Far-Right Leaders Circumvented PayPal Policy To Fund Charlottesville Rallies

The Charlottesville, Va., “Unite the Right” rally last Saturday that left dozens injured and one woman dead required strategic planning, with several neo-Nazi and Alt-Right leaders utilizing PayPal to fund their organization efforts.

Among the far-right event leaders who used PayPal, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, are its main organizer Jason Kessler, Alt-Right spokesperson Richard Spencer, and Augustus Invictus aka Austin Gillespie.

PayPal’s significant role in raising money to organize the “Unite the Right” event goes against the company’s Acceptable Use Policy that explicitly bans “the promotion of hate, violence, [and] racial intolerance.” However, many of the group’s leaders utilized personal accounts or circumvented this policy in several ways.

Several far right-wing groups and organizations also used the massive online payment processor to fund what became a deadly and chaotic event that started as a protest against the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue.

Identity Evropa, which particularly targets college campus protests under the leadership of Nathan Damigo, collected PayPal donations with an account named Identity Evropa, Inc. Damigo, who gained notoriety after punching a 95-pound Antifa protester in Berkeley, Calif., last April, was arrested at the Charlottesville event. The League of the South, a group that started as fringe academic secessionists and evolved into militant neo-Confederates, also used PayPal despite previously being banned from the service. Founder Michael Hill circumvented this ban by using his personal account, james.hill120651. The League of the South’s chief of staff and Florida chairman, Michael Tubbs, also collected funds through his account, neflos@net-host.net.

The Right Stuff (TRS), which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a “virulently anti-Semitic and racist website founded by Mike Peinovich in 2012,” also hosts several of the Alt-Right’s most popular podcasts and propaganda outlets. This group used its several podcast pseudonyms in order to avoid PayPal’s anti-hate propaganda policy. Musonius Rufus, Silas Reynolds, Identity Dixie and TRS off-shoot networks including Alternative Right Coalition all solicited funds through their own subsidiary accounts.

Online merchandise retailer Patriotic Flags, which is run by Kyle Rogers of the Council of Conservative Citizens, uses PayPal as its primary means of processing payments. The group offered several pieces of “Unite the Right” memorabilia items for Charlottesville attendees, including neo-Confederate jackets and flags of Rhodesia – a symbol touted by Columbia, S.C. mass murderer Dylann Roof.

A longtime Silicon Valley stalwart, PayPal was founded in 1998 with financial backing from tech heavy-hitters such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Yu Pan.

GoFundMe has also been implicated in providing a platform for funding white supremacists, including several campaigns in support of James Alex Fields Jr., who rammed his car into a crowd of protesters, killing one woman and injuring 19 others.

GoFundMe spokesman Bobby Whithorne told Reuters, "Those campaigns did not raise any money, and they were immediately removed.”