WeSearchr

Submission 6,118

About

WeSearchr is a crowdfunding website founded by former Business Insider CTO Pax Dickinson and conservative journalist Chuck Johnson, which features campaigns listed as "bounties" that users can donate funds to. The site is frequently associated with the alt-right and other fringe conservative groups, many of which have been banned from other crowdfunding platforms.

History

On February 8th, 2016, Dickinson and Johnson launched WeSearchr as a platform to crowdfund "bounties" to collect information regarding a variety of topics. In May, political cartoonist Ben Garrison posted a cartoon commissioned for the site, featuring Dickinson and Johnson standing over corpses of various political interest groups depicted as various wild animals (shown below).^[2]

was launched.^[1]

Controversies

Andrew Anglin's Legal Defense

In April 2017, Andrew Auernheimer launched a campaign on WeSearchr to fund the legal defense of Andrew Anglin, editor of the neo-Nazi and white supremacist news site The Daily Stormer, for his legal battle against the Southern Poverty Law Center.^[7] Over the next four months, the campaign received more than $159,000 in donations.

Election Fraud Campaign

On October 25th, 2016, the site launched a page to fund efforts to fight "election fraud" in the 2016 United States presidential election. That day, the campaign reached the front page of the /r/The_Donald subreddit.^[5]

Split With Pax Dickinson

In May 2017, Dickinson resigned as CTO of the platform, claiming that Johnson refused to grant their front-end developer a $1,000-per-month raise after the company received a seven-figure check.^[8]

James Damore's Google Manifesto Campaign

On August 8th, the site launched a page to collect donations for James Damore, a software engineer who had been fired the previous day for authoring a memo criticizing some of Google's diversity initiatives.^[6] Within one week, the campaign received upwards of $48,000 of its $60,000 goal.