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In this week’s Hate Report: Conspiracy theorists warn that the antifa are planning a civil war, Charlottesville 2.0 is a flop, and help us follow Nazi money.

Haters got into the Halloween spirit this year.

In Georgetown, Kentucky, a couple woke up to find that someone had carved a swastika into their Halloween pumpkin. The same-sex couple is in the process of adopting a multiracial child.

In Leesburg, Virginia, families awoke to find bags of candy containing Ku Klux Klan propaganda and images on their doorsteps. Local media reported that the notes read, “Attention White America! We are nearing the end of the line,” and warned of “white extinction.” Leesburg is one of the places debating what to do with its Confederate statues. 

Elsewhere in non-Halloween hate this week:

  • A former police chief in New Jersey said black people are “like ISIS,” and he engaged in years of racist hate speech and violence against African Americans, according to federal charges filed Tuesday. Frank Nucera was secretly recorded by a fellow police officer for months. The prosecution was welcome news for those worried how Attorney General Jeff Sessions would handle police reform.
  • A former University of Hartford student licked her roommate’s dining utensils, smeared her backpack with bloody tampons and described her as a “Jamaican Barbie,” according to hate crime charges filed this week. Brianna Rae Brochu, 18, allegedly bragged on her Instagram and Facebook accounts that she had been tampering with her roommates’ possessions. She now claims she was just trying to “appear funny.”   
  • A New Jersey mosque had threatening phone calls this week in the wake of Tuesday’s terrorist attack in New York. The mosque’s president has asked authorities to investigate the threats as hate crimes.

Help us follow the money

Last week, we took a look at how prominent American white supremacists are financing some of their activities using bitcoin. The dollar figures hit nine digits.

But there’s something we still don’t know: who’s sending them this money. One of our main areas of interest is finding out who’s funding this new wave of hate, so we’re asking for your help.

Locating the bitcoin wallets of notorious neo-Nazis is pretty easy because they often make wallet addresses public to solicit donations. Figuring out who gave them that money in the first place is more difficult. While transactions made over the bitcoin network are public, matching real-world identities requires some legwork and more than a little luck.

If you have any experience poking around the blockchain and are open to helping us solve a mystery, here’s a whopper: On Aug. 20, $97,854 worth of bitcoins were dropped into a wallet belonging to The Daily Stormer with the address 16JAUnuvxQ6BdfX4DwsEVTWgd3a8oitu8h. The address that sent the coins is 1DCa5tQh68VKtHfiDYpEJp3KAYgD482xYf.

If you have ideas about who sent this money to support a neo-Nazi hub, drop a hint by emailing us here.

‘White Lives Matter’ rally is disorganized flop

It was supposed to be a show of strength for America’s racist right, but a “White Lives Matter” event in central Tennessee last weekend ended up sparsely attended and badly organized.

Various fringe white supremacist groups, including Vanguard America and the League of the South, attended the rally, but they mustered only a few dozen people between them and two of the three planned events didn’t end up happening.

The small rally in Shelbyville largely was overshadowed by a much bigger crowd of counterprotesters, who at one point loudly played “La Bamba” to drown out the official speakers.

Russian bots go big on antifa

On Monday, special counsel Robert Mueller dropped his first indictments. Huge news! Nevertheless, Russian propaganda accounts found time to push another narrative.

A story from the Gateway Pundit warning of an impending civil war led by anti-fascists was one of the top 10 links shared that day on the 600 social media accounts monitored by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan nonprofit created to guard against Russia’s election influence.

Bret Schafer, who helps run the project, told us that a piece titled, “ANTIFA Leader: ‘November 4th […] millions of antifa supersoliders will behead all white parents,” made the top 10 list.

The article warned of antifa hordes violently rampaging across the country during a series of Nov. 4 protests. The goal supposedly was to cause rampant destruction and take down the Trump administration.

While the protests themselves are real, occurring in 20 cities across the country, there’s little evidence to support the narrative in the conspiracy theory corner of far-right media – such as Infowars and World Net Daily (among many others) – that this is the launch party for a civil war.

Many of those stories placed a major emphasis on racial fears, pitting white victims against the antifa’s implied multicultural horde.

In recent months, fact checkers at Snopes have debunked a slew of conspiracy theories about the antifa, including:

The tweet on which the Gateway Pundit story was based reads: “can’t wait for November 4th when millions of antifa supersoliders will behead all white parents and small business owners in the town square.”

That tweet was a joke made by a Twitter comedian mocking this kind of media coverage to begin with.

For the full story on how the whole Nov. 4 story materialized, this week’s Right Richter newsletter has a great rundown.

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the name of the bipartisan nonprofit created to guard against Russia’s election influence. It is the Alliance for Securing Democracy.

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Have a hate incident to report? Tell us about it here, or contact the Hate Report team: Aaron Sankin can be reached at asankin@revealnews.org, and Will Carless can be reached at wcarless@revealnews.org. Follow them on Twitter: @asankin and @willcarless.

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Will Carless was a correspondent for Reveal covering extremism. He has worked as a foreign correspondent in Asia and South America. Prior to joining Reveal, he was a senior correspondent for Public Radio International’s Global Post team based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Before that, Will spent eight years at the Voice of San Diego, where he worked as an investigative reporter and head of investigations. During his tenure in San Diego, Will was awarded several prizes, including a national award from Investigative Reporters and Editors. He has been a finalist for the Livingston Awards for young journalists twice in the last five years. He surfs, spends time with his family, travels to silly places and pretends he’s writing a novel.

Aaron Sankin is a reporter for Reveal covering online extremism, election administration and technology policy. Before joining Reveal, he was a founding editor of The Huffington Post's San Francisco vertical and a senior staff writer on The Daily Dot's politics team. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Salon, Time, The Motley Fool, Mashable, Business Insider, San Francisco magazine and The Onion. A San Francisco Bay Area native, Sankin studied history and sociology at Rice University. His work at The Daily Dot was a finalist in Digiday's 2015 publisher of the year award, and a story he wrote about a Midwestern family being terrorized by a teenage hacker was labeled by The Atlantic as an essential piece of journalism for 2015. Sankin is based in Seattle.