Amid FBI Inquiries, Stormfront's Don Black Starts Legal Defense Fund
As authorities continue to dig into the life of Dylann Storm Roof, the accused gunman in the Charleston church massacre, the FBI recently paid a visit to Don Black, the former Klan leader and founder of the largest white supremacist web forum in the world, Stormfront.
The agents, according to The New York Times, were seeking information about Roof’s possible online associates.
“This could obviously become overly broad and become a First Amendment issue,” Black told the Times, declining, however, to say if he had been served with a subpoena.
The FBI visited Black at his home in West Palm Beach, Fl., where he runs his racist chat site and an Internet radio show. The visit apparently left the 61-year-old Black badly rattled, so rattled that on July 4 he issued an online appeal for donations to what he is calling the Stormfront Legal Defense Fund.
“We are under siege!,” the appeal began.
“Stormfront’s existence is threatened now more than ever in its history,” Black wrote, adding, “This isn’t some fundraising hyperbole on my part.”
Black said that for now he has lawyers working pro bono on his behalf but he needs money for other expenses associated with litigation and “we may need to pay other attorneys as well.”
“I can’t discuss any details for the usual lawyerly reasons, but the assault has begun,” he wrote in the appeal. “I don’t know how far it will go or where it will end.”
Before he walked into the historic Emanuel AME Church in downtown Charleston on June 17 and allegedly gunned down nine black parishioners, Roof apparently authored a vicious, anti-black white nationalist rant and posted it on his personal website.
In the more than 2,000-word manifesto, Roof, 21, cited the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), which has called blacks “a retrograde species of humanity, as his gateway into the racist underworld. For decades, the group has had the ear of a number of prominent politicians, both state and federal, many of whom were members.
It is unclear whether the authorities have made similar visits to Black’s fellow racist Internet site proprietors. If they have not yet, they must surely be on their way.
The headline on the Times story is “White Supremacists Extend Their Reach Through Websites.” One of the sites mentioned in the story is The Daily Stormer, founded by neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin. Anglin dismissed the Times report in a blog post today on his site: “Jew York Times Promotes ‘White Supremacist’ Hoax In Offensive New Article.”
“It is just more of the goofy crap we have come to expect from these Jews,” Anglin said.
In his Independence Day plea for money, Black wrote, “Remember this isn’t just about Stormfront. We’re just the highest profile target.”
He said that under the “guise of protecting Americans from ‘hate speech,’ which ‘might lead to violence,’ the anti-White System is going for broke.”
A commenter on the site, “PureWhiteRagePWR,” urged Stormfront supporters to do whatever they could to donate to the legal defense fund, including sending in spare change.
“One less six pack, one less movie rental,” PureWhiteRage wrote. “Put that dollar you get as change in an envelope and send whatever it adds up to at the end of the month.”
PureWhiteRage ended the post with RAHOWA – racial holy war.
