Prominent neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer might have to reveal its funding, thanks to a new court filing in a lawsuit against the website’s founder, Andrew Anglin.
Anglin is currently on the run from two lawsuits. One of those lawsuits, by radio host and Daily Beast contributor Dean Obeidallah, accuses Anglin of defamation after The Daily Stormer accused Obeidallah of orchestrating a bombing at a 2017 Ariana Grande concert in England. In a new filing in the case, Obeidallah asked a judge to let him enter a discovery process for Moonbase Holdings, LLC, a shell company The Daily Stormer used to make its financial transactions look more legitimate.
If granted, the discovery process could reveal who funded Anglin’s hate site.
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Anglin, who claims to be in Cambodia, has not responded to Obeidallah’s initial complaint, the Southern Poverty Law Center first reported. As a result, a clerk of court ruled declared Anglin to be in default, allowing Obeidallah to seek damages in Anglin’s absence. In his new filing, Obeidallah asks to investigate Moonbase Holdings before pursuing specific damages.
Moonbase Holdings is “a likely reference to a conspiracy theory that Hitler survived World War II by escaping to a secret lunar base,” The Atlantic reported earlier this year. Incorporation records show Anglin’s father Greg registered the LLC in September 2016, when The Daily Stormer’s traffic was on the rise.
In a December 2016 post, Anglin announced The Daily Stormer would begin processing credit card transactions, as part of Anglin goal of “an expanding media operation, ultimately to get onto the scale of Breitbart.”
Anglin said the donations wouldn’t be linked directly to The Daily Stormer.
“It won’t say ‘Daily Stormer’ on your credit card bill, but will instead say ‘Moonbase Holdings,’” he wrote, “which either sounds like a hobby shop or a multi-level marketing scheme run by reptoids. Anyway, it looks innocuous on your statement.”
Obeidallah’s filing, which seeks documents showing Moonbase’s revenue sources, could potentially reveal donors’ names.
“At one point it appeared that Defendant Moonbase received approximately $3,405.70 per month in credit card donations through Hatreon,” the new filing in Obeidallah’s lawsuit reads. Hatreon is a crowdfunding platform beloved by hate groups, who are often banned from platforms like GoFundMe and Patreon.
Since February 9, 2017, the site has been down, its homepage displaying a notice that “pledging is currently disabled while we upgrade our systems.”
With Hatreon on hold, Anglin has claimed to be nearly broke.
“I had a chat with my lawyer and my money is basically dried up,” he wrote on Gab, a social media platform popular among the alt-right, “Lawsuits are expensive. I have no way of receiving anything other than crypto right now.”
As of Tuesday, The Daily Stormer had $9,181 in Bitcoin, according to transaction records. Since the site started accepting Bitcoin, donors have given it nearly $400,000 in the cryptocurrency. Obeidallah’s lawsuit also notes that The Daily Stormer has started soliciting Monero, a secretive, scandal-plagued cryptocurrency.
Obeidallah’s suit argues that Moonbase is likely on the verge of going broke. Before it does, he’s asking a judge to compel Anglin’s associates to produce documents showing the company’s assets, sources of revenue, and relationships with other financial institutions.
