GoDaddy has ordered the Daily Stormer to move its domain to another provider, after the white supremacist hate site published a vile attack on Charlottesville victim, Heather Heyer.
“We informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service,” GoDaddy wrote on Twitter on August 13.
The next day, on August 14, the hacker collective Anonymous may have taken over control of the Daily Stormer website. However, some are speculating that Daily Stormer did it to themselves in response to the GoDaddy announcement.
Google has now cancelled Daily Stormer’s domain registration.
The Daily Stormer attack on Heyer came as candlelight vigils were held around the country in memory of Heyer, a 32-year-old legal assistant who was killed when a car rammed into a crowd of people protesting a white nationalist rally in the Virginia city. It’s a reversal for GoDaddy; “GoDaddy, the largest domain registrar in the world, has defended its decision to provide a privacy service—designed to shield contact information from the public—to The Daily Stormer, AltRight.com, and several other white-nationalist and neo-Nazi sites,” Daily Beast reported in early July. Ben Butler, GoDaddy’s director of network abuse, told Daily Beast at that time that the First Amendment sometimes means allowing “tasteless, ignorant content.”
The Daily Stormer article was jaw dropping in the hatred it unleashed against Heyer. Most of it will not be repeated to protect the victim’s memory. However, a few comments will be printed below in order to provide a flavor of the degree of hatred that prompted GoDaddy to take action.
For example, the article, by the site’s founder Andrew Anglin, called Heyer a “fat, childless, 32-year-old sl*t” among other insults. The Los Angeles Times reports that Anglin “as founder and editor of the Daily Stormer, is one of America’s most prominent neo-Nazis.” According to the LA Times, Anglin once organized a “’troll storm’ against a Jewish woman on the Daily Stormer.”
“Despite feigned outrage by the media, most people are glad she is dead, as she is the definition of uselessness. A 32-year-old woman without children is a burden on society and has no value,” the article spewed. It also made fun of Heyer’s weight, called her a “slob,” and attacked women, saying, “they do virtually nothing their entire lives.”
People expressed disgust on social media.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has a page on Anglin, writing, “Andrew Anglin is the founder of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website, which aptly takes its name from the gutter Nazi propaganda sheet known as Der Stürmer. True to that vintage, Anglin is infamous for the crudity of his language and his thinking.” He has called Donald Trump “our glorious leader,” the site reports.
According to AL.com, “The Daily Stormer, which takes its name from the Nazi Party’s Der Sturmer tabloid newspaper, is an openly Neo-Nazi and white supremacist website. It has around 31 chapters in the U.S. and is an SPLC designated hate group.”
A ProPublica investigation reported that “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.” Dylann Roof, the shooter who targeted African-Americans in church, was a reader, the site reports.
In May, ProPublica revealed that “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.”
Heyer was a native of Greene County and graduated from William Monroe High School. She worked for Miller Law Group PC in Virginia as a legal assistant, according to her profile on LinkedIn.
A GoFundMe site was established in her name.
Susan Bro, Heyer’s mother, told Huffington Post: “I don’t want her death to be a focus for more hatred, I want her death to be a rallying cry for justice and equality and fairness and compassion.”
You can learn more about Heyer here:
Read about Anglin’s background here: