Why did Engadget think Alt-Right.com is a Russian propaganda site?

Last month, Engadget and Point ran an investigation that found Russian propaganda is still "a big problem for Reddit."  The piece highlighted three domains alleged to be Russian propaganda:  VeteransToday.com, SouthFront.org, and Alt-Right.com.  These sites were supposedly being spammed in dozens of different subreddits:    

As I read the Engadget article, I paid close attention to how the author, Benjamin Plackett, concluded that the domains were indeed Russian propaganda.

For SouthFront.org, he cited an academic paper by researcher Jessikka Aro.

For VeteransToday.com, he cited a 2017 report from Politico.

For Alt-Right.com, he cited an article on ThinkProgress by Casey Michel, titled: "Why did Columbus Nova register websites aimed at young white supremacists?"  Columbus Nova is a New York-based company with business ties to the Russian conglomerate Renova, which in turn is run by the Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg. 

Here's where things get murky:  In his article, Michel noted that Columbus Nova registered several domains with variations of the phrase "alt-right."  These included: Alt-Right.co, Altrights.co, and Alt-Right.com.  Michel also wrote:

There’s no evidence any material ever existed on the sites, and all of them return an error message.

That line caught my attention, because Alt-Right.com is clearly an active website.  Furthermore, the Internet Archive shows Alt-Right.com was active in 2017 and 2018, which is in contradiction with Michel's observation. 

So here's what I think happened:  Casey Michel made a typo.  (He probably meant to type Alt-Right.co or Alt-Rights.com.)  And Engadget took the typo at face value.

As far as I can tell, Alt-Right.com is a run-of-the-mill nationalist website.  The masthead lists "Brandon Martinez" and "Charlemagne" as the chief editors.  You can watch interviews on YouTube with them.  Brandon Martinez has an Amazon page, and his author bio says he's Canadian.  I don't see any obvious Russian connection.  Granted, it's not great if people on Reddit are sharing alt-right material, but that isn't the same thing as promoting Russian propaganda.  I think the distinction is important.

Unfortunately I don't have an active subscription on Whoisology right now, so I can't dive into the historical WHOIS records for Alt-Right.com.  (I'd want to check if it was ever registered to the e-mail address fintrater@columbusnova.com.)   The current WHOIS page for Alt-Right.com shows it's registered with a proxy service, but that record may have changed over time.    

I'm going to reach out to Engadget and see if they can fact-check whether Alt-Right.com was ever registered to Columbus Nova.  I'll update this post if they respond.