- PayPal suspended an account used by a notorious white supremacist.
- The man was using PayPal to sell copies of his book.
- The activity was brought to light by anti-fascist activists.
An avowed white supremacist will have to find another way to sell his racist tracts after PayPal suspended his account on Tuesday.
Billy Roper is a third-generation white supremacist, according to the Southern Poverty Law Centre; his father and grandfather were both members of the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC describes Roper, based in Arkansas, as “the uncensored voice of violent neo-Nazism.”
“I’m a biological racist,” he said in a 2003 essay published in a neo-Nazi newsletter, per the SPLC. “Every non-white on the planet has to become extinct,” he added in a 2005 radio interview. He also praised the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, admiring the “testicular fortitude” of al-Qaeda.
Though his views were well-documented, Roper was until this week selling his latest collection of hate speech, purporting to be a guide to surviving “the future breakup of America” into racial enclaves, on his own website, where he was accepting credit cards through PayPal — after Amazon and other online retailers had the 126-page screed removed from their platforms.
“We regularly assess activity against our Acceptable Use Policy and carefully review actions reported to us, and will discontinue our relationship with account holders who are found to violate our policy,” a company spokesperson said after Insider asked about his use of the service. PayPal’s policy states that users may not promote “hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance.”
Read the article by Charles Davis in Business Insider Australia.