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Neo-nazi site The Daily Stormer moves to the dark web, but promises a comeback

The Daily Stormer has moved to the deep net, after being booted by Google and GoDaddy. But they’re trying to get back onto the open internet.
Justin Ling
Montreal, CA

After being ejected by three different domain services, prominent neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer has moved to the dark web.

The new site is now available only through the Tor network, which allows users to set up their own domains. The original site, Dailystormer.com, is now fully offline.

The homepage, as of Tuesday morning, contained articles that make light of the car-ramming attack that claimed the life of 32-year-old Heather Heyer; admonish the “Jew media;” liberally employ various racial epithets; and, in a less offensive post, provided an update on which characters are available on Pokemon Go.

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In a statement, the site’s founder promised to bring his site back online.

“The Daily Stormer will be live in internet prison with drug dealers, terrorists, and perverts, which is where we’ve been exiled to, for all time,” Andrew Anglin said in a statement sent to VICE News. “We should have a real domain online within 24 hours. If it gets shut down again, people will know we are on the black web.”

The statement goes on to lament the state of free speech.

The Daily Stormer’s new dark web address was tweeted out by the site’s official Twitter account early Monday morning.

“The Tor hidden service will now be a permanent part of our infrastructure and always accessible,” the account told VICE News.

The site’s new hosting arrangement seems less than reliable, however, as the website intermittently went offline throughout the morning.

The owner of the Twitter account, who identified themselves as “someone else who works on the site,” said they would be “litigating for our original domain and putting up alternatives as well.”

The Daily Stormer does not appear to have filed any complaint with the body that oversees domain registrations or with any U.S. court.

The Daily Stormer’s darknet site still features a link for a crowdfunding effort to fight an ongoing lawsuit, promising “this site will be shut down if we don’t win this.” They’ve already reportedly pulled in more than $150,000, although things are getting tougher for groups of their ilk: Online crowdfunding sites, including GoFundMe, have taken aim at hate groups.

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The Daily Stormer’s Twitter, meanwhile, reported Tuesday that their bitcoin donations have “slowed to a trickle,” accusing cryptocurrency giant Coinbase of cancelling the accounts of anyone who transfers to their cause.

Read more: GoDaddy throws white supremacist site Daily Stormer off its servers

The Southern Poverty Law Center writes that the site “is dedicated to spreading anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and white nationalism, primarily through guttural hyperbole and epithet-laden stories about topics like alleged Jewish world control and black-on-white crime.”

The site was booted from its domain registration service, GoDaddy — and subsequently by Google, when it tried to register with the search giant — after publishing a defamatory article on Heyer, the victim of the car ramming attack that occurred in Charlottesville.

On Monday, the site also signed up with Contact Privacy, an anonymization service that helps hide the details of who registered a given website, and who they registered the site with. Tucows, which runs the service, also booted The Daily Stormer on Monday.

In a statement sent to VICE News, the company underscored that they receive a litany of complaints about websites under their service every day, but that The Daily Stormer was exceptional.

“Incitement to violence is not protected speech and the Daily Stormer regularly conducts such incitement, which is why we no longer provide it with any service,” the statement reads.