Brussels, Sept. 28 (BUS): The Daily Stormer’s website advocates the purity of the white race, publishes hate-filled conspiratorial statements against blacks, Jews and women and has helped inspire at least three racially motivated murders. It also made its founder Andrew Anglin a millionaire.
Anglin has tapped into a global network of supporters to acquire at least 112 Bitcoin since January 2017 – worth $4.8 million at today’s exchange rate – according to data shared with the Associated Press. It likely triggered more, the Associated Press reports.
Anglin is just one general example of how far-right agitators are raising large sums of money from around the world through cryptocurrency. Banned by traditional financial institutions, they have turned to digital currencies, which they use in more clandestine ways to avoid the oversight of banks, regulators and courts, an AP analysis of legal documents, Telegram channels and blockchain data from Chainalysis, a cryptocurrency analytics firm, found.
Anglin owes more than $18 million in legal judgments in the United States to people he and his followers have harassed and threatened. And while he’s online, he’s still visible — on most days, dozens of stories on the Daily Stormer’s homepage bear his name — in the real world, Anglin is a ghost.
His victims have tried – and failed – to find him, searching the Ohio address one by one. Voting records put him in Russia in 2016 and his passport shows that he was in Cambodia in 2017. After that, public matters got worse. He doesn’t have obvious bank accounts or real estate holdings in the US at the moment, his bitcoin fortune is still a long way off.
Beth Littrell, an attorney at Southern Poverty Law who helps represent one of Anglin’s victims, says it has become difficult to use the legal system to crack down on hate groups because it is now working with online networks and virtual money. “We were able to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan terrorist organization, to its very core,” she said. It is much more difficult to do the same today, she said. “The law is evolving, but it is too late to harm.”
Currency of the radical right
In August 2017, a week after a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Anglin received 14.88 bitcoin, an amount chosen for its italic references to the 14-word white supremacist motto and the phrase “Heil Hitler” because the H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. Worth about $60,000 at the time, this was his largest ever donation of Bitcoin, and it would be valued at over $641,000 at today’s exchange rate. The source of the funds remains a mystery. Anglin now faces charges in a US court of conspiracy to plan and promote the deadly march.
By the time of Charlottesville, Anglin was cut off by credit card processors and PayPal banned, so Bitcoin was his main funding source. In “Ryttard’s Guide to Bitcoin Use,” published in April 2020, he claimed to have funded the Daily Stormer exclusively with Bitcoin for four years.
“I have the money now. He wrote in December 2020, as the price of Bitcoin soared.
Anglin’s former lawyer, Mark Randaza, argued that political oversight by financial authorities drove Anglin into cryptocurrency by keeping him away from traditional banking, which he said was “more Nazi-like than Andrew Anglin hopes it is.”
“Don’t create a black market and then be surprised that there is a black market,” Randazah added.
While Anglin likely switched to Bitcoin for practical reasons, part of the cryptocurrency’s appeal to the radical right is ideological.
Bitcoin was developed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis when mistrust in the global financial system was rising. It offers an alternative that does not depend on banks. Instead, transactions are validated and recorded on a decentralized digital ledger called the blockchain, which derives its power from crowdsourcing rather than elite bankers.
RAE