Markus Meechan is not accepting his hate speech conviction without a fight. The Scottish YouTuber, known online as Count Dankula, needed just two days to raise £118,366 via GoFundMe. That total, which comes out to about $164,925, will be used to fund Meechan’s appeal of a March court decision that found him guilty of a hate crime after he taught his dog how to perform a Nazi salute.
In a 2016 clip, which was viewed more than three million times before it was taken down from Meechan’s channel, the Scotsman taught his dog (a pug named Buddha) to perform the “heil” salute associated with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. Meechan also conditioned Buddha to react positively when he said the words “gas the Jews.”
A Scottish court didn’t find Meechan’s joke very funny. Sheriff Derek O’Carroll convicted the YouTuber and punished him with an £800 ($1,117) fine. After that sentence was announced, several YouTube stars, including Philip DeFranco and Jon Jafari, bemoaned the verdict and its implications regarding free speech.
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Meechan also took issue with the decision. With his appeal, he hopes to prevent the court from establishing a dangerous precedent. “This conviction will be used as an example to convict other people over the things they say and the jokes they make,” he wrote on his GoFundMe page, “it sets a standard where courts will be able to willfully ignore the context and intent of a persons words and actions in order to punish them and brand them as criminals.”
Thanks to the generosity of his supporters, his legal fees for that appeal are now covered. We’ll see if his conviction is overturned — but in the meantime, he might want to be careful what other gestures he teaches his dog.
