A bunch of white nationalists unleashed a barrage of anti-Semitic attacks on this quiet Montana town

The names, emails, and addresses of some of Whitefish, Montana’s Jewish residents were released by the racist and anti-Semitic news site The Daily Stormer last Friday. (Btw, when I say the site is racist and anti-Semitic, I mean the site is reallllllllllllly racist and anti-Semitic. Two of its news tags are: “Jewish Problem” and “Race War.”)

There doesn’t appear to be a single brick and mortar synagogue in the town with a population of 6,649, which makes it a curious target of anti-Semitic attacks. So, why Whitefish?

You might recall the name Richard Spencer from a couple of weeks ago. He’s the white supremacist who hosted a conference near the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, last month. Spencer, who is the president of something called the National Policy Institute, an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a hate group, chanted “Hail Trump! Hail victory!” while he raised his arm in the air in a Nazi salute.

Spencer’s mother, who has said publicly that she doesn’t hold her son’s views, owns a building in Whitefish, and recently claimed activists began to boycott and threaten her and her building’s tenants in an effort to push them out of Whitefish. The activists say they are simply trying to defend their community. White nationalists and neo-Nazis alike joined in online to defend Spencer’s mother, which accumulated in The Daily Stormer posting on Friday the private information of eight of the activists, all women, accompanied by sexist and anti-Semitic commentary and imagery.

The activists have since received death threats, along with other members of the human rights organization protesting Spencer’s mother’s business.

The author of The Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin, thinks what he did is allllll good though, and has promised to publish an extended list:

“We will soon be releasing an extended contacts list, where you will be able to tell the business associates of these people what you think of their actions, and ask that they cut their business ties with the Jews engaged in this campaign of harassment and extortion against the Spencers,” Anglin wrote.

Collier Meyerson is a reporter at Fusion with a focus on race and politics. She lives in Brooklyn.