In the wake of their violent protest resulting in three deaths and scores of injuries, many individuals and organizations that overtly support white supremacist and alt-right causes have found the spigots they use to access the outside world being cut off. TPM's Allegra Kirkland writes:
PayPal, Patreon, Facebook, Squarespace, Spotify, Google, GoDaddy, Texas A&M University, the University of Florida, a mountain resort in Colorado and Boston’s city leadership are among the companies removing white nationalists’ accounts and institutions canceling their planned events in the wake of violent street clashes that left three people dead and dozens injured on Saturday. By eliminating both the physical and virtual platforms that white nationalists use to promote their ideas, those companies and institutions have curtailed the avenues by which they could grow their reach.
“I can’t think of another incident to which the backlash has been nearly so widespread,” Mark Pitcavage, an expert on right-wing extremism at the Anti-Defamation League, told TPM.
It's not exactly clear why some of these actions hadn't already been taken, but Charlottesville has certainly served as a wake-up call that "fringe" elements and ideas aren't inconsequential by any means. Accordingly, the blowback in many cases has been proportional to how violent and repugnant a particular entity is.
Andrew Anglin’s neo-Nazi website, The Daily Stormer, was essentially wiped off the mainstream internet after GoDaddy, Google and CloudFare stopped providing domain registration in quick succession. Anglin has since relocated the site to the dark web, where it is only available via use of a Tor network, radically restricting his audience.
“His site is all he has,” the ADL’s Pitcavage observed. “He can’t even show his face ‘cause he’ll get served with lawsuits. So his site is basically his voice. He gets hurt a lot worse than someone else who has a lot of different avenues for expressing their ideologies and beliefs.”
Good riddance. Some right-wing extremists impacted by the purge were defiant in the article, suggesting they would find other means and "the market will provide a solution." Anglin wasn't one of them.
“There’s only a limited number of ways to send money electronically over the Internet,” he said. “There are only a limited number of large social media sites—once you get away from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, you’re really dropping off in terms of the numbers of membership.”
With any luck, his site and repulsive message will be starved of traffic even if he manages to keep it alive financially.