Tech

The Domain Troll Behind Pro-Trump Stunts

PayForYourOwnNanny.com

A far-right Canadian troll buys ‘FreeLaura.com.’ Hours later, Laura storms the stage of ‘Julius Caesar.’ And he's got more stunts up his sleeve.

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Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast

At 9:13 p.m. on Friday night, Jack Posobiec tweeted a shaky video from the Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park with the caption: “BREAKING: Julius Ceasar [sic] Gets SHUTDOWN.”

The video depicts a woman, later revealed to be Laura Loomer, walking onstage during the assassination scene yelling, “Stop the normalization of political violence against the right.” Security was ushered to the stage as the crowd booed and Loomer was taken off. Posobiec then stands up, still filming the scene, and begins yelling, “YOU ARE ALL GOEBBELS” (pronounced “gerbils,” but with a hard g) until he too is taken away by security.

After the video was shared by prominent right-leaning figures like Sean Hannity and far-right publications online, the hashtag #FreeLaura immediately caught fire on Twitter. Some started to link to FreeLaura.com, which drove to a fundraising site to cover Loomer’s legal fees.

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However, eagled-eyed users on Twitter quickly noticed that FreeLaura.com had been purchased the day of the event—and hours before Loomer rushed the stage—by the owner of the pro-Trump website therebel.media.

Ezra Levant, the founder of Canadian far-right and pro-Trump website therebel.media, bought the website at 2:07 p.m. ET, six hours before the play began, according to domain records.

That is not the only domain purchased under Levant’s name and email address this week, The Daily Beast has found. FreeLaura.com is just one of 280 other domains registered under Levant’s email address, including several other pre-emptive political domains like ResignHillary.com and HumaForPrison.com, both registered less than two weeks before the 2016 election.

Levant purchased SaveFletcher.com shortly after 4 p.m. one day before Loomer was ejected from “Julius Caesar,” according to domain records discovered using DomainTools.

Levant did not respond to a request for comment about the identity of who “Fletcher” might have been, or whether he or she was in the audience that night.

But just four days before the “Caesar” interruption, therebel.media aired a segment featuring regular contributor Austen Fletcher—titled “OUCH: Watch ‘man on the street’ Austen Fletcher ask leftists simple questions”—on The Gavin McInnes Show.

On June 9th, a Rebel Media article written by McInnes promoted Fletcher’s future appearance at the “March Against Sharia,” saying he had “been attending leftist events all over the United States and making liberals look like idiots using the most basic questions imaginable."

When asked for comment by The Daily Beast, Fletcher said that he did not attend Friday’s Shakespeare in the Park performance and had nothing to do with the purchase of SaveFletcher.com.

“I noticed that too,” Fletcher said about Levant’s domain purchase. “No idea who the other Fletcher is. I was not there although the larger bearded guy that crashed it the second night looked like me lol.”

On Sunday, another protester, Salvatore Cipolla, a member of McInnes’ Proud Boys, rushed onto the stage as well. Proud Boys was created by Rebel Media’s Gavin McInnes and promotes a “#nowanks policy,” or the idea that men should minimize how often they masturbate.

“Whether or not you think the [“Julius Caesar”] disruption was warranted, the fact that the left is now talking about and defending free speech makes the demonstration totally worth it,” said Fletcher.

After Laura Loomer was ejected from Friday’s performance, she yelled outside of the theater, “they’re literally encouraging people to assassinate Donald Trump.”

Later in her Periscope, she is heard saying, “they’re just as bad as ISIS.” Loomer, who says in the video that she recently joined Rebel TV and previously worked with James O’Keefe’s organization Project Veritas, was subsequently charged with criminal trespass and disorderly conduct.

Loomer did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast via her Facebook page.

Posobiec, who filmed the viral video of the disruption, worked at Levant’s therebel.media until the last week of May, according to Buzzfeed. Before his tenure at Rebel, Posobiec was one of the foremost peddlers of the Pizzagate conspiracy, in which he accused Hillary Clinton of running a child sex ring out of a popular Washington D.C. pizza parlor. Recently, he has repeatedly claimed Clinton was involved in the murder of slain DNC staffer Seth Rich.

The list of domains associated with Levant’s email address is extensive, both targeting left-wing political foes in America and his native Canada, and also aiming  to “save” or “free” right-wing activists who are not currently imprisoned. Levant’s email address is listed as the proprietor of FreeMilo.com, a reference to right-wing agitator Milo Yiannopoulos’ ban from Twitter, along with FreeSteyn.com, HelpGareth.com, SaveTommy.com and SaveDerek.com, which are mostly references to far-right Canadian personalities.

Websites for upcoming or abandoned projects like MyTrumpStamp.com, NameThatThug.com and TheRefugeeChallenge.com also appear on the list. Levant’s email address is also tied to domains appearing to taunt Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, like FireJustin.com, CrookedJustin.com and TrudeauLies.com.

Levant also appears to own HonourRobFord.com and PayForYourOwnNanny.com.