrency merits deeper analysis, due to the way they used it to expand their movement and to obscure funding sources. It is not uncommon for far-right extremists to seek to hide their dealings from the public. The relative secrecy blockchain technology offers has become a profitable, but still extraordinarily risky, gamble against traditional banking.

“There are a lot of Bitcoin whales from pretty early [on in its history],” futurist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier told the Lex Fridman podcast in September. (People use “whales” to describe those who hold large sums of cryptocurrency.) “And they’re huge, and if you ask, ‘Who are these people?’ there’s evidence that a lot of them are not the people you would want to support.”

‘A huge tolerance for unreality’

Johnson of Counter-Currents, an influential figure in the white nationalist movement due to his outspoken support for the creation of an “ethnostate” serving only white, non-Jewish people, first picked up Bitcoin on Jan. 19, 2012, Hatewatch found, making him the first known figure in the movement to invest. Hatewatch could not determine black people dating site Johnson generated just shy of 30 Bitcoin on that Thursday in January 2012 – whether he mined it or purchased it, or someone merely sent it to him – but the date falls just a year-and-a-half after the first white nationalist dating site commercial cryptocurrency transaction took place.

Johnson obtained the 29.82 Bitcoin on a date when prices for the asset sat between five and 10 dollars. Hatewatch found that Johnson flipped the Bitcoin from that first transaction and additional ones into over $800,000 worth of value. He has turned his website Counter-Currents into a hub for cryptocurrency discussion in the movement and solicits donations in digital tokens, or cryptocurrency “coins,” such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Monero, Dating doctors app Cash, Tether, Cardano, Ripple, Dash, Neo, Stellar Lumens and Basic Attention Token. Hatewatch reached out to him for a comment on this essay, but he did not respond.

“If spicy dating app of you haters out there have any Bitcoin and you just want to get rid of it, send it to Counter-Currents, we have a Bitcoin address,” Johnson said on a Jan. 5 edition of his livestream, referring to those who perceive cryptocurrency as lacking in real world value. “I’ll hold it, white nationalist dating site, I’ll stack it, I’ll keep it … I have a huge tolerance for unreality.”

Johnson often platforms on his site an antisemitic white nationalist personality who goes by the pseudonym Karl Thorburn. As Thorburn, the author advises people in the movement to purchase and hold Bitcoin as an investment. He wrote through his Telegram account that he advertises for Bitcoin so white nationalists can have money they “can travel with, that bad people can’t seize/inflate, and that will allow [them] to live in a safer, White neighborhood and start a family.”

A full-sized PDF of this chart is available by clicking the image.

Thorburn also advises people in the movement on how to donate cryptocurrency to white nationalist causes without exposing their identities, highlighting one of key reasons that the assets appeal to them.

“Just transfer the [Bitcoin] from your exchange account to another wallet you control, and later move the [Bitcoin] from that wallet to the donor’s address. This creates plausible deniability because you aren’t sending the [Bitcoin] directly from your exchange account to a publically [sic] known nationalist,” he wrote for Johnson’s site in a post published on Nov. 26, 2020.

Matt Gebert, a State Department official Hatewatch identified as a white nationalist organizer in 2019 (the government suspended him after we published the story), also has contributed material to Johnson’s Counter-Currents. In April, Gebert brought the person behind the Thorburn white nationalist dating site onto a podcast. Explaining how he got interested in white nationalism, Thorburn said that he “went into the Stefan Molyneux thing, where it was hardcore atheism, and hardcore anarcho-capitalism” before becoming a white nationalist. A sd dating site number of people who started in libertarian online spaces adapted to the pro-fascist ideology of the “alt-right” movement during the rise of Trump.

“And in fact that’s dating men in fraternities reddit really led me into Bitcoin,” he said of Molyneux’s influence.

David Gerard, a cryptocurrency analyst and author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, told Hatewatch that the cryptocurrency community denies that extremists have immersed themselves in their subculture.

“Bitcoin started in right-wing libertarianism,” Gerard said in an email. “This is not at all the same as being a neo-Nazi subculture. That said, there’s a greater proportion of Nazis there than you’d expect just by chance, and the Bitcoin subculture really doesn’t bother kicking its Nazis out. … Bitcoiners will simultaneously deny they have Nazis (which they observably white nationalist dating site, and also claim it’s an anti-bitcoin lie, and also claim it’s good that anyone can use Bitcoin.”

‘At the expense of the parasites’

Molyneux, jewish online dating self-described moral philosopher who started his career as a libertarian pundit, denies being a white supremacist despite repeatedly and falsely claiming that non-white people are predisposed to be of lower intelligence. He started to embrace white nationalism around 2018 during a trip to Poland. (Hatewatch obtained leaked video of Molyneux calling a monologue he filmed at that time his “white nationalism speech.”) He never responded to a request for comment about that incident.

YouTube, and even typically more lenient Twitter, suspended Molyneux’s access to their websites in 2020 after years of his using the platforms to denigrate women and non-white people. Molyneux, relegated to fringe websites, saw his website traffic and his ability to raise funds plummet. One of his associates implied that Molyneux could survive the change because of Bitcoin.

“Stefan Molyneux was in Bitcoin at $1. He is more than ok,” Mike Cernovich, known primarily for pushing the #Pizzagate conspiracy theory in 2016, posted to Twitter in June after Molyneux was removed.

Molyneux may have obtained Bitcoin prior to 2013, but the earliest existing wallet of his identified by Hatewatch pulled in Bitcoin for the first time on Jan. 25, 2013, roughly a year sugar momma dating app reddit Johnson received his donation in January 2012, white nationalist dating site. Molyneux's experience with Bitcoin stands out alongside the other extremists Hatewatch studied. Not only did he invest long-term in Bitcoin, holding the asset through periods of volatility rather than cashing out, but his donors bestowed him with 1250 Bitcoin tokens, far more than anyone else Hatewatch studied. (The price of one Bitcoin has ranged between roughly $30,000 and $68,500 U.S. dollars in value during 2021.)

Hatewatch found that an anonymous “mega-whale,” someone who controls thousands of Bitcoin tokens, gave large donations from that sum to white nationalist dating site wallets in 2020, including one operated by Molyneux. On Oct. 11, this anonymous individual doled out 50 Bitcoin in total to such causes as the Ron Paul Institute, the Free Software Foundation and the American Institute for Economic Research. They gave Molyneux 10 Bitcoin, best romanian dating site is today worth white nationalist dating site half a million U.S, white nationalist dating site. dollars. Whoever operated the account held onto their Bitcoin since 2010, white nationalist dating site, underscoring Molyneux’s importance to Bitcoin’s community of early adopters and libertarian white nationalist dating site generated million-dollar profits in less than a decade through his donations, flipping $1.67 million worth of value into at least $3.28 million. In February 2021, he described the value of cryptocurrency using tropes commonly associated with antisemitism.

“Bitcoin is a currency that serves the people at the expense of the parasites, rather than the currency which serves the parasites at the expense of the people,” Molyneux said of the cryptocurrency on his independent radio show. “Bitcoin is rescuing your precious labor from how to qrite a dating app bio hoovered up endlessly by the invisible vampire mosquitoes of central banking.”

Molyneux responded to a request for comment by telling Hatewatch that by “parasites,” he was likely referring to his “deep moral opposition to imperialistic governments and wars of aggression” and his belief that “Bitcoin can put an end to such wars.” (Hatewatch has elected to publish the full comment of Molyneux, who disputes that he is “far right,” here.)

‘The dollar is going to collapse’

Neo-Nazis promote propaganda claiming that Jewish people control the banking industry for the purpose of deliberately harming or undermining the ambitions of non-Jewish white men. They also often openly cheer for the destruction of the U.S. as we know it – portraying the collapse of the government and financial system as an inevitability. This dystopian worldview primed neo-Nazis to embrace cryptocurrency’s promise early. The Daily Stormer lays out these beliefs in explicit terms.

“Bitcoin is going to become the new gold. Because of that, if you don’t buy any now you’re doing yourself a disservice. So buy some when the price goes down again, and when you do consider donating to us here at Stormer so we can continue to fight the Jew-owned banking empire,” a Daily Stormer post from Oct. 24, 2017 claims.

Daily Stormer editor Andrew Anglin, who in recent posts to his site advocated for the legalization of gang rape and called the COVID-19 pandemic a hoax, and Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, a man known for hacking,praising far-right terrorists and providing technical support to Anglin, started promoting cryptocurrency to their audience as early as 2015. Auernheimer’s first known Bitcoin address issued transfers in May 2014, roughly a month after he white nationalist dating site his release from federal prison and demanded 28,000 Bitcoin from the U.S. federal government as restitution. As of Dec. 1, 20 of the largest and oldest Bitcoin addresses known to belong to Auernheimer pulled in payments totalling $886,345 and transferred out roughly $1,069,395. Anglin, who appears to have adopted cryptocurrency soon dating eastern europe girls Aurnheimer in December 2014, has moved around at least 1 million U.S. dollars in Bitcoin, as Hatewatch white nationalist dating site reported .

“We know as an absolute matter of fact that the dollar is going to collapse, and presumably every other fiat currency on the planet is going to get dragged down with it. Maybe property or metals are better than crypto. Maybe even the stock market is better than crypto – I am not a financial advisor and I have no idea, white nationalist dating site. But what we know as a matter of fact is that you want your money somewhere,”Anglin wrote in 2020 of cryptocurrency.

Daily Stormer published a post in December 2017 under the byline “Tim Hort” that links their interest in cryptocurrency directly to their genocidal ideology. The post embeds a clip from Russia Today dating app for fitness Max Keiser asking his viewers to “imagine [JP Morgan Chase CEO] Jamie Dimon being sucked through a straw … imagine [Goldman Sachs Banker] Lloyd Blankfein being sucked through a garden hose … imagine Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein being spaghettified as they are sucked into the Bitcoin black hole.” Keiser is a self-described “Bitcoin maximalist,” meaning he believes the token is destined to become the dominant form of future money, even dating jamaican girl other cryptocurrencies. Daily Stormer interpreted his words as a call to first destroy the financial system and then kill Jewish people.

“Max Keiser is explaining how Bitcoin will finally allow us to break free of the Jewish control of our finances,” the post claims. “When we can finally control our own finances without needing to rely on the central k*** banks, we can start repairing. And white nationalist dating site up the ovens of course.”

Hatewatch reached out to Keiser through Russia Today’s press email, but no one replied.

In Hatewatch’s analysis of Daily Stormer’s Bitcoin transaction history, we found transactions that resemble the types of payments employers give to employees. Cryptocurrency wallets known to be controlled by Anglin regularly transferred Bitcoin, worth a market rate of between $2,000 to $3,000 U.S., into Auernheimer's most active wallet on the first or second day of every month. Between Aug. 1, 2018, and Dec. 1, 2021, Anglin transferred a total of $91,920.56 white nationalist dating site Auernheimer across 38 separate monthly transactions.

The Associated Press and PBS Frontline collaborated on a report in September showing that Anglin supporters have sent him at least $4.8 million white nationalist dating site Bitcoin, based upon data pulled from Chainalysis, a cryptocurrency analytics firm. 

​​‘It’s really good for anonymous transactions’

Anglin and Auernheimer likely have more money than Hatewatch can report. Both men pushed their audience toward the privacy-focused token Monero in the years following its release in 2014. Researchers cannot yet trace Monero due to its relative anonymity, as Hatewatch previously reported. Monero’s website describes their product as “a private, decentralized cryptocurrency that keeps your finances confidential and secure.” Critics note the degree to which law enforcement and other government officials so far struggle to see what people are doing with it.

The criminal underworld has reportedly employed Monero at a growing rate. The Financial Times noted in June that Monero has become “an increasingly sought-after-tool for criminals such as ransomware gangs.” In August, when comedian John Oliver ran a segment on his show depicting Monero’s advertising as subtly winking at criminals, an outreach organizer for the white nationalist dating site defended their technology on grounds that it fights back against “a society of ever-growing mass surveillance.” Monero has elsewhere argued that it enables commerce and does not promote secrecy, or crime, any more than cash.

The cryptocurrency-focused website The Block reported in August 2020 that 45% of illegal darknet markets, which traffic in things like stolen credit card information, ransomware, drugs and hacked passwords, support Monero. The number has likely only risen, due to Monero’s increasing name recognition and availability. Anglin appears to white nationalist dating site transacted with Russian darknet markets that traffic in illegal wares, according to analysis previously conducted by Hatewatch based on his Bitcoin usage. (Anglin later denied the existence of the payments by writing on his forum: “This is totally fake. I don't even know what any of this is about. I never bought any Russian darknet drugs lol.”) Due to Monero’s current untraceable nature, Hatewatch cannot yet see if he’s also used that token in a similar manner.

Auernheimer publicly described his enthusiasm for Monero on a podcast with embattled white supremacist Christopher Cantwell in December 2017. Auernheimer, who is believed to be living in Eastern Europe, has involved himself in the promotion of at least one hack-and-leak effort launched by Russian military intelligence, among other stunts, white nationalist dating site. A judge sentenced Cantwell to 41 months of prison in February on charges related to extortion and threats made against a fellow extremist.

“They’re trying to shut me out of the financial system,” Cantwell said of why he wants to get his audience involved in cryptocurrency on that December 2017 podcast. “People want to throw money at me and I’m like, ‘I’d love to take it, but I have my black partner dating site reviews way to take it from you right now.’”

Auernheimer responded to Cantwell by saying that he recently sold off some of his own Bitcoin, taking profit from it. Hatewatch identified Auernheimer as having sold off large amounts of Bitcoin roughly a month before the podcast aired – on Nov. 13, 2017.

“I hold a lot of Monero though. That’s my big thing now. I’m way into Monero. I hold a significant amount,” Auernheimer said. He went on after describing the difficulty to obtain Monero: “It’s really riding on the virtues of its technology. It’s really good for anonymous transactions. … It seems like a good idea.”

Anglin has described Monero as a tool to work around “spies from the various ‘woke’ anti-freedom organizations.” Other far-right extremists have followed Daily Stormer’s lead. The white supremacist group National Justice Party, which is linked to a pro-Kremlin propagandist who relocated to Moscow after attending the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection, accepts donations on their website in only two cryptocurrencies today – Bitcoin and Monero.

‘Do you know how much I fucking hate the government’

National Justice Party founder Michael Peinovich is among a group of extreme, far-right fringe activists who now install a system called BitPay that automates the creation of new Bitcoin wallets to coincide with each new transaction. Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, white nationalist dating site, the military wing of Hamas, embraces a similar technique. So does Nick Fuentes, the pundit whose vocal support for the Stop the Steal movement generated large white nationalist dating site of young white nationalists and neofascists at events in the runup to the violence on Jan. 6. In each case, the BitPay system makes donations difficult to track.

Fuentes accepts payments on his site through Litecoin, a so-called fork white nationalist dating site Bitcoin that trades at a fraction of its value per token, white nationalist dating site. French computer programmer Laurent Bachelier, who also donated to Anglin of the Daily Stormer and the white nationalist non-profit VDARE, gave 13.5 Bitcoin to Fuentes before killing himself through an intentional drug overdose on Dec. 8, 2020. Fuentes has claimed that the government has seized some of the money he received in donations.

“I don’t like to brag or anything, but if you knew how much money they took – do you know how much I fucking hate the government because I woke up and one of my checking accounts – one of my checking accounts, which has lots and lots and lots of money in it, had zero dollars,” Fuentes said on one of his livestreams in April.

Fuentes has not received or spent any Bitcoin at that address since Dec. 16, 2020, when he withdrew all 13.73371697 Bitcoin in his account, worth $266,392.40. Customers at his website are directed to pay for merchandise emblazoned with slogans like “Radical Extremist,” “White Boy Summer” and “Hate Speech Enjoyer” using dynamically generated Litecoin addresses or by making regular credit card payments through Visa and Mastercard.

Similarly, Peinovich’s main donation address had received 37.65076951 Bitcoin over its lifetime, for a total of $28,668.10 in donations, but went quiet once he switched to dynamically generating addresses in BitPay. The balance in the account is currently 0.06546048 Bitcoin, currently worth about $3,307.06. Hatewatch reported on Peinovich’s collaboration with the extremist Glen Allen, who acted as a shadow lawyer in his defense during the Sines v. Kessler trial, which focused on violence stoked by white supremacists at the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Leaked emails show Peinovich offering to compensate Allen through Bitcoin, demonstrating how white supremacists use the currency to organize in secret.

“Let me know how I can send you some cash or some more bitcoin,” Peinovich writes in an email to Allen.

Allen did not respond white nationalist dating site a request for comment about his emails with Peinovich.

‘A place that doesn’t hate us’

In the aftermath of the violence on Jan. 6, a gaming white nationalist dating site livestreaming site called DLive banned Fuentes. White nationalist dating site decision further isolated the 23-year-old extremist, who had up to that date used nightly live video appearances on the site to influence crowds of young men to attend Stop the Steal rallies. People donated to white supremacists and neofascist livestreamers in substantial amounts on DLive, as Hatewatch has previously reported. The company permanently removed a number of extremists beyond Fuentes after Hatewatch reported on them, including the antisemitic performer Owen Benjamin and Jan. 6 participant Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet.

“We feel better being in a place that doesn’t hate us,” Benjamin said affectionately of DLive in the months before they suspended his account.

DLive uses a blockchain-based system to distribute donations to its livestreamers, meaning it functions like an under-regulated cryptocurrency market. Sites like these, particularly those operated by ideologically driven libertarians, have become easy ways for extreme far-right figures to promote their propaganda and earn a living. Another blockchain-themed video site that traffics in an in-house currency is Odysee, which has in recent months given platforms to hateful propagandists banned from conventional sites, such as Fuentes, Peinovich and David Duke, among hundreds of others. Odysee’s situation may portend trouble for websites built on this model.

Critics of blockchain-based sites note the degree to which they operate outside of white nationalist dating site rules of banks, despite in some cases issuing money for people and storing it. The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Odysee’s parent company LBRY, not for issues related to the hateful content promoted on their site, but for offering unlicensed securities. The SEC claims that LBRY promoted their cryptocurrency as a security without being licensed to do so. LBRY denies the government’s allegations. That case, filed in March 2021, is pending in federal court.

‘The music will eventually stop’

When the Australian bank Westpac cut ties with Hitlerite, anti-Muslim extremist Blair Cottrell, his supporters, and many libertarians who may feel ambivalent about his hateful beliefs and simply love cryptocurrency, hyped his situation as an ideal reason for Bitcoin’s existence. These advocates suggested that if banks agree to cut ties with far-right extremists, those who are affected should respond by converting their fiat money (money issued by a government) entirely into cryptocurrency. This way of seeing the world, layered with dreams of big payoffs in passive income and understandable fears of government intrusion, has taken hold on the far-right fringe. But converting your money entirely into cryptocurrency carries undeniable risks.

“Regulators want to crack down on fraud,” financial analyst Jacob King told Hatewatch of the cryptocurrency space. “While this is great news in the long run, it will have a disastrous impact on the price of Bitcoin and many altcoins as they are dependent on price manipulators like Tether and Binance.

By “altcoins,” King refers in a general sense to cryptocurrencies that are not Bitcoin, running the gamut from more universal tokens such as Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin, to much more obscure offerings. His point of view runs contrary to the propaganda churned out on a regular basis by the cryptocurrency industry, which has become notorious for publishing quixotic assessments of their space. He mentions two potential looming dangers for cryptocurrency prices in Tether and Binance. 

Tether, a so-called “stable coin,” which is in theory ‘tethered’ to the price of the U.S, white nationalist dating site. dollar, plays a critical role in cryptocurrency, enabling investors to shift funds between tokens on exchanges, white nationalist dating site, or pull them out temporarily, without completely exiting and putting money back into fiat currency. As Bloomberg noted in July, “Tethers in circulation are worth about $62 billion and white nationalist dating site underpin more than half of all Bitcoin trades.” The thesis of that article helps underscore King’s concerns about what Tether could in theory do to tank the value of other cryptocurrencies. It notes that the DOJ is investigating whether Tether hid from banks the fact that transactions were tied to cryptocurrency. The Tether investigation also deals with possible white nationalist dating site manipulation:

In the course of its years-long investigation, the Justice Department has examined whether traders used Tether tokens to white nationalist dating site drive up Bitcoin during an epic rally for cryptocurrencies in 2017. While it’s unclear whether Tether the company was a target of that earlier review, the current focus on bank fraud suggests prosecutors may have moved on from pursuing a case tied to market manipulation.

The feds are also allegedly probing Binance, cryptocurrency’s most trafficked exchange, in an investigation led by government officials who investigate money laundering and tax evasion, according to a Bloomberg report white nationalist dating site in May. Bloomberg reported that “the specifics of what the agencies are examining couldn’t be determined” but noted that U.S. investigators have long expressed concern that such exchanges could be used for illicit finance. Binance indicated to Bloomberg that it does not comment on specific matters but touted its “robust compliance program” and asserted it takes its “legal obligations very men dating polyamory addition white nationalist dating site investigations such as these, so-called exit scams, which prey on trusting investors, incidents of hacking and hoaxes intended to pump up prices, all point to the possibility that the profitability such early investors as Greg Johnson saw last free latin dating site may not be as easy to find in the future. This scenario would prove even more risky if extremists choose to eschew traditional banking altogether or if traditional banks choose to cut them off.

“Neo-Nazis have mainly us free dating site online cryptocurrencies to escape the traditional financial system,” King added. “While that may have worked for the last few years, we’re seeing a huge pushback from regulators. The crypto markets are like a giant game of musical chairs. The music will eventually stop, and millions will be subjected to major losses as the prices tank back to their true values.”

Hatewatch reached out to Tether and Binance for a comment on this story and King’s depiction of them as “price manipulators.” Tether did not reply. Two different spokespersons for Binance responded to Hatewatch's request for comment to push back on King's depiction of the company, calling it “absolutely false” and “wildly inaccurate.” They also noted that any investigation of Binance may not lead to official actions against them.

Jay White nationalist dating site, the CEO of Cointelegraph, one of the biggest publications covering the cryptocurrency community industry and community, expressed a different point of view about the impact of regulation on cryptocurrency prices to Hatewatch.

“While there are certainly sections of the crypto community that are opposed to any form of regulation, the belief that crypto prices will fall in response to increased regulation is overly simplistic,” Cassano wrote in a text message. “On the contrary, there is widespread belief among cryptocurrency enthusiasts that a lack of regulatory clarity is slowing more widespread adoption. There are also those who actively want cryptocurrency to become part of the regulated economy, white nationalist dating site, if only so that it will stop being viewed as criminal.”

The publicly traded cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has already taken steps to remove some extreme far-right users from its service, which could become a larger trend if politicians pass regulations on the industry.

In addition to concerns about crashes, investors sometimes lose access to their cryptocurrency due to missing passwords or other blunders, rendering millions of dollars of value useless. Such may be the case of James Allsup, a white supremacist who associates with Peinovich. Known for his participation in the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” march on Charlottesville, Virginia, Allsup may have abandoned a wallet with 1.00586899 Bitcoin sitting in it right now, Hatewatch found. Allsup has not interacted with the wallet since 2018 but he has opened up new ones, suggesting that his money may have been rendered inaccessible. Hatewatch attempted to call numbers believed to be associated with Allsup to ask about this dormant Bitcoin wallet but failed to connect.

‘More valuable than gold’ or ‘close to nothing’

The “true values” of cryptocurrencies, as King put it, depends on who you are asking, and opinions vary in the extreme. What happens to digital currencies from here is likely to have a profound impact on the far right due to the degree to which extremists have adopted the technology relative to the population as a whole.

“Bitcoin is not new. It’s been around for a while. I’ve been watching it closely. I’ve not white nationalist dating site one example of it creating economic growth,” the computer scientist and futurist Lanier said on a September episode of the Lex Fridman podcast.

Balaji Srinivasan, a former Chief Technology Officer for the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, who has developed a reputation for speaking in bullish, quixotic terms about the space, compares Bitcoin and Ethereum to a future version of gold and oil.

“Thesis: the crypto version of any product ends up being far more valuable than the original,” he tweeted in January. “Bitcoin is already more valuable than PayPal and will eventually be more valuable than gold.”

For the risk analyst and author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the true value of Bitcoin may be zero. He opined about its value in a recent paper:

Few assets in financial history have been more fragile than bitcoin, white nationalist dating site. The customary standard argument is that ‘bitcoin has its flaws but we are getting a great technology; we will do wonders with the blockchain’. No, there is no evidence that we are getting a great technology – unless ‘great dating apps for fat women doesn’t mean ‘useful’. And at the time of writing – in spite of all the fanfare – we have done still close to nothing with the blockchain. So we close with a Damascus joke. One vendor was selling the exact same variety of cucumbers at two different prices. ‘Why is this one twice the price?’, the merchant was asked. ‘They came on higher quality mules’ was the answer. We only judge a technology by how it solves problems, not by what technological attributes it has.

Either way, those who invest in cryptocurrency have already experienced price volatility in the extreme, demonstrating the degree to which funds can evaporate overnight. A neo-Nazi who purchased Monero at the time Auernheimer endorsed it on Cantwell’s podcast in November 2017 would have seen their money rise to five times its value as of May 2021, only to see it shed roughly 60% of that amount just two months later. Bitcoin has somewhat infamously lost nearly all value during different market crashes throughout the years, only to see it skyrocket back white nationalist dating site current price pump is artificial, and bubbles always pop,” the author Gerard told Hatewatch.

Editor’s note: A co-author of this essay, Michael Edison Hayden, has at times owned cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ethereum, white nationalist dating site, Cardano and Algorand. He currently owns only one cryptocurrency, which is Ethereum.

Photo illustration by SPLC

Neo-Nazi Internet forum and hate website

For the White nationalist dating site named after the website, see Stormfront (character).

Type of site	White supremacist, white nationalist, neo-Nazi, Holocaust denial, antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Hinduism, anti-feminismanti-LGBT, Islamophobia, forum
Available in	English, with sub-forums in multiple languages
Owner	Don Black
Created by	Don Black
URL	stormfront.org
Commercial	No
Registration	Required to post (except in open sub-forums)
Launched	November 1996; 25 years ago (1996-11)[1]
Current status	Online

Stormfront is a neo-NaziInternet forum, and the Web's first major racial hate site.^[2][3] The site is primarily focused on propagating white nationalism, white nationalist dating site, antisemitism, islamophobia, anti-Hinduism, anti-feminism, homophobia,^[4]transphobia, Holocaust denial, anti-Catholicism, and white white nationalist dating site In addition to its promotion of Holocaust denial, Stormfront has increasingly become active in the propagation of Islamophobia.

Stormfront began as an online bulletin board system in the early 1990s before being established as a website in 1996 by former Ku Klux Klan leader and white supremacistDon Black. It received national attention in the United States in 2000 after being featured as the subject of a documentary, Hate.com. Stormfront has been the subject of controversy after being removed from French, German, and ItalianGoogle indices; for targeting an online Fox News poll on racial segregation; and for having political candidates as members, white nationalist dating site. Its prominence has grown since the 1990s, attracting attention from watchdog organizations that oppose racism white nationalist dating site antisemitism.

In August 2017, Stormfront was taken offline for just over a month when its registrar seized its domain name due to complaints that it promoted hatred and that some of its members were linked to murder.^[11][12] The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law claimed credit for the action after advocating for Stormfront's web host, Network Solutions, to enforce its Terms of Service agreement, which prohibits users from using its services to incite violence.^[13][14]

History[edit]

Early history[edit]

Stormfront began in 1990 as an online bulletin board supporting white nationalist David Duke's campaign for United States senator for Louisiana. The name "Stormfront" was chosen for its connotations of a political or military front (such as the German Nazi Sturmabteilung (also known as storm troopers or SA)) and an analogy with weather fronts that invokes the idea of a tumultuous storm ending in cleansing.^[15] The Stormfront website was founded in 1996 by Don Black, a white nationalist dating site grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s and a member of the National Socialist White People's Party.^[16][17] Black first received computer training while he was imprisoned for his role in an abortive 1981 attempt to overthrow the government of Dominica.^[18][19]

Although Stormfront became the first website associated with white supremacy, its founding as a private cyberspace medium for white supremacy was based on the earlier online bulletin board systemLiberty Net.^[20][21] Liberty Net was implemented in 1984 by Klan grand dragonLouis Beam and protected by four password-protected computers that took the FBI two years to decrypt.^[22] Liberty Net's code-accessed message board contained personal ads along with recruitment material and information about the white power movement.^[22] Liberty Net's success as a computer platform led to Stormfront's establishment and later conversion into a website.

Until this point, attempts at using the Internet as opposed to bulletin boards have had limited success for the white pride movement,^[23] but Stormfront developed a following with the growth of the Internet during the 1990s.^[15][24] By 1999, nearly 2,000 websites associated with white supremacism existed, with the recruitment power of reaching millions across the United States.^[25]

National attention[edit]

The website has received considerable attention in the United States, given that, as of 2009, it had over white nationalist dating site active members.^[26]

The 2000 CBS/HBO TV documentary special Hate.com focused on the rise of hate groups online and included input from Don Black, the founder of Stormfront.^[27] Narrated by Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), it featured interviews with Black and bisexual men dating son Derek as well as interviews with other white nationalist groups and organizations.^[27] Black had participated in the hope that the broadcast would show some sympathy towards the white nationalist movement, but Hate.com focused exclusively on the group's tactics and not its grievances.^[25]

Controversies[edit]

In 2002, Google complied with French and German legislation forbidding links to websites which host white supremacist, Holocaust-denying, or historical revisionist material by removing Stormfront's website from their French and German indexes.^[28]

Stormfront returned to the news in May 2003, when Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly reported on a racially segregated prom being held in Georgia and posted a poll on his website asking his viewers if they would send their own children to one. The next night, O'Reilly announced that he could white nationalist dating site report the results of the poll as it appeared Stormfront had urged its members to vote in the poll, thus skewing the numbers.^[29]

Doug Hanks, a candidate for the city council of Charlotte, North Manhunt dating site, withdrew his nomination in August 2005 after it was revealed that he had posted on Stormfront. Hanks had posted more than 4,000 comments over three years, including one in which he described black people as "rabid beasts".^[30][31] Hanks said his postings were designed to gain the trust of Stormfront users to help him write a novel: "I did what I thought I needed to do to establish myself as a credible white nationalist."^[30]

In 2012, Italian police blocked the website and arrested four people for inciting racial hatred.^[32] The measure was taken after the publication of a blacklist of "prominent Jews and white nationalist dating site who support Jews and immigrants" on the Italian section of the website. The list included possible targets of violent attacks, including gypsy camps.^[33] The subsequent year, in November 2013, Italian police raided the homes of 35 Stormfront posters. One man who was arrested in Mantua had two loaded weapons, a hand grenade casing, and a flag white nationalist dating site a swastika in his possession.^[34]

According to a 2014 two-year study by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)'s Intelligence Report, registered Stormfront users have been disproportionately responsible for some of the most lethal hate crimes and mass killings since the site was put up in 1995. In the five years leading up to 2014, nearly 100 people were murdered by members of Stormfront.^{[35][36][37][38]} Of these, 77 were massacred by one Stormfront user, Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian terrorist who perpetrated the 2011 Norway attacks.^[39]

Public profile and later history[edit]

The total of registered users is just shy of 300,000, a fairly astounding number for a site run by an ex-felon and former Alabama Klan leader. And that doesn't include thousands of visitors who never register as users. At press time, Stormfront ranked as the Internet's 13,648th most popular site, while the NAACP site, by comparison, ranked 32,640th. – The Year in Hate and Extremism, 2015^[40]

In a 2001 USA Today article, journalist Tara McKelvey white nationalist dating site Stormfront "the most visited white supremacist site on the Net."^[19] The number of registered users on the site rose from 5,000 in January 2002 to 52,566 in June 2005,^[41] by which year it was the 338th largest Internet forum, receiving more than 1,500 hits each weekday and ranking in the top one percent of Internet sites in terms of use.^[42][43] By June 2008, the site was attracting more than aita asian dating reddit users each day.^[44] Operating the site from its West Palm Beach, Florida headquarters is Black's full-time job, and he was assisted by his son and 40 moderators.^[16][44][45] The public profile of the site attracted attention from groups such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).^[46] The ADL describes Stormfront as having "served as a veritable supermarket of online hate, stocking its shelves with many forms of anti-Semitism and racism".^[47]

In 2006, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reported a discussion on Stormfront in which white nationalists were encouraged to join the United States military to learn the skills necessary for winning a race war.^[48][49] The 2008 United States presidential candidacy of African-American DemocratBarack Obama was a cause of significant concern for some Stormfront members:^[44] the site white nationalist dating site 2,000 new members the day after Obama was elected as president, and went offline temporarily due to the increase in visitors.^[50] Stormfront posters saw Obama as representing a new multicultural era in the United States replacing "white rule", and feared that he would support illegal immigration and affirmative action and that he would help make white people a minority group.^[44]

During the 2008 primary campaigns, The New York Times mistakenly reported that Stormfront had donated $500 to Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul;^[51] in fact, it was site owner Don Black who had contributed the money to Paul.^[52] Following an April 2009 shooting, Richard Poplawski, a poster on the site, calling himself Braced for Fate, was charged with ambushing and killing three Pittsburgh police officers and attempting to kill nine others.^[53]

During the 2016 election season, site founder Don Black said that the site was experiencing huge spikes in traffic corresponding to controversial statements by Donald Trump, who is popular among white supremacists. In response, Black upgraded the site's servers.^[54]

Black's son Derek, who was a long-time participant in the site, has disavowed the beliefs held by his father and family and the Stormfront site. Through his years in college, Derek Black came to feel that white nationalism is not supportable, white nationalist dating site. His story was captured in the book, "Rising Out of Hatred" by Eli Saslow.^[55][56]

In August 2017, Stormfront's domain name was seized by its registrar for "displaying bigotry, discrimination or hatred."^[13]

The site came back online on September 29, 2017. As of October 2017, services to keep the site online were provided by Tucows, Network Solutions, and Open minded dating site reviews is a resource for those courageous men and women fighting to white nationalist dating site their White Western culture, ideals and freedom of speech and association—a forum for planning strategies and forming political and social groups to ensure victory.

— Stormfront mission statement.^[58]

Stormfront is a white nationalist,^[5]white supremacist^[7] and neo-Nazi website^[2] known as a hate site.^[3]

It is a site on which Nazi mysticism and the personality cult ofAdolf Hitler are sustained and Nazi iconography is used and accepted.^[59] The Stormfront website is organized primarily as a discussion forum with multiple thematic sub-forums including "News", "Ideology and Philosophy" ("Foundations for White Nationalism"), white nationalist dating site, "Culture and Customs", "Theology", "Quotations", "Revisionism", "Science, Technology and Race" ("Genetics, eugenics, racial science and related subjects"), "Privacy", "Self-Defense, Martial Arts, and Preparedness", "Homemaking", "Education and Homeschooling", "Youth", and "Music and Entertainment".^[41][44] There are boards for different geographic regions, and a section open to unregistered guests, who are elsewhere unable to post, and even then, only under heavy moderation.^{[citation needed]}

Services[edit]

Stormfront's logo, featuring a Celtic cross surrounded by the motto "white pride world wide".

The Stormfront website hosts files from and links to a number of white nationalist and white racist websites,^[20] an online dating service (for "heterosexual White Gentiles only"), and electronic mailing lists that allows the white nationalist community to discuss issues of interest.^[23][46][60] It features a selection of current news reports, an archive of past stories, white nationalist dating site, live streaming of The Political Cesspool radio show,^[61] and a merchandise store featuring literature and music.^[58] Stormfront has reportedly published stories aimed at children.^[59]

A 2001 study of recruitment by extremist groups on the Internet noted that Stormfront at that time came close to offering most of the standard services offered by web portals, including an internal search engine, web hosting, and categorized links, and lacking only an Internet search engine and the provision of free email for its members (though a limited email service was available at the price of $30 a month).^[59]

Design[edit]

Prominently featured on the homepage is a Celtic cross surrounded by the words "white pride world wide." A mission statement praises courage and freedom. Stormfront states it discourages racial slurs, and prohibits violent threats and descriptions of anything illegal.^[41][59] Others state that blatant hate and calls for violence are only kept off the opening page.^[58][62]

The site uses the Fraktur font,^[63] which was the favored font of the Nazi Party when it emerged in the early 1920s. Official Nazi documents and letterheads employed the font, and the cover of Hitler's Mein White nationalist dating site used a hand-drawn version of it.^[64]

Purpose and appeal[edit]

Don Black has long worked to increase the mainstream appeal of white supremacy.^[41] Black established Stormfront to heighten awareness of perceived anti-white discrimination and government actions detrimental to white people,^[65] and to create a virtual community of white extremists.^{[15][44][59][66]} Black owns the site's servers, so he is not dependent upon website hosting providers.^[43]

Black's organization inculcated enough white pride to make "its worldwide aspirations meaningful and funny headlines for dating sites significant".^[58] Stormfront keeps the rhetoric in its forums muted, discourages racial slurs, and prohibits violent threats and descriptions of anything illegal.^[41][59] Site moderator Jamie Kelso was reportedly "the motivating force behind real community-building among Stormfront members" due to his energy and enthusiasm in organizing offline events.^[67] Black's positioning the site as a community with the explicit purpose of "defending the white race" helped sustain the community, as it attracts white people who define themselves in opposition to ethnic minorities, particularly Jews.^[41]

Stormfront established MartinLutherKing.org to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr.^[68] In a 2001 study of white nationalist groups including Stormfront, academics Beverly Ray and George E. Marsh II commented: "Like the Nazis before them, they rely upon a blend of science, ignorance, and mythology to prop up their arguments".^[59][69]

Ideology[edit]

Stormfront presents itself as being engaged in a struggle for unity, identifying culture, speech and free association as its core concerns,^[58] though members of Stormfront are especially passionate about racial purity.^[67] It promotes a lone wolf mentality, which links it to white nationalist theorist Louis Beam's influential work on leaderless resistance and offers a sympathetic assessment of Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, a white supremacist who committed suicide after a racially motivated killing spree in July 1999.^[59] Violet Jones notes that Stormfront credits its mission to "the founding myth of an America created, built, white nationalist dating site, and ideologically grounded by the descendants of white Europeans."^[70] Don Black has specifically compared his views to those of the Founding Fathers, whom he asserts "did not believe that an integrated black and white society was possible in America."^[71] Asked in 2008 by an interviewer for the Italian newspaper la Repubblica whether Stormfront was a 21st-century version of the Ku Klux Klan without the iconography, Black responded affirmatively, though he noted that he would never say so to an American journalist.^[72] In addition to its promotion of antisemitism and Holocaust denial, Stormfront has increasingly become active in the propagation of Islamophobia.^[73]

See also[edit]

References[edit]