Site Raises $150K for Founder of Neo-Nazi Site

Crowdfunded donations to Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer, have reached $150,000 to help pay for his legal defense in a lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Per the Los Angeles Times, it took under two months to raise the money on the California-based site WeSearchr, which specifically champions far-right causes that won't fly on sites like GoFundMe and Kickstarter due to their hate-speech policies. The suit centers around complaints that Anglin started an anti-Semitic "troll storm" against a Jewish Montana woman and her family. NBC News reports that Anglin posted a message to his readers with Tanya Gersh's phone number, home address, and other personal information, instructing them to "tell them you are sickened by their Jew agenda."

Gersh claims that hundreds of death threats and harassing messages poured in, including a tweet to her 12-year-old son that read, "Psst kid, there's a free Xbox One inside this oven." The suit says that Anglin's "campaign of terror" continued as he posted about Gersh with 30 separate Daily Stormer articles. "My friends used to joke that I was the happiest girl on the planet," Gersh says. "Overnight, my life was stolen from me. I'm in trauma therapy and the safe world I lived in inside my beautiful mountain town was changed for me." Gersh is suing Anglin for invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, malice, and violating the state's anti-discrimination act. SPLC President Richard Cohen expressed surprise over Anglin's rapid fundraising, given that his site's popularity centers around "vicious, incendiary, racist rhetoric." (More Southern Poverty Law Center stories.)