A widely visited white supremacist website that boasts millions of monthly unique views has been all but driven offline after mocking the female demonstrator fatally mowed down during a counterprotest Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The Daily Stormer took new form Tuesday a day after being tossed one after another from two of the web’s largest domain registrars for its attacks against 32-year-old Heather Heyer.
The neo-Nazi website described Heyer as an “overweight slob” and “the definition of uselessness” in an article published shortly after she was killed Saturday while protesting a far-right rally in Charlottesville, “Unite the Right,” prompting first GoDaddy and then Google to give it the boot for violating their terms of service.
It subsequently reemerged on a new domain Tuesday, dailystormer.wang, and individuals affiliated with the website shared a link on social media directing to a “hidden service” mirror on the dark web, a portion of the internet not indexed by search engines and more difficult to patrol and monitor.
The website’s new domain was already offline within hours, however, due to an issue with the Chinese tech company responsible for maintaining .wang domains, The Daily Stormer’s publisher, Andrew Anglin, told The Washington Times on Tuesday. He suspected the company, Zodiac Leo Limited, had suffered a cyberattack. Zodiac did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Forgive the outage, but we’ve got Jews at our throat like no one in history has ever had,” Mr. Anglin wrote in an article published shortly prior to Tuesday’s latest disruption. “This is truly worse than the Holocaust.”
The Daily Stormer received about 3 million unique views during a recent 24-hour span in-between the article’s publication Saturday and Tuesday morning – roughly the same amount of traffic the website would otherwise receive in a normal month, a person associated with The Daily Stormer told The Washington Times on Tuesday.
The Daily Stormer “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,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a watchdog organization that monitors hate groups.
Heyer died Saturday after being struck by a vehicle driven by James Alex Fields, a 20-year-old Ohio man who had travelled to Charlottesville to attend “Unite the Right,” a far-right rally had that descended into chaos hours earlier and prompted Virginia Gov. Terry McAullife to declare a state of emergency. Nineteen others others were injured by Fields when he plowed into a crowd of counterprotesters, including Heyer.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.