A crowdfunding site known to cater to the alt-right has been reincarnated under a different name after being dropped by PayPal and other payment processors.
The name of the site is Goy Fund Me, a pun for one of its mainstream competitors and a wink to white nationalists who have appropriated the Jewish word.
If you take their word for it, Goy Fund Me, and RootBocks before it, offer crowdfunding without censorship. But the site serves members of the alt-right and hate groups, several of whom are seeking money for legal fees after receiving criminal charges connected to incidents at the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.
It’s not clear who runs Goy Fund Me. The site lacks contact information and an interview request sent via an online contact form received no response. Contact information listed with both domains is private, and although Goy Fund Me and RootBocks both list the same limited liability corporation in their sites’ copyright, without information on where the LLC is based, it’s hard to know more.
Goy Fund Me accepts payments made with PayPal, credit and debit cards and Bitcoin, but so did RootBocks before all of its payment providers bailed.
When RootBocks launched in June, the alt-right and other white nationalist groups quickly embraced the platform.
“It means that we (the alt-right) finally have a funding resource that does not interpret advocating for our own interests as ‘hate’ and won’t shut us down for being ‘edgy’ or ‘extreme,’” an altright.com post said.
But a few months later, the site began to crumble. By August, RootBocks had received attention for its fundraising campaign for Jason Kessler, who organized the “Unite the Right” rally. First, RootBocks’ hosting provider dropped the site. Then, even with new hosting, RootBocks was suspended by all of the companies it had used to process payments, leaving the site dormant.
Soon after, a mirror site to RootBocks appeared: Goy Fund Me. It draws the same clientele, white nationalists who got the boot from other crowdfunding sites.
Kessler had used RootBocks to raise $3,000 meant for a lawsuit against Charlottesville. This month, Kessler was indicted on a charge of felony perjury. A current Goy Fund Me campaign was posted by the site’s anonymous administrator for help with legal fees after Jason, who isn’t identified by a last name, was indicted on a felony perjury charge.
“Jason has been on the front lines, sacrificing daily for the cause and certain authorities are attempting to silence him,” wrote the admin. “We ask that you dig deep and give generously in order to help Jason fight the system attempting to shut him down.”
Both RootBocks and Goy Fund Me list community guidelines that prohibit things like terrorism-related activity or calls for violence, and the new version appears to be attempting to prevent the fate of the site’s predecessor in some ways.
“Symbols and images that may be misconstrued by some as inspiring hate or violence will not be allowed as they will most definitely result in complaints to our payment providers,” according to the site. “If our payment providers receive too many of these, we will lost (sic) our donation platforms and the site will be unable to function.”
Still, some campaigns do include images associated with white nationalist organizations, such as flags for the League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies as a neo-Confederate hate group.
Here’s a glimpse at some of Goy Fund Me’s fundraisers:
Jacob Scott Goodwin
After the “Unite the Right” rally, five men kicked and hit 20-year-old DeAndre Harris in a parking garage, leaving him with a spinal injury and a head laceration.
Three of the five men who hit Harris have been charged in connection with the incident – Daniel Borden, Alex Michael Ramos and Jacob Goodwin.
Goodwin, 22, appears in video of the fight carrying a plastic shield, which he used to hit Harris in the head, according to the Washington Post. Harris also received a charge of unlawful wounding based on a Southern nationalist’s claim that Harris had hit him with a flashlight before the fight broke out.
Another Goy Fund Me user, Brad Griffin, Tweeted in response to Harris’ charge, “Yeah, he is being booked this morning. His whole story was another race hoax,” accompanied by a photo of “American Psycho” character Patrick Bateman.
Goodwin’s fundraising campaign has raised about $800 for his criminal defense.
Christopher Rey Monzon, AKA Chris Cedeno
Monzon escaped the “Unite the Right” rally without any criminal charges, but the same could not be said of a Florida protest where he charged the crowd.
At the time, city commissioners in Hollywood, Florida were considering whether or not to rename three streets honoring Confederate generals, including Robert E. Lee. (In the hours following Monzon’s arrest, the commissioners voted to rename the streets.)
Video shows Monzon shouting to civil rights protesters, “You are a cancer on the face of the earth! All Jews are!” before running toward the crowd thrusting a hybrid Confederate and League of the South flag. Police then tackled and arrested Monzon, who received charges of aggravated assault, disorderly conduct and inciting a riot.
Monzon’s Goy Fund Me campaign description, which identifies him as a League of the South member, diverges from video of the incident. According to the site, Monzon attended the protest “to stand for the Southern people. He was threatened at this protest by aggressive counter-protesters and was forced to defend himself.” The site describes his views as “namely that Islam has no place in the South.”
Monzon’s campaign has raised $440 for his legal fees.
Brad Griffin, AKA Hunter Wallace
Brad Griffin, whose Twitter account says he’s the public relations chief for the League of the South, also runs the white nationalist website Occidental Dissent. Griffin wanted to raise money for his site, but was kicked off of PayPal and GoFundMe before turning to Goy Fund Me.
Griffin, who attended the “Unite the Right” rally, is hoping to raise $2,000 through his crowdfunding efforts.
“In Charlottesville, we shook the world when a 1,000 White men (sic) stood up for themselves and said we aren’t going to put up with this bullshit anymore,” his campaign page says. “The whole might of the political, corporate and media establishment came down against us. We’re being attacked and repressed because we are a potent threat to their grip on power.”
So far, Griffin has raised more than $1,000 on Goy Fund Me.
Arktos
My major in college was philosophy, but I’d never heard of Italian philosopher and fascist-magazine contributor Julius Evola until the last year or so. Although I haven’t read his work, I have managed to pick up on the fact that if you can’t find a guy who’s in the alt-right, it’s probably because he’s locked in his bedroom masturbating to images of Evola. They really, really like Evola.
Maybe that’s because Evola was an avid anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer. I say that because it probably has nothing to do with Evola’s membership in a group that literally attempted magic spells to change Benito Mussolini’s mind when it comes to paganism. They really, really liked paganism.
Arktos, a publishing house for Europe’s white nationalist movement known as the New Right, already sells several Evola books. But the publisher, headed by altright.com co-founder Daniel Friberg, wants to expand its offerings.
With the goal of raising $9,000 to go toward publishing four Evola books in English, Arktos set up a Kickstarter campaign. Friberg claimed on Twitter that Arktos had raised half its funding in a single day before Kickstarter suspended the account, leading the publishing house into the arms of Goy Fund Me.
Arktos has raised $5,740 for its project on the site.
Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Twitter.