Despite claims of neutrality, WeSearchr was intended to be used as a crowdfunding platform for the alt-right from its inception. Charles "Chuck" Johnson teased the project in an April 18, 2016, video posted to his “GotNews” YouTube channel titled, “What the Alt Right Is And What It Should Do:”
Well, one thing that should be thought about, and this is something that I think the alt-right should take seriously, is we need to start forming our institutions and hiring our own people. … We need to have certain institutions that are set up. … We need a crowdfunding vehicle which induces people to leak information or does bounties and does opposition research. That's sort of what Pax and I are building at WeSearchr.
Later in the video, Johnson continued, “I’ll be working on businesses over the next 10 to 15 years for the alt-right. I happen to believe that one could make a lot of money if one were clever.”
According to WeSearchr’s “about” page, the platform allows users to crowdfund campaigns by proposing a “bounty” for some piece of sought-after information. Users and third parties are then able to contribute money to campaigns to incentivize the release of the desired information. If a bounty is answered and the information isn’t contested in 30 days, funds are distributed to the individual who submitted the information (75 percent), the individual who posted the bounty (10 percent), and WeSearchr (15 percent).
WeSearchr raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for "alt-right" leaders, such as Andrew Auernheimer’s bounty to raise money for the Daily Stormer’s legal defense fund or Defend Europa’s bounty to raise money to charter and staff a ship led by European white nationalists seeking to disrupt humanitarian vessels in the Mediterranean Sea that the group falsely claimed were smuggling migrants into Europe.
WeSearchr also promoted campaigns launched by white supremacists on its official Facebook page. The Daily Stormer Legal Defense fund was promoted via postings 13 separate times, in addition to other campaigns like a legal defense fund for Jason Kessler, organizer of the deadly "Unite the Right" demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Other campaigns heavily promoted on WeSearchr’s Facebook page included a bounty raising money for a Q&A with George Zimmerman, who was acquitted in 2015 for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin (promoted 22 times), and a bounty for a DNA test of Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King (promoted 20 times).
Johnson has a well-documented history of extremist beliefs. In the April 18, 2017, YouTube video mentioned above, Johnson asserted African-Americans with higher IQs are those that have mixed ethnic heritage:
Now, by the way, that's not to say that there aren't occasionally intelligent blacks just that their frequency in the population is quite, it's relatively, low. Generally when they are intelligent it's usually because there's been some racial admixture with some other ethnic group, which explains why blacks in the US, which tend to have a lot more white blood in them, are actually more intelligent relative to Africa, or relative to large chunks of Africa.
He is also a vocal proponent of the false narrative of an epidemic of black-on-white crime, a favorite stalking horse of white nationalists. From the same YouTube video:
There's skepticism about anti-racism. So any time that you have any data that shows that crime rates that are different, any time you show rape rates are different, these things that are very, deeply unpopular — that's why the Obama administration has worked so hard to eradicate mentioning all racial statistics, you know, until it serves, of course, their interests, but that's, you know, this idea that we're different from one another and that we shouldn't notice that is something that is quite frightening to the larger society.
Johnson echoed these same viewpoints in an article titled, “ANALYSIS: The Truth About the Charleston Shooting and the Confederate Flag: Beyond Black and White:”
If Roof actually said that blacks are raping our women, he is correct on the facts about interracial rape. … Blacks way disproportionately commit rapes against whites rather than the reverse. … Black lives may matter but Black women simply aren’t desirable —even to rapists. … Was rape culture to blame in Charleston? Roof could be considered a white knight crusading for white damsels in distress.
In a 2017 Reddit AMA [ask me anything], Johnson, responding to a question about the Holocaust, World War II, and the JQ [Jewish question], also revealed himself to be a Holocaust skeptic who is well versed in the work of David Irving, a prominent Holocaust denier, and a supporter of ethnostates, the chief desire of white nationalists:
I do not and never have believed the six million figure. I think the Red Cross numbers of 250,000 dead in the camps from typhus are more realistic. I think the Allied bombing of Germany was a war crime. I agree with David Cole about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real. I read the German War (highly recommended), Bloodlands, Mein Kampf and all of David Irving. I'm more or less of the view that the war was an outgrowth of the efforts of communism to spread itself throughout the world. I also believe that the fears of German extermination were not misplaced, especially in light of the Ukrainian famine. But I support Israel as a Jewish state and Zionism as a concept. I'm pro-ethno state, generally. I understand why and how Hitler rose to power, but think too much of our focus on World War II is spent trying to understand Hitler and not enough is spent trying to understand Weimar. Mencius Moldbug, aka Curtis Yarvin, is right. America is a communist country.
Considering Johnson’s history of promoting white nationalist viewpoints, his stated intention to establish a crowdfunding platform specifically for the "alt-right" and WeSearchr’s hosting and promotion of white nationalist campaigns, the SPLC classifies the platform as a white nationalist hate group.
