Alex Jones got a big Bitcoin donation this week. Will his victims get that money?
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones receives a Bitcoin donation, but will the victims of his defamation ever get that money? Dozens of white supremacist gang members are arrested in Southern California, and neo-Nazis continue to flee the messaging app Telegram.
It’s the week in extremism.
Alex Jones gets a Bitcoin donation
Ever since losing high-profile defamation lawsuits and being ordered to pay more than a billion dollars in damages to his victims, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been trying to maintain his lavish lifestyle. Researchers at the Southern Poverty Law Center, who have been keeping a close eye on Jones’ Bitcoin wallet, noticed a sizable donation last week. Does Jones get to keep the money?
In 2022, Jones was ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion in judgments to families of children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre. A series of court rulings ordered the payments after Jones spread false conspiracy theories about their children’s deaths.
By this time last year, however, Jones hadn’t paid his victims a cent, despite spending almost $100,000 a month on himself.
Megan Squire, deputy director for data analytics at the SPLC, noticed a donation to Jones this week of one Bitcoin, worth almost $64,000. The donation was notable for its size, Squire told USA TODAY, because most contributions range from a few dollars to about $100 worth of Bitcoin.
Squire doesn’t know who was responsible for the Bitcoin donation, only that it came from someone who holds tens of millions of dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency. “We don’t know who they are, but they’re a whale, and they sent Jones several other smaller donations, all in 2021,” Squire told USA TODAY.
Last week, a bankruptcy judge in Houston ordered Jones to auction off his Infowars media platform and assets to raise money to pay his judgments. The sales start next month.
It’s unclear whether last week’s donation will be subject to the bankruptcy proceedings and will eventually go to the people Jones defamed.An attorney representing Jones’ victims declined to comment on the donation. Jones did not respond to a request for comment.
Huge neo-Nazi bust in Southern California
Dozens of suspected members of a Los Angeles-area white supremacist gang were arrested this week as part of a sweeping operation by federal law enforcement. The 68 alleged gang members are charged with racketeering, firearms trafficking, drug trafficking and financial fraud.
The people arrested were alleged members of the “Peckerwoods,” a white supremacist street gang active in California that grew out of the prison system.
During the investigation, law enforcement seized large quantities of illegal firearms and dozens of pounds of fentanyl, methamphetamine and heroin, according to the federal indictment.
“The Peckerwoods’ violent white-supremacist ideology and wide-ranging criminal activity pose a grave menace to our community,” United States Attorney Martin Estrada said in a statement. “By allegedly engaging in everything from drug-trafficking to firearms offenses to identity theft to COVID fraud, and through their alliance with a neo-Nazi prison gang, the Peckerwoods are a destructive force.”
Neo-Nazis continue to flee Telegram
Ever since the arrest of social media platform Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov in France in August, far-right users of the encrypted messaging service have been abandoning it for new havens. A new report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies global extremism and disinformation, shows this trend is continuing.
The ISD report, released Friday, details how neo-Nazi groups have been migrating in recent days to a new, unnamed platform that was “chosen for its enhanced privacy features and lack of unique identifiers, such as User IDs, for its users.”
One such group already has almost 1,000 members on the new platform, according to ISD researcher Steven Rai.
Rai tracked more than 30 neo-Nazi and “accelerationist” groups to the new platform. Accelerationism is a white supremacist movement that seeks to foment a race war and ensuing dystopia to bring about a race-based new global order.
Statistic of the week: Two
That’s how many bridges in Pittsburgh were draped with banners displaying Nazi symbols last Saturday. An investigation is underway into the incident.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Alex jones owes victims more than $1 billion. He's still getting donations