Neo-Nazi activists claim to have raised $15,000 for Will Stancil (UPDATED)
Critics charge that Stancil is goading right-wing trolls to rake in "ironic" donations and gain an advantage against other Democrats.
Kody Hurst, a hard right activist who runs a parody website for newly declared Minnesota State House candidate Will Stancil, claims to have raised nearly $15,000 for his campaign. That is roughly the same amount that Stancil claims to have raised in the first 24-hours of his campaign.
The figures raise troubling questions about Stancil’s fundraising strategy and what measures, if any, he is taking to prevent right-wing extremists from determining the outcome of his race.
“We’ve raised through ActBlue ~15,000 in the first 24 hours,” Hurst told me in an interview Friday evening.
Hurst has kept a relatively low profile online. His own personal website at kodyhurst.com, however, is overrun with racist, antisemitic and homophobic slurs, conspiracy theories, along with promises to send political rivals “to deathcamps”. It also suggests an undisguised self-consciousness about his trolling efforts: “Just to spite what they’re selling / Ten thousand likes to prove the rest and I’ll move on / Henpeckers ain’t got shit against well-done subversion”.
Hurst’s parody campaign site, meanwhile, lampoons liberal social justice language and caricatures liberal views on immigration. But it also directs visitors to Stancil’s real ActBlue fundraising page. And “ironic” promotion by white supremacist figures and organizations like VDARE seems to have encouraged a growing number of activists to play along.
Stancil, for his part, has posted a tweet denying association with Hurst’s website. But Stancil has also been cagey about his campaign’s finances, dodging questions about whether he will accept public financing. And critics, meanwhile, allege that Stancil may in fact see “ironic” donations from the right as a way to gain a fundraising edge against his primary opponents.
“It’s really gross that you deliberately attracted a group of virulent misogynistic racists…right before declaring your run for office,” Eric, a regulatory specialist from Chicago, told Will Thursday evening.
There’s a certain logic to the accusation. On one hand, Stancil routinely argues that Democrats need to adopt cynical right-wing strategies to manipulate the media such as “kick[ing] up major controversies” to attract attention. On the other hand, he Stancil also insists that the right has found success with one media tactic in particular: finding “useful idiots” among their opponents to advance their political agenda. Cynically goading the right into “jokingly” funding his campaign reads in this light like a simple extension of Stancil’s call for ultracynical social media hardball.
As of this writing Stancil has also refused to say whether his campaign is making any efforts to screen out and return donations from Nazis.
UPDATE: After several hours of sustained criticism that followed the publication of this article, Will Stancil announced that he “received less than 20 dollars in donations from obvious far-right individuals, and they were instantaneously returned, as all such donations will be, regardless of amount”.
Stancil, in retaliation for my reporting, has alleged that it amounts to “openly working with a Nazi to spread a lie”. One problem with this accusation is that everything in this article is factually true. Nazis did claim to raise thousands of dollars for Will, critics did voice concerns that he was goading them into it, and Will did refuse to comment on the matter. Moreover I do not share the judgment of my critics that the claim was necessarily implausible since there is a long and well-documented history of the right backing Democrats in primaries — either “for lulz” or in order to prop up weak candidates. That Stancil eventually ended his stonewalling and denied their claim does not somehow make my reporting “a lie” or even “credulous” in retrospect.
A related argument seems to be that if Nazis gave Stancil thousands of dollars in order to embarrass and discredit his campaign opponents of Nazis have an obligation to ignore it. I think it basically stupid to judge Stancil simply for receiving money, something that he has no control over, and that if people think otherwise the thing to do is to explain to them that they’re wrong, not try to hide the truth from them. Refusing to say that he would return the money, on the other hand, was a completely unforced error on Stancil’s part, and one that he should probably reflect on as he attempts to launch his political career.