What’s next for the MAGA merchants of Etsy? More Trump.
While the former president has been banned from Shopify, independent sellers are still pushing Trump gear.
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Jonathan Babin sells small, faux-marble Mount Rushmores on his Etsy account for $19.99. On the extreme right side of the statue, next to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, rests the chiseled visage of Donald Trump.
The former president looks as he did during his time in the White House, sticking out like a sore thumb among the other presidents, though Babin has equipped him with a slightly sharper chin and a stout, flattop-like haircut. “Originally it was a gift idea for my boss,” he tells me, over Etsy’s messaging platform. “He sent a picture [of the sculpture] to a few of his friends and all of a sudden I had 20 orders.” Currently, it is one of two items on Babin’s s
A mysterious $500,000 Bitcoin transfer. Online stores selling sham nutritional supplements and buckets of protein powder. Inane, live-streamed video game sessions, full of dog whistles and racial slurs, fed by a steady flow of cryptocurrency donations in the form of virtual lemons.
Some of the income streams exploited by America s extremist movements have come under increased scrutiny after last month’s attack on the U.S. Capitol, for which some far-right extremists fundraised online.
Even as extremists are removed from platforms that serve as reliable sources of followers and money, they find new ways to wring financial support from an army of online haters.
Photo Illustration by Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
PayPal suspended an account used by a notorious white supremacist.
The man was using PayPal to sell copies of his book.
The activity was brought to light by anti-fascist activists.
An avowed white supremacist will have to find another way to sell his racist tracts after PayPal suspended his account on Tuesday.
Billy Roper is a third-generation white supremacist, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center; his father and grandfather were both members of the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC describes Roper, based in Arkansas, as the uncensored voice of violent neo-Nazism.