COLUMBUS – White nationalists say a Virginia rally was a landmark in what they’re calling an expanding drive to promote their agenda.
READ MORE: In The Columbus Dispatch
Counter demonstrator Heather Heyer was killed Saturday when police say a man from northwest Ohio plowed his car into a group of demonstrators protesting the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville and the U.S. Justice Department says it will investigate.
A judge has denied bond for James Alex Fields, 20, of Maumee (right), and said during a bond hearing Monday that he would appoint a lawyer to represent him.
Despite the violence, negative publicity and criticism from the White House, white nationalists are portraying the overall demonstration as a victory because hundreds of supporters attended. And they say more events are coming.
RELATED: President calls hate groups “criminals,” “thugs,” “repugnant”
Reporters leaving the courthouse after Fields’s hearing arrived to see a man screaming at the wall of photographers across the alley from the courthouse. According to a report by radio station WINA, Matt Heimbach and Matt Parrott, co-founders of the Traditionalist Worker Party, blamed city leaders and police for the violence at Saturday’s Unite the Rally, and said, “We’ll be back!”
A pro-Confederate group has asked to rally in support of a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee next month in Richmond, Virginia. And the University of Florida says white nationalist Richard Spencer has asked to speak there.
Meanwhile, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Alabama-based center that tracks such activity. In its most recent count, the law center listed 35 white supremacist hate groups in Ohio, including several factions of the KKK and multiple neo-Nazi and skinhead organizations.
One of those is the Daily Stormer, the world’s most-visited white-supremacist website, headquartered in Worthington.
GoDaddy tweeted late Sunday night that it has given the Daily Stormer 24 hours to move its domain to another provider because the site has violated GoDaddy’s terms of service by labeling Heyer “fat” and “childless,” GoDaddy spokesman Dan Race told the New York Daily News.
The site was briefly down Monday but was back up after a short time, including a post from the website’s publisher, Andrew Anglin, of Worthington, saying he had retaken control of the site. The site claimed it was briefly controlled by a member of the “Anonymous” group of hackers.
Google says it’s canceling the Daily Stormer’s registration for violating its terms of service after it posted the article mocking Heyer.