"A picture of disorganization: Analyzing Capitol Police’s failures on January 6" PBS NewsHour 4/15/2021
Excerpt
SUMMARY: Lawmakers Thursday continued to assemble their picture of what went wrong on January 6. An internal watchdog testified about his ongoing review of U.S. Capitol Police, and shared his initial conclusions about why their defense failed that day after a pro-Trump mob stormed the building. Congressional correspondent Lisa Desjardins has the report.
Analysts tracking Russian influence operations find a feedback loop between Kremlin propaganda and far-right memes.
Angee Dixson joined Twitter on Aug. 8 and immediately began posting furiously — about 90 times a day. A self-described American Christian conservative, Dixson defended President Donald Trump's response to the unrest in Charlottesville, criticized the removal of Confederate monuments and posted pictures purporting to show violence by left-wing counterprotesters.
“Dems and Media Continue to IGNORE BLM and Antifa Violence in Charlottesville,” she wrote above a picture of masked demonstrators labeled “DEMOCRAT TERROR.”
But Dixson appears to have been a fake, according to an analysis by Ben Nimmo and Donara Barojan of the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council think tank. The account has been shut down. Dixson's profile picture was stolen from a young Instagram celebrity (a German model rumored to have dated Leonardo DiCaprio). Dixson used a URL shortener that is a tell for the sort of computer program that automatically churns out high volumes of social media posts whose authorship is frequently disguised. And one of her tweets attacked Sen. John McCain for his alleged support of Ukrainian neo-Nazis, echoing language in tweets from Russian outlets RT and Sputnik.
The same social media networks that spread Russian propaganda during the 2016 election have been busily amplifying right-wing extremism surrounding the recent violence in Charlottesville, according to researchers who monitor the activity. It's impossible to tell how much of the traffic originates from Russia or from mercenary sources. But there were hordes of automated bots generating Twitter posts and much more last week to help make right-wing conspiracy theories and rallying cries about Charlottesville go viral.
A sample of 600 Twitter accounts [Hamilton 68 - Tracking Russian Influence Operations on Twitter] linked to Russian influence operations have been promoting hashtags for Charlottesville such as “Antifa,” a term for activists on the far left; and “alt-left,” a term Trump used, which was interpreted by many as suggesting an equivalence between liberal demonstrators and white nationalists in the so-called alt-right.
The sample includes accounts that are openly pro-Russian like state-controlled outlets RT and Sputnik, which a joint U.S. intelligence assessment concluded are “part of Russia's state-run propaganda machine.” The sample also includes those, like “Angee Dixson's,” that seem to be written by typical Americans. And it follows automated bots that help make messages go viral and even users around the world who spread the Kremlin's messages whether or not they mean to support Russia. The network is tracked by four researchers working with the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a project of the German Marshall Fund that seeks to expose efforts to undermine Western democracy.
(A spokesperson for Sputnik took issue with the assertions about it in this article, providing 22 links to the news service's articles that she called “highly critical of the president's response to Charlottesville.” She argued that to “ignore that reality … would only mean that you are fixing the facts to push a false narrative.” The spokesperson also disputed that Sputnik is a vehicle for any purported Russian disinformation campaign.)
“The Russian influence networks we track are definitely amplifying the broader alt-right chatter about Charlottesville,” one of the researchers, J.M. Berger, said. “The major themes they have been pushing are the 'both sides are violent' argument and conspiracy theories that George Soros was behind the counter-protests, although the latter has been trending more sporadically.”
The latest Soros accusation, which PolitiFact found to be baseless, shows another aspect of how messages snowball as they pass between the American right-wing and Russian propagandists, according to Nimmo. A U.S. right-winger asserts a “fact,” a Russian news agency fuses it with a Kremlin narrative, and then American right-wing websites parrot the Russian news agency's assertion.
Soros, a Hungarian-American investor and major Democratic donor, long ago became a frequent bugaboo for the Kremlin and for Republicans. He funds the Open Society Foundations, which support democracy and development around the world — and they have given money to ProPublica, including its Documenting Hate project, while accounting for less than 3 percent of ProPublica's revenue so far this year. Many recipients of Soros' contributions are viewed as politically liberal, but some right-wingers and the Kremlin tend to see his hand (or more precisely, his wallet) in any action they perceive as left-wing.
The accusation that Soros was behind the Charlottesville counter-protesters appeared to have been first uttered by Alex Jones, the conservative conspiracy theorist and provocateur, on Aug. 14. The next day, Lee Stranahan, a host for Sputnik, repeated the claim in several YouTube videos, according to Nimmo. Stranahan was previously a prominent advocate for the #FireMcMaster campaign against national security adviser H.R. McMaster.
The pro-Russian networks are also injecting Russian propaganda about other countries into U.S. far-right circles. After Jones' InfoWars interviewed Stranahan on Aug. 15, Stranahan's charge that the U.S. is hypocritical for supporting Nazis in Ukraine (a years-old Kremlin line) while condemning them at home appeared on fringe websites such as Mint Press News, TheLastAmericanVagabond.com, BBSNews and JewWorldOrder, Nimmo found.
“Given the number of channels that propagated the narrative at the same time, it is not possible to say whether a single channel or many different channels inspired the American actors' linkage of Charlottesville and Ukraine,” Nimmo wrote in a blog post. “What does appear probable is that the U.S. activists derived their narrative directly from the Kremlin and its supporters? —? and thus amplified Russian disinformation in America.”
Some in the self-described alt-right have embraced Russian support. At an earlier protest of the removal of a Confederate monument in Charlottesville in May, people chanted “Russia is our friend!”
Tracking disinformation online is challenging because it can be hard to discern users' motivations and affiliations. But Congressional investigators probing Russia's interference in the 2016 election are interested in how social networks spread fake news and propaganda, such as documents stolen by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman.
“The Internet and social media provide Russia cheap, efficient and highly effective access to foreign audiences with plausible deniability of their influence,” another of the researchers working with the Alliance to Secure Democracy, Clint Watts, told the Senate Intelligence Committee in March. “This pattern of Russian falsehoods and social media manipulation of the American electorate continued through Election Day and persists today.”
Update, Aug. 19, 2017:
This story has been updated to include a comment from PayPal.
Update, Aug. 22, 2017:
The name of Taboola's spokesman was removed at the company's request.
Because of its “extreme hostility toward Muslims,” the website Jihadwatch.org is considered an active hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. The views of the site's director, Robert Spencer, on Islam led the British Home Office to ban him from entering the country in 2013.
But its designation as a hate site hasn't stopped tech companies — including PayPal, Amazon, and Newsmax — from maintaining partnerships with Jihad Watch that help to sustain it financially. PayPal facilitates donations to the site. Newsmax — the online news network run by President Donald Trump's close friend Chris Ruddy — pays Jihad Watch in return for users clicking on its headlines. Until recently, Amazon allowed Jihad Watch to participate in a program that promised a cut of any book sales that the site generated. All three companies have policies that say they don't do business with hate groups.
Jihad Watch is one of many sites that monetize their extremist views through relationships with technology companies. ProPublica surveyed the most visited websites of groups designated as extremist by either the SPLC or the Anti-Defamation League. We found that more than half of them — 39 out of 69 — made money from ads, donations or other revenue streams facilitated by technology companies. At least 10 tech companies played a role directly or indirectly in supporting these sites.
Traditionally, tech companies have justified such relationships by contending that it's not their role to censor the Internet or to discourage legitimate political expression. Also, their management wasn't necessarily aware that they were doing business with hate sites because tech services tend to be automated and based on algorithms tied to demographics.
In the wake of last week's violent protest by alt-right groups in Charlottesville, more tech companies have disavowed relationships with extremist groups. During just the last week, six of the sites on our list were shut down. Even the web services company Cloudflare, which had long defended its laissez-faire approach to political expression, finally ended its relationship with the neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer last week.
“I can't recall a time where the tech industry was so in step in their response to hate on their platforms,” said Oren Segal, director of the ADL's Center on Extremism. “Stopping financial support to hate sites seems like a win-win for everyone.”
But ProPublica's findings indicate that some tech companies with anti-hate policies may have failed to establish the monitoring processes needed to weed out hate sites. PayPal, the payment processor, has a policy against working with sites that use its service for “the promotion of hate, violence, [or] racial intolerance.” Yet it was by far the top tech provider to the hate sites with donation links on 23 sites, or about one-third of those surveyed by ProPublica. In response to ProPublica's inquiries, PayPal spokesman Justin Higgs said in a statement that the company “strives to conscientiously assess activity and review accounts reported to us.”
After Charlottesville, PayPal stopped accepting payments or donations for several high-profile white nationalist groups that participated in the march. It posted a statement that it would remain “vigilant on hate, violence & intolerance.” It addresses each case individually, and “strives to navigate the balance between freedom of expression” and the “limiting and closing” of hate sites, it said.
After being contacted by ProPublica, Newsmax said it was unaware that the three sites that it had relationships with were considered hateful. “We will review the content of these sites and make any necessary changes after that review,” said Andy Brown, chief operating officer of Newsmax.
Amazon spokeswoman Angie Newman said the company had previously removed Jihad Watch and three other sites identified by ProPublica from its program sharing revenue for book sales, which is called Amazon Associates. When ProPublica pointed out that the sites still carried working links to the program, she said that it was their responsibility to remove the code. “They are no longer paid as an Associate regardless of what links are on their site once we remove them from the Associates Program,” she said.
Where to set the boundaries between hate speech and legitimate advocacy for perspectives on the edge of the political spectrum, and who should set them, are complex and difficult questions. Like other media outlets, we relied in part on the Southern Poverty Law Center's public list of “Active Hate Groups 2016.” This list is controversial in some circles, with critics questioning whether the SPLC is too quick to brand organizations on the right as hate groups.
Still, the center does provide detailed explanations for many of its designations. For instance, the SPLC documents its decision to include the Family Research Council by citing the evangelical lobbying group's promotion of discredited science and unsubstantiated attacks on gay and lesbian people. We also consulted a list from ADL, which is not public and that was provided to us for research purposes. See our methodology here.
The sites that we identified from the ADL and SPLC lists vehemently denied that they are hate sites.
“It is not hateful, racist or extremist to oppose jihad terror,” said Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch. He added that the true extremism was displayed by groups that seek to censor the Internet and that by asking questions about the tech platforms on his site, we were “aiding and abetting a quintessentially fascist enterprise.”
Spencer made these comments in response to questions emailed by ProPublica reporter Lauren Kirchner. Afterwards, Spencer posted an item on Jihad Watch alleging that “leftist 'journalist'” Kirchner had threatened the site. He also posted Kirchner's photo and email, as well as his correspondence with her. After being contacted by ProPublica, another anti-Islam activist, Pamela Geller, also posted an attack on Kirchner, calling her a “senior reporting troll.” Like Spencer, Geller was banned by the British Home Office; her eponymous site is on the SPLC and ADL lists.
Donations — and the ability to accept them online through PayPal and similar companies — are a lifeline for sites like Jihad Watch. In 2015, the nonprofit website disclosed that three quarters of its roughly $100,000 in revenues came from donations, according to publicly available tax records.
In recent weeks, PayPal has been working to shut down donations to extremist sites. This week, it pulled the plug on VDARE.com, an anti-immigration website designated as “white nationalist” by the SPLC and as a hate site by the ADL. VDARE, which denies being white nationalist, immediately switched to its backup system, Stripe.
Stripe, a private company recently described by Bloomberg Businessweek as a $9 billion startup, is unusual in not having a policy against working with hate sites. It does, however, prohibit financial transactions that support drugs, pornography and “psychic services.” Stripe provided donation links for 10 sites, second only to PayPal on our list. Stripe did not respond to a request for comment.
VDARE editor Peter Brimelow declared on his site that the PayPal shutdown was likely part of a purge by the “authoritarian Communist Left to punish anyone who disagrees with their anti-American violence against patriotic people.” He urged his readers to donate through other channels such as Bitcoins. “We need your help desperately,” he wrote. “We must have the resources to defend ourselves and our people.”
In 2015, VDARE received nearly all of its revenue — $267,038 out of total $293,663 — from donations, according to publicly available tax return forms that the Internal Revenue Service requires nonprofits to disclose.
Brimelow did not respond to our questions, instead characterizing ProPublica as the “Totalitarian Left.”
Some sites also supplement their donations with revenue from online advertising. For instance, SonsofLibertyMedia.com, which is on the SPLC list, generated about 10 percent of its revenue — $37,828 — from advertising in 2015, according to its tax documents.
The site, which describes itself as promoting a “Judeo-Christian ethic,” and recently posted an article declaring that a black activist protesting Confederate statues needed “a serious beat down,” does not appear to attract advertisers directly.
Instead, Sons of Liberty benefits from a type of ad-piggybacking arrangement that is becoming more common in the tech industry. The website runs sponsored news articles from a company called Taboola, which shares ad revenues with it. Known for being at the forefront of “click-bait,” Taboola places links on websites to articles about celebrities and popular culture.
Taboola's policy prohibits working with sites that have “politically religious agendas” or use hate speech. “We strive to ensure the safety of our network but from time to time, unfortunately, mistakes can happen,” said a Taboola spokeswoman. “We will ask our Content Policy group to review this site again and take action if needed.”
Sons of Liberty founder Bradlee Dean said that he forwarded our questions to his attorney. The lawyer did not respond.
Hate sites can initiate relationships with tech companies with little scrutiny.
Any website can fill out an online form asking to join, for instance, Amazon's network, and often can get approved instantly. Once a website has joined a tech network, it can quickly start earning money through advertising, donations, or content farms such as Taboola that share ad revenues with websites that distribute their articles.
Some companies, such as Newsmax, say that joining their ad network requires explicit prior approval.
But, according to a former Newsmax employee, the only criterion for this approval was whether traffic to the site reached a minimum threshold. There was no content review. Salespeople were told to be aggressive in signing up publishing partners.
“We'd put our news feed on anybody's page, anyone who was willing to listen,” he said, “it's about email addresses, it's about marketing, they don't care about ultra conservative or left wing.”
Dylan Roof frequented a website described by the SPLC as “white nationalist.” He said in a manifesto posted online that finding the website was a turning point in his life. He went on to murder nine African-American churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. That year, USA Today found Newsmax ads on the site.
They no longer appear there.
The white supremacist forces arrayed in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend — the largest gathering of its sort in at least a generation — represented a new incarnation of the white supremacy movement. Old-guard groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations and the Nazi skinheads, which had long stood at the center of racist politics in America, were largely absent.
Instead, the ranks of the young men who drove to Charlottesville with clubs, shields, pepper spray and guns, included many college-educated people who have left the political mainstream in favor of extremist ideologies over the past few years. A large number have adopted a very clean cut, frat-boyish look designed to appeal to the average white guy in a way that KKK robes or skinhead regalia never could. Interviews show that at least some of these leaders have spent time in the U.S. armed forces.
Many belong to new organizations like Vanguard America, Identity Evropa, the Traditionalist Workers Party and True Cascadia, which have seen their numbers expand dramatically in the past year. Most of these groups view themselves as part of a broader “alt-right” movement that represents the extreme edge of right-wing politics in the U.S.
These organizations exhibited unprecedented organization and tactical savvy. Hundreds of racist activists converged on a park on Friday night, striding through the darkness in groups of five to 20 people. A handful of leaders with headsets and handheld radios gave orders as a pickup truck full of torches pulled up nearby. Within minutes, their numbers had swelled well into the hundreds. They quickly and efficiently formed a lengthy procession and begun marching, torches alight, through the campus of the University of Virginia.
Despite intense interest from the media, police and local anti-racists, the white supremacists kept the location of their intimidating nighttime march secret until the last moment.
The next day, the far-right forces — likely numbering between 1,000 and 1,500 — marched to Emancipation Park. Once again, they arrived in small blocs under military-style command. The racist groups were at least as organized and disciplined as the police, who appeared to have no clear plan for what to do when the violence escalated. The racist groups stood their ground at the park and were not dislodged for many hours.
For many of them, this will be seen as victory. “Every rally we're going to be more organized, we're going to have more people, and it's going to be harder and harder for them to shut us down,” said a spokesman for Vanguard America, a fascist group, who gave his name as “Thomas.” “White people are pretty good at getting organized.”
And though police arrested James Fields Jr., a 20-year-old Ohio man, for allegedly driving a Dodge Charger into a crowd of anti-racist protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and wounding many others, the white supremacists generally avoided arrests.
They also outmaneuvered their anti-racist opponents. On Saturday, a multifaith group met at the historic First Baptist Church for a sunrise prayer ceremony featuring academic Cornel West and pastor Traci Blackmon. The anti-racists, many of them clergy members, walked quietly to Emancipation Park, where they were vastly outnumbered by the white supremacists.
Later, a band of more aggressive counter-protesters showed up at the park, chanting “Appalachia coming at ya. Nazi punks we're gonna smash ya!” These militant “antifa,” or antifascists, were also repelled by the white supremacists.
Given the scale of the protests, the far-right groups suffered few injuries. That was particularly notable given the fact that multiple people near the protests were armed. Throughout the weekend, right-wing and left-wing militias equipped with assault rifles, pistols, and body armor patrolled the streets of Charlottesville. (Virginia is an “open carry” state, so gun owners are legally allowed to tote around firearms.)
Many of the armed men viewed their role as maintaining a modicum of order. A “Three Percenter” militia out of New York state posted itself near Emancipation Park with the intention of keeping anti-racists from disrupting the rally. The group says it disapproves of racism but is dedicated to defending the free speech rights of all.
Blocks away, Redneck Revolt, a leftist militia from North Carolina, watched over the perimeter of a park where anti-racists had gathered, committed to preventing violent attacks by the white supremacist groups.
The presence of heavily armed citizens may have played a role in the decision of authorities to largely stay out of the violent skirmishes between the white supremacists and their opponents.
Those who actually marched included many new to the right-wing cause. The victory of Donald Trump in last year's presidential election has energized a whole wave of young people who were previously apathetic or apolitical, rally organizer Eli Mosley told ProPublica. The President has served as “megaphone” for far-right ideas, he said.
Mosley and his comrades are seeking to draw in as many of these newly politicized young people as possible. “We're winning,” he said. “We're targeting the youth and making a movement that appeals to the youth.”
Some of those who've gravitated to the extreme right milieu are former liberals — like Mosley's fellow rally organizer Jason Kessler — and supporters of Bernie Sanders. Many are ex-Libertarians.
“I was a libertarian,” said Mosley, as white supremacists chanted “Whose streets? Our streets!” in the background. “I looked around and noticed that most Libertarians were white men. I decided that the left was winning with identity politics, so I wanted to play identity politics too. I'm fascinated by leftist tactics, I read Saul Alinsky, Martin Luther King … This is our '60s movement.”
Since its launch in 2013, the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer has quickly become the go-to spot for racists on the internet. Women are whores, blacks are inferior and a shadowy Jewish cabal is organizing a genocide against white people. The site can count among its readers Dylann Roof, the white teenager who slaughtered nine African Americans in Charleston in 2015, and James Jackson, who fatally stabbed an elderly black man with a sword in the streets of New York earlier this year.
Traffic is up lately, too, at white supremacist sites like The Right Stuff, Iron March, American Renaissance and Stormfront, one of the oldest white nationalist sites on the internet.
The operations of such extreme sites are made possible, in part, by an otherwise very mainstream internet company — Cloudflare. Based in San Francisco, Cloudflare operates more than 100 data centers spread across the world, serving as a sort of middleman for websites — speeding up delivery of a site’s content and protecting it from several kinds of attacks. Cloudflare says that some 10 percent of web requests flow through its network, and the company’s mainstream clients range from the FBI to the dating site OKCupid.
The widespread use of Cloudflare’s services by racist groups is not an accident. Cloudflare has said it is not in the business of censoring websites and will not deny its services to even the most offensive purveyors of hate.
“A website is speech. It is not a bomb,” Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a 2013 blog post defending his company’s stance. “There is no imminent danger it creates and no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain.”
Cloudflare also has an added appeal to sites such as The Daily Stormer. It turns over to the hate sites the personal information of people who criticize their content. For instance, when a reader figures out that Cloudflare is the internet company serving sites like The Daily Stormer, they sometimes write to the company to protest. Cloudflare, per its policy, then relays the name and email address of the person complaining to the hate site, often to the surprise and regret of those complaining.
This has led to campaigns of harassment against those writing in to protest the offensive material. People have been threatened and harassed.
ProPublica reached out to a handful of people targeted by The Daily Stormer after they or someone close to them complained to Cloudflare about the site’s content. All but three declined to talk on the record, citing fear of further harassment or a desire to not relive it. Most said they had no idea their report would be passed on, though Cloudflare does state on the reporting form that they “will notify the site owner.”
“I wasn’t aware that my information would be sent on. I suppose I, naively, had an expectation of privacy,” said Jennifer Dalton, who had complained that The Daily Stormer was asking its readers to harass Twitter users after the election.
Andrew Anglin, the owner of The Daily Stormer, has been candid about how he feels about people reporting his site for its content.
“We need to make it clear to all of these people that there are consequences for messing with us,” Anglin wrote in one online post. “We are not a bunch of babies to be kicked around. We will take revenge. And we will do it now.”
ProPublica asked Cloudflare’s top lawyer about its policy of sharing information on those who complain about racist sites. The lawyer, Doug Kramer, Cloudflare’s general counsel, defended the company’s policies by saying it is “base constitutional law that people can face their accusers.” Kramer suggested that some of the people attacking Cloudflare’s customers had their own questionable motives.
Hate sites such as The Daily Stormer have become a focus of intense interest since the racially divisive 2016 election — how popular they are, who supports them, how they are financed. Most of their operators supported Donald Trump and helped spread a variety of conspiracy theories aimed at damaging Hillary Clinton. But they clearly have also become a renewed source of concern for law enforcement.
In testimony Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chief Will D. Johnson, chair of the International Association of Chiefs of Police Human and Civil Rights Committee, highlighted the reach and threat of hate on the Internet.
“The internet provides extremists with an unprecedented ability to spread hate and recruit followers,” he said. “Individual racists and organized hate groups now have the power to reach a global audience of millions and to communicate among like-minded individuals easily, inexpensively, and anonymously.
“Although hate speech is offensive and hurtful, the First Amendment usually protects such expression,” Johnson said. “However, there is a growing trend to use the Internet to intimidate and harass individuals on the basis of their race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, disability, or national origin.”
A look at Cloudflare’s policies and operations sheds some light on how sites promoting incendiary speech and even violent behavior can exist and even thrive.
Jacob Sommer, a lawyer with extensive experience in internet privacy and security issues, said there is no legal requirement for a company like Cloudflare to regulate the sites on their service, though many internet service providers choose to. It comes down to a company’s sense of corporate responsibility, he said.
For the most part, Sommers said, a lot of companies don’t want “this stuff” on their networks. He said those companies resist having their networks become “a hive of hate speech.”
Jonathan Vick, associate director for investigative technology and cyberhate response at the Anti-Defamation League, agrees. He said that many of the hosts they talk to want to get hate sites off their networks.
“Even the most intransigent of them, when they’re given evidence of something really problematic, they do respond,” he said.
Cloudflare has raised at least $180 million in venture capital since its inception in 2009, much of it from some of the most prominent venture capital firms and tech companies in the country. The service is what’s known as a content delivery network, and offers protection from several cyber threats including “denial of service” attacks, where hundreds of computers make requests to a website at once, overwhelming it and bringing it down.
Company officials have said Cloudflare’s core belief is in the free and open nature of the internet. But given its outsize role in protecting a range of websites, Cloudflare has found itself the target of critics.
In 2015, the company came under fire from the hacker collective Anonymous for reportedly allowing ISIS propaganda sites on its network. At the time, Prince, the company’s CEO, dismissed the claim as “armchair analysis by kids,” and told Fox Business that the company would not knowingly accept money from a terrorist organization.
Kramer, in an interview with ProPublica, reiterated that the company would not accept money from ISIS. But he said that was not for moral or ethical reasons. Rather, he said, Cloudflare did not have dealings with terrorists groups such as ISIS because there are significant and specific laws restricting them from doing so.
In the end, Kramer said, seedy and objectionable sites made up a tiny fraction of the company’s clients.
“We’ve got 6 million customers,” he told ProPublica. “It’s easy to find these edge cases.”
One of the people ProPublica spoke with whose information had been shared with The Daily Stormer’s operators said his complaint had been posted on the site, but that he was “not interested in talking about my experience as it’s not something I want to revisit.” Someone else whose information was posted on the site said that while she did get a few odd emails, she wasn’t aware her information had been made public. She followed up to say she was going to abandon her email account now that she knew.
“The entire situation makes me feel uneasy,” she said.
Scott Ernest had complained about The Daily Stormer’s conduct after Anglin, its owner, had used the site to allegedly harass a woman in the town of Whitefish, Montana. After his complaint, Ernest wound up on the receiving end of about two dozen harassing emails or phone calls.
“Fuck off and die,” read one email. “Go away and die,” read another. Those commenting on the site speculated on everything from Ernest’s hygiene to asking, suggestively, why it appeared in a Facebook post that Ernest had a child at his house.
Ernest said the emails and phone calls he received were not traumatizing, but they were worrying.
“His threats of harassment can turn into violence,” he said of Anglin.
Anglin appears quite comfortable with his arrangement with Cloudflare. It doesn’t cost him much either — just $200 a month, according to public posts on the site.
“[A]ny complaints filed against the site go to Cloudflare, and Cloudflare then sends me an email telling me someone said I was doing something bad and that it is my responsibility to figure out if I am doing that,” he wrote in a 2015 post on his site. “Cloudflare does not regulate content, so it is meaningless.”
Representatives from Rackspace and GoDaddy, two popular web hosts, said they try to regulate the kinds of sites on their services. For Rackspace, that means drawing the line at hosting white supremacist content or hate speech. For GoDaddy, that means not hosting the sort of abusive publication of personal information that Anglin frequently engages in.
“There is certainly content that, while we respect freedom of speech, we don’t want to be associated with it,” said Arleen Hess, senior manager of GoDaddy’s digital crimes unit.
Both companies also said they would not pass along contact information for people who complain about offensive content to the groups generating it.
Amazon Web Services, one of the most popular web hosts and content delivery networks, would not say how they handle abuse complaints beyond pointing to an “acceptable use” policy that restricts objectionable, abusive and harmful content. They also pointed to their abuse form, which says the company will keep your contact information private.
According to Vick at the ADL, the fact that Cloudflare takes money from Anglin is different from if he’d just used their free service.
“That’s a direct relationship,” he said. “That raises questions in my mind.”
Some companies offering other services vital to success on the web have chosen not to do business with Anglin’s The Daily Stormer. Google, PayPal and Coinbase, for instance, have chosen to cut off his accounts rather than support his activities. Getting booted around from service to service can make it hard to run a hate site, but Cloudflare gives the sites a solid footing.
And, by The Daily Stormer’s account, advice and assurances. In a post, the site’s architect, Andrew Auernheimer, said he had personal relationships with people at Cloudflare, and they had assured him the company would work to protect the site in a variety of ways — including by not turning over data to European courts. Cloudflare has data centers in European countries such as Germany, which have strict hate speech and privacy laws.
Company officials offered differing responses when asked about Auernheimer’s post. Kramer, Cloudflare’s general counsel, said he had no knowledge of employee conversations with Auernheimer. Later, in an email, the company said Auernheimer was a well-known hacker, and that as a result at least one senior company official “has chatted with him on occasion and has spoken to him about Cloudflare’s position on not censoring the internet.”
A former Cloudflare employee, Ryan Lackey, said in an interview that while he doesn’t condone a lot of what Auernheimer does, he did on occasion give technical advice as a friend and helped some of the Stormer’s issues get resolved.
“I am hardcore libertarian/classical liberal about free speech — something like Daily Stormer has every right to publish, and it is better for everyone if all ideas are out on the internet to do battle in that sphere,” he said.
Vick at the ADL agrees that Anglin has a right to publish, but said people have the right to hold to task the Internet companies that enable him.
“Andrew Anglin has the right to be out there and say what he wants to say. But the people who object to what he has to say have a right to object as well,” he said. “You should be able to respond to everybody in the chain.”
Some Christian groups have no problem protecting people from crimes driven by racial or religious hatred. They just draw the line at sexual orientation.
Last year, lawmakers in South Carolina introduced legislation that would have increased the standard penalties for anyone who assaults, intimidates or threatens another individual if they did so because of the victim's “race, religion, color, sex, age, national origin, or sexual orientation.”
Drafted by Democratic legislators after white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine African-American parishioners at a church in Charleston, the bill never even came up for a vote. It was a familiar fate. In recent years, at least a half-dozen other hate crimes proposals have died in the South Carolina statehouse.
Much the same story played out in Indiana, where Republican state Sen. Susan Glick authored similar legislation in 2016; Glick's bill would have increased time behind bars for those convicted of harming or intimidating someone if the assailant's motivation was driven by the victim's gender identity, disability, sexual orientation, race, religion or immigration status.
The legislation passed in the Senate by a vote of 34-16 but died in the House without so much as a hearing.
Since the 1980s, nearly every state in the union has enacted some sort of hate crimes law, as have Washington, D.C., and the federal government. While the laws vary from state to state, they generally bolster penalties for those who commit crimes — assault, vandalism, credible threats of physical violence, among others — because of some sort of bias against the victim.
South Carolina and Indiana are among a small handful of states that have failed to pass such laws. Wyoming, Arkansas and Georgia are the other hold-outs.
Much of the opposition to creating hate-crime legislation in these states has come from well-organized groups of Christian fundamentalists who on religious grounds disapprove of any sort of legal protections for gays, lesbians and transgender people. For these critics, the primary concern is legal language stepping up punishment for crimes motivated by contempt for the LGBT populace, measures they view as a small but dangerous part of a broader “homosexual agenda.”
One of the Christian groups is the Family Research Council. Contacted by ProPublica, the FRC's national office directed questions about hate crimes to Ryan McCann, an Indiana activist and lobbyist who works with the organization.
McCann views hate crimes laws as a sort of Trojan Horse: If Indiana adopts such a law, McCann said, LGBT advocates will use the precedent to argue for further legal safeguards, including anti-discrimination statutes, which he opposes.
Christian conservatives such as McCann have become potent activists against hate-crime legislation — lobbying, organizing their followers to petition statehouse lawmakers, and providing many of the key arguments against the laws.
“Homophobia and resistance to providing protections for LGBT people obviously play a role in the push back,” said Robin Maril, associate legal director for Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBT advocacy organization.
Statehouse experts are quick to point out that Christian conservatives aren't the only people who can be hostile to hate crimes laws.
Jeannine Bell, a law professor at Indiana University's Maurer School of Law, said some legislators in that state believe the laws will create an inequitable justice system that “serves particular groups and not others.” (Bell, who has studied the laws, disagrees: “That is a misunderstanding. Everyone has a race.”)
Lynne Bowman of Human Rights Campaign noted that, in general, Republican-controlled legislatures have not been supportive of hate crimes bills regardless of the language.
The range of concerns can include worries about limiting free speech or doubts that police and prosecutors can truly know a perpetrator's state of mind or motivations at any given moment. There have even been some expressions of misgiving among civil rights advocates that the legal hurdles created by hate-crime laws — establishing with certainty, for instance, someone's specific motivations — can be counter-productive.
Decades ago, in a landmark 1993 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court examined the fundamental fairness of hate-crime legislation. The court held that carefully crafted hate crimes laws do not infringe on the free exercise of speech, a finding that resolved the major constitutional questions on the matter. The case centered on a racially motivated incident in Wisconsin in which an African-American man assaulted a white teen, leaving the victim in a coma.
In the five states without hate-crime laws, however, there is little question that Christian activists have had an impact.
Bowman, a senior field director with Human Rights Campaign, said “homophobia” gives lawmakers “an easy excuse to stand up against these bills.”
For the past two decades, much of the resistance to hate crimes legislation has been orchestrated by a trio of intertwined conservative Christian groups.
The oldest and most prominent is Focus on the Family, the Colorado-based ministry founded by James Dobson. The sprawling organization, which produces a vast array of media on biblical topics and funds anti-abortion counseling centers for pregnant women, operated on a budget of nearly $90 million in 2013, the last year for which full tax records are available.
Focus on the Family portrays hate crimes laws as part of a plot to marginalize Christians and ban them “from the public arena.”
Dobson's ministry helped to spawn the Alliance Defending Freedom, a network of fundamentalist Christian lawyers who have argued that the laws infringe on religion while “creating additional legal protections for those engaged in homosexual behavior that are not available to everyone else.”
But it is the FRC, a third offshoot based in Washington, D.C., that has emerged as perhaps the most effective foe of hate crimes legislation.
When Congress took up the issue in 1999, an FRC leader told the Senate Judiciary Committee that revising the federal code to cover hate crimes could lead to the prosecution of “people who merely oppose homosexual activism.” Ten years later, as Congress debated the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, the FRC decried the act as a “thought crimes” bill.
Since then, the “thought crime” claim has become a common talking point in conservative Christian circles and the FRC's regional chapters have sought to halt hate crimes legislation at the state level.
In 2007, the FRC chapter in Arkansas urged lawmakers there to vote against hate crimes legislation authored by a veteran Democratic legislator. The bill failed. In a blog post, chapter leader Jerry Cox proudly touted the group's accomplishments, saying it had spent years fighting “to make sure Arkansas' civil rights and hate-crimes laws are not used to promote a homosexual agenda.”
McCann of the FRC is straightforwardly explicit about the group's thinking.
“The gay-rights groups and the folks on the left only want to get the terms ‘sexual orientation' and ‘gender identity' into the law,” said McCann. “Unfortunately, that's all they care about — their agenda.”
In Indiana, groups affiliated with the FRC have enjoyed great success in killing hate crimes bills over the past decade. The Republican Party currently enjoys a super-majority in the state, controlling both legislative chambers and the governor's office. But “even under Democrat rule these hate crimes bills didn't get a hearing,” said McCann, who helps to lead the Indiana Family Institute, a group associated with the FRC and Focus on the Family.
Currently McCann is pushing legislators to stop five different hate crimes bills pending in the statehouse.
Though the FRC describes its mission as the advancement of “faith, family and freedom in public policy,” critics take a very different view: The Southern Poverty Law Center has dubbed it an anti-gay “hate group.”
The FRC has vigorously denied the characterization. The allegations are “an attempt to discredit FRC's work and cut us out of public policy debates and media coverage over homosexuality and same-sex ‘marriage,'” the organization said in a 2010 statement.
The FRC has cultivated powerful allies, some of them in the White House. As Wired recently reported, both President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence appeared at the organization's “Values Voter Summit,” while a range of current or pending administration officials — Reince Priebus, Mike Pompeo, Tom Price, Jeff Sessions — have all spoken at FRC events. Ed Prince, the father of Betsy DeVos, provided millions of dollars in funding to the FRC in the group's early days. DeVos, a Michigan billionaire, has been tapped by the Trump administration to serve as U.S. Secretary of Education.
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While 45 states have enacted hate crimes laws, the statutes vary dramatically around the country. In 15 of those states, the laws do not cover gays and lesbians; in 28 they don't cover gender identity or transgender individuals.
In Georgia, state Sen. Vincent Fort, a Democrat, said he has sponsored at least five bills that have been defeated largely because they covered sexual orientation. “Some people have said, ‘If you don't include gay people, it might pass,'” he recalled. Still, he insists he'll never support “any bill that excludes gay people. I'm not going to have anything to do with a hate crimes law that, in effect, is discriminatory. Wouldn't that be ironic?”
Wendell Gilliard of South Carolina tells a similar tale. A Democrat from Charleston, Gilliard has introduced “four or five hate crimes bills” in the state House of Representatives — and all of them have come to nothing. The lawmaker, who is African-American, said he's been barraged with angry emails and phone calls about his bills — not about race but from people “quoting biblical verses about homosexuality.”
Opponents of the bills under consideration in Indiana claim the legislation, if passed, could be used to prosecute preachers who portray homosexuality as a sin. “Let's pray that silencing speech is not the next step in the ‘gay' agenda that the media embraces and pushes in the statehouse,” wrote Micah Clarke, an Indiana lobbyist and leader of an FRC chapter, in a newsletter sent to his group's members.
Clarke declined to be interviewed.
“There are gay-rights activists all over the country who are trying to silence those who don't agree with them,” said McCann, the Indiana lobbyist. As far as he's concerned, the bills provide special treatment to members of “favored political classes” and are likely to muzzle fundamentalist Christians.
“Those are ‘alternative facts,'” said one clearly frustrated lawmaker, Greg Taylor, a Democrat from Indianapolis who has authored two hate crimes bills currently pending in the state Senate. “It's mind-boggling.”
Robin Maril of Human Rights Campaign describes the rhetoric coming from her political foes in Indiana as “irresponsible” fear-mongering.
“It's absolutely not true. But it sounds scary and it plays into people's fears,” Maril told us. “None of this legislation would ever impede an individual's ability to speak out. ... We are not policing ministers' ability to give sermons.”
SUMMARY: What motivates hate groups and domestic terrorists? With the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist movements making a resurgence, special correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault talks to Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center about solutions to stop the hate and encourage tolerance.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): The Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups have gained more attention in the news recently, but as special correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault explains, the national undercurrent of racism may be even more pervasive.
It's part of our yearlong exploration of solutions to the problems of race in America.
These are boots that are intended so that, when you stomp on someone, the swastika will be left.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT (NewsHour): Heidi Beirich is leader of The Intelligence Project here at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit anti-terror organization.
She shows us memorabilia revealing some Ku Klux Klan history, boots with swastikas and boots with red laces, indicating Klan members who've physically harmed someone, and other racist paraphernalia. In 2014, there were some 784 active hate groups. Beirich brings us up to date.
The Ku Klux Klan has declined over the years, in part due to lawsuits that you people here at the Southern Poverty Law Center have filed. Briefly tell us about how that came about.
HEIDI BEIRICH, Southern Poverty Law Center: We started filing lawsuits against the Klan in 1981 over a lynching of a young black man in Mobile. That was our first anti-Klan law suit.
And we came up with this idea that we should sue these folks in civil court to bankrupt them. That was the plan. We have now had a series of Klan groups that we have sued, put them basically out of business, leading all the way up to very recently with the Imperial Klans of America. Our hope is that by taking their money away, they can't function anymore.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: And that was successful?
HEIDI BEIRICH: Yes. Every single one of them has been successful. Obviously, when these groups don't have money, that means there's less violence that they could perpetrate. The whole idea is to not allow them to function.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: But at the moment, there seems to be a resurgence and what appears to be a rise in hate groups. What explains that?
HEIDI BEIRICH: We have seen a sustained rise in hate groups since basically 2000. And the main thing driving this has been changing demographics in the United States.
