A developer who has helped members of the alt-right set up liability companies for their crowdfunding pages also registered a liability company for controversial ex-research fellow Dr Noah Carl for his planned lawsuit against St Edmund’s College, Varsity and Oxford student paper Cherwell can reveal.

Conner Douglass, a software developer, set up ‘Noah Carl Legal Fund LLC’ on 12th June, according to Texas records. Carl told Cherwell that Douglass had approached him to offer his web development services, which Carl accepted.

Douglass is the creator of MakerSupport, a payment platform designed to support the crowdfunding of members of alt-right and white supremacist groups, including several of those involved in the 2017 Neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia including Richard Spencer, as well as anti-feminist polemic and former YouTuber Carl Benjamin (who is now banned from the site). MakerSupport, which is no longer active, was set up in 2017 after members of the far-right began to be banned from mainstream crowdfunding sites such as Patreon.

Douglass did not respond to a request for comment.

Douglass is listed as the agent and CEO of MakerSupport LLC, and, more recently in April of this year the manager of Support Loomer LLC, which is linked to the crowdfunding page of far-right activist Laura Loomer. Loomer has been banned from sites including Facebook and Uber for her Islamophobic rhetoric: in separate Instagram posts this year, she has incited violence against U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and has called Islam a “cancer on society”.

Noah Carl, who was fired by St Edmund’s College in late April, announced last month that he plans to take legal action against the college for their handling of the controversy. He has so far raised over $81,000 from 1,046 donors, according to the support fund website, with some individual donors giving well over $5,000.

Varsity has contacted St. Edmund’s College for a comment on Carl’s planned lawsuit.

Carl added in his statement to Cherwell: “The web developers who built my crowd-fund build crowd-funds for individuals who would be at risk of having their campaigns shut down by activists if they used a traditional crowd-funding platform.

“I have no connection to the other individuals for whom they have built crowd-funds. All the money donated to my crowd-fund will go toward my legal costs, and any money left over will be donated to a free speech campaign of my choosing”, he continued.

The decision to fire Carl was made by the St. Edmund’s Governing Body following the conclusions of two investigations, one into the appointment process of Carl, and a second, the Herrtage Report, into his research and professional connections.

An open letter published last December and now signed by 586 academics and 874 students had called for an investigation into Carl. Cambridge also saw five months of protests by staff and students against Carl’s research fellowship, where protesters cited his papers published on a non-peer reviewed online site which included claims of links between race, IQ, and criminality.

The Herrtage report found that Carl’s body of work in the public domain “did not comply with established criteria for research ethics and integrity”, and that in the course of pursuing “problematic work”, he “had collaborated with a number of individuals who were known to hold extremist views”.