[Brief] Fascist Forge is Down — For Now
One of the most dangerous fascist forums on the Internet has suffered a similar fate as Stormfront and The Daily Stormer.
On February 15, VICE reported that Fascist Forge, an online hub for potentially violent fascists, was taken down by its domain name registrar on Tuesday.
“Fascist Forge showed signs of growth initially,” wrote Mack Lamoureux, a multimedia journalist and VICE Canada contributor. “But now, less than a year after it was founded, the site is offline. The site’s registrar placed it into a status called ‘clientHold’ on February 12.”
Indeed, according to a WHOIS query, fascistforge.org is currently in clientHold status, which, as Lamoureux reported, “effectively shuts down the website by telling a ‘domain’s registry to not activate your domain in the DNS and as a consequence, it will not resolve.’”
The forum’s fate is similar to that of other racist websites: After the disastrous 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, The Daily Stormer and Stormfront were placed in clientHold status, albeit temporarily, by their former domain name registrars, Google and Network Solutions, respectively.
As Lamoureux noted, the news comes after various organizations and journalists reported on Fascist Forge, including VICE, the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and American Odyssey back in September 2018.
