Fanaticism, Racism, and Rage Online

Fanaticism, Racism, and Rage Online
AdamKlein
Fanaticism, Racism,
and Rage Online
Corrupting the Digital Sphere
AdamKlein
Department of Communication Studies
Pace University
New York City, NY, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-51423-9ISBN 978-3-319-51424-6(eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51424-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016963223
The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
Cover illustration: Cover image Stocksolutions / Alamy Stock Photo, Image Source /
Alamy Stock Photo
Cover design by Henry Petrides
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Allison, Vivian, and Sidney
Acknowledgments
There are several people who have helped to make this book possible,
from its earliest conception to the final page. First and foremost, I want
to thank my original editor-in-chief, my dad, who has been reading my
writing, and improving it, for 30 years. Few books are written without
the support, time, and participation of family members. My wife, Allison,
read and re-read pages, and kept her sense of humor as I delved deeper
into hate websites in our living room. My mother, who without fail could
always help me find the right word. I also want to acknowledge the valu-
able input that I was given along the way from Ephrem, Jillian, Liam,
and Marvin and Sherry. I am also grateful for the academic support and
encouraging research environment that I receive from my Communication
Studies colleagues at Pace University; Emilie Zaslow, Barry Morris, Satish
Kolluri, Mary Ann Murphy, Marcella Szablewicz, Seong Jae Min, and
Aditi Paul. Toward to the development and publication of this book, I
want to sincerely thank my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, Shaun Vigil, and
assistant editor, Glenn Ramirez, as well as my two reviewers whose col-
lective suggestions helped to advance this work. Additionally, I can trace
some of the earliest origins of this book to bits of papers that I wrote, and
courses taken, at Howard Universitys Mass Communication & Media
Studies Ph.D.Program. To that end, I wish to thank my teachers, Carolyn
Byerly, Anju Chaudhary, and Barbara Hines. Finally, I want to acknowl-
edge my grandparents, Cecilie and Joseph Klein, who were survivors of
the Auschwitz and Dachau concentrations camps. My grandmother docu-
mented her own experiences in the Holocaust in her memoir Sentenced to
Live. In it, Samuel Pisar begins the Preface by saying: Soon history will
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
speak with the impersonal voice of researchers, scholars and intellectuals;

at worst, with the malicious voice of demagogues, revisionists and falsi-
fiers. Those words, like my grandmothers story to follow, have always
stuck with me. While I now represent that voice of researchers, I have
tried to produce a study that is not impersonal in tone, or twice-removed
from its subject matter, but rather open and engaging in its attempt to
educate others about the modern-day face of bigotry.
Contents
1 Introduction1
2 From Bookshelves toDesktops15
3 Hate Speech intheInformation Age25
4 Virtual Pleasure Island41
5 The Websites57
6 Hate intheOpen87
7 Deceit by Design: ATwo-Part Analysis107
8 Preserving theDigital Sphere141
9 Conclusion159
Bibliography169
Index183
ix
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Race-related debates versus hate speech 8

Fig. 3.1 Model of information laundering in cyberspace 37
Fig. 5.1 Snapshot of web-traffic activity three-month average in 2015 59
xi
List of Tables
Table 5.1 Hate websites under review by average web traffic 61

Table 7.1Website features from the collective sample of 25 hate domains 112
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
May 21, 2015: Dylann Roof clicked save on his Facebook page and leaned
back to wait for his new profile to upload. His profile picture, a selfie
framed in front of a South Carolina swamp, was his latest contribution to
the digital world. This was the image that his social network would come
to know. For someone who had previously been a silent tourist online, he
had in a short time become a regular content creator. From Facebook,
Roof had become a frequent visitor to the political blog Council of
Conservative Citizens, the site that first awakened him to the belief that
something was very wrong with race in America. Elsewhere on the web,
Roofs digital footprint was much deeper.
Three months prior, he started his own website, LastRhodesian.com.
It was a reference to the short-lived African colonial regime, and the site
of a bloody race war started by white nationalists. Inside his site, Roof
shared other photos of himself standing in the swampy wilderness sporting
a black jacket, tight bowl haircut, and covered in symbols of the confed-
eracy. But more than pictures, he shared his mind on this page: I hate
with a passion the whole idea of the suburbs. To me it represents nothing
but scared White people running. Running because they are too weak,
scared, and brainwashed to fight. Why should we have to flee the cities we
created for the security of the suburbs?1 This was the Dylann Roof that
the world would soon meet.
At 11:17 pm, the upload was complete. He glanced over the new
profile. The 21-year-old boy in the picture glared back at him with
The Author(s) 2017 1

A. Klein, Fanaticism, Racism, and Rage Online,
DOI10.1007/978-3-319-51424-6_1
2 A. KLEIN
a scowl on his face and a prominent patch of the Rhodesian flag on

his jacketRace wars. Three weeks later, Roof would enter the
Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Charleston
with a 0.45-caliber handgun in his backpack. He would be greeted
by a reverend and a room of welcoming faces, beckoning him to join
them for Wednesday night Bible study. He sat down and listened to the
prayers, to the banter and solidarity of this group. Everyone was so
nice, he would later recall.2
Soon though, the other words came back to him. The ones that had
been spewing online for months; in the chat rooms, the comment forums
of the Daily Stormer, the news feed of the Council of Conservative
Citizens website that collected story after story of black on white crime,
and those of his own digital manifesto: We have no skinheads, no real
KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone
has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has
to be me.3 Roof reached into his backpack and drew the handgun. In
the next moments, he would open fire on the congregation that had wel-
comed him, killing nine African Americans.
The tragic shooting at the 200-year-old Emanuel AME Church in
2015 was not the first time that white power fanaticism has erupted into
a deadly shooting spree at the hands of one if its followers. In the last ten
years, there has been a violent strain of unhinged racists and white power
ideologues that have turned their words of hatred into lethal acts of terror.
In 2014, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported approximately 290,000
hate crimes occurring each year across the United States, illustrating a
relentless pattern of violence motivated by race, religion, sexual orienta-
tion, ethnicity, gender, and gender identity.4 From Benjamin Williams,
charged with setting fire to three synagogues and killing a gay couple in
California, to Benjamin Smith, whose shooting spree through the Mid-
west wounded eight minorities and claimed the lives of a Korean doctoral
student and African American basketball coach, to Dylann Roof whose
mass shooting at the Charleston church stole nine lives from the black
community including the pastor and civil rights leader Clementa Pinckney.
However, despite their differences in age, background, and motivation,
Roof, Williams, and Smith each utilized the same basic blueprint of mod-
ern hate movementscultural intolerance escalading into tirade, and hate
speech graduating into action. But these three racial fanatics were tied by
yet another common thread that both documented and united their paths
along a global movement: the Internet.
INTRODUCTION 3
Like Roof who visited the race-obsessed Council of Conservative

Citizens website before launching his own white nationalist homepage,
Smith and Williams also frequented the pages of white power domains such
as World Church of the Creator and Stormfront.5 These are the new Ku
Klux Klan (KKK) meeting halls, the latest Nuremberg rally town squares.
Only they do not take place in the backwoods and basements of American
subculture, and they are not advertised in the swastikas and shields of the
Third Reich. They are websites, globally accessible to everyone via the
World Wide Web. Over the past 15 years, racist and radical movements
have steadily relocated their central bases into the decentralized network
of cyberspace, from hardcore skinhead gangs to the neo-Nazi party faith-
ful. In this new virtual reality, Klan hoods have been replaced by a much
thicker cloth of anonymity, and the book-burning rallies of yesterday have
become todays white power music downloads, fanatical forums, and rac-
ist video blogs. But how did we get here so fast? When did the digital
culture of Americas racist underbelly become so proficient, professional,
and even popular?
In fact, the concept of mass-mediated hate speech is not a recent
phenomenon. The paths to organized bigotry, hate, and even genocide
have always been traced to a few embittered voices in a society brought
together in larger numbers by the leading tools of the media of that soci-
ety. History has revealed this in chillingly proficient ways. From Hitlers
1930s Nazi ferment that filled the pages of newspapers and bookshelves
across Germany calling for all Jews to be cast from society, to the Hutu
militia men in 1990s Rwanda, whose radio broadcasts prompted the mass
murder of their fellow Tutsi countrymen and women. The relationships
between hate speech and mass communication have steadily evolved
together hand in hand with every new generation, and the digital age is
no exception.
Since 1995 when the first hate website was launched, until the pres-
ent day, with over 30,000 websites, online forums, and social networks
currently operating across the web,6 the messages of intolerance and the
primary mode for disseminating them have all gravitated toward the web.
But unlike other forms of communication used to deliver hate culture to
the masses, the Internet has brought its own unique properties, which
not only transmit, but also transform, conceal, and seamlessly merge hate
speech into the mainstream of popular online culture. Most watchdog
agencies firmly agree that the Internet, as a medium for spreading hateful
ideas and objectives, has become the ideal electronic venue that seems
4 A. KLEIN
particularly suited for recruitment.7 This book will examine how the
Internet, its structure, properties, and, most of all, its digital culture, have
allowed a resurgence of hate groups to adapt all their movements into one
computer-screen-sized space that is shared by three billion users.8
Corrupting theDigital Sphere

Many studies in recent years have addressed the notable ways that the
Internet has democratized the public square.9 The Internet has often
been envisioned as the modern embodiment of Jrgen Habermas pub-
lic sphere,10 where citizens engage directly, albeit digitally, in participatory
democracyto bring about change. Here, the dominant structures of society
are challenged through unguarded arenas like the political blogosphere, as
new knowledge is co-created and shared through wikis and social networks.
In form, the web presents the ideal counterculture environment, in which
alternative forms of information, interests, as well as marginalized communi-
ties have flourished because of the endless and unrestricted digital landscape
that allows for these fields and groups to thrive.
But, at the same time, fewer studies have addressed the darker element
that has emerged from that same democratic spherethat is, the huge
resurgence and successful transformation of hate groups across the web.
Corrupting the Digital Sphere addresses the new media topic of hate in
the digital world, but more specifically, how its authors and participants
have managed to adapt their movements into the social networking, polit-
ical blogging, and information-providing contexts of the modern online
community.
Today, racist and radical movements are on the rise once again, fueled
by new social and political issues, but with familiar themes. Among
them, an immigration debate that centers largely on Hispanic immi-
grants in the United States and Muslim refugees in Europe, as well as
the LGBT human rights struggle that has recently seen historic advance-
ments toward social equality, and the growing clash between African
American communities and law enforcement over cases of police brutal-
ity. These are just some of the stories and issues by which todays hate
groups have framed familiar messages of blame, anger, fear, resistance,
uprising, and action.
Subsequently, hate group activity is more prevalent in society than it
has been in decades. In 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center, one
of the leading watchdogs of extremism in the United States, reported
INTRODUCTION 5
a staggering 998 active hate groups across the country.11 But as to the
underlying question of why this spike in hate group activity is emerging
seems to be, at least in part, addressed by the simultaneous expansion of
their online communities, ranging from culturally intolerant to outright
racist websites, and that correlation has been supported by many of the
hate groups themselves.12 Reno Wolf, founder of the white supremacist
National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP),
proclaimed, We get a lot of members off the Internet. In fact, we fig-
ured out that in the last couple of months, about 12% of those who visit
our website really follow through and join the organization.13 Of course,
as Conant observed, Its hard to conduct accurate surveys of racists, who
tend to exaggerate their strength and importance.14 At the same time,
a reality that cannot be overlooked is the sheer number of hate websites
which has increased by the tens of thousands in the last 5 years alone,15
along with traffic flow to these online communities, and so, a revitalized
and highly vocal hate movement is nonetheless burgeoning in the digital
world.
Beyond the growing community, the Internet has also brought its
own unique platforms of communication into the information age, such
as political blogs and social networks. Just as these public platforms have
affected not only the flow but also the form of traditional media content
(i.e., journalism), so too have they begun to reshape the appearance
and profile of hate speech in cyberspace. This book will further explore
how hate movements of all stripeswhite nationalist, anti-immigrant,
anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti-Muslim, anti-LGBT, black separatist,
anti-government militia, and many othershave managed to success-
fully infiltrate mainstream digital culture, through blogs, social net-
works, and even search engines, in order to build the greater illusion
of legitimacy and conventional support for their causes, while cloaking
their true nature.
In the following chapters we will journey to the outer fringes of cyber-
space, as well as to some of the most popular spaces of the web, to examine
the new media dynamics that have allowed hate to thrive online. They
are the digital infrastructure, which offers a framework for extremists
to coalesce with one another and with mainstream culture; the informa-
tion environment that provides the context of issues, news, politics, and
research for these movements to tap into; and the online culture in which
younger users are constantly communicating, sharing, learning, and devel-
oping, but through which recruitment can also be achieved.
6 A. KLEIN
Approaching Online Hate

So what is hate speech? As defined by McMasters, hate speech is that
which offends, threatens, or insults groups based on race, color, religion,
national origin, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or a number of other
traits.16 But when thought of as the strategic expression of hate commu-
nities in the digital world, hate speech should be understood as something
more than the ranting and raving of a few fanatics. It is, in fact, the techni-
cal craft of their trade. Collectively, online hate speech can be defined as
the strategic employment of words, images, and symbols, as well as links,
downloads, news threads, memes, conspiracy theories, political blogs, and
even pop culture, all of which have become the complex machinery of
effective inflammatory rhetoricthe kind that can recruit a following.
The Internet, with its own complex machinery of communication, has
provided the racist and radical movements with a new arsenal of possibili-
ties that, like any abuse of the media, must be investigated and properly
understood.
But pursuing an analysis of hate speech on the Internet can quickly lead
the reader into an unexpected maze of terminologies, politics, and cultural
debates. With every turn, there seems to be a new trapdoor to avoid or
fall through. For example, when does the debate over affirmative action or
immigration cross a line from acceptable debate into culture war? If I am
on the far right or the far left of an issue, does that make me a radical?
How far is too far? For a culture as diverse as American society, these ques-
tions of language are a part of life. This can be especially true when issues
of race, religion, or sexual orientation enter into the public domain of the
news media where designations of political correctness are often validated,
modified, or challenged.
The Internet, however, is a much less filtered outlet. The infinite public
square of discussion on the web has stripped the boundaries of political
correctness and speech restraints, and in some ways, this can be a good
thing. The web can provide us with a more candid view of sentiments
about race and racism than we would typically receive in our other com-
munications. So while the existence of online hate represents some of the
worst elements of digital culture, our exposure to it here can serve to teach
us about the face of real intolerance in the twenty-first century, while also
making us that much more aware when we encounter it online and in the
real world.
INTRODUCTION 7
Separating Web Debate fromDigital Hate

In this book, it is important to have a guide for approaching hate speech
as an identifiable discourse in society and digital culture. The line that one
crosses over from a politically heated debate into racist sentiment may be
ambiguous, but it is not absent. This author contends that a strong divide
does exist between hate speech and racial debate. Whereas some would
argue that racism exists at one end of the spectrum and healthy debate
at the other, these two forms of communication are separated entirely by
motive and emphasis. Those who engage in the debate over affirmative
action, for instance, are commonly motivated by political, social, or eco-
nomic issues, and as such, their contexts place emphasis on matters of jobs,
equality, or fairness. But those who engage in hate speech through the
affirmative action debate are only really motivated by the issue of identity,
and this is seen in their words that place an emphasis on a people rather
than the matter at hand. The most common example of this is the supe-
riority/inferiority discourse that is present in most of these faux-political
contexts.
When we separate debate and hate speech by their respective motives,
public interest, and racial identity, it becomes clear that there is not a solid
spectrum of communication in all matters of identity, but rather two sepa-
rate lines, with debate on one side, and hate on the other. In the United
States, however, both forms of expression are protected under the same
legal umbrella of the constitution. As we will examine in a later chapter,
the First Amendment does not discriminate between a spectrum of debate
and the spectrum of hate on the Internet. However, in this book, there
is an important value in noting not only the separation between the two
forms of racial communication, but more importantly, the way that hate
websites borrow from the arguments and appearance of those closest to
them on the debate side (see Fig. 1.1). In fact, that is their precise strategy.
In this way, we see a complex dilemma in defining online hate that
looks and behaves like an everyday political blog or social network. Using
the issue of American immigration as an example, at its core this debate
is really about citizenship, the economy, and national security, with sev-
eral perspectives emerging on either side of these arguments. Occasionally,
some on the political right have infused the additional theme of nation-
alism into their case against immigration, which is not a form of hate
speech, but which can be employed to bolster those that are, such as anti-
Hispanic groups whose websites claim that Hispanic culture threatens
8 A. KLEIN
Spectrum of Debate Spectrum of Hate

Illegal immigration is a problem Hispanics are unwelcome here
Affirmative action is unfair Blacks are looking for a handout
Fig. 1.1 Race-related debates versus hate speech
white American society. The fact that concepts of nationalism and culture
war exist on opposite plains of our working definitions of digital debate
and hate is not as significant as the reality that they are only separated by a
very thin line. The same narrow divide exists within movements on the far
left as well, such as black separatist websites that express sweeping general-
izations about white people, or the anti-religious movements whose blogs
tend to vilify all of Judeo-Christian America. Each of these socialpolitical
expressions can easily fuel the larger fire of cultural intolerance building in
American society regardless of whether or not that is their intent.
In this book, some of the current contexts in which we will see hate
websites exploiting that gray area between politics and radicalism include
the issues of racial profiling in America, immigration and American citi-
zenship, the Presidents nationality, same-sex marriage, terrorist attacks,
the Syrian refugee crisis, the IsraeliPalestinian conflict, and even kitchen
table issues like religious holidays, music culture, and sports. Each of
these themes can carry an element of cultural identity (some more than
others), which the racist and radical movements have keenly learned to
utilize as subtext on their sites. It becomes clear that the new voice of hate
speech is now being spoken in the language of our popular culture and
politics, and not the actual racist belief system that lies beneath.
Chapter 2 will begin by exploring the origins of the relationship between
media, information, and hate speechan unlikely union that has steadily
evolved over time through culture wars, propaganda, and the innovations
of media technology. The chapter will trace the deliberate transformation
of hate speech into an informational form from books to electronic media,
and into the computer age. Beyond historical origins, we will also consider
some of the concepts and strategies of what Lee and Lee called the fine
art of propaganda,17 beginning with the nature of the message.
INTRODUCTION 9
Chapter 3 will present a theoretical foundation that illustrates how the

Internets unique properties allow subversive social movements to quietly
legitimize their causes through a borrowed network of associations. My
theory of information laundering will demonstrate how the constructs
of cyberspaceprimarily search engines, political blogs, and social net-
workscan unwittingly take an illegitimate currency, such as hate speech,
and transform it into a loose form of web-based knowledge. The section
will further explore how an online information seeker can unknowingly
find their way into hate websites that, as a later chapter will show, have
been designed to appear as educational, political, scientific, and even spiri-
tual in nature.
Chapter 4 will then explore some of the structural, legal, and social
concerns that are central to the issue of online hate speech. Among them,
we will focus on the challenges of the absolute free speech environment of
the Internet. This chapter is meant to encourage readers to think critically
about the Internets structure, as we do in other forms of media literacy,
in order to locate the factors that allow virulent discourse to flourish on
the web. In addition to hate speech, we explore the structural features
that benefit hate websites, such as the anonymity factor of the web, its
decentralized structure, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) system, and
contradictions in global content standards.
Chapter 5 brings readers into the world of 25 of the leading hate web-
sites operating online today. Like the Internet itself, the network of online
extremism is vast. In this chapter, insights into a range of hate URLs,
and the ideologies they represent, will help to shed light on this growing
culture. The websites are presented along a categorical spectrum, begin-
ning with the most outspoken self-identifying white supremacist sites, to
the less obvious faux-social networks and community forums, to the faux-
information and research websites, to finally a few domains considered by
some to be mainstream political organizations, but whose pages com-
monly publish or host racist content. This chapter also takes a closer look
at a primary function of these websites: recruitment of the Net Generation.
As Matthew Hale, founder of the white supremacist Creativity Alliance
website, states, We want to have the elite. We are striving for that, focus-
ing on winning the best and the brightest of the young generation.18 We
will examine this process of attracting the best and brightest of the Net
Generation by exposing some of the ways that these communities have
begun to mimic online youth culture within their own sites that now offer
social networks, music, games, dating, and other forms of self-expression.
10 A. KLEIN
From the outer fringes, Chapter 6 focuses on racist and radical dis-
course that has progressively surfaced in the mainstream Internet, within
websites like Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube, where contributors are less
inhibited to express themselves in ways they never would in the real world.
Whether it is a political blog that takes on a mob-like mentality, or a gam-
ing community that entertains racist rants, cultural intolerance of this sort
is especially alarming because it intermixes with the traditional content,
and, in websites like YouTube, has the potential to go viral and inspire
imitations. We will examine two of the most disturbing trends to arise
from this phenomenon. The first is the increased use of YouTube and
Facebook as platforms for lone fanatics who post their racist manifestos
and final tirades before committing their deadly acts. Second, we will look
at the recruitment function of social media outlets by terrorist organiza-
tions, such as ISIS, which used YouTube to release its promotional video
Flames of War that has since received several hundred thousand views.
Chapter 7 shifts the focus inward to examine the strategic design and
common discourses found in todays hate websites. Through content and
frame analysis, the research will peel back the new media presentation and
coded language of digital hate culture as we address two underlying ques-
tions. First, how have hate websites adapted their themes into the infor-
mation/social networking culture of the Internet? This two-part chapter
begins by looking at how the authors and organizations behind these
websites have deceptively designed their homepages and content offerings
to generate the inviting air of legitimacy. Then, the chapter will exam-
ine a second fundamental question. How have the hate websites under
investigation framed the modern messages of intolerance? We will dig into
the predominant claims and encoded language that surfaced in the news
articles and forums of these sites, and expose six common hate narratives.
Chapter 8 will come full circle, returning to the other side of the demo-
cratic sphere where some organizations have built their own web com-
munities for the purposes of monitoring online hate and promoting a
communication of tolerance. The chapter highlights the ways that educa-
tors, law enforcement, and non-profit watchdog agencies are working to
combat the proliferation of racist and radical movements on the Internet.
Their initiatives speak to the power of citizen groups that use the same
digital space to employ anti-hate campaigns and measures to promote a
new digital literacy as their weapons against racism. We will also highlight
the important role that the Net Generation must play in learning to navi-
gate this digital environment and confront online hate going forward. As
INTRODUCTION 11
Steele asserted, The best remedy for hate speech is more speech. And the
World Wide Web, which can be expanded infinitely, offers anyone who
wishes to set up opposing viewpoints the opportunity to do so.19
Conclusion
Throughout history, the most effective hateful propagandawhat many
media scholars commonly deemed the hypodermic needle of mass com-
municationhas been circulated through societys most trusted media
and information sectors, and crafted in cultural discourse that is intended
to reach mainstream audiences. Whillock observed how, Rather than
seeking to win adherence through superior reasoning, hate speech seeks to
move an audience by creating a symbolic code for violence.20 She called
these rhetorical codes hate appeals in which preexisting cultural and
historical stereotypes are tapped into through mainstream vehicles such
as information and politics, and even humor. The effect of this rhetorical
strategy is to denigrate what Allport referred to as the designated out-
group of society in a way that simultaneously appeals to the majoritys
in-group mentalities,21 thereby advancing the second goal, to create a
cultural divide.
The popular newspapers of 1930s Nazi Germany spoke directly to this
approach by consistently writing of a great Aryan heritage comprised of
blonde hair and blue-eyed Germans who were honest and proud, while,
at the same time, reporting on Jewish fraud and deception in the business
and academic fields. Decoded, these sentiments played out perfectly with
a struggling society to convey the idea that there were two Germanys,
and that Jews were not part of the great future Aryan Fatherland, but
were rather the people behind a deep conspiracy to control it. By the late
1930s, most German citizens did nothing when their Jewish neighbors
were being taken from their houses and thrown into cattle cars to destina-
tions unknown, but suspected.
As the grandson of two Holocaust survivors of the Auschwitz and
Dachau concentration camps, my study of online hate speech has ema-
nated from a desire to pursue the question of how the fever of racist senti-
ment can so thoroughly sweep over a civilized society as it did in 1930s
Germany and other parts of Europe.22 Any research of the Holocaust will
reveal that the systematic removal of Jews from society did not begin with
the national march of anti-Semitic rallies through Nuremberg or the riots
of Kristallnacht. It began in the popular editorials of German newspapers
12 A. KLEIN
like Der Sturmer and the political cartoons that depicted mainstream vili-
fications of the Jews. It began in the fringe media. These were the Nazis
greatest allies for turning the whole of German society against an entire
people who had lived peacefully within their borders for centuries.
Understanding what constitutes hate speech today requires recogniz-
ing the same elements that were fundamental to the Nazis formula: the
courier, the message, and the medium. As we will soon see, the couriers of
modern hate are highly organized communities and individuals who are as
multigenerational as they are media-savvy. While some may identify them-
selves as supremacists and others as nationalists, their message is one
and the same, intolerance. Online, the myriad languages of bigotry have
begun to converge into mutually beneficial relationships, such that the
lines that once separated racism from political extremism, or hate speech
from social commentary, are increasingly more difficult to distinguish.
Prior to the Internet, fringe groups had largely become insignificant
in American society, relying mostly on the more ineffective currencies
of mass media (pamphlets, self-published books, and local radio) to dis-
seminate their ideologies. However, for media-savvy racist subcultures,
the niche-driven communities of the World Wide Web would present a
unique opportunity to relocate their movements from out of the spotlight
of society, and into the anonymous and unguarded ether of the Internet.
The new media space, which has seen countless social movements flour-
ish in its global network, has afforded hate organizations the same ability
to reintroduce and redefine themselves as equal residing members of the
interconnected digital culture.
Notes
1. Heres What Appears to be Dylann Roofs Racist Manifesto,
Mother Jones, last modified June 20, 2015, http://www.mother-
jones.com/politics/2015/06/alleged-charleston-shooter-dylann-
roof-manifesto-racist
2. Daniel Arkin and Erik Ortiz, Dylann Roof Almost Didnt Go
Through With Charleston Shooting, NBC News, last modified
June 19, 2015, http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/charleston-
church-shooting/dylann-roof-almost-didnt-go-through-charleston-
church-shooting-n378341
3. Heres What Appears.
INTRODUCTION 13
4. Meagan Wilson, Hate Crime Victimization (Washington, DC:

Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2014), accessed July 20, 2015, http://
www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4905
5. Anti-Defamation League, Poisoning the Web: Hatred Online (New
York: ADL Publication, 2001).
6. District Attorney Vance and Rabbi Abraham Cooper Announce
the Simon Wiesenthal Centers Report on Digital Terrorism and
Hate, last modified May 1, 2014, http://www.wiesenthal.com/
site/apps/nlnet/content.aspx?c=lsKWLbPJLnF&b=8776547
&ct=13928897
7. Brentin Mock, Neo-Nazi Groups Share Hate via YouTube,
Southern Poverty Law Center, last modified April 20, 2007,
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-r eport/
2007/neo-nazi-groups-share-hate-youtube
8. Internet Used by 3.2 Billion People in 2015, BBC News, last
modified May 26, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/
technology-32884867
9. See Guy T. Hoskins, Meet the Habermasses: Charting the
Emergence of a Social Media-Enabled Public Sphere in New
Democracies, International Journal of Technology, Knowledge &
Society 9, no. 4 (2013): 2539; Jos van Dijck, Facebook as a
Tool for Producing Sociality and Connectivity, Television & New
Media 13, no. 2 (2012): 160176; Jrgen Gerhards and Mike
S.Schfer, Is the Internet a Better Public Sphere? Comparing Old
and New Media in the USA and Germany, New Media & Society
12, no. 1 (2010): 143160; Lincoln Dahlberg, The Internet and
Democratic Discourse: Exploring the Prospects of Online
Deliberative Forums Extending the Public Sphere, Information,
Communication & Society 4, no. 4 (2001): 615633.
10. Jrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans.
Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1989).
11. Niraj Chokshi, The Year of Enormous Rage: Number of Hate
Groups Rose by 14 Percent in 2015, Washington Post, last modi-
fied February 17, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/
news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/02/17/hate-groups-rose-14-
percent-last-year-the-first-increase-since-2010/?tid=sm_tw
14 A. KLEIN
12. Pete Simi and Robert Futrell, Cyberculture and the Endurance of
White Power Activism, Journal of Political and Military Sociology
34, no. 1 (2006): 115.
13. Carol Swain and Russell Nieli, Contemporary Voices of White

Nationalism in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 124.
14. Eve Conant, Rebranding Hate in the Age of Obama, Newsweek,
May 4, 2009.
15. In 2010, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a group which tracks racial
extremism worldwide, unveiled its annual Digital Terrorism &
Hate Report that documented over 8000 active hate and terrorist
websites. In 2015, the same report now tracks over 30,000 hate
sites, blogs, and social networks that are now operating across the
web.
16. Paul K.McMasters, Must a Civil Society Be a Censored Society?
Human Rights: Journal of the Section of Individual Rights &
Responsibilities 26, no. 4 (1999), 8.
17. Alfred C.Lee and Elizabeth B.Lee, The Fine Art of Propaganda
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., Inc., 1939).
18. Swain and Nieli, Contemporary, 124.
19. Shari Steele, Taking a Byte Out of the First Amendment, Human
Rights: Journal of the Section of Individual Rights & Responsibilities
23, no. 2 (1996): 14.
20. Rita Whillock, The Use of Hate as a Stratagem for Achieving
Political and Social Goals, in Hate Speech, ed. Rita Whillock etal.
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995), 52.
21. Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Reading, MA: Addison-
Wesley Publishing Company, 1954), 1725.
22. My grandparents, Joe and Cecilie, were among the only survivors
of their families after the Holocaust. By chance, they were reunited
in Prague a few weeks after being liberated from separate concen-
tration camps. They married shortly thereafter.
CHAPTER 2
From Bookshelves toDesktops
When the Protocols of the Elders of Zion hit bookstands in Russia, its
pages circulated swiftly through the streets and halls of society. Within
a few years, the book rose in readership and distinction across much
of Western Europe where it was heralded in major newspapers such as
the Times of London and Morning Post. Even more significant than the
Protocols popularity on local bookshelves was its circulation in the lead-
ing libraries of Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, and NewYork where it was not only
treated as a piece of literature, but as an informational artifact come to
light. In this recently discovered book laid the proof of a Jewish con-
spiracy to take over the world, unearthed and exposed for all to read.
It was all there in black and white and narrated form, inscribed from
the hands of Jewish elders who had attended a secret meeting of the
Zionist Congress where this plot had been sown and recorded. That
plot: To destroy empires and annihilate peoples, the Jews will hatch
revolutions.1
There was only one problem with this text, aside from the arduous task
of translating its millions of copies around the world in Russian, English,
Arabic, and every European language. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
was a fake. A complete forgery aimed at linking the evils of democracy
and liberalism with an already familiar enemy, the Jews, the Protocols put
into false words what a few anti-Semites had dreamed up using plagia-
rized works that were not even about the Jews. The Protocols was even-

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-51424-6_2
16 A. KLEIN
tually proven a forgery when its contents were traced, almost verbatim,
to an obscure French text that had been written over 30 years prior to
its publication. However, the actual revelation of this propaganda is not
as significant as the sheer complexity of its method, achieved through
the crafting of literature, manipulation of print industries, archiving of
books, and exploitation of libraries, newspapers, and scholars. Even more
astounding than this sophisticated heist of the media is the time in which
it occurredat the end of the 1800s.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is one of the earliest examples of racial
intolerance disguised in the form of a discovered piece of information.
Written in 1897 at the instruction of members of the Russian secret police
who were intent on quelling the Czars interest in democracy and mod-
ernism, the Protocols set out to present the institutions of liberalism as
the very tools by which Jews were going to bring down world civilizations,
like Russia. According to Segel, liberal ideas like equality of all citizens
before the law, freedom of conscience and religion, freedom of the press,
compulsory education, universal suffrage [and] constitutional govern-
ment were beginning to threaten the autocracy in Russia at the turn of
the century when the staged discovery of the Protocols helped to subdue
that movement by casting its principles as the ploy of a Jewish conspiracy.2
So powerful is this method of hate speech when done effectively that it
can remain active in the annals of bigoted conspiracy theorists even after
its refutation, and later reemerge with renewed vigor in the public domain
as a forgotten fact. Similar examples of this phenomenon include the select
misinterpretation of Charles Darwins Theory of Evolution, used as genu-
ine proof that black men were somehow less evolved than whites, or the
infamous blood libel that for centuries maintained that Jews were using
the blood of Christian children for their rituals. Each of these lingering
examples managed to sustain their forged legitimacy because they were
born in the trusted circles of the scholarship of their time, namely, science
and the church, respectively.
Such was also the case with the Protocols, which was not only supported
by the likes of a young Winston Churchill, but also propagated regularly by
American auto tycoon Henry Ford in his Dearborn Independent that ran
articles like, The International Jew, The Worlds Problem.3 Ultimately,
the counterfeit Zionist document would become a major influence on
Adolf Hitlers scholastic beginnings as referenced in his book Mein Kampf
and the devastating anti-Semitic campaign to follow. Sixty years after the
Holocaust, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is still being sold in book-
FROM BOOKSHELVES TODESKTOPS 17
stores around the globe, from the Far East to the Middle East and in
countless Western cities like Paris, Venice, Mexico City, San Diego, and
New Orleans.4
The success of this, one of the oldest pieces of mediated propaganda
in modern history, can only be understood by examining the elements,
practices, and theories behind an unlikely pairing in the field of mass
communications: information and hate speech. When put together, the
communicative compound of racist propaganda can prove even more
damaging than outright bigotry, which is often recognized as such and
quickly disregarded by most everyday citizens. Information-based pro-
paganda, however, does not even need to find expression beneath the
radar of civil society. In fact, the actual intent of this form of hate speech
is to be discovered and validated on an intellectual ground, particularly
by way of the media where, within reputable outlets such as newspa-
pers, books, and journals, racist ideas can be transformed into public
knowledge.
The Ministry forPublic Enlightenment

andPropaganda
The practice of sowing hateful bigotry into legitimate sources of infor-

mation became something of a sinister art form in the twentieth century
when mass media itself became a penetrating force in the daily lives of
all citizens, and radical movements learned to wield the power of mass
communication. Hitler well understood the power of informational media
when he formed the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.
This central division of the Third Reich became the essential tool of Nazi
fanaticism as it systematically used media propaganda in horrific, yet
groundbreaking ways. The Ministry was divided into seven departments
intended to oversee every sphere of German culture: Literature, news
media, radio, theatre, music, visual arts, cinema.5 By the mid-1930s, the
very same German media that ushered in the latest films and music from
around the world was also subtly ushering in the winds of intolerance, fol-
lowed by a national fervor of anti-Semitism introduced via blatant media
bias, and not-so-blatant propaganda. Newspapers like Der Sturmer, anti-
Semitic cartoons, billboards, and even childrens books like The Poison
Mushroom, depicting the Jews as spreading fungi, were not simply forms
of cultural expression, but the quiet pulse of a nation beating with new
themes of intolerance for the Jews.6
18 A. KLEIN
Hitler also understood and used the mobilizing power of household

media devices, rather than just relying on traditional political billboards,
rallies, and speeches. The radio became the primary means for uniting
Germany under one Nazi banner:
The Nazis were aware that the radio was the most efficient propaganda
vehicle. Thus, inexpensive radio sets (peoples receivers) were sold
or distributed without cost. Between 1933 and 1941, the proportion of
German families owning a radio rose from 25% to 65%.7
Once the Nazis had gained firm control of the media infrastructure of
Germany, they began harnessing the social dependency on that system by
way of a steady flow of alarming news about the Jews. Herf cites several
of the methods by which the Ministry, led by Hitlers master propagan-
dist, Joseph Goebbels, was able to craft an intellectually based case for
socially accepted anti-Semitism. They included inundating press offices
with Word of Day directives (anti-Jewish talking points) to fill the pages
of daily newspapers, crafting pseudopsychology papers to bolster scien-
tific claims about the inferiority of Jews, blacks, gypsies, homosexuals, and
other undesirables, and doctoring official statistics of the Third Reich to
paint a picture of a supposed Jewish domination of German professional
life.8 All of these fallacies were carefully supported by seemingly legiti-
mate sources, from newly appointed university professors to emerging
anti-Semitic think tanks and countless intellectual journals suddenly dedi-
cated to addressing the single academic conundrum, Die Judenfrage (The
Jewish Question). And while the new scholars of Nazism were imposing
the Jewish Question upon all of German society, the Ministry of Public
Enlightenment was simultaneously working around the clock to supply
them with the answers.
For everyday German citizens, most of the titles upon their local news-
stands appeared as they were before the media takeover, but now the
headlines had changedand so had their message. Within every news
story about the Jews of Germany or greater Europe, a strong binary dis-
course was present. The theme of us versus them was interlaced into the
subtext of national news items, suggesting to all non-Jewish readers that
they had to be on either one side of this equation or the other. And who
was going to argue with the new science of race, or the rediscovered his-
tory of Aryan greatness, or the facts that proved the existence of a Jewish
conspiracy, or the mob that reinforced it all?
White Nationalists, Intellectual Media

andPolitics
For those who went on to study the effects of propaganda, both schol-
ars and racists alike, much was learned from the tactics of the Ministry
of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Behavioral science research
on individual persuasion shifted after World War II to the specialized
study of propaganda and mass persuasion. Sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld of
Columbia Universitys Bureau of Applied Social Research dedicated much
of his groundbreaking work in mass communication toward exploring the
nature and impact of wartime propaganda, with particular focus on radio.9
Ensuing studies by Speier and Otis (1944) examined the nature of Nazi
radio propaganda, noting how it was often used as substitute for express-
ing violence prior to actual warfare.10
In the United States, researchers like Alfred Lee and Elizabeth Lee of
the newly established U.S. Institute for Propaganda Analysis were also
able to identify the potent techniques of mass persuasion.11 Among them,
three practicesthe testimonial, transfer, and card stacking techniques
reflected the false-information-providing role of propaganda that would
become refined and mastered by new white supremacists in the coming
years. The testimonial method relied upon the opinions of respected peo-
ple to shape an audience, while transfer technique carried the authority,
sanction and prestige of something respected and revered, and lastly, card
stacking involved the selection and use of facts or falsehoods, illustrations
or distractions in order to give the best or the worst possible case.12
Collectively, these techniques borrow the opinions, authority, and pres-
tige of respected citizens and institutions of society, and present select
interpretations of their ideas in order to produce a false truthin this
case about race. In fact, these strategies have been employed by white
power ideologues for decades. Beginning with Willis Carto, one of the
earliest white nationalists to surface in the Civil Rights era, the gradual
transformation of hate speech, from the burning cross to the published
word, would continue all the way on to Donald Black and the birth of
Stormfront.orgthe first hate website.
Carto started his campaign in 1955 with a faux-political magazine called
Right: The Journal of Forward-Looking American Nationalism. According
to Zeskind, Willis Carto often wrote under the chosen pseudonym of
E.L.Anderson, Ph.D., while he contended that, Western Civilization
had entered a period of decline as a result of a polluted gene pool.13
20 A. KLEIN
Specifically, Carto was referring to African Americans, who, he often sug-

gested, might ultimately kill the American (white) culture. Carto cre-
ated his own testimonial device in the Right by inventing the academic
voice, E.L.Anderson, Ph.D., to shape the opinions of his readers. Later,
Carto formed an anti-minority political interest group called the Liberty
Lobby that became loosely associated with the Republican Party. In this
way, Carto also attempted to transfer the authority and prestige of an
American political party to strengthen his own initiative. While Carto was
only briefly successful in his mainstream political pursuits, he did build a
legacy of devout white nationalists, like himself, as well as a publishing
company called the Noontide Press, which later became, and is still today,
dedicated to producing Holocaust denial literature. His objective to fight
American multiculturalism on intellectual grounds would ultimately be
followed by others.
William Pierce was another white nationalist who made a major impact
on the scene through literature when he published The Turner Diaries
in 1978, a novel depicting a domestic race war on American soil. Unlike
Carto, however, Pierces intellectual background was not invented and he
used his academic legitimacy to propel his standing among the neo-Nazi
movement that was rebuilding in the United States and Europe in the
1970s. Pierce earned his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Colorado
and later taught at Oregon State University until he became a senior
research scientist for an aerospace firm.14 However, the career that Pierce
ultimately settled on was as head of the National Alliance, an international
neo-Nazi organization. There, according to Swain and Nieli, Pierce would
invent new means for spreading his underlying view that nonwhites and
Jews constitute an alien racial presence in America.15
Key to Pierces method was his ability to craft racist literature like The
Turner Diaries, or his later work, Hunter, which depicts the assassina-
tion of interracial couples and Jews.16 Although these were only works of
fiction, the message behind their content was clear: racial war. Through
published literature, Pierce continued Cartos strategy of legitimizing
their cause along an intellectual line. The Turner Diaries, in particular, had
wild success among the racist right in Europe where it was translated
into French and German, as well as in the United States, where it has
achieved a cult status among supremacists and militia groups alike. The
popular book opens with a band of white revolutionaries using a home-
made fertilizer bomb to blow up a federal building. The Turner Diaries
has been cited as the inspirational text of many racist and anti-government
r adicals, including Timothy McVeigh.17 In 1995, McVeigh blew up a fed-

eral building in Oklahoma City using a homemade fertilizer bomb, killing
168 people.
If anyone followed the lessons of Pierces Turner Diaries and Cartos
Liberty Lobby, it was David Duke. Duke, too, understood early on that
published prowess and political standing were the keys to transfer-
ring legitimacy to the white nationalist movement in America. He sought
and obtained both. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has called David
Duke perhaps Americas most well-known racist and anti-Semite.18
Duke began his career in hate much like his predecessors, circulating
newsletters like The Racialist on college campuses. However, Duke would
make a much larger impact on the white nationalist scene as the founder,
and later Grand Wizard, of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (a faction of
the KKK) where he published several white supremacist works like The
Crusader. More importantly, Duke was very instrumental in the white
power movements resurgence in the 1970s because, according to the
ADL, he was one of the first neo-Nazi and Klan leaders to stop the use
of Nazi and Klan regalia and rituals, as well as other traditional displays of
race hatred, and to cultivate media attention. Dukes goal was to present
himself as a respectable racist, and the white nationalist movement to
which he belonged, as a legitimate cause.
So successful was Duke in juxtaposing the themes of white supremacy
with political race issues, like affirmative action, that he gained a large
mainstream following in his home state of Louisiana. In 1989, Dukes
ambition to evolve white nationalism into a common cause of the people
was realized when he was elected the Republican State Representative of
Louisiana. According to Swain and Nieli, David Dukes victory stunned
the Republican political establishment, from President George Bush
on down.19 Nevertheless, Duke, the recognized racist and anti-Semite,
had earned himself and the white power movement a genuine seat at the
table of American politics. Duke would later lose other political elections,
including a bid for Republic Party presidential candidate in 1992, but he
would never forget his strategic origins. Today, Duke has returned to the
intellectual route, publishing in several formats and speaking at numer-
ous academic conferences around the world on issues of personal inter-
est to him like Holocaust denial. However, with regard to the future of
white nationalism, Dukes lasting legacy may not rest at his own podium,
but rather at the computer-savvy hands of his longtime protg, Don
Black.
22 A. KLEIN
Into theComputer Age andtheBeginnings

ofDigital Hate Culture
Don Black started his career as a white nationalist in Alabama following

in the footsteps of William Pierce. According to Zeskind, Black joined the
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1975 under the new tutelage of David
Duke.20 He ascended rapidly in Klan stature to become a Grand Dragon
(state leader), and later, replaced his mentor David Duke as the Grand
Wizard of the KKK (national director). But it was not until Don Black
went to prison that he would realize his true potential as a modern voice
for hate. Swain and Nieli chronicle the event in 1981 when Black and
other Klan members were arrested in a bizarre plot to invade the tiny
Caribbean nation of Dominica in support of anticommunist forces on the
island.21 Black was sent to a Texas federal penitentiary where he made
good use of his time thereBlack first learned how to program computers
in federal prison.
Upon his release, Black returned to David Dukes side and the move-
ment to normalize the face of white nationalism, but he never stopped
experimenting with the home desktop computer. Like other social move-
ments in the 1990s, Don Black recognized that the future of his own
cause was somehow linked to this new computer technology. In 1995,
Black launched the first white nationalist website Stormfront.org from his
Florida home. In his own words, he recalls:
It was with the exponential growth of the Internet, which began, I think,
in 94 or 95, that we first had the opportunity to reach potentially mil-
lions of people with our point of view. These are people who, for the
most part, have never attended one of our meetings or subscribed to
any of our publications. We were for the first time able to reach a broad
audience.22
And with that broad audience, Stormfront and the Internet carried the
white power movement onto a new plain of public access. It was not long
before underground books like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and The
Turner Diaries began to resurface on the Web, while other white power
publishers gained an immediate foothold by building their own websites
and links to existing domains like Stormfront. In this way, the road to
legitimizing hate had come full circle. What began with a transparent sys-
tem of racist propaganda had reinvented itself along a 50-year pathway
through college campuses and publishing houses, faux-news journals and

political lobbies, to full party status and elected legitimacy, into, at last, a
public information platform.
Over time, the new context of digital culture allowed other racist and
radical movements to redefine themselves with a new identity of sorts, one
that shares not only the same spaces of the media (i.e., books and websites)
as legitimate information sources, but also similar themes (i.e., politics and
social issues). Of course, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, there is only
one problem with the new legitimatized identity of white nationalism. It
is only an illusionan alias. Digital racism, repackaged as knowledge, is
still racism. But as we will soon see, that detail makes little difference to
hate groups, which can benefit from the evolving digital space either way.
In the next section, we will show exactly how the Internet has provided
modern hate movements a new dimension for delivering their message to
mass audiences. In the late 1990s, research on hate activity online would
have been both premature and highly inconclusive. Even though websites
like Stormfront were quickly followed by other websites, the Internet had
not yet taken full shape and little could be inferred, let alone understood,
about where the new media would take extremist cultures. However, in
many ways, we have now seen how 20 years of the Internets development
has impacted racist and radical movements. As such, it is appropriate at
this point to take a step forward toward understanding how today the hate
communities have adapted themselves into the digital world. In the next
chapter, we begin by positing a new theory to explain what the Internet
has done to transform the meaning of information, and what that, in turn,
has done for hate speech.
Notes
1. Binjamin W.Segel, A Lie and a Libel: The History of the Protocols of
the Elders of Zion (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press,
1995), 56.
2. Ibid., 57.
3. Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World
War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2006), 81.
4. Will Eisner, The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 2005).
24 A. KLEIN
5. John Dornberg, Munich 1923: The Story of Hitlers First Grab for
Power (New York, NY: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1982), 4955.
6. Louis L.Snyder, Encyclopedia of the Third Reich (New York, NY:
Paragon House, 1989), 429430.
7. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Der Sturmer,
USHMM Propaganda Collection: Gift of the Museum fur
Deutsche Geschichte, Berlin.
8. Herf, The Jewish Enemy, 36.
9. Paul F.Lazarsfeld, Radio and the Printed Page: An Introduction to
the Study of Radio and Its Role in the Communication of Ideas
(New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1940).
10. Hans Speier and Margaret Otis, German Radio Propaganda in
France during the Battle of France, in Radio Research, 19421943,
ed. Paul Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton (New York: Duell, Sloan,
and Pearce, 1944), 208247.
11. Alfred C.Lee and Elizabeth B.Lee, The Fine Art of Propaganda
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., Inc., 1939).
12. Karen S. Johnson-Cartee and Gary Copeland, Strategic Political
Communication: Rethinking Social Influence, Persuasion, and
Propaganda (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,
2003), 167.
13. Leonard Zeskind, Blood and Politics: The History of the White
Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).

2003), 260261.
15. Ibid., 261.
16. Ibid., 260.
17. Jo Thomas, Behind a Book that Inspired McVeigh, last modified
June 9, 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/09/us/
behind-a-book-that-inspired-mcveigh.html
18. David Duke, last modified August 1, 2009, http://www.adl.
org/learn/ext_us/david_duke/default.asp
20. Zeskind, Blood and Politics, 94.
22. Ibid., 155.
CHAPTER 3
Hate Speech intheInformation Age
If we pause to recall a time not so long ago when trusted information was
equated with tattered books on library bookshelves and scholarly journals,
then it would seem strange that new media could alter that valued system
so abruptly. But by 2003, the Internet had become the most important
source of information for more than 70% of Americans, ranking higher
than books, newspapers, television, and radio, according to a University
of California, Los Angeles Internet Report.1 Shenk characterized online
information as a major contributing factor to what he called societys grow-
ing problem of data smog. He noted, Information overload has surely
been accelerated and highlighted by the popularization of the Internet.2
But even a greater problem than the sheer quantity of data is the nature
and quality of what constitutes public information on the Internet today,
and it is that ambiguity of factual content that has, more than any other
factor, paved the way for hate groups ascendancy onto the mainstream
information stage.
Online, informational content can include everything from a wealth of
scholarly databases, to electronic book series, to news sites whose head-
lines change by the hour, to self-published e-books, to public wikis. But it
also includes opinion blogs, tweets, hardline political forums, user reviews,
and video tutorials. Adding to the never-ending mixture of data, opinion,
and popular culture is an amalgam of bad information as well, such as tab-
loid gossip, conspiracy blogs, and hate websites. The parameters of what is
considered trusted information have widened in the virtual world, pri-

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-51424-6_3
26 A. KLEIN
marily because the drivers of that content are anonymous and unrestricted
public that are far less scrupulous about the kinds of the facts they publish.
Principally, one might argue that despite the false perceptions of what is
believed to be trusted information online, true knowledge is what really
matters in any medium. But, for hate groups especially, perception is real-
ity. Despite the Internets lack of gatekeepers, or its questionable fusion of
facts and opinion, or the open boundaries that define information there,
people continue to go online to seek out new knowledge. For the rac-
ist organization, the general perception of an information superhighway,
something they can belong to, signifies a rich opportunity to finally plug
their movements into a mainstream circuit.
A Theory ofInformation Laundering

Beyond the Internets inexpensive and unregulated virtual real estate into
which so many fanatical organizations have migrated, there is perhaps a
more profound feature that has helped fringe groups solidify their perma-
nent place in the digital world. That is the legitimizing factor of an inter-
connected system of search engines, news outlets, political blogs, and social
networks that collectively funnel into and out of todays radical and racist
websites. For the information seeker, the result of this funneling process is
a wider array of unique perspectives, and thus, a broader understanding of
any given topic. However, for the propaganda provider, the same process
inadvertently lends the credibility and reputation of authentic websites
to those illegitimate few to which they are nonetheless connected. Such
is the case with many of todays leading search engines like Google and
Yahoo, that unwittingly filter into hate websites, or video-sharing com-
munities like YouTube, which host their venomous content everyday. The
theoretical process I call information laundering is unique to the elements
of the Internet, which provides the ideal environment through which false
information and counterfeit movements can be washed clean by a system
of advantageous associations.3
However, before we break this theory down by its various processes and
with specific examples, it is important to examine the theoretical founda-
tion of information laundering. These following concepts have helped to
explain how propaganda and false information are sometimes overlooked,
and even authenticated, by educated minds and reputable gatekeepers.
The theories of white propaganda (Jowett and ODonnell, 1999)4 and
academic/technical ethos (Borrowman, 1999)5 follow a long line of schol-
HATE SPEECH INTHEINFORMATION AGE 27
arly pursuits in the field of propaganda, some of which we have already

discussed. But these two contributions, in particular, lend a current per-
spective to the modified nature of hate speech in the information age.
Jowett and ODonnell define propaganda as a highly functional commu-
nicative device that is associated with control and is regarded as a deliber-
ate attempt to alter or maintain a balance of power that is advantageous to
the propagandist.6 In terms of an analytical spectrum upon which to clas-
sify hate speech, Jowett and ODonnells Model of Propaganda demon-
strates the separation of information and persuasion according to purpose.
This model illustrates a split in the communication process between these
two forces whereby propaganda exists somewhere in between and often by
design, thus going unnoticed by the receiver. Jowett and ODonnell call
this method white propaganda under the three distinctions: white, gray,
and black (from selective facts to outright fabrications). This research is
concerned with the nature of white propaganda, specifically, which delib-
erately blurs the line of persuasion and information. The result of this
clever distortion is a produced message that appears reasonably close to
the truth [and is] presented in a manner that attempts to convince the
audience that the sender is a good guy with the best ideas and political
ideology.7
While gray propaganda delves into more dishonest practices like false
advertising and statistics tampering, black propaganda is typically the most
recognized form demonstrated in amplified public deceits like those of
the Nazi era. However, in todays media-savvy society, white propaganda
might be the most pervasive of the three because of its effective ability to
penetrate mainstream issues. As noted, groups like modern white suprem-
acists have moved away from recognizable hate symbols and toward
engaging, more day-to-day news items like domestic politics and popular
culture issues. On the surface, these areas provide extremists with fodder
for their ongoing narratives of generalized distrust, anger, and fear of non-
white Americans. On the Internet, these themes have been carefully sewn
into website forums which are intended to read just like daily news feeds
or online editorials.
When considered as units unto themselves, many of these community
forums and news articles do bear elements of accurate information.
However, when the same reader steps back for a moment to observe all
the articles, editorials, and forums of a given hate website, it becomes
clear that these individual units are really part of a bigger mechanism that
continually feeds one hate-based news story after another. In this con-
28 A. KLEIN
text, these contents have been carefully selected, highlighted, and, in some
cases, stripped down by the inscriber to convey only a distinct racist point
of view. Soon, we will see how racist and radical websites use a common
methodology of white propaganda to inject their perspectives into the
mainstream funnel of interconnected blogs, web wikis, online news, and
search engines.
Like white propaganda, Borrowmans concept of an academic and
techno-ethos also examines the manipulation of information through the
media, but more specifically it considers the creditability of building
blocks of this process on the web. In his study on the educational pit-
falls of cyberspace, Borrowman considers the example of students who
used the Internet to research the Holocaust. He observes how through an
open network, students could be led directly to Holocaust denial websites
which are structured to appear as academically reputable research centers
with professional titles, university affiliations, links to published literature,
and scholarly-sounding mission statements. He explains:
When academic ethos is at work, a reader is convinced that the writer is a

rational, reasonable, intelligent individual who is engaging in an honest dia-
logue readers are led to believe that a writer is being ethical and fair in the
construction of his or her argument. For Holocaust deniers the construction
of such an ethos is enormously important.8
Beyond the contextual methods for constructing the appearance of an

expert in a given field, Borrowman also asserts that a new techno-ethos
has evolved for information seekers online. He contends, techno-ethos is
the credibility or authority that is constructed online in the programming
proficiency demonstrated in a flashy Web site. Today, this can be achieved
with relative ease through either technical know-how or simply hiring a
qualified website designer. The fruits of this labor can be extremely effec-
tive with the Net Generation whose critical thinking skills Borrowman
fears have been partially replaced by what he calls critical surfing. In
other words, young researchers have become accustomed to giving cre-
dence to websites simply based on their professional designs, visual appeal,
sophisticated options in media convergence, and the fact that they were
found through trusted search engines.
With so many young adults assigning these features the stamp of cred-
ibility, it should come as little surprise that so many hate groups are lining
up to acquire the best website designers that money can buy. However,
the concepts of academic and techno-ethos only describe the search and
selection thought processes of many of todays online information seek-
ers. These qualities, along with white propaganda, are critical elements
to the theory of information laundering, but only to the extent that hate
groups have learned to capitalize on them inside of their own sites. The
other half of the formula exists well beyond the homepage in the pathway
that led to these illegitimate spaces. This all-important external factor that
we once called the information superhighway was not created by hate
movements, but nevertheless has become their most useful accomplice.
Online, the pathways to false knowledge and propaganda are the same
as those that lead to legitimate and credible resources. It is as if benefi-
ciaries like white supremacist or anti-Semitic organizations have slid into
a new Dewey Decimal System and contaminated it, but few have noticed
their presence there. Today, radical websites have become conveniently
integrated and interconnected into the central currencies of online infor-
mation and community building. This chapter divides these currencies
into four major categories: search engines (discovery), news and wikis
(information), political blogs (opinion), and social networks and video
sharing (expression).
Search Engines
Like most activity in cyberspace, the process of laundering hate speech
into a loose form of information begins at the primary entrance point for
most day-to-day inquiries, the search engine. A typical search engine, like
Google, Yahoo, or Bing, uses a specialized algorithm to designate and
rank the most relevant websites in their directory based largely upon the
popularity and freshness of those sites.9 The more popular the site,
the more likely it has mass appeal, and therefore, an assumed relevance to
a large group of users. At the same time, certain websites might contain
the most recent and, again, relevant input, regardless of their prominence.
Such sites are considered fresh and can quickly be allocated to a higher
ranking in the results pages. Other factors that determine search engine
relevancy include a websites location with regard to the users server,
the scope of the query itself, and other emerging factors. But occasion-
ally these same factors can work to the benefit of websites that are less-
than-reputable, but are nonetheless either popular among a large group of
users, or current in terms of the content they offer as it relates to a specific
topic (i.e., race). And sometimes, search engines discover hate websites
30 A. KLEIN
simply based on the URL names that conveniently match the search terms
entered by users. For example, typing American Renaissance into the
Google search engine will bring you, in the very first hit, to American
Renaissance the website, a popular white nationalist community. A search
for the common word resist will logically turn up resist.com, the home
base of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR).
The web information company Alexa.com, which tracks the traffic
metrics of activity on the web, also details the clickstream for every
given website noting the immediate pathway that led a user into that
particular site.10 While the leading hate sites examined in this study are
frequently funneled into via other racist and radical sites, Alexa consis-
tently cited their number one preceding page is Google, followed closely
by Yahoo. Of course, these major pillars of the Internet are aware of their
unintended ability to lead an information seeker into the nefarious cor-
ners of the web by way of their highly fluid directories, and so they are
constantly working to improve their algorithms to limit the likelihood of
this happening. But the factor that they cannot control is the mind of the
Internet user, who may or may not be directly searching for a hate web-
site, which, of course, would never self-identify as such. But through their
selection of words that denote cultural identities or racial politics, they are
led into these communities nonetheless.
Let us briefly consider an illustrative experiment in the process of infor-
mation laundering. As a preliminary test, the research separately entered
the search terms White People and Holocaust into the Google,
Yahoo, and Bing search engines, and surveyed only the first two pages
of results for each term. From this basic observational approach, all three
search engines yielded two or more results that were sponsored by racist
or anti-Semitic inscribers. On the first page of search results for white
people, Google offered a listing for the white supremacist community
of Stormfront.org. On their second page, Yahoo and Bing offered direct
links to the white nationalist websites of SaveYourHeritage.com and
Resist.com, respectively. Each search engine also provided the same link
to an Urban Dictionary article, in which white people are denigrated as
the most hated race of human beings.11
Separately, all three search engines provided the webpage of Is the
Holocaust a Hoax? among their otherwise legitimate set of results (his-
torical, commemorative, and biographical sites about the Holocaust),
thereby giving credence to an illegitimate page aimed solely at debunking
the murder of millions. Similar extremist results can be found through
searches of other cultural terms like homosexuality and Islam. It is

important to note that within many of these initial websites, one finds
links to other racist and radical websites even more virulent than the first,
thereby threading together in just one or two moves the fringe elements
of cyberspace to a mainstream search engine.
News andWikis
The news and research pathway often represent the second stop for online
information seekers. Electronic encyclopedias like Wikipedia represent the
powerful democratization of knowledge on the Internet, because their
informational content can be authored or altered by just about any mem-
ber of the participating public. While sites like Wikipedia make no claim
that their public-provided information will always be accurate, we must
remember that many online visitors view these sites in much the same
way that libraries are perceived, as keepers of trusted facts. For known
hate communities, which are well chronicled within Wikipedias pages,
there is an ongoing struggle between those contributors who classify their
causes in appropriate terms such as white nationalist, anti-Hispanic,
anti-Semitic, or terrorist, and those who defend these communities,
attempting to define them in ways that legitimize the movement. Both the
researchers of intolerant communities and their supporters can technically
contribute to the growing knowledge base about these hate sites, though
Wikipedias site administrators maintain the final say in the content that
will remain in a given article, often playing the role of referees of accuracy.
Yet, one can see how many hate communities have benefited from these
open venues of information in small but significant ways.
Metapedia, for example, is another electronic encyclopedia, which is
presently described by Wikipedia as antisemitic, containing white nation-
alist, white supremacist, white separatist and neo-Nazi in the second
line of that article.12 In fact, this author has contributed to that defini-
tion, as is noted in the footnotes of the Wikipedia page. But through
Metapedias campaign to legitimize their profile, they too have contrib-
uted to its definition in the very first line of the Wikipedia page, which
now reads: Metapedia is a multilingual, far-right electronic encyclopedia,
which states that it focuses on European culture, art, science, philosophy
and politics.
Of course, there is much more good than harm that comes out of
Wikipedias coverage and exposure of the hate communities and other
32 A. KLEIN
topics online. But at the same time, unlike a traditional encyclopedia, wikis
provide direct links to the topics they reference, including racist and radi-
cal websites, which are interconnections that simply do not exist in the real
world. While a library, for example, may provide an interested visitor with
published materials about the history of the KKK, the librarians do not
then offer information about where the next Klan meeting will be held.
Another example of a site that offers legitimacy by association is
Amazon.com. For many Internet users, particularly college students,
Amazon is their premiere source for academic books. But as a trusted pro-
vider of informative resources, Amazons variety of literature also includes
titles ranging from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to The Turner Diaries
to Mein Kampf. Of course, these books can be relevant material for any-
one pursuing this kind of research. However, the danger of discovery in
Amazon is that younger shoppers can arrive at these works of literature in
quest of other legitimate resources that may bear related search terms. The
Southern Poverty Law Center noted Amazon users that punch Klan
into the book search engine pull up to a staggering 22,767 results
relating to the KKK.13
These kinds of academic inquiries negotiate an ongoing struggle
between the legitimate providers of information and the hate-filled agen-
cies that infiltrate their venues of research, literature, and, occasionally,
even the mainstream news. Such was the case with Fox News that twice,
in 2008, booked a guest on their news program whom they identified as
Internet journalist Andy Martin. On the Internet, Martin was better
known as one of the original circulators of the whisper campaign that
President Obama was a secret Muslim, which picked up steam when
his fabrication made the pages of the popular conservative website, Free
Republic.14 The NewYork Times and other news sources began following
Martins sordid history of filing literally hundreds of lawsuits marked in
phrases like crooked, slimy Jew and sentiments like I am able to under-
stand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less
and less sorry that it did. Fox News would later apologize for acciden-
tally legitimizing the anti-Semitic and racist guest. However, this incident
signifies the successful penetration of hate onto the mainstream informa-
tion stage, which has become increasingly more common, and many have
begun to examine the role of the Internet in this rising phenomenon. Paul
Farhi is one Washington Post journalist who has observed a recent increase
in fringe-based news stories emerging in his profession:
Stories that might have been dismissed as marginal or kooky in an earlier age
now command serious scrutiny from mainstream news organizations. The
news medias romance with the fringe may be a stark reflection of how the
business has changed in just the past few years. Before there was an Internet,
before the explosion of sources of news and commentary, mainstream news
organizations could maintain something like a gatekeeper role, downplaying
or ignoring stories they deemed unfit for public consumption.15
Meanwhile, internally, the websites of fringe movements have also sought

to reflect the borrowed content of mainstream news organizations on
their own homepages. This common practice is found on websites like
that of the National Socialist Movement, which features news stories from
the New York Times, Fox News, and CNN.com, which typically center on
race-related issues such as Mexican drug trafficking, or crimes carried out
by African American assailants. These legitimate news stories take on new
meaning when artificially strung together to present a collective narrative
of racial aggression.
Political Blogs
From news and wikis, the next sphere of information gathering on the
web represents a far less restrained form of civic discourse. The political
blogosphere is a powerful venue for everyday citizens to engage directly
in the public square, sharing perspectives about a wider variety of political,
cultural, and social issues than is often seen in the mainstream media. Free
of the traditional gatekeepers, the blogosphere often appeals to more par-
tisan crowds who hold little back when expressing their political beliefs,
theories, and biases. In terms of information, one could say that a greater
degree of freedom from the standards of journalistic accuracy exists in
the public-driven blogosphere; however, many web users nonetheless view
political blogs as their primary source of currents events information.
For a modern hate group, the blogosphere presents a rich opportunity
to breach the intellectual base of those politically minded citizens. The
journey into the fringe elements of cyberspace often runs through these
corridors of public debate that tap into, and coalesce with, issues of legiti-
mate social concern, which can be exploited by hate groups who need not
identify their affiliations with any extremist agenda. In a 2010 letter to
the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), more than 30 organi-
zations, including Free Press and the Center for Media Justice, asserted,
34 A. KLEIN
The Internet has made it harder for the public to separate the facts from
bigotry masquerading as news.16 Calling on the FCC to return its atten-
tion to racist speech in the mainstream, the coalition highlighted how
todays hate mongers spread lies and hate under the cloak of anonymity,
and sometimes, the guise of credibility blogs are filled with the hateful
messages and misinformation of anonymous posters.17
A prominent example of hateful rhetoric infiltrating from the blogo-
sphere occurred in the wake of the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme scandal,
when the ADL reported that popular blogs devoted to finance were
suddenly being flooded with anti-Semitic comments.18 The ADL posted
examples from mainstream blogs including NYMag.com, Dealbreaker.
com, and Portfolio.com, as well as from the discussion boards of Forbes.
com, and Sunsentinel.com. Some blogs are more known than others for
their frequent hosting of racially charged rhetoric, stemming from recur-
ring political topics. The grassroots conservative Free Republic website is
one such blog, a self-described forum for engaging issues of God, Family,
Country, Life and Liberty. While many moderate political topics are cov-
ered in the websites discussion boards, other subjects, such as the con-
spiracy of President Barack Obamas citizenship and The Homosexual
Agenda, are debated as well.
In 2015, many long-standing radical organizations have adapted their
once-aging movements into vibrant political blogs, from the Council of
Conservative Citizens of the racist right, to the New Black Panthers of the
radical left. One major group that has been building an aggressive pres-
ence in the blogosphere is the anti-government militias, which has shown
a capacity to intermix with mainstream causes in an online climate that
has many authorities worried.19 Keller, of the Southern Poverty Law
Center (SPLC), writes, Militiamen, white supremacists, anti-Semites,
nativists, tax protesters and a range of other activists of the radical right
are cross-pollinating and may even be coalescing.
Of course, political blogs collectively represent some of the best of
what the World Wide Web has to offer, a new democratic sphere where
issues of race and identity, and the politics that surround them, are central
topics that merit healthy discourse. However, online hate groups, pos-
ing as political causes, have learned to seize on language that stokes the
flames of cultural intolerance without directly revealing a racist agenda.
For instance, anti-Israel blogs often open a convenient gateway into anti-
Semitic discourse, much the same way that anti-immigration blogs tap
into primed anti-Hispanic sentiment.
Like the coded language of hate speech, Bratich noted how the Internet
also has a penchant for housing conspiratorial rumor mongering.20 He
writes, while a conspiracy theory may in itself be based on bad informa-
tion, it is made even more foul because it circulates through an untrust-
worthy medium. In their national survey, Stempel etal. located evidence
of robust positive associations between belief in conspiracy theories and
higher consumption of nonmainstream media (blogs and tabloids).21
And so, in the blogosphere, hate groups have also found an ideal space
for injecting their narratives of racial and ethnic conspiracies among a wel-
coming cyberculture of paranoia.
One such racial conspiracy theorist that found validation for his bigot-
ries and paranoia on the Internet was Dylann Roof. Roofs own journey
into the fringes of digital hate culture is unnervingly indicative of the pro-
cess of information laundering at work. In his own words, Roof explains:
The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hear-
ing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read
the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the
big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more
importantly this prompted me to type in the words black on White crime
into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website
I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon
pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this
moment I realized that something was very wrong.22
Prior to his lethal acts at the historic black church in Charleston, Roof had
become deeply absorbed into the world of racist blogs and forums. But
his online activity extended into one other digital realm where he shared
a single picture of himself bearing a scowl on his face and the symbols of
apartheid on his jacket. The digital outlet was Facebook.
Social Networks andVideo Sharing

In addition to blogs, news, research, and search engines, the digital universe
of social networks and video-sharing websites has provided modern hate
movements with a prime segue into online culture. Today, social networks
are much more than just friend-building websites; they represent dynamic
spaces where individual identities are expressed, formed, and shared. Like
other digital prospects, hate organizations have honed in on this invaluable
chance to share their own cultural identities, tastes, and preferences, and, of
36 A. KLEIN
course, to recruit. In addition to offering another digital passageway into

racist subculture, social and sharing networks have inadvertently supplied
hate movements with something far more valuable than an information
platform. They deliver the Net Generation. There is no more concentrated
category of the Internet than social networking and video-sharing websites
to attract the prime audience whom hate movements are desperately striv-
ing to inspire. What has perhaps made social networks, such as Facebook,
so attractive to hate groups and individuals is the ease with which the young
community welcomes all cultures, and both new friends and ideas are
accepted and liked with little reservation with the click of a mouse.
Early examples of groups that have built a social networking presence
include numerous We Hate Israel and We Hate Zionists community
pages on Facebook, one of which currently boasts 81,527 likes.23 On
YouTube, one can find the teachings of Al-Qaeda senior recruiter, Anwar
Al-Awlaki, whose videos have been viewed tens of thousands of times, to,
more recently, the Islamic State militants' (ISIS) well-established presence
on Twitter that the Wilson Center estimates has gained over 46,000 fol-
lowers, some of whom have been recruited by their message.24 Beyond
organized hate, social media sites have also become a common outlet for
many lone racists and radicals to launch their bigoted rants to what they
believe to be a world of listeners.
Social networks and content sharing websites represent the last domain
of the information-laundering process used by todays hate groups to
achieve a more accepted presence in the digital world. The result of fun-
neling hateful rhetoric through these four channels of discovery, infor-
mation, opinion, and expression can be seen in growing examples of
culturally intolerant sentiments that surface in mainstream media and pop-
ular culture, which, in turn, recharges the online base of bigotry. That base
continues to grow by the thousands. Through this opportune system of
associationssome cleverly acquired, and others by sheer happenstance
racist movements are able to digitally launder hateful rhetoric through
Internet channels in order to produce a loose form of accepted public
discourse (see Fig. 3.1).
Today, this process is playing out in cyberspace everyday without public
awareness or media investigation about where certain mainstream racist
sentiments originated. For instance, accusations about a presidents reli-
gion, or claims about his nationality, do not emerge from true academic,
political, or public debates. Rather, they begin on the fringes, in white
power websites, and only through the Internet where they have found a
successful pathway to work racist themes into mainstream discourse.
Search Social
Engines Networks
Hate Web-Based
Hate
Speech Knowledge
Websites
Wikis & Political

News Sites Blogs
Extremism The Internet Mainstream
Fig. 3.1 Model of information laundering in cyberspace
Conclusion
There are no perfect formulas for explaining the lasting power of racist
and radical propaganda in society. The theory of information launder-
ing only attempts to explain the current generations version of that
toxic phenomenon, but as we have already seen, expressions of orga-
nized bigotry adapt with the times. From The Protocols forgery, con-
trived in Russia but circulated throughout the world, to the Turner
Diaries, inscribed in Virginia but later carried out in Oklahoma City,
the effects of information-driven hate speech can be contagious and
permanent. As students of digital media and information, we can try to
comprehend patterns of hateful propaganda that have now infiltrated
all corners of digital culture. We can also begin to observe how certain
opportunists have managed to manipulate the structures of new media
systems and the information dependencies of the next generation to
their own ends. The two variables of this equationmedia systems and
the next generationare always changing. But if yesterday has taught
us anything, it is that hate groups have an eerie ability to keep up with
both.
Notes
1. UCLA Internet Project, Internet Peaks as Americas Most
Important Source of Information, last modified February 11,
2003, http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/x3829.xml
2. David Shenk, Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut (San
Francisco: Harperedge, 1999), 26.
38 A. KLEIN
3. The theory of information laundering was first introduced in an

article published in Communication Theory, vol. 22(4) 2012. The
theory as well as some of the content in this section of the book has
been drawn from that article titled, Slipping Racism into the
Mainstream: A Theory of Information Laundering.
4. Garth S. Jowett and Victoria ODonnell, Propaganda and
Persuasion (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999).
5. Shane Borrowman, Critical Surfing: Holocaust Deniability and
Credibility on the Web, College Teaching 47, no. 2 (1999): 4454.
6. Jowett and ODonnell, Propaganda and Persuasion, 15.
7. Ibid., 16.
8. Borrowman, Critical Surfing, 7.
9. Dirk Lewandowski, Search Engine User Behavior: How Can
Users be Guided to Quality Content? Information Services & Use
28 (2008): 261268.
10. Alexa: The Web Information Company, last accessed August 8,
2015, http://alexa.com/
11. White People, Urban Dictionary, last modified August 12, 2011,
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=white+people
12. Metapedia, Wikipedia, last accessed September 14, 2015,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metapedia
13. Mark Potok, Books on the Right, Southern Poverty Law Center,
last modified August 20, 2009, http://www.splcenter.org/intel/
intelreport/article.jsp?aid=904
14. Jim Rutenberg, The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama,
New York Times, last modified October 12, 2008, http://www.
nytimes.com/2008/10/13/us/politics/13martin.html?_r=0
15. Paul Farhi, From the Fringe to the Mainstream: How Scandals
of Dubious Validity or Relevance End Up Attracting So Much
Media Attention, American Journalism Review (2010): 35.
16. Gautham Nagesh, Groups Want FCC to Police Hate Speech on
Talk Radio, Cable News Networks, The Hill, last modified June
1, 2010, http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/
100833-groups-want-fcc-to-police-hate-speech
17. Federal Communication Commission, Future of Media and

Information Needs of Communities in a Digital Age, Washington,
DC, 2010, accessed August 31, 2015, http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/
ecfs/document/view?id=7020450549
18. Mainstream Web Sites Flooded with Anti-Semitic Comments in

Wake of Madoff Scandal, last modified December 19, 2008,
http://www.adl.org/PresRele/Internet_75/5422_12.htm
19. Larry Keller The Second Wave: Evidence Grows of Far-Right
Militia Resurgence, last modified November 3, 2009, http://
www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-
issues/2009/fall/the-second-wave
20. Jack Bratich, Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular
Culture (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008), 86.
21. Carl Stempel, Thomas Hargrove, and Guido Stempel III, Media
Use, Social Structure, and Belief in 9/11 Conspiracy Theories,
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 84, no. 2 (2007):
366.
22. Heres What Appears to be Dylann Roofs Racist Manifesto,
Mother Jones, last modified June 20, 2015, http://www.mother-
jones.com/politics/2015/06/alleged-charleston-shooter-dylann-
roof-manifesto-racist
23. Facebook under Fire for Allow Hate Speech Against Jews to
Proliferate Online, last modified September 17, 2013, http://
www.algemeiner.com/2013/09/17/facebook-under-fire-for-
allowing-hate-speech-against-jews-to-proliferate-online/
24. Report: ISIS Has At Least 46,000 Twitter Followers, Wilson
Center, last modified March 6, 2015, https://www.wilsoncenter.
org/article/report-isis-has-least-46000-twitter-followers
CHAPTER 4
Virtual Pleasure Island
In July 2011, many Internet users read about the first high-profile case
of a popular social network colliding with the elements of hate speech
in cyberspace.1 The network is Facebook, the largest online community
today and home to a staggering 30% of Internet users across the globe
each month.2 Facebook has been an online social network since 2004,
but just over a decade later, it has also become a haven for a few unex-
pected residents of the online communityHolocaust denial groups.
Among the sea of faces and profiles, mainly high school and college stu-
dents, a new wave of memberships has surfaced dedicated to the cause
of denying that the Holocaust ever occurred; that it was in fact a Jewish
conspiracy.
Those who had heard this same rhetoric voiced before quickly recog-
nized its subtext and responded, but not to the Holocaust deniers, or
to the white pride groups that had also recently converged onto the
mainstream site. Instead, activists like attorney Brian Cuban decided to
address Facebook directly, demanding that the Internet giant remove all
those profiles that espoused any form of racist sentiment. In an open let-
ter, Cuban wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to clarify that the
Holocaust denial movement is nothing more than a pretext to allow the
preaching of hatred against Jews and to recruit other like-minded indi-
viduals to do the same.3 Despite the fact that other watchdog groups like
the Simon Wiesenthal Center were suddenly alerting the popular site that

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-51424-6_4
42 A. KLEIN
it had become a recruiting ground for white power fanatics, Facebook

executives ultimately decided not to remove the Holocaust denial groups,
citing no clear violation had been made to their terms of service.
Terms of Serviceat the end of the day, these three words often
constitute the only real law of the land in the digital world. Regardless
of whether the claim of hate speech was legitimate in this particular con-
text, or the fact that Facebook is primarily a youth-based social network,
the news item that had quickly ascended to Internet headlines disap-
peared just as fast, having no legal ground on which to stand. There
simply was no existing precedent on which to base cases against this
form of hate speech on the web. The apparent approval of Holocaust
denial groups in the mainstream social network represented a legitimiz-
ing victory for the greater hate community. The Facebook controversy,
however, is only the tip of the iceberg in what is rapidly becoming a fiery
ethical debate that addresses the real issue behind the news story, that
is, the unguarded walls and anything goes atmosphere of the World
Wide Web.
As many of us know, the Internet is not just a place for content to be
created and shared. It is a vast network of communities and cultural inter-
sections where people, in one sense or another, can go. When thought
of in this manner, the young Internet user enters into a virtual theme
park every time they log on. A 14-year-old, for instance, may visit any
website they please, chat with new friends, join an online community, and
perhaps take the relationship even further. The opportunities for interac-
tion are endless, and perhaps even thrilling, for the younger age groups
who have yet to discover these social exchanges in the real world. But
for all its thrills and virtual experience, the infrastructure of the digital
world is anything but a theme park. One difference here is that an actual
park, like Walt Disney World, has cameras that monitor around every
corner, safety measures on every ride, public security guards onsite, and,
of course, medical centers in case of an emergency. In most cases, these
precautions are not just in place to please the park visitor, but they are
also required by law.
So why are the most popular online hangouts for youth culture not
treated with the same degree of protective measure and oversight? Today,
the answer to that question lies buried beneath the complex infrastruc-
ture and legal framework of the Internet. In the old media context of
newspapers, books, movies, television, games, and music, we have seen
VIRTUAL PLEASURE ISLAND 43
issues such as violence, obscenity, hate speech, and, in particular, chil-

drens exposure to these elements, debated in courts of law and official
oversight agencies like the FCC. But those tangible pages of text and
recorded images of cinema each share qualities of media that can be easily
monitored in our measured system of free speech, primarily because their
producers and the products they create are localized, that is, books with
identifiable authors and traceable origins.
Of course, no media system is ever fully free from laws and oversight,
otherwise anyone with a platform could falsely cry fire in a crowded the-
ater, steal copyrighted material, libel a private citizen, publish photos of
child pornography, or call for the killing of an entire race of people. In
traditional American media, a legal groundwork for such cases has already
been laid through heavily contested issues like ownership, access, trade-
marks, but, most of all, content as it relates to free speech in the public
sector. Even when traditional media go too far, such incidences are easily
identified and isolated, their questionable content debated on established
ground, and, if necessary, consequences delivered to the appropriate
accountable authors. But in the digital world, none of these essential con-
structs exist. In fact, the very infrastructure of the Web is so complex that
the potential for effectively safeguarding or regulating any part of it is
nearly impossible.
While it would seem that the same laws which apply to the actual world
should likewise apply to the virtual one, van Dijk reminds us that existing
legislation depends on clearly demonstrable, localizable and liable legal
persons and ownership titles.4 On the Internet, satellite networks con-
necting to other networks worldwide have replaced clear lines of juris-
diction, and, most often, the Internet user is only as identifiable as their
screen name allows. It soon becomes apparent that the World Wide Web
is far too open-ended and undefined a mass medium in terms of its access
points, owners, and borders to approach the issue of dangerous speech
with any real authority or consequence. The result of these unparalleled
freedoms is also apparent.
For popular websites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, there are
currently no binding mechanisms in place that force these, or any other
website for that matter, to monitor their social networks and content
made available to their visitors. Legally, the young Internet user becomes
an ideal target in this world, in part because of their impressionable minds,
but also because the community itself goes virtually unchecked by any true
authority, and entrance at the gate is free.
44 A. KLEIN
Where Is Cyberspace?
If you imagine yourself as an investigator of online extremism, or cyber
crime, or simply a parent concerned over their childs online activities, the
path to discovery begins at the click of the browser icon. However, once
you enter that digital doorway, you might as well be stepping off a ledge
into space itself. The greatest challenge in monitoring, regulating, or sim-
ply defining the Internet is first pinpointing its actual location. But unlike
the printing presses that generate books and newspapers, or radio towers
that transmit music and commercials, the locality of the web is in no way
central to one point. As Einzinger explains:
On the Internet, central nodes, where you could effectively monitor the
data flow, just dont exist. At the point of origin, content is split into many
small data pockets that seek their way through networks on their own and
are reassembled at the point of destination. There are many, many routes
to get from A to B on the Internet. Remember: the Internet consists of a
myriad of IP networks and Internet service providers can only see and moni-
tor their own small part.5
Adding to the complexity of information flow is the reality that Internet

Service Providers are centered all around the world, from Silicon Valley to
Singapore, where they launch private websites that quickly become inter-
linked to other sites with different web hosts, perhaps even operating from
other countries. In this way, the Internet is easily the most anonymous,
decentralized, and, therefore, non-traceable form of media that the world
has ever known.
Many have cited the decentralization of the Internet as one of the key
factors in its embrace as a global democratic sphere of communication.
This argument is also rooted in the fact that the web provides nearly any-
one with an inexpensive platform for instantly reaching a potential audi-
ence of millions. For the myriad social movements and political causes
around the globe, this open access means they no longer need a podium
and a microphone to reach the most immediate masses. In fact, they do
not even need a facethey simply require access. In Reno v. ACLU, the
US Supreme Court finally weighed in on the vast democratic forums of
the Internet in their most definitive function:
Through the use of chat rooms, any person with a phone line can become
a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any
soapbox. Through the use of the Web pages, mail exploders, and news-
groups, the same individual can become a pamphleteer. [T]he content
on the Internet is as diverse as human thought.6
Perhaps the diversity of that human thought can best be attributed to a

network that is not localized, but rather decentralized, global, and also
very much anonymous. While the anonymity of the Internet can afford
certain social movements with a greater freedom to express their beliefs,
such as in authoritarian nations where public debate is otherwise outlawed
by a state-run press, there are other beneficiaries of this Internets ano-
nymity whose motives are not as noble.
The web has provided an ideal space for white supremacists, anti-gay
hate groups, terrorist organizations, and other anti-social movements to
reemerge in a mainstream medium that is far less exposed than a side-
walk rally or TV interview. In Anonymity, Democracy and Cyberspace
Akdeniz suggests that, As a concept anonymity is closely related to free
speech and privacy. Internet technology allows for anonymous communi-
cations and this can be used for several purposes, including those that are
socially useful and those that are criminal.7 For racist and radical move-
ments, the anonymous and decentralized infrastructure of the Internet
means that they, too, are no longer localized. Like all social movements,
hate groups, which had never before had an audience larger than their
most immediate regions, can instantly transmit their message all over the
world, while, at the same time, remain safely hidden on the web.
In effect, the global connection has instantly turned the basement sub-
culture of hate groups into well-organized and increasingly international
movements. The white supremacist Creativity Alliance website, for exam-
ple, now provides links to its sister sites in Australia, Germany, Croatia,
and Slovakia, while Stormfront.org offers the worlds largest hate commu-
nity, with digital connections to chapters in Canada, France, Italy, Russia,
South Africa, Spain, the UK, and many other countries. In any number of
languages, this trend exemplifies the power of the Internet where a cen-
tralized movement can extend into other countries, thus connecting once
fragmented communities and causes beyond international borders. In
Stormfront en Francais, a new forum about Jewish people reads, Notre
veritable ennemi. Translation: Our true enemy.8
In addition to expansion, the Internet has also provided hate organiza-
tions with the opportunity to exploit another dilemma of the webs infra-
structurethat is, the lack of regulation in a global medium where lines
46 A. KLEIN
of jurisdiction are as vague as they are complex. Perhaps more than any
other issue of the Internet, the jurisdiction of intellectual property across
international borders has been given the greatest amount of global legal
attention to date. Typically, these non-binding resolutions have centered
on issues of copyrights, trademarks, and patents. Regardless of legal zone,
Steele asserts, there are some problems with applying currently existing
laws to cyberspace. Unlike in the physical world, there is no physical loca-
tion where these communications take place, making it difficult to deter-
mine where violations of law should be prosecuted.9 As many legislators
and law enforcement officials quickly discovered, the mere act of locating
dangerous or hateful content on the web does not necessarily pinpoint the
actual location of its author. Further, if that author were beyond the physi-
cal limitations of the local authority like the FCC or the Federal Trade
Commission (FTC) that also monitors web activity, who is to say which
agency, national or international, would even enforce it? This is great news
for those wishing to test the laws of hate speech online. It also leads us
to another factor of perhaps even greater consequence for various hate
movements: on the web, locality is not just an issue of jurisdictionit is a
matter of culture.
Because the Internet knows no national boundaries, the chances of
being introduced to the social norms of other cultures is far greater than
in any other medium, and by and large, this has been one of the most valu-
able outcomes of the digital age. However, with this constant influx and
fusing of culturesthe great global village that Marshall McLuhan once
predicted10the online community is inevitably exposed to contrasting
definitions of ethics and cultural values. A common example of this effect
is the issue of child pornography. In the United States, laws and culture
deem that a child under the age of 17 is a minor, and thus it is considered
illegal and immoral to produce pornographic material featuring minors in
any platform including the Internet. Other countries, however, have dif-
ferent standards as to what age divides child from adult and, hence, what
constitutes illegal pornography. In much the same way, the intercultural
dilemma has also challenged the issue of hate speech on the web.
In Einzingers analysis of Media Regulation on the Internet, he notes
in some Central European countries there is strict legislation against
right wing extremism (neo-Nazism), but this is absent from most other
countries. Therefore there are some neo-Nazi sites on the Web which can-
not be removed because their servers are located in countries where there
are no legal grounds for their removal.11 One such nation that fits this
bill as a prime location for extremists to flourish within its open servers is
the United States. While Americas legal system does include laws aimed
at criminalizing certain forms of hate speech, such legislation is narrowly
defined and rarely tried in a court of law. This makes the web hosts that
operate on American soil the new safe houses for racial fanatics that would
otherwise be prosecuted in nations that more strictly outlaw forms of hate
speech, such as Germany, Austria, France, Poland, Spain, and the Czech
Republic.12
For most, the intercultural environment of the Internet delivers an
invaluable vehicle for arriving at unlimited global information and diver-
sity. For others, it becomes a virtual pleasure island for uninhibited rac-
ists to express their resentments toward diversity itself, while, at the same
time, expanding their own communities worldwide. Even as new cases
arise, such as the recent trend of white supremacist hashtags emerging in
live tweet discussions during the2016 presidential debates, any attempt
to curtail these or other instances of online hate still leaves one important
question unaddressed.
Who Is Accountable?
The question of accountability in the digital world is almost as complex
as the concept of locality. In fact, they are practically one and the same,
but with regard to the legal contexts of hate speech, the issue of a web-
sites locality only establishes the scene of the crime, while the matter
of accountability aims to determine the offending party. Once again, the
Internets infrastructure presents a challenge to the task of determining
accountability. For as long as mass communication has been an industry,
the process of arriving at fault in cases of media law has usually rested
on the shoulders of whichever individual, company, or organization was
responsible for delivering the content into the public domain. Sometimes
there can be more than one offender. In matters of libel in an authored
work, for instance, both the writer and publisher can be held account-
able for the fraudulent content of a book if it is deemed damaging to
the plaintiff. A more relevant example might be a political magazine that
advocates for violent actions against illegal Hispanic immigrants. In this
case, the journals publisher could be found responsible for propagating
the illegal form of hate speech. In many ways, the publishers of tradi-
tional media outlets are the industrys self-regulating boundary between
an author whose work goes too far and the public domain that might
48 A. KLEIN
have received it. On the Internet, however, no such traditional gatekeep-

ers exist, because anyone can be a publisher.
If thought of as a giant bookstore where both products and ideas
are sold, the Internet has no discretion over what items will stock its
shelves. All one needs in this day and age to publish an idea or ignite
a cause is a website and an ISP to disseminate that content. Most of
the time ISPs are like storage facilities, unaware of the content they
host. And without incentive to do so, why should they be aware? For
ISPs that specialize in web hosting, there are no legal ramifications
that would deem them a publisher should one of their websites or
blogs publish something that is defamatory about a specific individ-
ual or group of people. According to Shyles, There has been dispute
over whether ISPs are publishers or distributors. This classification is
important because it is often difficult to track down the originator of
a defamatory statement on the Internet.13 For the racist or radical
website, this is both good and bad news. On one hand, it allows any
hate-based organization ease with which to post any matter of content
on the web, because, as Shyles further explains, it is in the best interest
of an ISP to avoid exercising any kind of editorial control or paren-
tal screening in order to avoid liability as publishers. On the other
hand, as publishers of the site, the hate group can technically be held
liable for any practiced form of speech that is not protected by the First
Amendment, that is, libel, slander, or, more relevant to these purposes,
speech that is deemed threatening or harassing.
But the concept of the online publisher has become even more ambig-
uous in the digital world as the infrastructure of the Internet becomes ever
more democratic. What was once conceived as a media outlet comprised
of content-filled websites has now become a multidimensional channel of
communication platforms. From video sharing to audio podcasts, from
civic journalism to open discussion forums, social networks to political
blogs, the concept of the Internet publisher encompasses all functions of
these converging media. And today, hate movements can make use of all
of them as long as the question of web accountability remains unclear.
This lack of clarity is reflected in the rising number of cases that address
the intangibles of online content. Questions such as, does a news website
like CNN.com bear responsibility over the belligerent comments of the
readers that follow its news articles? Or, more suited to our purposes is
the question of whether an anti-gay website can be held accountable if
one of its members posts a forum calling for the killing of members of the
LGBT community. What if they, or one of the other members, should act
on the call?
Perhaps one the greatest challenges to monitoring the words of hate
groups on the Internet is designating the actual identity of a publisher
behind the privacy of their screen names. In 2013, for example, while
using Google to search for my university profile, to my surprise I came
across an article that white nationalist website Metapedia had written
about me. In it, the anonymous contributors who were not pleased that I
had designated their faux-encyclopedia a white supremacist community
had proceeded to describe me as Jewish supremacist from the United
States, a yellow propagandist, and further offered that my grandpar-
ents were Holocaust survivors. Along with my picture, and a Star of
David next to my name, the article alarmingly listed my home address.14
In one respect, this insignificant example of disparaging rhetoric again
serves to illustrate information laundering at work, for however absurd
the article may be, it was nonetheless easily located by way of Googles
search engine, sharing space on a short list of a handful of otherwise accu-
rate articles. But the Metapedia example also demonstrates a hard truth
about any derisive or false representations on the Internetthere is little
we can do about. The authors of this, or any hate website, are known only
by usernames. Their anonymity is further protected by their locations,
digitally scattered across the globe. Metapedia, for example, is a website
based out of Sweden, free from the oversight of other nations that each
has different standards of what constitutes illegal speech.
Of course, online anonymity is one of the Internets most liberating
features affording all users a blanket of security in communications that
the real world does not. But anonymity for the racist minds of society can
mean something else entirely. In their exploration of the psychological
uses of the Internet, Magdoff and Rubin remind us, on the Net you need
not necessarily be who you were when you turned on the computer.15
In this sense, the Internet provides its users more than just anonymity; it
allows them to become a different version of themselves all together. In
her work on Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, Citron underscores how online
anonymity disinhibits people to act more destructively if they do not per-
ceive the threat of external sanction.16 In this world, Internet users with
fictitious names can indulge in the perspectives and issues that are nor-
mally considered taboos of society. They can retweet the violent ideas
of terrorist groups like ISIS on Twitter, even though in 2015 the FBI
declared such sponsorship illegal.17 They can even join a hate community,
50 A. KLEIN
which promotes ideas like white supremacy or racial holy war. Of course,
most everyday citizens are not interested in these offerings, but those few
who are have benefited greatly from the web culture of anonymity. In
time, the complex questions of online accountability will be addressed,
most likely on the grounds of debates stemming from mainstream web-
sites, such as whether YouTube is liable if a defamatory video is broadcast
within its vast domain. Meanwhile, subjects like these are still very open
to interpretation. As for the digital authors of hate speech, the umbrella
of the Internet continues to provide enough cover for hate websites to
develop comfortably within its broad legal limits.
The Legal Landscape ofHate Speech

Finally, there is one more important element of online hate that keeps its
many authors free from scrutiny and safely behind their keyboards spew-
ing out bigotries. That element is hate speech itself, which most US courts
have so broadly defined so as to protect the integrity of all forms of speech
in America. But in practical terms, the terms that legally define what con-
stitutes actual hate speech leave a great deal of latitude for racist and radi-
cal movements to communicate their intolerant value systems, and often
underlying violent intentions, online.
Hate speech has been called the Pandoras box in American legal
debates.18 While most unpopular speech in the United States is consti-
tutionally protected in the great marketplace of ideas, several high courts
have introduced exceptions to certain forms of expression where the lan-
guage has been used to incite violence against a person or group of people.
In Chaplinsky vs. New Hampshire, the court ruled that fighting words
those that (1) by their very utterance inflict injury and (2) tend to
incite an immediate breach of the peaceare, in fact, unlawful.19 Over
the last century, other cases have rendered decisions that added more ter-
minologies like clear and present danger, incitement to imminent
lawless action, and the hecklers veto to the growing litany of legisla-
tion.20 In the Beauharnais vs. Illinois case, it was even declared illegal to
advertise, publish, present or exhibit the citizen of any race, color,
creed or religion to contempt, derision, or obloquy.
While these state decisions have never managed to challenge the
Supreme Courts overriding view of the First Amendment, which main-
tains the broadest interpretation, they do represent a more proactive
response to hate speech. That response is perhaps indicative of the 36% of
Americans who would support more legislation outlawing public com-

ments that advocate genocide or hatred against an identifiable group
according to a 2014 YouGov poll.21 The same poll, however, found that
38% of Americans would oppose such legislation. Another poll conducted
by Rasmussen Reports found that 50% of citizens believe hate is growing
in America, while 44% feel that extreme political rhetoric on the radio,
television and the Internet lead to increased hate in America.22
As students of new media and communication, these polls and the
sorted legislation of local courts should tell us two things about this
issue. First, the grassroots debate surrounding hate speech is very much
divided across the country, and it is fair to assume that this can largely
be attributed to varied understandings of what actually constitutes hate
speech, legally defined or not. Second, this issue is not just about public
or legal views on racism, but rather it concerns language. Many of the
attempts to pinpoint a working legal definition of hate speech have sought
to do so by drawing a line of illegality at that point where the rhetoric
promotes violent action such as fighting words or clear and present
danger. However, as we know, language itself is so much more com-
plex and capable than these exacting terms would suggest. In their study
on the First Amendment regarding cases of hate speech, Delgado and
Stefancic remind us that seemingly inoffensive words such as Mexican,
illegal, or invader can quietly encode racism lingering from previ-
ous times, pre-determining how we think and talk about some of our
fellow humans.23 In Dog Whistle Politics, Ian Haney Lpez called these
kinds of terms coded racial appeals, which some politicians have been
using for decades to covertly win over the votes of bigoted constituen-
cies.24 The notion of the dog whistle in this context implies that these
coded appealsterms like welfare queen or food stamp president
may only be heard by those racists among us who, like the canine, have an
acute sense for these frequencies.
Clearly, the mere expulsion of fighting words from a website does
not necessarily expunge the voices of racism in other forms, nor has it
stopped some of their authors from occasionally inciting actual harm
to others. In fact, many hate groups have adapted with these times by
employing rhetorical strategies, and even website designs, that promote
their intolerant cause, while carefully not publishing words that spell out
hateful violence. One of the primary goals of this books research was to
look at ways that the messages inside racist and radical websites manage
to suggest violent actions without articulating a direct form of the illegal
52 A. KLEIN
iction listed above. As later chapters will show, there are a number of
d
ways to advocate a hostile agenda through subtext and suggestion.
Returning to the practical matter of online hate speech, the real con-
cern for most regulators, legal or public, is the amplified exposure of
young adults to outright racism and hate on the Internet. It is therefore
no wonder that some of the more recent issues emerging about hate
speech on the Internet center on one of the most protected environ-
ments for childreneducation. In many schools across the United States,
local boards of education have begun to institute intolerance filters
onto computers in an attempt to seal off potential gateways to harm-
ful material for aspiring minds. These same filters that seek out websites
dedicated to racism have already become known to many hate groups
who have responded by providing their own counter measures, such as
instructional forums titled How to bypass filters at work or school
and Does your school block this site?25 Other districts have taken it
upon their own authority to ban access to the popular video-sharing web-
site YouTube on school grounds. The unfiltered media site is one of the
most frequented among the Net Generation, but as many teachers have
observed, it is also rapidly becoming a viral breeding ground for popular
amateur content that expresses misogyny and homophobia. This trend is
certainly not what Marshall McLuhan had in mind when he once wrote
of a global village.
For now it is sufficient to say that the unregulated environment of
cyberspace has posed a real challenge for educators and information spe-
cialists alike that utilize the web to teach the next generation. It seems
that just as they are introducing young minds to new technologies and
democratic modes of communication, hate groups are using those same
tools for their own nefarious purposes in their race to win over the Net
Generation. And the underlying question remains, what is to stop them?
There are currently no legal grounds upon which to stop a neo-Nazi
group from entering into a social network community like Facebook or
Academia.edu for that matter, nor is there a precedent that would aptly
challenge the kinds of hate speech that are infiltrating the search engine
universe of information gatherers everyday.
Certainly free speech, popular or not, is the essential centerpiece to any
working democracy. Even with regard to this subject matter, McMasters
aptly reminds us that Hate speech uncovers the haters.26 If for no other
reason to protect the First Amendment online, one can argue is that it
locates, tracks, exposes, and informs us about the dangerous elements

of our society. And so, the notion of Internet responsibility must extend
beyond the term of service. The vigilance against hateful rhetoric begins
certainly with the individual Internet user, but it also includes the popular
websites they visit, and the ISPs that deliver them to the world. In her
2014 work, Citron calls on more content hosts to employ strategies to
counteract destructive impulses within their websites.27 She writes, Just
as the anonymity of networked interactions can influence our behavior, so
can a sites environment. Today, it is important to recognize the vulner-
abilities that exist online with regard to public discourse, and to be more
critical of themnot for the sake of challenging the First Amendment
but rather to understand exactly how it is that this ever evolving Internet
operates to the benefit and opportunism of those who would seek to
exploit its unique framework.
Conclusion
In many ways, the exceptional trait of the Internet, its unlimited spec-
trum for free expression, is also its Achilles heel. The fact that there is no
velvet rope to keep underage users from entering certain digital domains
is matched by the reality that there is also no detectors that prohibit hate
groups and individuals from entering that same space. While traditional
media industries like television and radio are supported, and in many ways
protected, by an established network of gatekeepers that filter in the desir-
able content and weed out the rest, the new media code is one that deeply
embraces our independence from such oversight, even if it is often to our
detriment. And in this way, the legal landscape of the web presents some-
thing of a paradox.
In one respect, the transparent infrastructure of the Internet provides
an open window into communities of concern for law enforcement agen-
cies: terrorist cells, radical political groups, the white power movement.
For each of these extremist organizations with a website, there is no doubt
a team of officials monitoring it closely, not to mention the watchful eyes
of numerous civil rights groups. However, in another respect, this remark-
able looking glass is nothing more than an illusion. What one sees on
the screen before them is a website created in one place, but hosted in
another. Its location is ambiguous at best in this vast digital universe, and
its authorsperhaps present in digital formare still quite shielded from
view. The privacy of the Internet is secured in passwords, screen names,
54 A. KLEIN
avatars, and a decentralized network that presents a liberating environment

for its young users. For others, like parents, teachers, and law enforce-
ment, its anonymity poses a series of dangerous scenarios.
The answer to addressing the perils of the Internet, however, is not as
complex as it may seem. While there are some who advocate strongly for
more regulations on the web, reducing free speech in any venue is sel-
dom the solution. The public square of the World Wide Web thrives only
because it is part of an open democratic network. Some American civil
rights groups have also argued for more restrictions on hate speech itself
by adopting the same measures as many European countries have in pro-
hibiting the propagation, publishing, or broadcasting of racist sentiments.
But these measures have actually done very little to abate the real problem
of racial intolerance and widespread anti-Semitism in Europe. In the end,
the greater issues behind hate speech are still present in societies, both
here and abroad. The real answer then is education. Rather than restrict-
ing the Internet with regulations and filters, each of which could later
inhibit other Internet freedoms, we must become more informed about
the existence of these racist elements and alerted to their broadening agen-
das on the web. Through more speech, not less, an open dialogue about
online intolerance can begin to lift the veil of anonymity from digital hate
culture, and uncover the actual movement behind these communities.
Notes
1. Facebook Tells Holocaust Survivors Denial Pages Can Stay, last
modified July 28, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/
07/28/holocaust-denial-pages-can-stay-says-facebook_n_
912116.html
2. Donna Tam, Facebook by the Number: 1.06 Billion Monthly
Active Users, last modified January 30, 2013, http://www.cnet.
com/news/facebook-by-the-numbers-1-06-billion-monthly-
active-users/
3. Douglas Macmillan, Facebooks Holocaust Controversy,
Business Week, May 12, 2009, accessed October 12, 2015, http://
www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2009/
tc20090512_104433.htm
4. Jan van Dijk, The Network Society: Social Aspects of New Media, 2nd
ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005), 128.
5. Kurt Einzinger, Media Regulation on the Internet, accessed

October1,2015,http://www.osce.org/fom/13846?download=true
6. Seth Kreimer, Technologies of Protest: Insurgent Social
Movements and the First Amendment in the Era of the Internet,
University of Pennsylvania Law Review 150, no. 1 (2001):
119125.
7. Yaman Akdeniz, Anonymity, Democracy, and Cyberspace, Social
Research 69, no. 1 (2002): 224.
8. Stormfront En Franais, last modified October 25, 2007,
http://www.stor mfront.org/for um/for umdisplay.php/
stormfront-en-fran-ais-69.html
23, no. 2 (1996): 14.
10. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964).
11. Einzinger, Media Regulations, 143.
12. Michael Bazyler, Holocaust Denial Laws and Other Legislation
Criminalizing Promotion of Nazism, accessed August 1, 2009,
http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_yad/departments/audio/
Bazyler.pdf
13. Leonard Shyles, Deciphering Cyberspace: Making the Most of Digital
Communication Technology (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications, 2003), 343.
14. Metapedia recently removed my profile page from its website.

However, just as quickly as the web page was removed from that
site, it resurfaced in another white nationalist online encyclopedia
by the same contributors.
15. JoAnn Magdoff and Jeffrey B. Rubin, Social and Psychological
Uses of the Internet, in Deciphering Cyberspace: Making the Most
of Digital Communication Technology, ed. Leonard Shyles
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003), 207.
16. Danielle Citron, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2014), 58.
17. Ryan Reilly, FBI: When It Comes To @ISIS Terror, Retweets =
Endorsements, last modified August 7, 2015, http://www.huff-
ingtonpost.com/entry/twitter-terrorism-fbi_55b7e25de4b0224d
8834466e
56 A. KLEIN
18. Paul J.Becker, Bryan Byers, and Arthur Jipson, The Contentious
American Debate: The First Amendment and Internet-based Hate
Speech, International Review of Law Computers 14, no. 1 (2000):
3341.
19. Dale Herbeck, Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, in Free Speech on
Trial: Communication Perspectives on Landmark Supreme Court
Decisions, ed. Richard Parker (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of
Alabama Press, 2003), 8599.
Responsibilities 26, no. 4 (1999).
21. America Divided on Hate Speech Laws, accessed August 21,
2015, https://today.yougov.com/news/2014/10/02/america-
divided-hate-speech-laws/
22. 50% Say Hate Is Growing in America, last modified June 23,
2009, http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/life-
style/general_lifestyle/june_2009/50_say_hate_is_growing_
in_america
23. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Southern Dreams and a
New Theory of First Amendment Realism, Emory Law Journal
65, no. 2 (2015): 303358.
24. Ian Haney Lpez, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals
have Reinvented Racism & Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015).
25. Does Your School Block This Site?, accessed August 4, 2009,
http://www.stormfront.org/forum/sitemap/index.php/
t-269822.html
26. McMasters, Must a Civil Society.
27. Citron, Hate Crimes, 239.
CHAPTER 5
The Websites
In the early 1990s, while the Internet was still in its nascency and the
world was largely unaware that it lay on the brink of a new information
age, hate groups hung in the depths of cultural irrelevance. Back in the
fabric of American society, those racist and radical organizations were hard
to miss when they converged on a small town or college campus foolishly
donned in swastika-patched armbands and unranked uniforms. Even well-
funded groups like the KKK, which had once commanded national atten-
tion during the Civil Rights era, had largely become inconsequential in
the age of cable television. Though cable TV gave way to an explosion of
special interest programmingincluding channels dedicated to race and
religionthe gatekeepers of these networks protected the airwaves from
those easily identifiable representatives of intolerance. By the mid-90s, as
far as the mainstream media were concerned, hate groups like the KKK
and neo-Nazi Skinheads had all but been resigned to their reoccurring
roles as the cartoonish character guests of TV talk show platforms like
the Jerry Springer Show, where their bigoted viewpoints were more often
mocked than feared by audiences. But the Internet and the information
age would change all of thatfor everyone.
When the global community entered the information age, the doors to
the World Wide Web were opened to anyone who could access and uti-
lize the new medium. Online, those traditional gatekeepers of the main-
stream media would themselves become largely irrelevant in deciding how
the structure and culture of the web would develop. Instead, a vast array

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-51424-6_5
58 A. KLEIN
of narrowcasted media content, like special interest websites and blogs,

helped to build the Internet from the ground up. Through increased con-
nectivity, preexisting forums of social and political expression found new
homes in the virtual world where the concept of a community swiftly
became a global sphere of unlimited communicative potential. Suddenly,
everyone had a microphone on the world stage.
Organized hate speech, as its own form of virulent socialpolitical
expression, quickly emerged on the web as well, through budding web-
sites, discussion boards, chat rooms, and eventually, the blogosphere. The
white nationalist movement in particular moved to re-establish itself in
the new platform, followed by Holocaust denial groups, anti-government
and xenophobic militias, anti-gay factions, and terrorist organizations that
each steadily expounded their agendas in the digital world. In fact, the
very first white power website, Stormfront.org, was launched in 1995,
but over 20 years later, it has grown into one of the largest special interest
communities online today. In this chapter, we look at 25 hate websites,
like Stormfront, that have each emerged, adapted, and under a newfound
legitimacy, begun to thrive on the web.
From a global perspective, the number of organized hate sites, forums,
and social media pages currently exceeds 30,000 according to the Simon
Wiesenthal Center, which has been tabulating an annual Report on Digital
Terrorism and Hate since 1997.1 While 30,000 is no doubt a staggering
number, especially when one considers the scope of any given community
on the web, the breadth of online hate activity should be understood in
the greater global context of the Internets marketplace of ideas. When
compared to other cultural communities and social movements that have
brought their various organizations into the digital world, todays online
hate websites present formidable numbers.
Digital Hate: Size andSignificance

Audience size in cyberspace is more difficult to measure than any other
mass media metric of popularity and following, such as television ratings or
motion picture sales. The Daily Stormer website, for example, is currently
ranked the 37,840th most visited website in the world by the Alexa Web
Information company.2 But that number only begins to resonate when
measured against the 970 million websites that are now operating online
today.3 The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist community, is in fact one
of the largest hate sites on the Internet today, especially in the United
THE WEBSITES 59
States where it is ranked #21,800, just behind Stormfront at #12,082,

(with Google ranked #1). But if we begin to consider the more specific
category of organized cultural interest groups on the web, the true size
and significance of online hate begins to take shape.
In Fig. 5.1, some of the worlds leading cultural interest organiza-
tions are shown, measured against four of the most frequented hate web-
sites. This time, rather than a websites ranking, we compare the average
monthly visitation to these websites over a three-month period in 2015,
as compiled by SimilarWeb analytics.4 Even in the company of some of
the most influential advocates for civil rights and social equality, the sig-
nificance of the sample becomes self-evident. In terms of their following,
Stormfront, Metapedia, American Renaissance, and Daily Stormer each
receive considerably more visitors to their websites than their watchdog
counterpart sites.
Fig. 5.1 Snapshot of web-traffic activity three-month average in 2015

60 A. KLEIN
From its virtually unknown beginnings in 1995, Stormfront now com-

mands an audience of between 800,000 to one million monthly visitors,
far greater than competing advocacy sites like Human Rights Campaign,
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), or
the Anti-Defamation League that work specifically against the rising tide of
hate on the Internet. Theirs, however, may be a losing battle as long as hate
websites continue to pursue a competitive strategy of bridging new follow-
ers from the interconnectivity that only the Internet provides.
Ultimately, size in the digital world is multidimensional when one
considers the addition of links that interconnect one hate community to
another, and so on. A visitor to the benign-sounding MartinLutherKing.
org, for instance, can link directly to Stormfront, and from there move onto
the White Aryan Resistance homepage, and then onto Dylann Roofs Last
Rhodesian site, and dozens more interconnections, demonstrating how the
whole is greater than the sum of its parts in a highly active web commu-
nity such as this. In its broadest conception, digital hate culture has truly
become a modern pandemic phenomenon. As Swain and Nieli discovered
in their early 2003 study, Anyone who spends a few hours surfing the
various white nationalists and white racialist websites on the Internet will
discover just how vast the network of these organizations has become.5
The selection of 25 hate websites examined here was chosen to reflect a
representational cross-section of racist and radical activity on the Internet.
As such, the two central criteria for selecting each URL were the websites
popularity in terms of monthly visitors, and its representation of modern
Internet trends. Not surprisingly, these two barometers often comple-
mented one another. That is to say, the larger the web community, the
more likely it offered a functional and interactive website by represent-
ing common features such as audio and video podcasts, social networking
options, news forums, chat rooms, research archives, as well as links to
mainstream extensions such as a community YouTube channel.
Collectively, the sample presented here represents a stunning transfor-
mation of a movement that once could have been characterized as an
underground discriminatory subculture, turned into a vigorous commu-
nity (see 25 hate websites in Table 5.1). How yesterdays extremists have
transitioned, or, perhaps more aptly, adapted into this new generation
can only be understood by ultimately going directly to the sourcethe
websites themselvesand examining their pages from the Internet users
point of view. We will explore the following communities from the most
blatant websites to the cleverly veiled:
THE WEBSITES 61
Table 5.1 Hate websites under review by average web traffic

Website Monthly visitsa Websites linking inb
Stormfront 810,000 1798

Daily Stormer 590,000 1002
Metapedia 400,000 1738
American Renaissance 350,000 1453
VDARE 260,000 1991
David Duke 110,000 1515
Final Call 110,000 1180
Occidental Observer 100,000 1067
Council of Conservative Citizens 90,000 575
Westboro Baptist Church 80,000 913
Institute for Historical Review 75,000 1414
Ku Klux Klan 75,000 247
Tightrope 35,000 106
Jew Watch 30,000 655
White Aryan Resistance 30,000 343
MartinLutherKing 25,000 296
National Vanguard 20,000 320
Vanguard News Network 20,000 259
American Freedom Party 15,000 389
National Socialist Movement 9000 149
Podblanc 9000 94
Solar General 9000 49
Family Research Institute 4000 172
Creativity Alliance 3000 66
National Alliance N/A 165
Monthly website visitation information provided by SimilarWeb analytics

a
b
Total number of external websites linking into the hate websites sourced from Alexa Web analytics
Self-Identifying Supremacists (Traditional Hate)

Faux-Social Networks and Forums (Community)
Faux-News and Research (Information)
Mainstream Political Organizations (Political Activism)
In each category, a single website will be examined in greater depth for

its representation of the larger field, as other sites are collectively explored
for their prominent attributes. From there, we shall take an extended look
at one primary purpose of these pages, which is recruitment.
62 A. KLEIN
Self-Identifying Supremacists
The first class of hate websites collectively encompasses the same ideologies
that will be found in the latter three categories. In the pages of websites
like NSM88.org, you will find the home of the neo-Nazi National Socialist
Movement, while the domain of KKK.com brings visitors into the modern
world of the Ku Klux Klan, and Natall.com represents one of the largest
and well-funded white supremacist communities of the National Alliance.
Other prominent domains of this category include the digital domain of
the White Aryan Resistance, the National Vanguard, and the white power
pop culture site Tightrope.cc. This cluster of hate communities is linked
by two commonalities: each represents a traditional supremacist ideology,
largely racial and religious in nature, and each bares unconcealed agendas
online. In this way, we are beginning in the most blatant corner of online
hate culture, where the Internet has essentially served to reinvigorate, and,
in some cases, unite these age-old organizations of intolerance.
Hate activity in the mainstream media has often been captured in images
of the neo-Nazi banner marching through the streets of Small Town in the
United States. Depending upon ones perspective, the sudden resurfacing
of a neo-Nazi rally behind the banner of swastikas can appear as a fright-
ening reprisal of 1930s Germany, or an angry mob of teenagers in need
of attention. While there is certainly no faade to the threat of this nos-
talgic movement, the transmission of its public message had been largely
deflated throughout the 1980s and 1990s and confined to underground
books, underground music, and flyers that led to underground meetings.
That is until its most recent efforts to resurface in the online community.
It is appropriate to begin this exploration through the fringes of cyber-
space with one of the most identified hate factions in modern history, the
neo-Nazis, whose agenda and message are also among the most extreme.
Leading the pack in terms of notoriety is NSM88.org, the website of the
largest neo-Nazi group in the United States. The SPLC has defined the
neo-Nazi agenda by its shared hatred for Jews and a love for Adolf Hitler
and Nazi Germany.6 The watchdog group notes further that, While
[neo-Nazis] also hate other minorities, homosexuals and even sometimes
Christians, they perceive the Jew as their cardinal enemy, and trace social
problems to a Jewish conspiracy that supposedly controls governments,
financial institutions and the media. This element of a perceived con-
spiracy plays a major role in the discourse found on the NSM88 pages.
However, in recent years, neo-Nazis in the United States have expanded
THE WEBSITES 63
their mission beyond anti-Semitism to include a newly targeted Hispanic

population. This supremacist issue centers largely on the growing immi-
gration debate, which lends the neo-Nazi agenda a familiar theme of the
outsider, threatening the white establishment from within.
The NSM88 website presents one end of a theoretical spectrum of
transparency in the digital hate arena. Here, we might expect to see the
Internet used as a medium in the same way that radios and billboards were
once employed by Hitlers Nazi Party, recalling their use of newspapers
to present the Jews as sinister cartoons plotting in the shadows, or as the
vermin and rats of German society. The homepage of the NSM website
could not likely be confused for anything other than a neo-Nazi gathering
place, swathed in images of white power rallies, traditional swastikas, and,
recently, a cartoon depicting a Star of David-shaped intersection leading
directly to the White House. The name Hitler appears a few times on the
homepage, and the sites URL containing the number 88 is a common
neo-Nazi reference to Heil Hitler from the numeric correlation to the
eighth letter of the alphabet: HH. These various numeric symbols are
common to racist communications and, along with exploited images like
the Celtic cross, allow groups like the NSM to brand and market their
agendas online into tee shirts, music labels, and badges of honor.
While an initial scan of the NSM homepage draws upon familiar Nazi
imagery and an overall militant feel, a snapshot of this websites features
reveals much more about its modernized strategy aimed at attracting
a newer generation of visitors to its cause. Like all the websites in this
sample, NSM88.org is representative of contemporary Internet trends.
From links to YouTube videos featuring rally speeches, to radio podcasts
and fully functioning community blogs, to racially biased news stories,
the NSM site demonstrates sophistication in its ability to package their
initial message into the new digital culture. Of course, to most everyday
citizens, the prospect of stumbling into the website of one of the leading
neo-Nazi groups in the United States would be like intentionally driving
your car into the bad part of town. However, with over 140 websites cur-
rently linking into the NSM88.org domain, including Wikipedia, CNN.
com, Google, and Yahoo, that prospect becomes less an act of deliberate
consciousness and more of a foolish wrong turn.
In addition to the NSM, the other major websites associated with the
neo-Nazi and/or white power banner demonstrate a high level of techni-
cal savviness and sophistication on their homepages. Perhaps just as recog-
nizable as the neo-Nazis have been in embodying anti-Semitism, the KKK
64 A. KLEIN
is potentially the most identifiable white supremacist movement. Forming

ranks not long after the end of the Civil War, the KKK is one of the old-
est active hate organizations today, well known for their bigoted platform
and the white hoods they hide behind. In recent years, the Internet has
provided a new form of anonymity for KKK.com, where they can rebuild
a racist network that had lost much of it membership and clout in the last
30 years. According to Samoriski, the rebuilding process has been one of
the major functions of the web for white nationalism:
Organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), traditionally involved in real

world demonstrations, parades, and leafleting to gain publicity, have found
the ease and low cost of Internet publishing ideally suited for their public
relations needs. Such organizations are able to create and maintain Web sites
to communicate with existing members and reach new ones much more
cheaply. Hate groups are also able to link to other sites, thereby creating
a hate network on the Internet.7
These observations hold true for the current KKK website which is
updated regularly. The nationwide hate group has, in effect, built a vir-
tual headquarters online, linking all of its dispersed chapters in the digital
world. According to the ADL, this strategy has been working well for
the KKK of the new millennium: After a period of relative quiet, Ku
Klux Klan activity has spiked noticeably upwards in 2006, as Klan groups
have attempted to exploit fears in America over gay marriage, perceived
assaults on Christianity, crime and especially immigration.8
Among the other websites that are recognized for their parent organiza-
tions agenda, the National Alliance homepage welcomes Any White per-
son (a non-Jewish person of wholly European ancestry) of good character
and at least 18 years of age to its online community. It connects directly
to another organizational hate community of the National Vanguard,
which offers daily articles on subjects such as the legacy of Adolf Hitler,
and the science of racial evolution. The Tightrope.cc website is unique
to this category as the leading retail site for all things white power, from
shirts to patches, flags to hoodies, mouse pads and other regalia adver-
tising messages like 100% White, 100% Proud, White Lives Matter,
and various symbols of skinhead culture. Tightropes growing success in
the digital world is a reminder that these racist communities are not just
about politics and belief systems; rather, they are a subculture; one that
as evidently appealing to younger audiences, male outcasts in particular,
THE WEBSITES 65
who are attracted to a scene entrenched in these symbols of social rebel-

lion. The WAR homepage, launched under the attractive moniker Resist.
com, is well aware of its appeal to younger crowds, providing video games,
cartoons, bumper stickers, and racist music downloads. However, with
their forums on International Jewry, virtual leaflets on Holocaust Denial
campaigns, and About Us statements that speak to Aryan ideals, the
underlying neo-Nazi agenda still scratches close to the surface on this and
other websites in this category.
In representing supremacist beliefs so openly on the Internet, there
is one more quality that these websites share, which is important to rec-
ognizethey are also among the least visited hate communities in this
sample. As is evident in Table 5.1, none of the websites in this category are
frequented online anywhere near those top-tier hate sites. The National
Alliance page, for example, is ranked at the bottom of the list of 25, while
the NSM88 website receives an average of 9000 visits each month. These
figures should raise the question: Why are the hate organizations that are
the most well known in society not correspondingly the most frequented
in the virtual world? Perhaps it is because these websites so openly repre-
sent recognized hate movements that todays Internet user is less comfort-
able in identifying with their communities. After all, as was established in
an earlier chapter, this is a digital culture that thrives on its anonymity and
its faades.
Faux-Social Networks andCommunity Forums

It should come as little surprise that the most popular community in
the realm of digital hate culture shares a key quality in common with
the most successful websites on the Internet todaysocial connection.
Stormfront is by far the largest, most frequented web domain among all
the hate sites according to web analytics providers, receiving an average of
730,000 unique visitors each month.9 A predominantly white nationalist
site, Stormfront demonstrates one of the most elaborate and complete
transitions of modern hate culture into the online platform. It has been
described by the ADL as a veritable supermarket of online hate, stock-
ing its shelves with many forms of anti-Semitism and racism, including
forums ranging on subjects of parenting to teens, classified ads, to home
and gardening, and an alarmingly interactive chat community.10
In this narrow category of Faux-Social Networks and Community
Forums, websites like Stormfront and Podblanc have discovered the
66 A. KLEIN
formula for cultivating a robust online presence to offer a socially engag-

ing, interactive space where popular cultural interests are placed on the
homepage, and community politics exist somewhere beneath the fold.
Visitors to Stormfront find a web community that has been around
for over 20 years, and has evolved steadily with the changing times. Its
founder, Don Black, not surprisingly, was a longtime student of the white
power movement and a former member of the KKK, which he helped
revitalize with David Duke before turning his attention to computers and
the Internet. Blacks website in many ways embodies the transition that
hate groups have gone through in the twenty-first century, from the rec-
ognized banners of intolerance (represented by the previous category), to
the modern-day virtual neighborhoods of social bigotry.
Visually, Stormfront is structured like a multipurpose community
site that looks more like Craigslist than a white nationalist domain. Its
radio podcasts, forums, and chat rooms host its self-reported 300,000
members who, according to its statistics, have created almost 900,000
discussion threads, and 11.5 million individual posts. Stormfronts most
prolific feature are its forums that provide discussion platforms for com-
munity interests such as history, politics, poetry, nature, science, technol-
ogy, money, health, homemaking, music, and dating. Internally, however,
these user-friendly forums deliver a virtual hornets nest of intolerance to
this member-based community. In Chap. 6, we will examine more closely
some of the predominant messages of digital hate today, but in the pres-
ent context, we can briefly consider a small sample of the 84,000 threads
found in the annals of Stormfronts Lounge forum, such as How to Deal
with Invaders, Help rid America of Muslims, Negro Found Hanging
Out in Georgia Tree, and How to Get Rid of Jews in My America.11
There are currently 1800 different websites linking directly into
Stormfront, while its members post countless links to other hate websites
in their forum threads, making Stormfront a central nexus of hate activity
in the digital world. But Don Blacks website is not the only domain to
effectively tap into the social and sharing culture of cyberspace. Podblanc.
guru has been carefully monitored and documented by watchdog groups
as a next generation hate website that facilitates the uploading of rac-
ist video rants, and acts of fanatic violence from all around the globe.
Podblanc is a video-sharing website thats fast becoming an online insti-
tution for the white nationalist movement modeled after YouTube,
the SPLC reports.12
THE WEBSITES 67
Today, video-sharing hubs like YouTube and Vimeo have become a

premiere format for much online creative expression, especially for the
younger net-savvy content creators. Podblanc taps into this youth-driven
trend with well over 1000 channels, many of which exploit race humor
and amateur comedy sketches. However, other postings go as far as depict-
ing montages of skinheads punching, kicking and stomping orthodox
Jews and nonwhites. The victims appear to be selected at random as they
ride subways and walk down public streets.13 Like all video-sharing web-
sites, Podblancs success is built on the activity of countless contributors
who post daily videos, most of which use rants and satire to drive home
messages of hate and intolerance, while some circulate celebrated foot-
age of deadly acts of violence. As new content is uploaded every hour,
with some videos receiving thousands of views, there is strong evidence
that Podblanc is benefiting from the same form of social/creative activ-
ity that has made mainstream video websites so popular. Of course, while
YouTube is constantly at work at removing violent and offensive mate-
rial that seems to multiply in the era of copycat video posts, Podblanc is
focused on benefitting from that same viral phenomenon.
Unlike the previous two networks, The Creativity Alliance website
incorporates a theme of religion into its racist community. The website of
the Creativity movement proclaims to be a religious creed based on the
scientific work of Charles Darwin, and thus delivers a faith-based blend of
science and intolerance. The homepage, which features the slogan White
Racial Loyalty Without Compromise, is a community that includes chat
rooms and forums, church membership information, as well as links to its
Facebook and Twitter pages. The Creativity Alliance has received national
attention from the notoriety of its founder, Matt Hale, who spent years
promoting his brand of spiritual white supremacy. Hale, who was denied
his law license by the Illinois Bar Association, went on instead to become
Pontifex Maximus of the Church of the Creator at age 25. Incidentally,
Pontifex Maximus started his website in 2005 out of his home office, the
second-floor study of his fathers house in East Peoria, Illinois.14 He is
currently in federal prison for trying to have a Jewish judge killed. Both
the Creativity movement and Hales website, however, have continued
to build a worldwide membership with devout followers, such as Craig
Cobb, founder and operator of the Podblanc website.
Finally, LGBT-hate has been on the rise in American culture, especially
in the wake of the historic 2015 Supreme Court decision that affirmed
the right of same-sex couples to marry across the country. As other legal
68 A. KLEIN
debates over the civil rights of LGBT citizens play out in American courts,
a virulent strain of anti-gay religious movements has forged an ugly pres-
ence in the digital world. Perhaps the most notorious example can be
found at the website of the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), whose
derogatory URL this author chooses not to print. The WBC first came
into the national spotlight in 1998 when behind their church leader Fred
Phelps, members picketed outside the funeral of Matthew Shepherd, the
teenager from Laramie, Wyoming, who was beaten to death because he
was a homosexual. The signs they held back then very much reflected
the same principles, which can be found on their small, but growing web
community today.
Among the gallery of images an Internet user will immediately encoun-
ter on the site are scenes of rallies at which prominent signs declare God
Hates F*gs, and God is Americas Enemy. The open letters, blogs, and
sermons it shares are typically framed by so-called biblical justifications
of hate and condemnation of the LGBT community and its supporters,
like President Obama, whom it frequently calls the anti-Christ. With
over 900 websites currently linking in, including Wikipedia, Reddit, and
Stormfront, the ADL asserts that the WBC site is specifically designed to
inflame the passion of viewers.15
In their work on viral hate speech, Foxman and Wolf remind us that,
the First Amendment has been held to protect speech that advocates
violence, so long as the speech is not directed to inciting or producing
imminent lawless action.16 And so, the examples drawn from the WBC,
Podblanc, and Stormfront websites show us just how these communities
shrewdly facilitate an advocacy for cultural violence without breaking a
law. From member-driven video uploads of ethnic assaults on Podblanc, to
forums like Help rid America of Muslims on Stormfront, one does not
need a footnote to read into the subtext of these sentiments. They insinu-
ate real acts of physical violence, which even in this social context, can
and have inspired others tend to emulate what they see.
Faux-Information andResearch
As effective as the community approach has been for websites like
Stormfront, those social gathering spaces are not the most prevalent cyber
fronts for todays racist and radical organizations. In fact, the largest col-
lective in this sample are the websites that use the faade of news, poli-
tics, history, and even science in attempts to educate their readers about
THE WEBSITES 69
cultural differences. It is all about building an intellectual basis for hate.

There is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to
the whole world, Thomas Jefferson said. In fact, that is the quote that
is prominently placed at the top of the American Renaissance homep-
age. It is also an underlying, albeit misused, mantra of this and so many
other white nationalist communitiesthat their websites are exposing the
truth about race, ethnicity, sexuality, and human biology, for the world
to realize.
There are different forms of hate speech disguised as information, and
it seems that each year radical groups find new masks to wear in the digital
world to blend in with the scenery of information culture. Some of the
websites examined in this sample include self-styled electronic encyclope-
dias, daily news sites, historical societies, and scientific communities. But
the most prolific form that the modern hate website has adopted is the
political blog, offering that perfect nexus of cultural issues, identity poli-
tics, and racist perspective.
The Daily Stormer website presents a disclaimer on its homepage
exclaiming, We here at the Daily Stormer are opposed to violence. We
seek revolution through the education of the masses. When the infor-
mation is available to the people, systemic change will be inevitable and
unavoidable.17 Next to Stormfront, the Daily Stormer is quickly becom-
ing the most visited hate community in cyberspace, with about 600,000
visitors each month, who come to read the articles that circle around
sociopolitical and cultural topics, such as the next presidential election, the
liberal media, and Hollywood. But for a website that disowns violence,
this blog conspicuously offers inflammatory editorial sections titled The
Jewish Problem and Race War. The Daily Stormer is, in fact, named
after the infamous Nazi newspaper Der Strmer, and it too features the
same cartoonish images of long-nosed Jews creeping in the shadows of
societyonly these depictions are now expressed as memes, which readers
can copy and share.
A Los Angeles Times article called The Daily Stormer unique in its
combination of fascism with a millennial tone.18 The website and its
30-year-old founder, Andrew Anglin, have received increased exposure
since July 2015 when it was strongly suspected that Charleston shooter,
Dylann Roof, had been regularly visiting and commenting on the Daily
Stormer under the name AryanBlood88 (posting verbatim the same
thoughts that he shared on his own site). But the profile of Daily Stormer
had already been surging since its aggressive launch in 2013. Two years
70 A. KLEIN
later, the SPLC featured Anglins website on its Hatewatch series, noting
a significant milestone it had reached:
The Daily Stormer has in the last six months often topped the oldest and
largest hate site on the web, Stormfront, in terms of reach and page views,
based on Alexa data. Its readers spend more time on the site than they do
on Stormfront and, on a slow day, more than 10,000 log on. Daily Stormer
also reaches a younger and wealthier demographic.19
Unlike Stormfront, the articles of Daily Stormer are not authored by the
general community, but rather by Andrew Anglin himself, and a few other
journalistic sources. The quotations reflect the fact that most articles
are certainly not inscribed from the hands of professional journalists, such
as stories authored by VDARE (Virginia Dare), a subject of a later cat-
egory of hate site. Further, a few articles found on the Daily Stormer
appear to be contributed by mainstream sources, such as one story of a
violent crime committed by a Black Felon that is purportedly provided
by the Chicago Tribune. While the Tribune did write the story, they cer-
tainly did not provide Andrew Anglin permission to present it as their
contribution to his hate community. Here, we see a common strategy of
many radical websites, which take real news articles that feature a single
aspect of race, such as an African American assailant, and repost the story
in their own pages, cleverly weaving it into the fabric of hateful narratives
already established.
The Daily Stormer is one of a series of cunning hate sites that have
tapped into the intersecting blogosphere, where articles shared and sto-
len are constantly floating between websites, and where radical ideas are
gradually being legitimized through this process of information launder-
ing. Helping that process is another hate website that has fashioned itself
into the first electronic encyclopedia with a white nationalist perspective.
Metapedia is presented as the alternative encyclopedia. The website is
designed to offer Internet users an educational resource on tens of thou-
sands of subjects, from peoples, to places, to events, providing a racial spin
on their explanations. At first glance, Metapedia both looks and operates
just like Wikipedia. It is also offered in 16 different languages, each rapidly
growing in popularity. The SPLC identifies Metapedia as a clear indication
that white power communities are attempting to reach young academics,
but reaffirms that while their scholarly subjects sound familiar their
definitions dont.20
THE WEBSITES 71
Online, Metapedia helps to endorse the validity of a website like Daily

Stormer, by first defining it as an alternative media and pro-European
news website based in the United States.21 Such benevolent descriptions
can then be very effective in diluting the Internets general knowledge
about such communities, especially when we consider that the average
online information seeker can find the Metapedia version of reality
through any common search engine. For example, a Google search for
the Daily Stormer currently turns up the Metapedia article on the very
first page of results. As a result, for web readers, it is not only Metapedia
that has validated the Daily Stormer, but also Google. And because of
Metapedias familiar wiki design, the visitor may be further inclined to
authenticate its material as legitimate information. More common top-
ics, such as the page on Adolf Hitler, or a search for the term African
Americans, reveal Metapedias shrewd agenda to redefine history and
contemporary understandings. In the former example, a reader will find
no mention of the Holocaust or genocide in Hitlers entire biography. As
for the latter example, a search for African Americans does not return
that title, but rather the page on Black Africans in the United States,
where they are described as part of the negroid race that currently reside
in the United States. The media refer to them as Youths when they have
misbehaved.22
Many of the websites in this larger category follow the same pattern
of borrowing from the contemporary discourses of identity politics, and
further inflaming them, such as the black Presidents secret Muslim
faith, or the Jewish-controlled liberal media, or the scourge of illegal
Hispanic aliens. Through such sentiments that straddle hardline poli-
tics and racist beliefs, bigotry is effectively being couched in mainstream
debates. The American Renaissance website, for instance, with its traffic
of 350,000 visits each month, uses virtually no racist or incendiary lan-
guage on the homepage. Its news, commentary, and podcast sections are
tamely organized around science stories, political conversation, and think
pieces that almost sound academic in tone. Almost. Taken as a whole,
articles such as Politics and White Consciousness, We Used to Shoot
Looters, and To Understand the Ferguson Riots, Look to Africa allow
visitors to read between the lines to find the racist perspectivebut, of
course, that is why so many are there. Solar General, which is perhaps
the most up-to-date hate site in the sample of 25, blends modern bigotry
with conspiracy theory. Launched in 2014, Solar General claims to be the
Most Controversial, Censored, and Forbidden Web Site in the World,
72 A. KLEIN
which is likely an advertisement to younger audiences. It provides edgy

news exposs, video podcasts, ebooks, photo galleries, and a virtual library
of culturalmainly Jewishconspiracies. Packaged in an appealing digital
format, Solar General could well find its way into the purview of browsing
college students, which is why this is a community to watch.
While some hate websites aim to contemporize, others look to present
a more traditional informative tone. On the Occidental Observer (motto:
White Identity, Interests and Culture), one finds a quarterly journal fea-
turing topics such as Whiteness Studies, as well as the highlighted books
of former California State University professor,Kevin MacDonald, that can
best be described as scholarly anti-Semitism. It is important to recognize
that whiteness study is an area of interdisciplinary teaching and research
found at numerous universities, with important contributions from distin-
guished scholars such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Thomas Nakayama, Judith
Martin, and Henry Giroux. However, the works of these and other serious
scholars would not be found in the page of websites like the Occidental
Observer that is not really interested in exploring White Identity, Interests
and Culture, as much it is dedicated to denigrating other identities and
cultures. MacDonalds works, which include Understanding Jewish
Influence, are also shared on sites like Jew Watch and DavidDuke.com.
These so-called news and political domains have aligned interests in replac-
ing their anti-Semitic reputations with the standing of a trusted web source
for learning about Jewish power, lies, and conspiracy. The Vanguard News
Network site (motto: No Jews, Just Right) also offers news stories aimed
at establishing the Jewish people as the underlying cause for global eco-
nomic crises, Wall Street scandals, foreign conflicts of war, White House
decisions, and the lists go on.
While the aforementioned sites are working to expose the truth about
Jewish domination in the modern world, other domains are targeting the
historic record. The Institute for Historical Review (IHR) represents one
of several Holocaust Denial organizations operating online today. Its
authors regularly launder scholarly writings into the Internets informa-
tion stream, aiming to establish that the genocide of six million Jews was
nothing more than a myth perpetrated by calculating Jewish leaders. Like
the Institute, the website of MartinLutherKing.org also uses revision-
ist history, along with the precious URL name that it secured in 1999, to
teach the truth about Dr. King. According to a 2011 Huffington Post
article, the site is a spinoff of Stormfront creator Don Blacks mak-
ing, where younger visitors can read about Dr. King the communist,
THE WEBSITES 73
wife-beater, plagiarist, sexual deviant and all-around fraud. There are

flyers to the same effect that children can download, print and bring to
school.23 The news story also points to cases where students have been
found to use this website as a source for book reports.
In the race for spreading knowledge about the work of Martin
Luther King, Jr., or the evils of the Holocaust, it is reassuring to know
that the legitimate commemorative websites of The King Center and
U.S.Holocaust Memorial Museum each receive more visitors than IHR.
org and MartinLutherKing.org. But the revisionist sites have also been on
the rise for several years, steadily catching up to their authentic counter-
parts. In the years ahead, it will be crucial to monitor these and other web-
sites of this prolific category of intellectualized hate, especially as there
are fewer Civil Rights leaders, and even far fewer Holocaust survivors,
left to tell their firsthand accounts. Those who are asked to learn about
their critical historiesprimarily, high school and college studentsare
now twice and even three times removed from the generation that lived
through them. The same audience is also the generation that is rapidly
moving away from traditional sources like books whose paragraphs, pages,
and chapters are found in the greater context of libraries. Instead they are
searching for answers to questions through online search engines, and
often finding them in fragmented form on authorless websites. Does this
make the later generations less likely to recognize information about the
Civil Rights era that is, in fact, well-crafted digital propaganda? And will
it make them more susceptible to trust a veiled hate site that provides so-
called proof that the Holocaust never occurred? Only time will tell.
Mainstream Political Organizations

The final websites in this review are probably the most likely to dispute
their place on this list of extremist communities. That is because, in some
circles, groups such as VDARE, Nation of Islam, and the Council of
Conservative Citizens (CCC) are seen as legitimate political organiza-
tions with a recognized mainstream standing. VDAREs President Peter
Brimelow, for example, was a featured speaker at the Conservative Political
Action Conference (CPAC) in 2012. Brimelows panel session, which
followed the speeches of sitting US Senators, was titled The Failure of
Multiculturalism: How the pursuit of diversity is weakening the American
Identity.24 The Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan has been a guest
of several news shows, including NBCs Meet the Press, where his views
74 A. KLEIN
on negative Jewish influence have been nationally represented.25 And the

CCC has held numerous ties to prominent Republican politicians, such
as former US Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott who has spoken at their
group meetings, or Ann Coulter who has openly defended the organiza-
tion from accusations of white supremacy.26
In one light, these organizations do represent widely shared interests
and political perspectives, whether it is VDAREs advocacy in preventing
illegal immigration, or the Nation of Islams commitment to the Black
Muslim community. But in the digital world, these groups websites have
allowed outsiders to take a closer look at bigoted sentiments that many
watchdog agencies have long suspected were bubbling just beneath the
surface of the organizations. Here, we return to an earlier important dis-
tinction between those interests that engage in a discourse of race through
a spirit of civic debate or through motivations of hate. The critical ques-
tion to consider in analyzing the following websites is whether the source
and focus of their political ire is in fact a policy, or a people?
The CCC states its principles as a pledge to support American civili-
zation, liberty, justice, and national safety, but its web content and his-
tory tell a different story.27 While on its face the CCC appears to be a
respectable conservative advocacy, its initiatives are apparently designed
for a United States which they define on their website as a Christian
and European nation. The CCC represents perhaps one of the most
significant cases in this sample, in part because of its connections to
established Republican political figures like Governor Haley Barbour of
Mississippi, but even more so because of its successful masking of racist
sentiments behind the policy discourse of mainstream conservatism. In
their Intelligence Report investigation, the Southern Poverty Law Center
examined some of the common positions circulated on the CCC website,
and found this group to be more preoccupied with race than any with
specific policies they proclaim to champion. They concluded that the CCC
was, in fact, a hate group that routinely denigrated blacks as genetically
inferior, complained about Jewish power brokers, called homosexuals
perverted sodomites, and accused immigrants of turning America into a
slimy brown mass of glop.28
The CCC site, which receives approximately 90,000 visits each month,
provides feature articles dedicated to several topics of race and society, but
none so popular as the subject of crime. The site reports heavily on black-
on- white criminal activity, which is how Charleston shooter, Dylann
Roof, purportedly discovered the CCC homepage when using those
THE WEBSITES 75
search terms on Google. Yet, for all its focus on criminality in America,
the CCC website news feed consistently finds fault with only African
Americans and Hispanic-Americans. The website further uses recurring
themes of national safety and patriotism to bolster its content regarding
the threat of outsiders to white, Christian society. In fact, this fear tactic
is one of the oldest hallmarks of white nationalism.
The same themes can be found throughout the website of the American
Freedom Party, a third-position political party launched in 2010. The par-
tys website has tapped into some of the fierce right-wing resentment of
the Barack Obama presidency, commonly voiced by Tea Party groups.
However, theirs is a platform more reminiscent of white supremacist ide-
als, as evidenced by their websites mission statement which shares the
coded battle cry of many far-right extremists, that The United States
has become Unrecognizable.29 Elsewhere, they explain, The American
Freedom Party (AFP) is dedicated to the interests vital to the preserva-
tion and continuity of ethnic European communities within the United
States of America.
Like the CCC and AFP, the Family Research Institute (FRI) website
also acts as the digital extension to a fairly recognized public advocacy.
Using science as its pretense for hate, the FRI website offers special
reports and scientific articles on all matters of homosexuality and
its harmful effects on society. The groups homepage is decorated with
images of microscopes, a human brain, and a silhouette of the nuclear
family it aims to preserveman, woman, and children. The articles them-
selves, however, reveal much more about the Institute than they do about
the topics they claim to investigate. Some of the studies include Does
Incest Cause Homosexuality?, Do Homosexual Teachers Pose a Risk
to Pupils?, Homosexual Brains?, and Homosexual Sex as Harmful
as Drug Abuse, Prostitution, or Smoking.30 It is difficult to imagine any
respectable scientific journal publishing these types of faux studies that
are thinly veiled attempts to frame LGBT citizens as both deviant and
subhuman.
Most of the articles are authored by the FRI founder Dr. Paul Cameron
and his son Kirk. In 1983, Paul Cameron, once a recognized scientist,
was expelled by the American Psychological Association (APA), for mis-
representing and distorting other peoples psychological research and
using it to sensationalize his point of view on homosexuals.31 According
to an APA representative at the time, Camerons research tried to show
homosexuals being mass murderers and child molesters and credits other
76 A. KLEIN
people for those findings. If you read their research, they have in no way
made such claims. We have letters from those researchers saying he has dis-
torted their research. It is important to remember that while such a mark
on ones credibility will no doubt tarnish their standing in the scientific
world, online, all one needs to publish is a website. For the typical college
freshman, perhaps new to scientific research but familiar with the Internet,
an official website like the Family Research Institute looks and sounds
like a credible resource. But beneath the surface, the FRI domain is built
upon homophobic biases and paranoid conclusions, neither of which have
a place in true science.
Like anti-gay groups, anti-Hispanic sentiment has also been surging
at an alarming rate in the last decade, in close connection to an impas-
sioned immigration debate. On the issue of citizenship, this research is
not concerned with the fierce anti-immigration groups, of which there are
many, whose goals are strictly issue-oriented. But among these legitimate
political advocacies, one finds the VDARE Foundation, whose website
claims to be a premier news outlet for patriotic immigration reform.32
VDAREs web contributors have included noted conservative pundits
like Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, and Michelle Malkin, as well as noted
white supremacists like Jared Taylor and John Philippe Rushton. Taylor is
the founder of the aforementioned American Renaissance hate site, while
Rushton is known for his Charles Darwin Research Institute where he
used selective science to make a case for evolution-based racism.
One might conceivably argue that VDARE.com should not be judged
for the writings of a few of its fanatic journalists. However, it is hard to
miss the message that is carried in the organizations own namesake.
VDARE is named after Virginia Dare, the first white Christian child born
into the new world. Followers of the VDARE site, which receives a mas-
sive 250,000 visits each month, can find more references to a white-bred
American society that is now under siege from the threat of non-white
minorities, in article such as Welfare: Its a Minority (and Immigrant)
Thing, Black Mayor Accused of Molesting White Teenage Girl,
More Legal Lynchings of White Men, and Silicon Valley Gets by Fine
Without Hispanics.33 While the friends it has acquired in politics and
journalism have long protected VDARE from greater scrutiny, its digital
record has gradually exposed its character as a racially consumed, xeno-
phobic community.
Finally, the Nation of Islam (NOI) is an 85-year-old religious move-
ment that has gone through many different transformations under v arious
THE WEBSITES 77
leaders, from its founder W.D. Muhammad, to Elijah Muhammad,

to Malcolm X. But since 1977, the movement has been led by Louis
Farrakhan, whose preaching of black separatism, anti-Semitism, and white
people as a devil race has so permeated the NOI, that many watchdog
agencies now deem it a racist organization. The Anti-Defamation League
writes:
Under the guidance of Louis Farrakhan, who has espoused anti-Semitism

and racism for over 30 years as NOI leader, the organization has used its
programs, institutions, and media to disseminate its message of hate. While
Farrakhan often speaks about serious issues affecting the African American
community, including racism, police brutality, and economic disparities, he
often places blame for these societal problems on Jews.34
The NOIs official website is a relatively tame cover page for its organiza-
tions work in community and political activism. However, the far more
visited website of the groups official publication, Finalcall.com, offers a
more outspoken representation of the NOIs perspectives on American
power and culture. There, one finds stories on topics such as Jews and
money, Jews and Hollywood, and Jews and President Obama. The
focus on Jewish influence in the Final Call, like that of Hispanic infil-
tration in VDARE, or homosexual pandemic in the Family Research
Institute, essentially invalidates these websites claims of having a religious,
political, or scientific legitimacy, respectively. Instead, each cause in this
greater category reveals itself to be driven, in part, by much deeper preju-
dices. And yet, in packaging a message of bigotry inside more accessible
themes like family values or patriotism, these websites have presented
a new version of prejudice that is more palatable to wider audiences. It
should, therefore, come as little surprise that three of the mainstream
domains in this category are also among the most visited websites in the
sample.
Toward aStrategy ofRecruitment

For all of its scrutiny and exposure in the context of this review, the overall
image of the modern hate community is one that has begun to discreetly
look, sound, and even read like many of todays most popular websites. It
is evident that what once was perceived as transparent bigotry in the form
of white supremacist emblems and costumes has been carefully modified
78 A. KLEIN
to conform into the trends of information, politics, and digital culture in

the virtual world. The result of this camouflaging process is a collective of
hate domains that effectively appear much more like Reddit or the Drudge
Report.
Of course, there is little mystery behind the question of why racist
and radical movements are so interested in adapting their messages to
the themes of online information and community. The answer is recruit-
ment, and college youth recruitment in particular. As Matt Hale of the
Creativity Alliance proudly declared, We particularly attract the youth.
In fact, I could say that half of our members are younger than twenty-five
years oldwe are a very youth-based organization. We attract college
students mainly through the Internet.35 The recruiting successes of Matt
Hale have been echoed by Reno Wolf, Don Black, Jared Taylor, and other
hate organizers who have long tried to cultivate an understanding of this
digital culture and the generation that amasses it. Assuming that a website
like the Daily Stormer has created a model community in cyberspace
fully functional, informative, engaging, and user friendlythe process of
now attracting the predominantly white, educated, Internet user relies
heavily upon the strategies of recruitment, and an ability to craft messages
that will appeal to the target audiences susceptibilities. In a word, it is all
about identity.
Banduras social cognitive theory has been a critical foundation for
much media scholarship examining relationships between mass messages
and audience response.36 For decades, many researchers subscribed to the
hypodermic needle theory that assumed the transmission of a mediated
message into an audiences psyche was a direct pathway. Such was seem-
ingly the case with Nazi propaganda in the 1930s and 1940s. However,
increasingly, scholars did not believe the media worked in such a penetra-
ble fashion. To measure the response of an audience, one could not simply
ignore the audience itself. Applying Banduras theory of social learning,
researchers began to explore those factors that led an individual to model
or follow what they saw in the media, such as the prospect of reward
or consequence. Among other factors, identification addressed the pos-
sibility that an individual feels a strong psychological connection to a
model or message based on their own views and experiences. As Miller
later explained, if he or she feels a sense of identification with a model,
social learning is likely to occur.37
In some ways, identification might seem somewhat obvious to todays
media consumer, especially Internet users who naturally assume they play
THE WEBSITES 79
an important role in their response to the content they absorb. However,

this idea was groundbreaking during a time when many believed that
media influence and social learning processes worked as fluent mecha-
nisms of cause and effect, like the strings of a puppeteer. The notion that
we must personally identify with a given message was a profound state-
ment to make with regard to the everyday citizens of 1930s Germany
who claimed, post-war, to have been duped by the propagandist ideology
of the Nazi party. For those easily influenced by the Nazi movement, or
any modern hateful ideology, the social learning theory suggests that they,
in fact, play an active role in their own seduction process by culturally
identifying with the message of bigotry.
Today, some of the same principles of identification apply to hateful
messages in the digital world, though the modern Internet user is without
question part of a more media-savvy generation. Thus, for a hate website
to effectively align its content with a particular segment of online culture,
it must effectively build that same strong psychological connection in
the form of the message and its presentation.
Theories ofRecruitment
In their work on Persuasion Techniques Used on White Supremacists

Websites, Weatherby and Scroggins explored various compliance tech-
niques to describe the methods for online recruitment in white power cul-
ture.38 They applied the psychological theories known as foot-in-the-door
and low-ball technique to their analysis of organized hate websites. With
foot-in-the-door technique, a person will be more likely to accede to a
request if he or she previously has agreed to a smaller related request.39 In
cases of low-ball technique, they reassert that an individuals compliance
is gained by not telling the person the whole story.40
When applied to their content analysis of four white power websites,
Weatherby and Scroggins found both strategies were employed as com-
mon recruiting techniques by their web authors to make [their] sites
message appear less extreme. Examples included links to sites such as the
League of the South or Holocaust denial sites that appear scholarly, but
in reality can be a first step toward indoctrinating people with extremist
beliefs. Further, they assert that any attempt to clean up a groups repu-
tation, whether it has a .org address or a plea to be understood, [should]
be considered foot-in-the-door or low-ball technique.41 In their study,
Stormfront.org displayed the most examples of these contextual strategies.
80 A. KLEIN
When we return to the 25 hate websites under review, it is clear to see

foot-in-the-door and low-ball methods being applied here as well. For
instance, websites like Podblanc, which initially offer the promise of a new
video-sharing network but instead deliver a stream of discriminatory con-
tent, practice a modern form of foot-in-the-door technique that exploits a
trusted sharing culture of cyberspace. The Vanguard News Network and
Metapedia websites thrive on low-ball style content on their pages that
offer news and information, but only supply the half of the story that
presents readers with a racist interpretation of the facts.
Through the websites we have examined, we see both general and
refined applications of recruiting techniques at work. In the more general
sense, hate websites incorporate many themes on their homepage that are
aimed at enticing a younger audience, particularly those seeking an alter-
native community with which to self-identify. Simi and Futrell noted how
hate groups knowingly attract young adults who tend to feel disenfran-
chised and marginalized in their own social environments, and as such,
turn to the Internet to find refuge in a web community that proclaims,
theres other people out there that think like you.42 Several studies have
observed that it is often the lonely, marginalized youth, seeking a sense of
identity and belonging who are also the most susceptible targets for hate
groups.43 Accordingly, websites like the Daily Stormer and Solar General
tend to build upon this sense of speaking to the outsider by constructing
introductory messages linked to social rebellion, such as Censored and
Forbidden.
However, within the inner spaces of these sites, namely, the forums,
podcasts, and other specialized content, a more refined recruitment strat-
egy is evident in the framed messages of intolerance. Whereas once the
topics of racism were overtly related to race, here we have seen themes
that tactically overlap with mainstream concerns that affect everyday audi-
ences. Concerns like who should be elected president, getting into college,
and crime feed into more desirable themes like identity politics, affirma-
tive action, and black gangs, respectively, which, in turn, build upon the
underlying narrative of a white oppression.
Returning to Net Generation, it is important to note that one need not
necessarily enter a hate website to encounter these kinds of strategies of
recruitment or messages of racial intolerance. In the next chapter, we will
examine the growing presence of radicalism in the open social networks
and video-sharing sites like Facebook and YouTube, which have each been
gradually infiltrated by white power ideologues and racist organizations
THE WEBSITES 81
looking to preach, socialize, and recruit. But there is another prime

medium for younger audience that several modern hate groups have been
trying to exploit for years, and that is music.
The music culture of the Internet is a direct conduit into the interests
and activities of the Net Generation. Here, too, racist groups have made
steady inroads, in particular through white power rock music, which was
not born online. During the resurgence of white nationalism in the United
States and Europe in the 1980s, neo-Nazi and Skinhead culture became
younger and more expressive through loud music gatherings that would
draw in thousands. Today, thousands have turned into millions online,
where white supremacist record labels like Resistance Records and Final
Stand Records tap into the hate music market, which can gain an even
larger following than many websites can attain. White power music is one
of the leading commercial enterprises for online supremacists, but its rev-
enues are worth much more than dollars and cents. The Net Generation
and music go hand in hand, especially in the digital world. For the white
power movement, its version of racist rock sounds very much like the
metal-thrashing melodies that are popular with many predominantly white
young males. But of course, their lyrics convey much more than angst.
Cohen (2003) explains:
The allure of the angry-sounding music often entices the loner teenager
before he or she recognizes the significance of the lyrics. Sometimes the lyr-
ics themselves are the draw. Teenagers who feel alienated by their peers are
most susceptible to hate rocks message of solidarity and pride in the white
race.44
Simi and Futrells study noted how todays white power websites offer
MP3 downloads, CDs, streaming radio and video, which were evident
in the websites of Tightrope, Stormfront, NSM88, and White Aryan
Resistance. In addition to white power music downloads, supremacist
rock bands have also infiltrated mainstream bases like YouTube with their
songs, videos, and subculture, to steadily build a new following there.
Ultimately, the popularity of racist rock, coupled with the sales of para-
phernalia such as hats, bumper stickers and clothing on these sites, as well
as the recent production of race war online games, signals a disturbing
trend in digital hate on two fronts. First, these are all examples of highly
sophisticated foot-in-the-door techniques of recruitment. By producing
defiant rock music or violent video games that can travel as apps, digital
82 A. KLEIN
hate culture is merely opening the door for the Net Generation. From
there, the young browser can link deeper to the next layer of racist sub-
culture, one which they might have never considered entering before, had
they not been lured by that initial song or game.
On the second front, we are beginning to see perhaps the next phase
of the online adaptation of racist movements in their strategic branding of
all things white power. The Tightrope website, for example, has begun
selling White Lives Matter apparel and other merchandise that have
been reproduced in modern styles. On other sites, we can find the sale of
computer mouse pads, DVDs, sunglasses, and even pet wear that have all
been branded in white nationalist emblems and themes. These websites
are demonstrating a keen understanding of the connection between style,
youth culture, identity, and a sense of belonging.
Conclusion
The racist and radical communities of the twenty-first century are well
represented in the websites examined in this chapter. It is clear to see in
this collection of dot coms and dot orgs that there is a growing online
movement of renovated bigotry that is diverse in its affiliation, but also
integrated in a greater community. The messages we find in this spectrum
of hate, whether they are framed through information, pop culture, or
politicstend to flow along parallel lines and lead toward similar ends,
mainly a rising up against nonwhite oppressors. The common notions
of fighting back and cultural rebellion are highly attractive to not
only politically minded citizens, but to many young adults as well. Their
idealism and rebellious inclinations make the Net Generation a prime tar-
get for hate organizations, which opportunely stand for anti-establishment
themes, that is, anti-government or anti-cultural conformity. As Stormfront
founder, Don Black, explains:
The Net itself is, as I have mentioned, an alternative news media we feel
that we are planting the seeds with these people, which will grow and later
may be the basis for a more viable political movement. These are people who
frequently are in government or corporations, the military, or even the news
media. These are people who are really important to us. I dont think were
going to have any kind of revolution strictly from the outside.45
THE WEBSITES 83
For the Net Generation, it is important to remember that online culture

is much more than just information-seeking or music downloading. It
is a zone of self-expression, social development, and even experimenta-
tion. It is a place to map out an identity. But for websites like American
Renaissance, Stormfront, and Metapedia, their digital culture is also more
than the sum of its applications and access points. It is a direct link to that
next generationa delivery system for receiving new followers in search
of a web community to call their own.
Notes
1. District Attorney Vance and Rabbi Abraham Cooper Announce
the Simon Wiesenthal Centers Report on Digital Terrorism and
Hate, last modified May 1, 2014, http://www.wiesenthal.com/
site/apps/nlnet/content.aspx?c=lsKWLbPJLnF&b=8776547
&ct=13928897
2. Daily Stormer, accessed October 2, 2015, http://www.alexa.
com/siteinfo/dailystormer.com
3. Total Number of Websites, accessed October 2, 2015, http://
www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/
4. Monthly website traffic data obtained from SimilarWeb Analytics.
The Alexa Web Company provided the total number of websites
linking in to each site.
2003), xiii.
6. Active U.S.Hate Groups in 2008: Neo-Nazi, accessed June 28,
2009, http://www.splcenter.org/intel/map/type.jsp?DT=9
7. Jan Samoriski, Issues in Cyberspace: Communication, Technology,
Law, and Society on the Internet Frontier (Boston, MA: Allyn and
Bacon, 2002), 251.
8. About the Ku Klux Klan, accessed September 2, 2015, http://
archive.adl.org/learn/ext_us/kkk/default.html
9. Stormfront.org, accessed September 15, 2015, https://www.
jumpshot.com/report/stormfront.org/
10. Don Black: White Pride World Wide, accessed September 15,
2015, http://www.adl.org/poisoning_web/black.asp
84 A. KLEIN
11. Stormfront Forums, accessed September 15, 2015, https://

www.stormfront.org/forum/f8/
12. Craig Cobb Celebrates Death of Rosa Parks, accessed October
20, 2015, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-
report/2009/craig-cobb
13. Ibid.
14. Angie Cannon and Warren Cohen, The Church of the Almighty
White Man, U.S.News & World Report, July 19, 1999.
15. Westboro Baptist Church, accessed October 15, 2015, http://
archive.adl.org/learn/ext_us/wbc/
16. Abraham H.Foxman and Christopher Wolf, Viral Hate: Containing
its Spread on the Internet (New York: Macmillan Publishers, 2013),
64.
17. Daily Stormer Homepage, accessed October 12, 2015, http://
www.dailystormer.com
18. Matt Pearce, What Happens When a Millennial Goes Fascist? He
Starts Up a Neo-Nazi Site, The Los Angeles Times, accessed June
24, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-daily-stormer-
interview-20150624-story.html
19. Heidi Beirich, Blog Wars: The Daily Stormer and its Racist

Frenemies, last modified March 10, 2015, https://www.splcen-
ter.org/hatewatch/2015/03/11/blog-wars-daily-stormer-and-its-
racist-frenemies
20. Aryan Encyclopedia Takes Off, last modified December 1, 2007,
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=863
21. Daily Stormer, accessed October 1, 2015, http://en.metapedia.
org/wiki/Daily_Stormer
22. Black Africans in the United States, accessed October 1, 2015,
http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/African_Americans
23. Keith Thompson, White Supremacist Sites MartinLutherKing.
org Marks 12th Anniversary, last modified January 16, 2011,
http://www.huf fingtonpost.com/keith-thomson/white-
supremacist-site-ma_b_809755.html
24. Leigh Ann Caldwell, Immigration Speaker Sparks Controversy at
CPAC, last modified February 11, 2012, http://www.cbsnews.
com/news/immigration-speaker-sparks-controversy-at-cpac/
25. Minister Louis Farrakhan: In His Own Words, accessed October
2, 2015, http://archive.adl.org/special_reports/farrakhan_own_
words/print.html
THE WEBSITES 85
26. Mark Potok, Columnist Ann Coulter Defends White Supremacist

Group, last modified February 13, 2009, https://www.splcenter.
org/hatewatch/2009/02/13/columnist-ann-coulter-defends-white-
supremacist-group
27. Statement of Principles: CofCC, accessed October 14, 2015,
http://conser vative-headlines.com/introduction/
statement-of-principles/
28. Racist Council of Conservative Citizens Finds Home in

Mainstream Politics, last modified March 15, 1999, https://
www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/1999/
racist-council-conservative-citizens-finds-home-mainstream-
politics
29. The American Freedom Party Mission Statement, accessed

October 1, 2015, http://american3rdposition.com/?page_id=
195
30. Scientific Articles, accessed October 13, 2015, http://www.

familyresearchinst.org/category/articles/
31.
Marlene Cimons, Dannemeyer Hires AIDS Quarantine
Advocate, Los Angeles Times, August 20, 1985, accessed October
1, 2015, http://articles.latimes.com/1985-08-20/news/
mn-1965_1_aids-quarantine-advocate
32. VDARE Homepage, accessed October 2, 2015, https://www.
vdare.com/circle-of-support
33. VDARE Articles, accesses October 2, 2015, http://www.vdare.
com/articles
34. What is the Nation of Islam? Anti-Defamation League, last

modified September 1, 2015, http://www.adl.org/anti-semitism/
united-states/c/what-is-the-nation-of-islam.html?referrer=
https://www.google.com/#.WC4lZKIrLeQ
36. Albert Bandura, Social Learning Through Imitation, in Nebraska
Symposium on Motivation, ed. M.R.Jones (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1962).
37. Katherine Miller, Communication Theories: Perspectives, Processes,
and Contexts (New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 2005),
224.
38. Georgie Weatherby and Brian Scroggins, A Content Analysis of
Persuasion Techniques Used on White Supremacist Websites,
Journal of Hate Studies 4, no. 9 (2006): 9.
86 A. KLEIN
39. Edgar Schein, Inge Schneier, and Curtis H. Barker, Coercive

Pressure (New York: Norton, 1961).
40. Robert Cialdini, Rodney Bassett, and John Cacioppo, Low-Ball
Procedure for Producing Compliance, Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology 36, no. 5 (1978): 463476.
41. Weatherby and Scroggins, Persuasion Techniques, 19.
42. Pete Simi and Robert Futrell, Cyberculture and the Endurance of
White Power Activism, Journal of Political and Military Sociology
34, no. 1 (2006): 115142.
43. Tactics for Recruiting Young People, accessed September 19,
2015, http://www2.sd35.bc.ca/saverill/OnlineKidz/Violent-
Hate_Sites.html
44. Adam Cohen, White Power Music is an Effective Recruiting

Tool, in White Supremacy Groups, ed. Claire Kreger (Farmington
Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2003), 37.
CHAPTER 6
Hate intheOpen
June 10, 2009: James von Brunn logged off his Packard Bell computer,
grabbed his keys, and strode out the door of his sons Annapolis apart-
ment. He had moved in with his son and future daughter-in-law two years
ago where he paid $400 a month in rent and spent most of his time on
the Internet. The drive to Washington, DC, was only 30min from there,
and 88-year-old James cruised along purposefully in his 2002 red Hyundai
as he headed west toward the nations capital. For a man approaching his
1990s, the onetime advertising copywriter, with a degree in journalism,
was unusually media-savvy. Before leaving, he checked over the website
he had launched for the purpose of selling a self-published book, and sent
out a final email to inform his many readers that they shouldnt expect to
hear from him again.1 James also made a few final notations in his note-
book that now rested beside him on the passenger seat.
As he drove over the beltway and into the city, everything seemed in
order, yet things were not quite right. James thought of the first black
American president, Barack Obama, who just days before had made
global headlines at a former Nazi concentration camp where he publicly
denounced the growing wave of Holocaust deniers. The newly scribbled
pages of the notebook beside him summarized von Brunns beliefs. In
them he wrote, The Holocaust is a lie. Obama was created by Jews.
Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do. Jews captured Americas
money. Jews control the mass media.2

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-51424-6_6
88 A. KLEIN
James double-parked his car on the southbound side of 14th Street

next to the National Mall. He glanced long and decisively at the entrance
of the museum to his right. The clock on his dashboard read 12:44 pm.
With that, he opened his driver side door and reached over his notebook
to grab a 0.22 caliber rifle. When he approached the visitors entrance
of the U.S.Holocaust Memorial Museum, the museums security guard,
Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns kindly opened the door for the old man.
James raised his rifle and shot directly into the chest of Johns, the 39-year-
old African American Officer who had served as the museums guard for
six years.3 From there, James tried to take his firearm, and his rage, into
the museum itself, which was filled with visitors and a few Holocaust sur-
vivors on the premises that day. The 88-year-old man who had just shot
Officer Johns in the chest was stopped at the doorway by return fire from
the other guards. As he had told his ex-wife many times before, James was
attempting to go out with his boots on.4 Just after 1:00 pm, the life-
long white supremacist and anti-Semite, James von Brunn, lay wounded
and motionless on the floor of the Holocaust Museum beside the African
American guard he had just shot dead.
The tragic shooting at the Holocaust Museum in 2009in many ways
mirrors the events of the 2015 shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist
Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Like the 21-year-old
assailant Dylann Roof who selected a historic black church to encapsulate
all that he abhorred about the African American community, 88-year-old
James von Brunn regarded the U.S.Holocaust Memorial Museum as the
symbol of Jewish conspiracy. And like Roof who built the website, The
Last Rhodesian, as a receptacle for spewing his deranged viewpoints on
race, von Brunn utilized his own website, Holy Western Empire, to pub-
lish his anti-Semitic propagandist book, Kill the Best Gentiles!
But in other ways, the digital footprints that preceded each mans jour-
ney to commit deadly hate crimes were also quite different. Prior to June
17, 2015, Roof was virtually unknown in the digital world, except for his
recently acquired Facebook community. Elsewhere, he had been allegedly
using an alias to post comments on white nationalist websites, while build-
ing his web page that he chose not to share with his Facebook network.
By contrast, James von Brunn had been on the FBI radar since his failed
attempt to take the entire Federal Reserve Board hostage in 1981, claim-
ing that they were then part of a larger Jewish conspiracy.
But perhaps even more significant in the present context were the
online writings of von Brunn, which had appeared on the well-known
HATE INTHEOPEN 89
political blog Free Republic in 2008. Like many bloggers on this site dur-
ing that time, von Brunn had been contributing to discussion threads
on the emerging Birther Movement, a conspiracy theory of the far right
that claimed President Obama was not an American citizen. Not so unlike
the rhetoric of Holocaust deniers, which provides a convenient pretext
for anti-Semitism, there is also implicit connotation found in Birther dis-
course, that the first black president is not one of us. In 2008, the Free
Republic had become a haven to this brand of identity politics, even to
zealots like von Brunn, who posted a now infamous thread titled, Obama
is Missing, which was followed by over 250 responses.
The implication here is not that a vibrant political blog of the right or
the left will inherently become a breeding ground for violent radicalism.
The actions of James von Brunn are most certainly his own. But Von
Brunns presence in the Free Republic, along with the other like-minded
Birthers who are racially, and not politically, motivated, signifies the
encroachment of hateful rhetoric into the mainstream Internet. This chap-
ter now shifts the focus on digital racism, from the fringes of cyberspace
to the most popular corners of the Internet where websites like Facebook,
YouTube, and Reddit, along with leading political blogs, have become the
new harbors for hate.
Into theMainstream
Politics aside, the Free Republic is not a hate website belonging in the
same category of a Daily Stormer or Council of Conservative Citizens.
Launched in 1996, it was one of the first, and for many years, one of
the premiere mainstream blogs for conservative readers and writers who
proudly called themselves Freepers. In her work on Blogging America:
Political Discourse in a Digital Nation, OBrien writes, love them or hate
them, Freepers are an undeniably large presence on the web.5 Today,
the Free Republic receives over 2 million visits each month and is cur-
rently ranked the 1662 most visited news and media website, according
to Alexa Web Analytics.6 And yet, like other popular domainspolitical
and socialthe Free Republic is widely accessible to a variety of fanatic
points of view that would otherwise never find representation in tradi-
tional media outlets.
In the most extreme cases, some of which will be explored in this chap-
ter, the digital world has seen the incursion of terrorist groups into infor-
mation- and video-sharing networks like Twitter and YouTube. And in
90 A. KLEIN
subtler, more pervasive examples, some social networks and popular blogs
have become populated by individuals who come neither for the community
nor for the politics, but for the chance to unpack cultural diatribes. The
rise and impact of such trolling and racist rants in social media, blogs,
and even video gaming has become an area of increased focus in media
studies.7 In fact, a few scholars have begun to theorize that the amplifica-
tion of fanatical sentiments in the blogosphere, in particular, has led to a
subsequent escalation of vitriolic rhetoric in modern political discourse. In
a 2010 debate at University of Virginias Miller Center for Public Affairs
on the subject of Does the Internet Help or Hurt Democracy?, technol-
ogy columnist and author Farhad Manjoo contended:
What were seeing more and more is that thethe extreme points of views
that were getting [that] couldnt have been introduced into national dis-
cussion in the past are being introduced now by this sort of entry mecha-
nism people put it on blogs, and then it gets picked up by cable news, and
then it becomes a national discussion.8
In his statement, Manjoo observes a shift in the tone of public discourse

in recent years that he partly attributes to the entry mechanism of the
Internet. This phenomenon, which I have labeled information launder-
ing, is well illustrated in the Birther movement. We can trace its origins to
the conspiracy forums of popular blogs like the Free Republic, before it
was then elevated in status by a 2008 National Review Online article that
was the first to call on the then-Senator Obama to release his birth cer-
tificate.9 From there, the movement graduated into the 24-h cable news
media where it became a regular talking point of the Presidents first years
in office. By 2011, a CBS News/New York Times poll finds 25% of US
citizens believe that President Obama was not born in the United States,
despite the public release of his birth documents.10
Certainly, one can argue that to attempt to discredit a presidents
nationality, or to publicly question his religious faith, is a form of politics,
albeit the kind that is targeted to appeal to a certain xenophobic mind-
set. But what is most significant about this level of address is how easily it
can permeate the public sphere today through the power of the Internet,
which raises a larger question about what other types of discourse can infil-
trate mainstream America this way? That question has become evermore
relevant today when it suddenly applies to a much more sinister message,
and messenger, that has surfaced in a much broader platform.
HATE INTHEOPEN 91
The Rise ofISIS inSocial Media

The horrific acts of the terrorist organization known as the Islamic State in
Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, could not be classified as anything other than a hate
movement, cloaked in the mantle of religion. To catalog ISIS as a religious
order, or even an army, is to give this malignant mob of executioners the
very eminence and standing that they seek. But the work of this jihadist
group is, at its base, inspired by the worst form of bigotrya hate move-
ment directed at Coptic Christians, Shiite Muslims and perceived Muslim
apostates, Jews, Americans, Syrians, Iraqis, Turks, Russians, and French
citizens. The ISIS massacres of civilians by grisly beheading and mass
executions, as well as their annihilation of 3000-year-old cultural heritage
sites, have been captured and shared with the world by the groups own
video uploads. Such acts have earned ISIS the universal distinctions of
terrorists and thugs, but their methods have also given them a label
that few would associate with a terror organizationsocial media-savvy.
In 2014, the global community came to know ISIS by its heinous acts
that were streamed online, mainly through YouTube, and then rebroad-
cast in edited form by the mainstream news media. The terror group
initially used the web as something of a trophy shelf on which to place
its latest execution footage, sometimes viewed up to hundreds of thou-
sands of times. Its digitally documented murders of journalists, foreign
aid workers, and other innocent civilians were likely intended for Western
eyes, as suggested by ISISs decision to use English-speaking narrators.
From YouTube, the groups social media presence spreads into Twitter,
where their various user accounts grew sometimes to 50,000 followers.
As Twitters administrators, eager to keep their information network
terror-free, tried to suspend the ISIS accounts, new ones quickly emerged.
Terrorism analyst Rita Katz writes:
ISIS maintains an organized and well-coordinated online network with more

than a dozen official accounts on Twitter for its central leadership. Some of
these pages are used to release messages from the groups leadership, and
others are focused on recruitment, intimidation, and networkinggaining
tens of thousands of followers.11
In late 2014, ISISs online campaign culminated in the release of a 55-min

propaganda film, which has since been viewed over one million times in
various forms. The Flames of War is a well-produced recruitment tool,
92 A. KLEIN
notably narrated in English, and aimed at inspiring impressionable minds

to join the jihadist cause against the United States. In the film, the Iraq
War is positioned as the launch point for ISISs crusade, and the beginning
of Americas demise. We are shown images of President George W.Bush
assuring victory in the region, followed by scenes of the growing Iraq
insurgency, and then footage of young ISIS militants preparing for the
ongoing battle.12 The film is professionally edited, with an apocalyptic
score playing throughout, and one gets the impression that Flames of War
was produced for a video-game-minded audience.
The effectiveness of ISISs social media campaign can be seen in its
measurable following, and in the alarming upsurge in recruitment of
young males from around the globe that has been drawn to the menacing
anti-American discourse, and the allure of joining the glorified mission
that ISIS skillfully projects. While there is little research to date on this
terror-media-phenomenon, a 2015 CNN article reported, An estimated
3,400 Westerners have traveled to join ISIS in its quest to establish an
Islamist state in Iraq and Syria, according to counterterrorism officials.13
It is true that enlistment into a terrorist camp is not a new phenom-
enon; however, the elements of access and anonymity in this social media
context are factors that have definitely built inroads to violent extremism
as never seen before. In contrast, the propaganda vehicles of the Nazi-
era required that viewers had to visit the movie theaters, or purchase the
magazines, in order to be exposed to that influence. But ISIS knows that
its messages need neither a physical commitment nor a print machine to
reach its audiencethey simply need an Internet connection and a social
network. Journalist Hazel Sheffield has examined how the group has man-
aged to build a global brand through the Internet, via such strategies
as targeting Muslim teenagers on Facebook, or using memes that can go
viral through their Twitter feeds, and even the use of product placement
in their high-quality productions. She writes:
Last summer, ISIS supporters in occupied areas of Syria and Iraq started to
appear on social media with jars of Nutella in what became a meme. Some
commentators think these photos are supposed to soften the image of ISIS
abroad and convince would be recruits that they will still have access to
luxuries if they join.14
Beyond these tactics, it is also apparent that ISIS understands well how to
direct the attention of the mainstream media, such that they in effect will
HATE INTHEOPEN 93
become co-distributors in spreading the propaganda. To keep the news

media unwittingly assisting in their global circulation, ISIS releases its pro-
paganda in stages so that the interests of news reporters and its audiences
are piqued and primed for the next production. For example, prior to
releasing the Flames of War, ISIS uploaded a 6-min trailer of the film. That
trailer alone received several hundred thousand views. More recently, the
group shared a single poster image of a new sadistic way to kill, as one
journalist described it, featuring ISIS militants on horseback surround-
ing a group of prisoners.15 The strategy is one in which the terrorists are
whetting the appetite of their followers, the media, and the general public,
who are collectively being manipulated to ask the same question: What
comes next?
As the cycle continues to play out, ISIS executes more innocent victims
whose murders are then featured in more video uploads that are shared
with our popular social networks. The content is then picked up in the
news feed of the mainstream press, where millions more are exposed to
it. As viewers tune in in measureable droves, ISIS responds by producing
more Internet-destined videos of massacres and destruction. Of course,
the overwhelming majority of observers will be disgusted and terrified
by what they see. But for ISIS, exploiting the Internet as an instrument
of recruitment is a matter of numbers. Present results have shown the
terrorist faction that a small percentage of viewers will, in fact, see the
same images as a commerciala call to adventure or a holy crusadeand
respond positively, and perhaps even proactively, to the campaign.
Even on a small scale, the media effect of ISISs online operations is
significant for its ability to inspire other like-minded groups, and its entre
into new public ground. Since ISISs successful advancements into social
media platforms, Al Qaeda has become much more active on Twitter,
while the terrorist groups Boko Haram and Al Shabaab have taken a page
from ISISs campaign, releasing their own professionally edited films of
their mass execution of civilians on the Internet.16 At the same time, ISISs
digital productions have granted it unprecedented access to newer and
younger audiences abroad. Whereas traditional counterterrorism efforts
have always looked to the borders and the airports as the sites in need of
greatest protection from the entry of terror, ISISs social media penetra-
tions have made it clear that hateful radicalism has found a back door into
our homes. Of course, while terrorism continues to be a global pandemic,
it is also true that many violent extremists already reside here.
94 A. KLEIN
Manifestos andPlatforms forRage

The Internet has been called a willing listener.17 For an individual who
goes online in search of an open platform, especially those who have been
brought up in this digital age and are accustomed to its receptive nature,
the web offers an unparalleled outlet for personal expression. While many
Internet users seek out social interaction in websites like Facebook and
Instagram, and others look to harness a following in content-sharing net-
works like YouTube, there are those who simply desire an audience. Prior
to the Internet, human beings did not have the potential to write a letter
or record their thoughts and effectively send it to the world. But since the
creation of media-sharing sites and social networks in the era of web 2.0,
many have found that potential to connect with a virtual world, whether
motivated by a yearning to perform, or the illusion of fame, or the chance
to finally be heard. However, the open stage of this digital age has also not
been without its abuses, and as many users have come to share their ideas
or talents with a potential audience of millions, there are others who have
come to share their rage.
In recent years, websites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have
come to host a specific form and function of hateful rhetoric, becoming
the chosen outlet of a disturbed citizens final tirade before committing
deadly acts. Since 2001, American culture, far more than any other nation,
has been at the mercy of a series of shootings on school grounds, col-
lege campuses, movie theaters, and religious centers, by the lethal acts of
young lone gunmen. A 2014 Harvard study found that the rate of mass
shootings in the United States had tripled since 2011,18 during which
time the country sadly had come to know towns like Tucson, Aurora, and
Newtown, for the unprovoked massacres that happened there. These tragic
events have become a recurring news story almost every few months, but
one near constant subplot has been the subsequent discovery of an online
diatribe of some sort posted by the assailant just days or hours prior to
their deadly acts.
In May 2014, a 22-year-old named Elliot Rodger drove to a sorority
house of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he
opened fire on three female students who were standing outside, killing
two of them. He then took his firearms and deadly intent into downtown
Isla Vista where, from his car, Rodger casually shot at other UCSB stu-
dents on the sidewalks, killing one young man, before eventually taking
his own life. Police would soon discover that Rodger had also stabbed
HATE INTHEOPEN 95
three men to death in his apartment. But it would not take long before the
American public, upon learning the name Elliot Rodger, would begin
typing the words into an Internet search. What many of us found was a
YouTube video titled Elliot Rodgers Retribution, in which the assail-
ant explained in detail his motivations for the coming days murder spree.
From the drivers seat of his BMW, Rodger spoke into the camera about
the women that had ignored him for years, and his apparent existence of
loneliness, rejection, and unfilled desires, declaring:
Well, this is my last video, it all has to come to this. Tomorrow is the day
of retribution, the day in which I will have my revenge against humanity,
against all of you. I dont know why you girls arent attracted to me, but
I will punish you all for it.19
Rodgers 7-min YouTube confessional would quickly be shared across the

web in news sites, social networks and blogs, and even celebrity gossip
pages like TMZ.Soon, it would be discovered and broadcast in segments
by cable TV news outlets. The nature of his words clearly indicated a deep
misogyny that had been building for years, culminating in the hate crimes
he would commit, primarily directed against women. Sadly, he had suc-
ceeded in both of his prime objectives; first by exacting a lethal form of
revenge, and second, in obtaining national notoriety, albeit posthumously,
by his deeds and final dispatch.
The use of YouTube, and other social media, as platforms for would-
be killers and hate criminals to launch their manifestos is now common
practice. Other examples include Jared Loughner, who posted a series of
disturbing anti-government rants on his MySpace page before shooting
Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and killing six of her constituents at a
town event in Tucson, Arizona, or Anders Behring Brevier whose YouTube
video promoted the killing of Muslims just hours before he murdered 69 kids
at a Labour Party youth camp in Norway. Vester Flanagan broke the pattern
by posting the actual footage of his on-air murder of two Virginia journalists
on his Twitter account shortly after he gunned them down, proudly tweet-
ing in one of his posts, I filmed the shooting.20 Even when the enraged
individual does not use a social network to publicize their final diatribe, the
same material is often found posted to personal blogs, which is symptomatic
of the same desire to preach ones hatred to the world. In a recent example,
Chris Harper Mercer wrote the following on his blog about Vester Flanagan,
whose murder of the Virginia journalists had occurred just one month prior:
96 A. KLEIN
I have noticed that so many people like [Flanagan] are all alone and
unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who
they are. A man who was known by no one, is now known by everyone. His
face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on
the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems the more people you kill, the
more youre in the limelight.21
A few days later, the young man who wrote this statement fatally shot
his professor and eight fellow students of his English class at Umpqua
Community College. Mercers commentary provides a window into the
logic of a lone gunman who seeks an audience with the virtual world. In
one respect, we can see a familiar desire for fame among these individuals,
to become a name that is revered, feared, and remembered. After all, those
who commit these atrocious acts could just as easily have written their
rage-filled manifestos into a notebook or personal diary for only the few
to find. Their choice to share such thoughts online with an imagined mass
audience is indicative of the belief that a grand notoriety will be achieved,
and that the world is watching.
In a second regard, Mercers words eerily demonstrate how those indi-
viduals of like-minded rage are following each other. Copycat violence,
explained Paul Klite of the Rocky Mountain Media Watch organization,
is vivid evidence of the mass medias power to spread ideas and actions
and represents a perplexing challenge to journalistic ethics. Television
doesnt cause copycat crimes, but it does plant the ideas in vulnerable
and troubled minds.22 The same influence can be said of the Internet and
digital culture, where it seems that anything and everything can become
an instant trend. Online, the trendsetting phenomenon is heightened
by the immediate gratification of quantifiable results that one receives
in terms of counting the total views, likes, or followers. And so, for
deeply disturbed individuals like Chris Mercer or Elliot Rodger, there is a
social learning process at work in their imitative behavior. Applying Albert
Banduras guiding theory,23 each man sees not only these spectacular acts
of violence broadcast in the media, which are then underlined by the
assailants digital diatribe, but they learn of the reward for such behavior
in the form of instant national fame.
Of course, there are other psychological and sociological factors to
account for this epidemic of mass shootings, from severe mental illness to
the influence of gun culture, to the current fanaticism that we have been
examining, which is evident in many of the present cases. But increasingly
HATE INTHEOPEN 97
the role of the Internet and social media in particular, is being considered
for the unwitting role it plays as an outlet for individuals to voice their rage
on a path to violence. The hope is that parents, educators, doctors, and
law enforcement can learn to trace the digital footprints of these disturbed
citizens before they reach their endpoint. In the mean time, mainstream
news outlets are beginning to make the socially responsible decision to
not publicize the names of mass shooters following such events, preferring
to honor only the memory of the victims, while also dissuading the next
would-be assailant from seeking out a similar form of glory.
A Digital Undercurrent ofHostility
Until this point, we have been examining cases of extremism that have
either been transported to the Internet by some external antagonist, or
have progressed from the virtual world into a realized form of violence.
In both scenarios, the task of classifying the source as fanatical or danger-
ous is a straightforward practice because we have the evidence of a capac-
ity for violence in the form of the group or individuals acts of terror. In
other words, it is easy to assign a distinction of hate speech when we
have the full timeline of events before us, from which we can later analyze
and hopefully learn. But what about the rage-filled rhetoric that is surfac-
ing online every day, but does not, as yet, have a clearly labeled path to
violence? Without the final act written, the central question remains as to
whether we are able to accurately discern when someones digital aggres-
sions are setting the stage for an ensuing act of terror. In truth, we see
examples of extremism in our social networks, in our news threads, and
in pop culture forums every day if we look for them. And in these heavily
frequented web communities, there is no perfect formula for deciphering
between an indication of violent intent and the Internet user who is simply
being belligerent or bigoted in their communications.
Some of todays most common hot zones of hostile rhetoric are politi-
cal news sites like Drudge Report,24 or conspiracy outlets like InfoWars,25
as well as everyday news comment sections, which can take on an almost
mob-like mentality when contentious issues are being debated by read-
ers. The threads that follow can often spiral into racist sentiments being
tossed around by adults who would normally never share such thoughts
in public life.26 In his 2013 study on cyber-aggression, Runions presents a
model to illustrate how the Internet has provided certain unique features
that allow hostile individuals to vent more frequently and fiercely, and in
98 A. KLEIN
a habitual manner. Among them, he cites an environment where there are

few cues for self-control, and an ease of online anonymity that reduces
ones accountability for aggression.27 The result is what some have called
the disinhibiting effect of the Internet, where individuals may feel more
liberated to post hateful commentaries or cast insults at perfect strangers.28
The Internet also offers an outlet for rage release, which only fuels ones
desire to seek out this thrill of attacking others with no apparent conse-
quences. Speaking on the obscurity factor of the web, Kowalski writes:
[A]nonymity affords people the opportunity to be meaner than they might

be in face-to-face confrontation, to say nothing of the fact that not being
able to see the emotional reactions of the target of cyber-bullying makes the
perpetrator unable to gauge when his or her harassment has gone too far.29
While much attention in this area of study has focused on cyberbully-

ing among adolescents, far fewer studies have concentrated on the rage-
seeking adults who often find an outlet for their brand of harassment in
news comments section and open political forums. In 2014, the problem
of comment forums giving way to groups of individuals who sought to
do nothing but offend, provoke, and anger others (better known as troll-
ing) became so severe that, in an act of social responsibility, many news
websites began suspending that feature. In his article Online comments
being phased out, Dan Gross writes, comment forums have gained a
reputation as a haven for Internet trolls. Several of the sites that have
banned comments noted the lack of civility in their decisions.30 His web-
site, CNN.com, is one of those that had chosen to disable most comment
sections.
Beyond news and politics, one also finds flashpoints of rage and big-
otry inside of unsuspecting pop culture communities. Reddit is perhaps
one of the more notorious pop forum websites that has gained a glorified
reputation for the antagonism of its users. The website is often a target of
criticism for having done little to curtail some of the vile and racist con-
tent that has emerged in its pages. Some of its community forums have
recently included the WhiteRights discussion group, CoonTown,
and BlackGirls, which were initially set up to cater to the interests of
African American women in Reddit, but became flooded with a deliberate
stream of racist comments, a practice known as brigading. Bridget Todd
of The Atlantic wrote: For the next few weeks, [racist] users flooded r/
blackgirls with racist comments on regular contributors posts, racist posts
HATE INTHEOPEN 99
of their own, and even sent racist private messages to r/blackgirls users
[the] community became practically unusable.31
Twitter has also struggled in recent years to maintain a user-friendly
climate in its information network, which is perhaps amplified by its own
popularity. As Twitter has gradually become the premiere site for real-time
social commentary during cultural and political events, such as the Super
Bowl, the Olympics, or the presidential debates, the tendency for some
of the chatter to move toward hateful or downright hostile has swelled.
When actor Seth Rogen recently tweeted, If you think theres some con-
spiracy against white people, you are, I guarantee, a stupid white per-
son, his biting remark was met by a deluge of anti-Semitic and white
nationalist responses. The immediate pile-on of tweets about the non-
white Jews, Jewish media control, kikes, Jews in camps, and many
other responses from known white supremacist accounts like White
Genocide, served to illustrate the heavy presence of that element on
Twitter. Disturbingly, White Genocides entrance into the public square
would not be a one-off. During the 2016 presidential campaign, politi-
cal tweets posted by the handle White Genocide would be retweeted
by Republican candidate Donald J.Trump on more than one occasion.
Though these posts were political in nature, White Genocides profile is
anything but, featuring pro-Adolf Hitler documentary links, references to
Jewmerica, and other provocative material.32
As to Donald Trump, his twitter activity has increasingly become a sub-
ject of concern, especially when placed in the context of his audience,
which now includes the radical right. When, at the height of the 2016
campaign, Candidate Trump mystifyingly tweeted false statistics about
the number of whites killed by blacks in America, white nationalists
were listening. The evidence could be in seen in the cascade of celebratory
headlines to follow in websites like Stormfront and the Daily Stormer.
Todays media- savvy racist organizations have become mindful of the
potential of popular websites like Twitter and Reddit to be the satellite out-
posts to their home base hate sites. In these trusted networks of cultural
discourse, hate speech can blend inconspicuously with a cross-section of
mainstream commentaries, and recruitment is also made evermore possible by
those intolerant charactersand public figures who already congregate there.
The climate of hostility that can be found in some of our most popular
online communities is, in part, to be expected with an infinite medium
where all forms of speech have been given the widest berth for passage
and co-existence. Facebook, as cited earlier, currently has few restrictions
100 A. KLEIN
on which groups may socially intermix in its open network, as long as their
profile page does not breach the terms of service. Therefore, hate groups
like the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) are welcome there. Not to be
associated with the original Black Panthers, whose principal members
have rejected the newer groups claims to their legacy, the NBPP has been
described as a virulently racist and anti-Semitic organization whose lead-
ers have encouraged violence against whites, Jews and law enforcement
officers.33 Some NBPP members have used Facebook to promote violent
actions against police officers.34 Similarly, the African American Defense
League (AADL) features an arsenal of semi-automatic assault rifles as the
welcome header of its Facebook page. In 2016, an AADL member posted
that it was time to Rally the troops and sprinkle Pigs Blood, a call to
arms to kill police officers.35 One visitor, Micah Xavier Johnson, liked
the page, and then did just that, gunning down five Dallas police officers
and wounding civilians at a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest. He was
also a follower of the NBPP Facebook page.
As of this writing, some of the other known radical voices socially net-
working on Facebook include the John Birch Society, Nation of Islam,
VDARE, and David Duke. While massive web communities like Facebook
and Twitter were certainly not designed to host these choirs of cultural
intolerance, their growing presence underscores a hard fact about the
Internet age: that while it promised and ultimately delivered a more inclu-
sive public discourse, the nature of that discourse is one that carries a more
fanatic strain.
Conclusion
In his work on political extremism on the Internet, Warner observed
how online people now have the opportunity to preselect the ideologi-
cal perspective of the political content they encounter, allowing them to
fragment themselves into narrow interest groups and ultimately polarize
along ideological lines.36 This phenomenon falls more broadly in line
with Klappers theory of selective exposure, which explained how people
tend to habitually expose themselves to mass communications in accord
with their existing opinions and interests and to avoid unsympathetic
material.37 This form of fragmented political engagement through online
media is fundamentally different from what citizens had previously expe-
rienced through media such as newspapers, which tend to separate tradi-
tional reporting from opinion sections. Local TV stations typically avoid
HATE INTHEOPEN 101
partisan perspectives, while cable news networks offer only three domi-
nant markets of right, left, or moderate-leaning viewpoints to follow. But
online, the political electorate has a much wider array of opinion leaders
to choose from, including those on the farthest ends of the spectrum.
The result, Warner cautions, is an Internet user that is rapidly choosing to
indulge in the more extreme perspectives that support his or her opinions
in the most fervent of ways, while absolutely denigrating the opposition.
He writes, If individuals are only in contact with people they already
agree with, there is a danger that their opinions will polarize and become
increasingly radical.38
The potential for such people going online to receive a more narrow
and extreme version of reality, news, politics signals a dangerous oppor-
tunity for those groups who are simultaneously logging on to provide the
kind of digital culture that espouses hate and celebrates intolerance. The
problem is further compounded by the fact that these two worlds now
meet, not in the fringes of cyberspace, but within our most trusted online
communities. As an undercurrent of hostility builds inside the politi-
cal blogosphere and within popular websites like Reddit and Twitter, it
becomes clear that no effective counter movement can address digital hate
if we do not recognize that it lives within all corners of the Internet. It
is, after all, easy to draw a circle around known hate websites, to identify
that segment of the web as problematic and in need of monitoring. But it
is much more difficult to effectively tackle the burgeoning issue of online
fanaticism that has permeated our favorite political forums, social, and
video-sharing websites.
For terrorist organizations like ISIS and Boko Haram, the porous net-
works of YouTube and Twitter offer unprecedented access to display their
appalling activity to a global audience, while also gaining a more inti-
mate connection with potential followers. Likewise, for James Von Brunn,
Aaron Rodger, and Chris Harper Mercer, blogs and social networks pro-
vided a platform to unleash a virtual rage that preceded and primed the
actual wrath to follow. The web also delivered a brief limelight that
some desired. Although these individuals and terrorist groups are part of
an extreme minority, both online and in society, the global reach and viral
nature of the Internet has the uncanny ability to amplify their message and
stature in such a way that these zealots also appear more prevalent, and
closer to home, than they actually are.
While the overwhelming majority of hostile and racist rhetoric that we
encounter online does not preview an ensuing act of violence, some do.
102 A. KLEIN
But far more common than any single example of Internet bigotry erupt-
ing into real-world violence is the long-term effect that the proliferation
of online hate speech is having on public discourse today. In Daniels work
on cyber racism, she writes, The least recognizedand, hence, most
insidiousthreat posed by white supremacy online is the epistemological
menace to our accumulation and production of knowledge about race,
racism, and civil rights in the digital era.39 In other words, the rise in
racist and radical rhetoric on the web has begun to contaminate cultural
debate, as well as the tone of civic discourse today. For traditional hate
groups, this trend of homegrown digital hostility likely presents the next
best thing to direct recruitment.
Notes
1. Darryl Fears and Marc Fisher, A Suspects Long History of Hate,
and Signs of Strain, Washington Post, June 11, 2009, accessed
November 20, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
content/article/2009/06/10/AR2009061003495.html
2. Theo Emery and Liz Robbins, Holocaust Museum Shooter James
von Brunn had History of Hate, Seattle Times, June 12, 2009,
accessed November 20, 2015, http://seattletimes.nwsource.
com/html/nationworld/2009330156_holocaustshooting12.
html
3. In Memoriam, last modified November 3, 2015, http://www.
ushmm.org/information/press/in-memoriam/stephen-tyrone-
johns-1969-2009
4. James G. Meek and Richard Schapiro, Holocaust Museum
Shooter, Daily News, accessed June 11, 2009, http://www.
nydailynews.com/news/world/holocaust-museum-shooter-neo-
nazi-james-von-brunn-ex-wife-vowed-boots-article-1.374005
5. Barbara OBrien, Blogging America: Political Discourse in a Digital
Nation (Portland, OR: William James & Company, 2004), 18.
6. Alexa: The Web Information Company, Free Republic, accessed
October 2, 2015, http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/freerepublic.
com
7. Anthony McCosker and Amelia Johns, Contested Publics: Racist
Rants, Bystander Action and Social Media Acts of Citizenship,
Media International Australia 151 (2014): 6672.
HATE INTHEOPEN 103
8. Fahrad Manjoo Speaking at the UVA Debate: Does the Internet

Help or Hurt Democracy? June 10, 2010, accessed October 2,
2015, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media-jan-june10-
miller_06-01/
9. Jim Geraghty, Obama Could Debunk Some Rumors by Releasing
His Birth Certificate, National Review Online, last modified June
9, 2008, http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/9490/
obama-could-debunk-some-rumors-releasing-his-birth-certificate
10. Stephanie Condon, Poll: One in Four Americans Think Obama
was Not Born in the U.S., CBS News, last modified April 21,
2011,http://www.cbsnews.com/news/poll-one-in-four-americans-
think-obama-was-not-born-in-us/
11. Rita Katz, Follow ISIS on Twitter: A Special Report on the Use
of Social Media by Jihadists, last modified June 26, 2014, http://
news.siteintelgroup.com/blog/index.php/entry/192-follow-
isis-on-twitter
12. Pieter Van Ostaeyen, The Flames of WarThe Fighting has Just
Begun, last modified September 28, 2015, https://pietervanos-
taeyen.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/the-flames-of-war-the-
fighting-has-just-begun/
13. Ray Sanchez, ISIS Exploits Social Media to Make Inroads in
U.S., CNN, June 5, 2015, accessed September 15, 2015, http://
www.cnn.com/2015/06/04/us/isis-social-media-recruits/
14. Hazel Sheffield, ISIS has Built a Global Brand Using Celebrity
and Social Media, Belfast Telegraph Online, March 9, 2015,
accessed October 16, 2015, http://www.lexisnexis.com.rlib.pace.
edu/hottopics/lnacademic/?
15. Corey Charlton, Have ISIS Found a Sadistic New Way to Kill?
Daily Mail, August 25, 2015, accessed October 16, 2015, http://
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3210469/ISIS-introducing-
new-killing-style-Ominous-warning-terror-group-s-latest-video-
depicting-hor rific-murder-released-featuring-prisoners-
surrounded-Islamists-horseback.html
16. Mark Clayton, Terrorist Tweets: How Al Qaedas Social Media
Move Could Cause Problems, Christian Science Monitor,
February 7, 2013, accessed October 15, 2015, http://www.
csmonitor.com/USA/2013/0207/Terrorist-tweets-how-Al-Qaeda-s-social-
media-move-could-cause-problems
104 A. KLEIN
17. Rachel Dretzin, Growing Up Online, Documentary, directed by

Rachel Dretzin and John Maggio (Boston: PBS, 2007). DVD.
18. Amy Cohen, Deborah Azrael, and Matthew Miller, Rate of Mass
Shootings has Tripled Since 2011, Harvard Research Shows,
Mother Jones, October 15, 2015, accessed October 20, 2015,
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/mass-shootings-
increasing-harvard-research
19. Chris Geo, Full VideoElliot Rodgers Retribution Video, last
modified May 24, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=G-gQ3aAdhIo
20. Eliot McLaughlin and Catherine Shoichet, Police: Bryce Williams
Fatally Shoots Self after Killing Journalists on Air, CNN, August
27, 2015, accessed November 1, 2015, http://www.cnn.
com/2015/08/26/us/virginia-shooting-wdbj/
21. Elliot Hannon, Heres What We Know So Far About Umpqua
School Shooter Chris Harper Mercer, Slate, October 1, 2015,
accessed November 1, 2015, http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_
slatest/2015/10/01/umpqua_community_college_shooter_
chris_harper_mercer_profile.html
22. Paul Klite, Media can be Antibiotic for Violence, Quill 88, no. 4
(2000): 32.
23. Albert Bandura, Social Learning Through Imitation, in Nebraska
Symposium on Motivation, ed. M.R.Jones (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1962).
24. The Drudge Report is an online news aggregator that has been
known to regularly post headlines that present a racial narrative.
For example, the site incessantly reports on black crime in
America, the rise of minority populations, and subsequent
decline of a white majority.
25. InfoWars is a fierce anti-government website and popular supplier
of hard right conspiracy theories. Its chief author and conspiracy
theorist, Alex Jones, has suggested that the Sandy Hook school
shootings were somehow staged, that the US Government also
had a hand in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Oklahoma City bomb-
ing, and that President Barack Obama is a secret Muslim and a
supporter of Al-Qaeda terrorists.
26. Kevin Runions, Toward a Conceptual Model of Motive and Self-
Control in Cyber-Aggression: Rage, Revenge, Reward, and
Recreation, Journal of Youth & Adolescence 42, no. 5 (2013):
751771.
HATE INTHEOPEN 105
27. Ibid., 753.

28. John Suler, The Online Disinhibition Effect, CyberPsychology &
Behavior 7, no. 3 (2004): 321326.
29. Robin Kowalski, Teasing and Bullying, in The Dark Side of

Interpersonal Communication, ed. Brian Spitzberg and William
Cupach (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers,
2007), 190.
30. Doug Gross, Online Comments are Being Phased Out, CNN,
November 21, 2014, accessed October 4, 2015, http://www.cnn.
com/2014/11/21/tech/web/online-comment-sections/
31. Bridget Todd, Does Anything Go? The Rise and Fall of a Racist
Corner of Reddit, The Atlantic, July 16, 2013, accessed October 4,
2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/
d o e s - a n y t h i n g - g o - t h e - r i s e - a n d - f a l l - o f - a - r a c i s t - c o r n e r-
of-reddit/277585/
32. Tal Kopan, Donald Trump Retweets White Genocide Twitter
User, CNN.com, last modified January 22, 2016, http://www.
cnn.com/2016/01/22/politics/donald-tr ump-retweet-
white-genocide/
33. New Black Panthers Party, Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed
October 5, 2015, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/
extremist-files/group/new-black-panther-party
34. Anti-Defamation League, New Black Panther Party Advisor Calls
for Killing in Ferguson Aftermath, last modified September 16,
2014, http://blog.adl.org/extremism/new-black-panther-party-
advisor-calls-for-killing-in-ferguson-aftermath
35. Drew Griffin, David Fitzpatrick, and Curt Devine, Was Dallas
Cop Killer Micah Johnson Radicalized Online? CNN.com, July
11, 2016, accessed September 28, 2016, http://www.cnn.
com/2016/07/10/us/micah-johnson-dallas-radicalized-online/
36. Benjamin Warner, Segmenting the Electorate: The Effects of

Exposure to Political Extremism Online, Communication Studies
61, no. 4 (2010): 430.
37. Joseph T.Klapper, The Effects of Mass Communication (Glencoe,
IL: The Free Press, 1960), 1920.
38. Ibid., 431.
39. Jessie Daniels, Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New
Attack on Civil Rights (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, 2009), 8.
CHAPTER 7
Deceit by Design: ATwo-Part Analysis
From the outset, this investigation has moved along an inward trajectory
as we followed hate culture as it progressed from an underground society
into the digital world. What began as an exploration of traditional propa-
ganda in the era of print and electronic media, hurdled into the informa-
tion age where hate communities emerged first as discussion boards in the
unregulated virtual world. From there, we ventured further into cyber-
space along interconnected channels of search engines and social networks,
and soon learned how 20 years of web development had transformed hate
culture into a vast array of fully functional websites, many repackaged as
user-friendly communities of information, politics, and social interaction.
We then observed how the present era of web 2.0 had provided fanatical
groups and individuals an even deeper entrenchment into the digital land-
scape by affording them mainstream inlets of social media and content-
sharing websites to anchor their messages of intolerance and rage.
But now, we direct our focus on this malignant culture and delve even
deeper to examine the firsthand experience that these authors of bigotry
have created inside of their web communities. The following two-part
analysis places the leading hate websites under a virtual microscope to
examine the experience of the digital consumer within these pages to
reveal how they have become thriving dens of fanatic congregation. As a
multipart investigation, this extended chapter begins with a textual analysis
of the hate websites, their homepages and modern features, and the strat-

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-51424-6_7
108 A. KLEIN
egies behind them. Part II will then examine some of the predominant
messages that are being disseminated to, and in some cases by, visitors to
these websites, through news feeds and forums. In this approach, our
dual investigation of presentation and message shadows the same pathway
that a visitor to these hate domains might experience, from the homep-
age to the comments sections, allowing us to ask the following questions.
What prime functions do the staging and features of these web commu-
nities serve? What common positions and underlying agendas are being
expressed, both by the authors and members of these sites? And, given the
special context of hate speech, how does language play a role in forming
a shared message of bigotry? To shed greater light on this corridor of the
Internet, these underlying questions will be addressed in two sections:
Part I.Examining Deceitful Web Design
A Textual Analysis of Hate Website Features
Part II.Deconstructing the Racist Messaging System
Six Facts Put Forth By Racist/Radical Websites

Homegrown Hate Rhetoric and Racist Code Language
Method ofAnalysis
The research employed a methodology that was designed to identify, first,

the nominal features and content offerings of the 25 racist and radical web-
sites under review. Keeping the Internet user in mind, this final phase of
the investigation begins at that initial point of entry for every website, the
homepage. As objective visitors, we ask ourselves, what common features
stand out in these websites that capture the immediate attention and inter-
est of an Internet user? We might recall that Borrowman earlier defined
techno-ethos as the credibility or authority that is constructed online
in the programming proficiency demonstrated in a flashy web site.1 Using
a textual analysis, the study set out to locate common structures that pro-
vided a given web community with a techno-ethos that could heighten
its perceived air of credibility. Along that criterion, the categorical features
that emerged from the study included mission statements, research tools,
news sources, web links, social media links, public forums, merchandise,
scholarly signifiers, and kids features. Two coders reviewed each of the
DECEIT BY DESIGN: ATWO-PART ANALYSIS 109
websites, noting the presence or absence of these common features. Once

both researchers had separately reviewed the entire sample of 25 sites,
Scotts Pi was employed as a statistical measure to determine the reliability
between the findings. This study initially aimed for a minimum 75% level
of agreement, which Shoemaker classifies as good for the application
of Scotts pi.2 In fact, the intercoder reliability test yielded a Scotts Pi of
82%, which is considered to be an excellent level of agreement.
In addition to website features, this research also aimed to identify a
recurring set of themes emanating from the news sections offered by a
majority of websites over several months. Frame analysis was used as the
methodology to systematically bracket headlines that emerged over the
three-month period from regularly updated news feeds. News frames were
initially cataloged by topics that appeared at least ten or more times to
confirm a thematic repetition, ranging from issues such as Jewish con-
trol, the threat of LGBT lifestyles, to crimes committed by African
Americans, and other predominant issues pertaining to identity threats.
Among these and other cataloged storylines, the research identified six
reoccurring themes, or purported facts, circulated by todays racist and
radical websites.
Frame analysis was selected as a qualitative method for showing how a
particular media outlet shapes, packages, and ultimately delivers informa-
tional content to a given audience. The concept of framing is often attrib-
uted to Goffman, whose sociological research was interested in the ways
that people learn to perceive, identify, and label life experiences and
current events.3 In his more focused work on framing in the news media,
Entman later posited that, most frames are defined by what they omit as
well as include, and the omissions of potential problem definitions, expla-
nations, evaluations, and recommendations may be as critical as the inclu-
sions in guiding the audience.4 In other words, a media frame is designed
to convey a specific understanding about a given issue, and racist and radi-
cal organizations thrive on this concept in their presentation of a reality
that supports their mission, while conveniently omitting any counter argu-
ments. By identifying some of the current messages that are formulating
on the fringes of cyberspace, we may later track the potential penetration
of these so-called facts into the political and cultural mainstream.
Finally, with regard to the communicative goals of digital hate cul-
ture, it was also important to identify how extremist positions are being
expressed inside these communities. This area of study speaks directly to
those refined strategies of messaging and recruitment that were exam-
110 A. KLEIN
ined earlier, such as foot-in-the-door technique. Rhetorical concepts such

as code language and binary discourse play a major role in building our
understanding about the ways that a hate culture transforms an overt mes-
sage of racial war into a nuanced expression of acceptable intolerance.
A central part of this process of analysis involves uncovering the com-
mon code words of hate. Within the popular forums of white power cul-
ture, particularly, this research collected a lexicon of terms that might not
normally be recognized as the rallying cries of racists. Seemingly benign
terms like real American and European values bear new meaning
alongside encoded phrases like nonwhite oppressor and mud people.
Understanding a modern language of racial propagandists is critical to
deciphering the true intent behind their words.
Period ofAnalysis
In Chap. 4, the research introduced 25 websites that were selected for
their representation of three desired criteria: the web communitys affili-
ation with an arena of racist or radical ideology, its high level of web traf-
fic, and its exemplification of modern Internet trends. The textual and
frame analyses of these select websites spanned a period of approximately
13 weeks, from late July through early November of 2015. While much
of these websites news feeds and public forums were in constant flux
over that period, their homepage and central features remained relatively
unchanged, which allowed for a balanced and steady analysis of these vari-
ables. For the frame analysis, this particular time period was marked by a
resurgence of fanatical activity in the United States, including deadly hate
crimes that were committed on college campuses, religious centers, and
even live television, which received national media attention. The horrific
shooting at a historic black church in South Carolina early in the summer
of 2015 also drew a national spotlight over extremist activity in America,
and on the Internet in particular, where the 21-year-old shooters mani-
festo was traced. The summer and fall of 2015 was also the start of the
2016 presidential election season, which brought an array of politically
charged cultural issues to the foreground, such as immigration, LGBT
equal rights, and affirmative action policy. Such issues were not only the
fiercely debated topics of presidential candidates and the mainstream
media, but they were also heavily echoed in the inflammatory discourse of
online hate websites.
Part I.Examining Deceitful Web Design

As we investigate the presentation of hate websites, it is important to recall
a primary function of many of these spaces: to attract the young edu-
cated target audience. As the founder of one extremist website reminds us:
We find that college students in general are more receptive to new ideas,
theyre more open-minded, and they are willing to get involved in our
church it is often young bright college students who are most receptive
to what we say.5 Along this sentiment, this research noted early on the
prevalence of informational and social features on these sitesthe news
forums, social media, research content, and scholarly signifiers intended,
in part, for that college crowd.
In this analysis, a research tool consisted of any feature that offered
either encyclopedic or scholarly information about matters pertaining to
identity and culture. Examples of these included databases of racial ter-
minologies, downloadable articles, and posted statistics. A news source
was deemed as any article, report, or commentary on a contemporary
issue. These often were drawn from actual news items or external links
to mainstream news that contained some elements of factual events, and,
therefore, would classify as what Jowett and ODonnell call white pro-
paganda.6 Next, the provision of network links was defined as any sub-
heading or pictorial icon that led visitors to another website altogether
(most commonly to another hate site). Network links by themselves may
not denote an informative feature, but collectively, they are essential to
presenting these racist and radical movements as part of a larger field
of ideas, interconnected and factually reinforced. Another common fea-
ture was the presence of links to mainstream social networks that, for the
purposes of presentation, offered a sense that a website was socially con-
nected as well. Mainstream social links, typically found on the homep-
age, were defined as any feature that connected to a conventional web
community, with YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter being the most com-
mon examples. Also common to these domains was a feature that this
researcher calls scholarly signifiers, or any identifiable context that aimed
to academically legitimize the website. Examples included noted univer-
sity affiliations, Ph.D. credentials (real or fabricated), and false associa-
tions like Charles Darwin. These and other key features will next be
examined for the frequency of their inclusion, and for the calculated roles
they play.
112 A. KLEIN
Table 7.1Website features

Website features Inclusion (%)
from the collective sample of 25
hate domains News stories 80
Links to other hate sites 80
Research tools 76
Scholarly signifiers 76
Links to mainstream sites 76
Membership 64
Public forums 56
Merchandise 56
Kids features 32
The Information Trend Line

The 25 examined websites represent not only a well-supported cross-
section of cultural intolerance in its many forms, but also a collective shift
in the message strategy of its authors. In what might be considered the
most sophisticated form of propaganda ever practiced by a given move-
ment, these leading hate websites have modified their collective identities
to blend in with the information culture of the digital age. In Table 7.1,
we see the results of that camouflaging process in the swift adoption of
web features that disguise these communities as sites of knowledge and
social interaction. For the first-time visitor, their initial encounter with
a homepage such as the Occidental Observer would, in that case, strike
them as not so unlike any other political blog. And so, as long as a website
meets the current Internet standard of proficiency and flash, the assump-
tion is made that these users might entrust their intellectual curiosity to
the spaces deeper pages and content.
One of the most recognized features of an authentic political blog
or information network is the inclusion of a regularly updated news
feed. Of the collective sample, the majority of websites offered some
form of contemporary news on the homepage, which provided their
readers with more than current events. If fact, selected stories in this
radicalized context also served as a catalyst for sowing xenophobic
and racist narratives into the general perception of current events that
would elicit bigoted responses. In 2015, some of the issues and events
that Americans read about in mainstream newspapers were simultane-
ously being covered by these 25 websites. For example, stories about
the growing protests of African American communities against law
enforcement agencies in cities like Ferguson, Missouri, and NewYork

City, over cases of perceived police brutality, were important issues for
social reflection. But the same stories quickly became inflammatory fod-
der in the news cycles of hate websites. Of the hundreds of stories circu-
lating through these sites, one article from Solar General wrote about,
The Racial War of Black Against White,7 featuring a manufactured
image of the blood-spattered word Kill Whitey beneath the headline.
The power of trusted news to use select facts, characterizations, and
images to shape attitudes about, not just a given issue, but an entire
people, is why this research has chosen to focus additional attention on
the incendiary news feeds of these websites (see Part II.Six Facts Put
Forth By Racist/Radical Websites).
While news and opinion features address the interests of a general read-
ership, research tools are of particular use to a more academic audience,
such as college students. Various offerings in research were featured
on over three-quarters of the websites, ranging from so-called scientific
studies, to online journals, digital libraries, and databases. The widely fre-
quented Metapedia website, a self-ascribed pro-European community,
has built an extensive online encyclopedia with over 13,000 articles in
the English version on all topics, but with a discernable bigoted under-
tone on subjects of race, religion, nationality, and sexuality. Another faux-
scholarly website, the Institute for Historical Review, provides academic
materials, like research papers that, at first glance, appear to communicate
history and politics. However, a closer analysis reveals the true nature of
their investigations. An article for the Journal of Historical Review titled
New Official Changes to the Auschwitz Story, sets about debunking
the claims of millions of Jews being gassed to death in the Nazi concen-
tration camp, as do countless other research reports. Coupled with its
other informative sections on topics like sinister Jewish plots, one gathers
an anti-Semitic motive behind the sites dedicated work in debunking the
Holocaust.
Another important symbol of trusted information is the inclusion of
scholarly signifiers on the homepage. These telltale signs of academic
prowess and standing were found in 76% of the sample, ranging from
websites that display qualifications like Ph.D. credentials, loose univer-
sity affiliations, and even looser intellectual associations. For example,
the Creativity Alliance site falsely applied Charles Darwins name to its
cause of racial evolution and superiority. Other examples of signifiers
included references to sponsoring academics to enhance the standing of
114 A. KLEIN
that community. While most readers probably have never heard of Frank
Weltner, the Jew Watch website introduces him under the homepage
caption, Historical Statement of our Goals, Focus, and Philosophy by
Frank Weltner, M.A.English, Librarian of the Jew Watch Project.8 Here
Weltners actual identity is not as important as those respectable qualifi-
cations he brings to the site. Scholarly signifiers like Weltners masters
degree in English and his librarian standing might inspire trust among
academic-minded visitors.
While scholarly signifiers are employed to highlight a particular
websites academic credibility, network links are constructed to bol-
ster the impression of a larger field of knowledge to which the site
belongs. All but five websites in this sample included some form of
network links, broadening and uniting the cultural supremacist com-
munity together. This infrastructural component, made only possible
online, has given racist and radical movements a newfound mobility and
shared stature, which they had never possessed prior to the informa-
tion age. In fact, it is almost possible to interconnect the full sample
of 25 websites to one another, such as the National Alliance homep-
age that takes readers directly to the Vanguard News Network, or the
American Freedom Party which connects its followers to the Occidental
Observer, or MartinLutherKing.org that deceptively appears educa-
tional, but then transports visitors to the largest hate community on the
web, Stormfront. In any other medium of mass communication, many
of these competing white nationalist and extremist groups rarely share
the same geographic space, let alone prospective followers. However,
online, these communities strategically overlap, and therefore, appear
to align behind a common front.
As hate networks steadily blend together a cross-section of white
supremacists, anti-LGBT groups, skinheads, and neo-Nazis, their authors
are simultaneously reaching out to more conventional social media as well.
The feature of mainstream web links was found in 76% of the sample,
which illustrates a fundamental element of the information-laundering
process, showing how hate Web sites are able to borrow the content of
trusted sources, like CNN, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Examples of main-
stream connections were often found prominently on the homepage,
such as the National Socialist Movement site that presented linking news
headlines from the New York Times, Fox News, and London Times web-
sites, unbeknownst, of course, to their authors. But more common than
real news was the presence of YouTube videos, streaming all manners of
content, from radio podcasts to news hours, racist cartoons, to hate rock
music. The prevalence of YouTube videos, along with Twitter followings
and Facebook links, served to build the feel of an interactive environ-
ment. Today, web travelers have come to expect that a professional web-
site will also be connected to their everyday social media domains. These
are not only the digital indicators of a sophisticated homepage, but also
the virtual language through which the Net Generation is accustomed
to communicating. In terms of the young Internet user, already familiar
with YouTube, the appearance of its borrowed affiliation on a website like
the Creativity Alliance only makes those racist sentiments expressed on
their YouTube Channel, CA-TV, seem all the more socially acceptable. On
the Westboro Baptist Church site, users are encouraged to Follow us on
Twitter, while David Dukes popular homepage asks visitors to Like us
on Facebook, revealing how todays hate groups apparently understand
the power of social capital.
Community Building
Whether the online visitor enters an extremist website seeking informa-
tion or friendship, the length of their stay, or likelihood of return, will
certainly depend on how much they identify with the culture of the space.
Such is true of most websites that are designed to attract a following. For
a majority of the 25 websites investigated, the inclusion of communal fea-
tures, such as public forums and purchasable paraphernalia, encouraged
new visitors to acclimate themselves into the culture of the space. Public
forums were defined as any web features in which users are able to post
their own articles, discussion topics, and comments. In some instances,
the forum was the centerpiece of the community, acting as the hotbed of
bigoted expression. The Stormfront website, for example, offers dozens of
community forums and subforums for the educated visitor interested in
matters like Theology, Poetry, and Science, Technology, and Race.
Stormfront also emboldens its members to engage in discussions on fam-
ily matters seemingly unrelated to race. A visitor might discuss finances
in the Money Talks section, or get cardiovascular tips in Health and
Fitness, or share parental advice in Homemaking and Education
and Home Schooling. Such discussion boards seem to normalize the
white power cause beneath the banner and banter of these kitchen table
topics. But within the public domains, one also finds protracted discus-
sion threads with blatantly bigoted sentiments. In the Westboro Baptist
116 A. KLEIN
Church website, open letters directed at homosexuals, Jews, Muslims,

and President Obama provide a conventional context for allowing mem-
bers to spew their form of faith-based hate. Other website forums play
more directly to the base hate agenda. A National Vanguard forum cur-
rently features discussion threads on White Americans are being Targeted
for Extermination, and Another Heinous Black on White Crime.9
What is potentially troubling about these forums is not only the level of
reviling teeming within them, but, even more so, the fact that like minds
who share these thoughts have been brought together where they can col-
lectively foster the spirit and belligerency of an angry mob.
In addition to exploiting community forums, a majority of the websites
sought to indoctrinate new recruits through the invitation of member-
ship. For most Internet users the practice of signing up for website access
is an afterthought, a brief detour en route to the central site offerings.
However, even todays most regular users do not realize that, for the web-
site, the sign-up option is a delivery system for receiving emails, personal
information, and sometimes even money. For a white power site, the same
features also helped to construct an active support system and community
outreach among fellow supremacists. In most cases, the websites exam-
ined here did not require an initial sign-in page to access the community.
Rather, the membership options allowed access to specific features, such
as private forums. Following this brief exchange, sometimes there were
solicitations for donations, or information about upcoming meetings. On
the KKK homepage, visitors are encouraged to get involved by attend-
ing national events or starting their own local campaigns.10 In this way,
the membership/sign-up function can be viewed as that first step taken
beyond the digital community and toward the brick and mortar one.
Though most visitors do not realize that they have taken that step simply
by signing in, they have actually allowed the hate group to get their foot
in the door toward building a relationship with the new user that might
someday materialize into something more substantial.
Like membership, the sale of merchandise also allows an extremist
website to communicate its culture through its followers and beyond the
digital domain. Merchandising features were defined as any commodities
sold or shared by the host organization or its members. Of the 25 hate
websites, more than half offered the sale of racist or radical merchandise,
the majority of which was evidently geared toward younger consumers.
Items such as mouse pads, t-shirts, White Aryan Resistance music CDs,
backpacks, and other cultural material collectively revealed a thriving scene
of white pride paraphernalia being exchanged in these online market-

places. Websites like Stormfront provide classified ads for members to sell
various items to other visitors like an Authentic Hitler Youth Knife, or
Survival/Tactics/Weapons/Firearms/Etc. In the surrounding context
of discussion about the threat of nonwhite race and the mounting white
uprising, such merchandise carries an alarming implication.
The majority of merchandise found in these websites is notably meant
to be worn, pinned up, or played. Such products are not sold for the
mere sake of turning a profit, but rather to display a cool youth culture
around the cause. The sale of white pride paraphernalia on the heavily traf-
ficked retail website Tightrope.cc will be seen by others, and possibly turn
a few heads. Here, the goal of recruitment is being sought through the
brand and appeal that the white power look and sound offers to a younger
generation. And thus, by no means are these websites simply selling a
t-shirt. They are effectively selling the movement.
Finally, and perhaps most troubling, almost one-third of these lead-
ing hate sites provided applications that were unmistakably intended for
adolescent audiences. The inclusion of kids features was fairly easy to
recognize, for whom else are attractions like games, puzzles, cartoons,
and rock music intended? Indicators of a youth-based platform often
included such features as well as prominent forums outlined for kids,
youth corps, teens, and students. On the faux-biographical website
MartinLutherKing.org, built specifically to tarnish his legacy, a young visi-
tor finds the MLK Pop Quiz, and a prompt to Download the flyers to
pass out at your school.11 Such nefarious tactics reveal an alarming youth-
recruitment strategy at work, evoking memories of the Hitler Youth bri-
gades of 1930s Germany. Todays new youth brigades are promoted in
websites like KKK.com, that has built its own Knights Party Youth Corp,
or the National Socialist Movement that now offers a forum for its Viking
Youth Corp. Other websites offered more interactive features to pique
the interests of even younger visitors, likes puzzles, cartoons, and comics
that depict white warrior superheroes. For teenagers, video games such
as Shoot the fags and KaboomArab Training Game, found within
the White Aryan Resistance site, are meant to be light-humored entertain-
ment. Other sites, like the National Social Movements NSM88Records,
speak the popular language of angry rock music that appeals to a certain
audience. As Cohen suggested in her study, Teenagers who feel alienated
by their peers are most susceptible to hate rocks message of solidarity and
pride in the white race.12
118 A. KLEIN
Overall, beneath all the music, games, forums, social media, and mer-
chandise, these website offerings perform a dual function. Their com-
mon purpose is one of community building for the website, and identity
building for the individual. But as they utilize these features that covertly
indulge the tech-minded senses of the digital native, or play on unifying
social themes like family values, patriotism, or religious inspiration, the
overriding message beneath the presentation is still one of intolerance,
racial resentment, and, sometimes, violent recommendations. In the next
section, we will lift the veil and take a closer look behind the flashy curtain
to explore the actual messages, language, and implied agenda of the digital
hate community.
Part II.Deconstructing theRacist Messaging

System
If the purpose of news feeds, memberships, and YouTube links is to legiti-
mize an extremist community, the common discourse that underlies these
presentational features serves a primary objective as wellto mobilize it.
It should come as little surprise that the rhetoric found in these 25, as well
as in thousands of other, hate websites is crafted to strike a chord of intol-
erance and marshal a racial rebellion with online audiences. Not unlike the
alarmist language that is often voiced during legitimate times of national
security crises or local crime waves, the discourse found in todays racist
and radical websites carries similar tones of alarm, fear, outrage, resistance,
and action. Only, these responses are not directed toward the menacing
nation or the local street gang that threatens the greater good. They are
directed at an entire peoplethe nonwhite oppressorsupposedly in
our midst and invading our culture from within.
As history has shown when racist sentiments have become well-
packaged propaganda campaigns, they can sometimes turn the call for
cultural paranoia among the few into a manic call-to-arms for the many.
Yet, how does one identify these messages in todays hate websites that,
we have already established, more often masquerade as trusted outlets of
information? To answer the question, we peel back the final layer of digital
hate culture, and enter the freeway of purported facts, conspiracy theories,
and coded language that is the modern racist messaging system.
In their work on White Supremacists, Oppositional Culture and the
World Wide Web, Adams and Roscigno attributed much of the success
of the white power campaign to that movements skillful dissemination
of recurring themes: the righteous crusades of white men set against

the evil conspiracies of the nonwhite races.13 They asserted, It is this
juxtaposition of conspiracies with crusades that has provided the domi-
nant recruitment frame and identity for many white supremacist organiza-
tions. This combination of conspiracies and crusades was also a common
thread found throughout the websites under investigation, which fed into
more specific narratives of fear and loathing of the nonwhite races. But
there is one other overarching theme that emerged from the frame analysis
of news content being circulated by these hate domains, and that is the
image of an oppressed white minority under siege.
The defensive-uprising frame will be the central focus of the next sec-
tion that examines these common messages, which collectively assert that
the white race is, in fact, the new subjugated cultural minority and must
defend itself against the oppressive nonwhite majority. Such expression
takes on many forms in these domains, but typically the defensive-uprising
frame evokes an underlying sentiment of cultural rebellion that appeals to
the defiant natures of not only the racist individual, but also some politi-
cally minded citizens, anti-governments groups, and many young adults.
In his manifesto, Dylann Roof, who murdered nine African Americans,
chronicled how he first was enlightened to the white nationalist perspec-
tive. Having typed black on white crime into a Google search, he was
led directly to the domain that we have been exploring. Once inside the
racist fringe, the following foremost narratives are what he, like countless
others, likely found.
Six Facts Put Forth by Racist/Radical Websites

A rhetorical model that can be found in many of the updated hate com-
munities today is the message of truth-telling about race, culture, and
identity in America. As the common idiom goes, mainstream society is
foolishly unaware of a dangerous truth about a particular group, but this
website will finally expose the reality of this culture. While reoccurring
themes of racial superiority and overtones of resentment diffuse through-
out these websites, the specific framing of a set of purported facts about
nonwhite America begins to emerge. Recalling that we are now visitors
to these sites, and having been partially convinced of their legitimacy by
way of their professional designs, the following themes are what we might
encounter when we go deeper into reading the news and commentaries
they offer. It is important to note that while the following facts may read
120 A. KLEIN
like obvious fiction in this labeled context, each has been drawn from a
broad fabric of misinformation that is cycling through the interconnected
digital hate culture everyday. And, as technology writer Farhad Manjoo
summated in his seminal work, True Enough, in the online world, people
choose their own facts.14
1. White people are under siege from the deadly threat of Black
America.
An October 2015 visit to the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC)

website offers visitors a collection of 30 news stories on the homepage, a
supposed snapshot of life in America. The assemblage of stories reports of
a South Carolina woman nearly killed in a racial hate crime, a Louisville
pizza delivery stabbed in a racial hate crime, Yet another racial hate crime
murder in Indianapolis, and then the same story of racial crime emanat-
ing from St. Louis, Richmond, Tacoma, NewYork City, Anchorage, and
so on.15 In every incident in this collage of violence, the two constants are
the identity of the victims and the assailants. The story of white America
being brutally victimized by black America is not only a prevailing theme
funneling through the daily news feed of the CCC website, but it is per-
haps the most common narrative found in today racist web communities.
The assertion that the white race, in particular, is under siege is almost
gleefully depicted in the reporting of robberies, assaults, and murders of
white men, women, and children at the hands African American assailants.
Such local stories are, in fact, often based on true events, thus leaving any
regular visitor to these sites to draw the logical conclusion that most black
men are out to get the white race.
But while these stories depict murders committed by black perpe-
trators, the notion of a systematic mass genocide of white people is the
pure creation of the website author who attempts to frame these events
as pandemic and happening in our backyards. Recalling Entmans earlier
explanation that, most frames are defined by what they omit as well as
include, the overwhelming omission in this particular news frame isthe
other crime stories whose assailants are, in fact, not black. In 2012, the
U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistic reported that white men and women
were arrested for 60% of all violent crimes across the country.16 The same
annual report found that black males did commit more murders, mostly
upon other black males, which accounted for 5,095 homicides or 45.6%
of the national average. However, white males were responsible for 4631
capital crimes, or 41.5% of the national murder rate. These figures roughly
reflect decades-long trends, and certainly no demographic is winning
when thousands of its representatives are killing other men and women
of any race.
But while the number of black violent offenders is high in this account,
so, too, is the proportion of white perpetrators, but yet almost none of
the news stories offered by these hate websites focused on a single act of
violence committed by a white assailant, save one exception. The deadly
shooting by the 21-year-old regular of the CCC website, Dylann Roof,
was covered by several of the websites. However, this particular news item
was most often framed as a singular example of white on black crime
overblown by the liberal media. In fact, upon learning of Roofs mani-
festo that cited the CCC website as inspiration, that web community
issued the following statement to the news media:
[O]ur societys silence about [such] crimesdespite enormous amounts of

attention to racially tinged acts by whitesonly increase the anger of peo-
ple like Dylann Roof. This double standard *only makes acts of murderous
frustration more likely* [emphasis by the council]. In his manifesto, Roof
outlines other grievances felt by many whites. Again, we utterly condemn
Roofs despicable killings, but they do not detract in the slightest from the
legitimacy of some of the positions he has expressed.17
The words of the CCC spokesman reflect an underlying narrative of white

nationalist websites that there is not enough recognition in the main-
stream media about the dangers of Black America. Ironically, some of the
websites in the sample post news stories about African American assailants
which they gained from mainstream sources, presenting their borrowed
headlines as corroborating evidence on their homepage. The American
Renaissance website, one of the most frequented in the sample, strategically
reposted articles titled, Honor student beaten to death and Beating
death captured on amateur video, stories reported by conventional news
outlets, but then repositioned within close range of one another on the
popular white nationalist site. Coupled together, these news events could
effectively invoke fear and race-based anger in the minds of frequent read-
ers, which is precisely the intent.
2. Hispanic immigrants are destroying Americas white heritage and

livelihoods.
122 A. KLEIN
If there is one difference between the racism that defined so much of

the twentieth century, and that which has entered into this millennium,
it is ironically how diverse the focus of modern bigotry has become. The
prejudice that was once reserved for the African American community,
and which still burns in the underbelly of American society, has notably
expanded in recent years to include other races, but none so fervently as
those of Hispanic heritage. As Hispanic Americans have become the fast-
est growing demographic and the largest minority in the United States
according to the 2010 census, there has been a responding increase in the
presence of Latino culture in all corners of the media. But one particular
corner where greater Hispanic representation is not a welcome sight is at
the center of white nationalistire.
The discourse surrounding Hispanic Americans collectively framed
their demographic on two anger-and-fear-driving fronts. First, Hispanic
immigrants, both legal and illegal, were presented as harbingers of wide-
spread criminality. And second, an overriding theme went one step fur-
ther to characterize Latino culture as both invading and overtaking the
American way of life. From the American Freedom Party, a headline reads
75% of Population Growth Since 2000 from Immigration, 100 Million
More by 2065.18 The Occidental Observer reported on the Decline
of the economic position of Whites,19 and VDARE forewarned readers,
Hispanic Americans three times more likely to be on welfare than White
Americans.20
Other so-called facts about immigration included claims that Hispanic
Americans, presented primarily as illegal immigrants, are systematically
dismantling the US education system, the English language, and the local
community storefronts with their own Latino culture. But in reality, these
statements have much less to do with immigration than with an underly-
ing concern about skin color. As a Vanguard News Network article more
clearly elaborates, Those brown-skinned invaders will play a big role in
ruining what is left of our country.21 A central theme resting beneath the
assertion of Hispanic infiltration on American jobs and culture is the idea
of white dispossession. This is the fear that the livelihoods, possessions,
and the proud history of European Americans are being taken from them,
and it is an essential rhetorical tool used by racial fanatics to keep their fol-
lowers angry and on the alert. For the hate website that strives to merge its
brand of extremism with mainstream political discourse, the immigration
issue offers the perfect subterfuge for allowing racism and xenophobia to
disguise as patriotic nationalism. While this is not a new strategy of white
supremacists, the discourse emerging around it is unique in how it now

frames the majority white population as the endangered species.
3. Jews are really behind Americas problems, conspiring to control

our institutions.
If Latinos intend to steal away American culture, and African Americans

are slowly threatening to exterminate the white race, then Jews are behind
these and all other national ills designed to debilitate society for their own
personal gain. Such is the claim according to the web pages of both racist
and radical movements alike. While the websites of the Westboro Baptist
Church, New Black Panthers, and American Renaissance each represent
very different forms of hate culture ranging from religious extremism, to
left-wing radicalism, to right-wing racism, respectively, each is nonetheless
tied by one common thread: their virulent anti-Semitism.
The theme of Jews conspiring on a mass scale to control society (or to
pursue global domination) has been deeply rooted in anti-Semitic propa-
ganda over the ages. In fact, evidence of this message strategy was seen as
early as the Russian fabrications of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion text,
and later, in the narratives of Nazism of 1930s and 1940s Germany. In
both examples, the countries from which the conspiracy charge emerged
were facing economic turmoil, as their leaders pointed to a Jewish scape-
goat on which to hang the problems of a nation. And so it is today, amid
an economic crisis confronting the United States, coupled with the grow-
ing diversity of American culture, that the baseless cries of a Jewish con-
spiracy behind it all are once again on the rise.
The frame analysis revealed a long litany of global and national problems
for which the Jewish people are purportedly to blame, including the rise
of the terrorist group ISIS, civil wars in the Middle East, and global eco-
nomic catastrophes, and at home, the civil rights movement Black Lives
Matter, the so-called war on Christmas, crime rates, political corruption,
and, ironically, racism itself. Headlines like Jewish and Zionist Influence
at the BBC,22 Jews at Forefront of Welcoming [Syrian] Invasion,23
Jewish Supremacists Encourage Anarchy in Neighbor [Middle East]
States,24 and Jews, Multiculturalism, and the War on Free Speech25
collectively reveal a widespread attempt to cast the Jewish people as ever
plotting to dismantle modern civilization from within. But they also imply
a methodology behind Jewish domination, which begins with their per-
ceived Machiavellian influence over institutions like the media, politics,
124 A. KLEIN
finance, and academia. These pillars of society were often presented as

institutions breached by Jewish conspirators.
At the forefront of the Jewish conspiracy frame are websites like the
Occidental Observer, Daily Stormer, and Jew Watch, which list hundreds
of purported Jewish plots at work, ranging from Jewish Banking &
Financial Manipulations, to the Associations [Jews] Dominate, to the
Jewish Hollywood machine out to brainwash America.26 Another pur-
ported conspiracy circling the news feeds of the hate communities claims
that Jews are using multiculturalism as their secret weapon to topple
white, Christian America. For example, there is a series of stories relating
to President Obamas Jewish advisors in the White House, with the prin-
cipal assertion being that Jews are using an African American president to
promote toxic diversity initiatives in a calculated design to undermine the
country.
One final element to the conspiracy frame is the contention that the
Jewish people are exploiting the lie of the Holocaust as a means to gain
world favor. Holocaust denial is something of an obsession among the
white power base, and in this context, the genocide of millions is reduced
to a political bargaining chip being played by the Jewish people. For mod-
ern hate culture, the steady narrative of crafty Jewish liars and schemers
conveniently allows extremists to offer a common denominator to explain
how the inferior races can still flourish in society. It is the Jews, they
argue, who are hijacking social institutions, manipulating public opin-
ion, and, most cleverly, using multicultural movements to deteriorate the
society.
4. The LGBT community is going to corrupt theAmerican familyand

threaten religious freedom.
On June 26, 2015, in a historic victory for the gay and lesbian com-
munity, the US Supreme Court rendered its 54 decision legalizing the
right of all same-sex couples to marry across the country. But immediately
following the decision, the fanatic anti-LBGT movement fired up their vit-
riolic rhetoric across the World Wide Web. Articles like Gay Rights, Civil
Rights, and How Freedom Dies, from American Renaissance, encapsu-
lated how these intolerant communities were now framing the seminal
moment for LGBT equality, as a dangerous breaking point for American
liberty.27 The theme of a collective threat to the American way of life has
become a new emphasis of gay hatred among the radical right, merging
with the age-old demonization of the LBGT community as a social sick-

ness. But since the passage of the 2015 ruling, it seems anti-gay voices,
perhaps to compensate for a diminishing relevance in society, have become
even more fervent in their abhorrence for LGBT citizens and their sup-
porters. One article on the Daily Stormer spreads the fabricated headline
that President Obama views Gay Freedom [as] More Important Than
Religious Freedom, which would naturally evoke a defensive posture
from religious readers that now view their rights as under siege.
The rhetoric of websites like the Family Research Institute (FRI) and
Westboro Baptist Church commonly characterized the LGBT community
as unnatural and even detrimental to the modern family, playing upon
ancient claims that LGBT citizens are capable of transferring their sexual
orientation onto others, and that, like a virus, homosexuality can be both
contagious and curable. But true science has found no such evidence, and
most of popular American culture now recognizes that fact. In strategic
contrast, the FRI website offers research positing that homosexuals are
unhealthier than heterosexuals in every measure, including conditions of
obesity, depression, heart disease, alcoholism, and smoking.28 With no
true scientific data to back up these assertions, of course, groups like FRI
rely heavily upon the scholarly signifiers built into their homepages to
give the appearance of academic legitimacy. The homosexual sickness
frame is also intended to imply that LGBT activity is a condition that
is able to affect, or infect, American youth. The FRI site, for example,
presents homosexuality as invading American schools in articles like, Do
Homosexual Teachers Pose a Risk to Pupils?29 The religious extremist
Westboro Baptist Church, on the other hand, treated homosexuality as a
plague that needs to be totally abolished from American life. Among
its declarations, this rabidly anti-gay church proposed that American sol-
diers are dying for the homosexual and other sins of America. God is now
Americas enemy.30
Supporters of LGBT rights, such as much of the Hollywood commu-
nity, have also become frequent targets of radical groups seeking to manu-
facture an explanation for the growing acceptance of gay rights in society.
After all, if a gay or lesbian citizen is supposedly flawed, then one might ask
how have so many become leading figures in areas like business, academia,
medicine, and the arts? To confront this obvious anomaly, bigoted camps
pin their frustrations on institutions such as the media establishment, or
social practices like political correctness, each presented as the social sup-
port systems for the LGBT community. A news story on the Daily Stormer
126 A. KLEIN
is headlined Sickening Jew Media Calls Man a Coward for Standing Up

Against the Government and Faggots.31 This discursive model has been
shared among many hate-culture narratives, such that whenever a bigoted
point of view is unsupported by the evidence, radical groups turn to con-
spiracy media theory to explain it away.
As we observe the same intolerant communities using their websites to
inject a new mantra, that LGBT equality poses a threat to the heterosexual
majority, again the extremists are forced to contend with the evidence of a
community that is represented by doctors, soldiers, and dedicated fathers
and mothers. In the face of such positive cultural contributions, websites
like Stormfront, Daily Stormer, the Family Research Institute have begun
to transform same-sex culture into the next national red scare move-
ment, against which American citizens must become both paranoid and
vigilante. Such rhetoric is not only culturally intolerant, but as the recent
surge in anti-LGBT hate crimes has shown us, it is also dangerous.
5. A mighty white uprising is taking shape across the United States

and abroad.
For decades, racist organizers have sought to inoculate national social

issues with their own brand of politics in an attempt to exploit the public
dissent that foments around these mainstream debates. From desegrega-
tion of schools to affirmative action policies, immigration to equal pay, gay
marriage to voting rights, the strategy of linking racist ideologies to con-
temporary issues and current events serves to legitimize a culture of hate.
And within the 25 representative websites, such shrewd messaging was
more widely practiced than outright racism, as these political subtexts help
to give these bases of hate real causes upon which to vilify a people, but
without appearing to be blatantly extremist or crossing the line into illegal
hate speech. More and more, conventional American politics is becoming
the new breeding ground for modern-day extremism, and the common
message that is being framed behind each issue is the new white uprising
that is steadily forming to counter todays unwelcome social changes.
In many ways, the white power base, in particular, views itself at the cen-
ter of todays political fights. Within websites like American Renaissance,
for example, the economic struggle of the common working man is
associated directly with and against the success of people of color in sto-
ries like, Asians still earn more than any other racial group, and More
handouts for Indians. But underpinning the collection of stories about
white dispossession is the message of a growing white rebellion. On the

popular David Duke website, one finds stories like, Sons of Confederate
Veterans must fight not only for our Monuments but also for the existence
of our people, and Dr. Duke supports the students and friends of LSU
to defend the heritage of LSU, the South and America NOW!32 Wrapped
inside these topical issues and events is the message of a white race fight-
ing back; a populist rally cry that easily appeals to the masses.
Playing into the theme of cultural rebellion is a news focus of many
of these sites that centers around one individual from whom contempo-
rary notions of changing America conveniently revolve. For the white
nationalist movement, the nomination of the first black American presi-
dent was in many ways the ultimate public relations gift. The presidency
of Barack Obama has given white supremacists a much-revived platform
for fueling the fires of racism in America, and for inspiring a unified revolt
against the perceived takeover of a black, Muslim, African born, rad-
ical, with supposed designs to remake the country. While in fact Barack
Obama was born in Hawaii, the son of black and white parents, and a
lifelong practicing Christian, the subtext of the aforementioned conspiracy
theories is simply that he is not one of us. But as long as online hate
communities continue to peddle these ideas into the digital mainstream,
they can turn this president into the symbol of their central narrative of
black versus white.
While most websites effectively packaged their bigotry inside of main-
stream events and political issues, such as the H1N1 swine flu, pre-
sented as a Mexican epidemic infiltrating America, or the record US
military aid to Israel, proof of a Jewish conspiracy, a few websites were
more blatant in their presentation of an endangered white society. The
Daily Stormer, for example, has a section dedicated to Race War, while
the White Aryan Resistance website offers little pretense to soften its mes-
sage of racial retaliation with forums like Declaration of War, Economic
Warfare, and Blood & Soil. Beyond the news feeds, a common image
scrolling through many of these websites is scenes of white Americans
picketing on the sidewalks of small towns, and holding signs that express
the message of white uprising. On the American Freedom Party website,
the pictures of protests feature signs that read, White Lives Matter, and
Diversity = White Genocide.33
In the fringe world of racist and radical subculture, it is paramount to
maintain relevance with your followers, and one of the best ways that this
is accomplished is through an endless discourse of opposing cultural forces
128 A. KLEIN
to elicit a state of paranoia and resistance. Modern politics conveniently

provides todays hate websites with an infinite supply of conflict to tap
into, and to reframe as further evidence of a white oppression emerging
on all fronts. The antidote for such cultural tyranny, which is now being
framed as a genuine takeover with an African American dictator at the
helm, is rebellion. On the National Socialist Movement website, one of its
news bulletins currently reads, Actions, Not Words!
6. A wealth of evidence exists to prove that the white race is biologically

superior.
At the heart of all the aforementioned facts is the single belief that
has motivated bigoted fanatics for centuries, the racial superiority com-
plex. This fundamental conviction, which can be found in racial, and now
also in religious, sexual, and gender-related contexts, has been given new
life on the Internet where websites like Stormfront and organizations like
the Creativity Alliance have sought new strategies to prove the assertion
of white superiority. Chief among them is the biological frame, which
contends that science has provided the final word on the existence of racial
superiority, and likewise, inferiority.
Essential to the superiority/inferiority frame is the prolific use of binary
discourse throughout these websites, which is a process of presenting a par-
ticular message along the lines of opposite terms, such as weak and strong,
guilty and innocent, black and white, superior and inferior. According to
Coe et al., binary discourse allows an author to craft opposing positions
where one side is given a moral power over the other.34 Of course, the
very act of dividing any issue into two distinct choices is a clever strategy for
propagandists because it simplifies what are complex cultures into adverse
positions, and ultimately implies to the reader that they must associate with
one particular side or the other. For racial propagandists, there is no form
of polarization perhaps more effective than proposing that a potential fol-
lower can be either on the side of the advanced race, or the inferior.
Inside Stormfronts well-visited Science and Technology forum, the
sentiment of racial superiority is established in topics like The white race
as a consequence of sexual selection (by men), The difference between
white and black DNA, The IQs of white nations, and Human evolu-
tionsome races seem like theyve devolved. Similarly, the Solar General
website offers a permanent section on White Evolution, with articles on
the genetic superiority of Caucasians by Dr. William Pierce. Metapedia
also provides its own encyclopedic pages on topics like Jewish group evo-
lution strategy, which they explain, refers to theories, most prominently
developed by Kevin MacDonald, which argue that there are evolutionary
explanations for several argued characteristics of Jews, the Jewish influence
and how it has been used by Jews.35
With a subtext of cultural superiority/inferiority, the white suprema-
cist identity is scientifically contrasted to nonwhites, creating a dangerous
divide through a seemingly logical justification for the cultural opposition.
Berlet and Vysotsky called this forced viewpoint of the white supremacist
community dualism:
Dualism is the idea that the world is divided into the forces of good and
evil with no middle ground. The White Supremacist movement presents
the world as a place where heroic warriorswhite, heterosexual, (mostly)
Christian men and womenare in constant battle with a number of oth-
ers: non-white races, Jews, homosexuals, etc.36
The Creativity Alliance website takes the message of dualism a step fur-
ther by infusing religion into its claim of racial hierarchy: We believe
that race is our religion [that] the White Race is natures finest. The
combination of bigotry, science, and religion is a dangerous concoction
for it implies that holy license is granted to those followers that choose
to believe in a God-given right of racial superiority. The mission state-
ment of this particular website is even more troubling in its suggestion of
a course of action: Christianity teaches love your enemies and hate your
own kind, while we teach exactly the opposite, namely hate and destroy
your enemies and love your own kind.37
While, of course, these words, like all of the facts offered by these
hate sites, are just thoughts on a web page, for some, they can teach con-
vincing lessons which occasionally provoke literal interpretations. The
Creativity Alliance is no stranger to this grave possibility, as it was one
of its own members who, in 2002, turned the words into actions when
Benjamin Smith embarked on a three-day shooting rampage, killing an
African American and a Korean American and wounding nine others
citizens of perceived racial inferiority. Of course, the Creativity Alliance
took no responsibility for such acts, but to this day, their site continues to
espouse a core set of beliefs that concludes with the following statement:
WE BELIEVE that, due to the Jew-instigated demographic explosion of
the mud races, we must (as a matter of life or death!) not only start, but
also win the worldwide White Racial Holy War within this generation.38
130 A. KLEIN
Homegrown Hate Rhetoric andRacist Code Language

While even hate websites sometimes post rules or terms of service in
their communities, these artificial measures do little to curb the fanatical
sentiments of visitors who use the anonymous platform as a soundboard
for voicing personal diatribes. Within the open forum, one can often
observe the rawest forms of racism, cultural resentment, and hostility, pul-
sating in an ongoing exchange of rants and responses. The message of
uprising is made abundantly clear through the unabridged expression of
members who hold back little when they share comments like, Ban Islam
and exterminate Muslims. Yes, they might exterminate Jews, but who will
be their next target?39 and The worst of all race traitors are the ones
who have mixed with a non-white there is no turning back for those
who have defiled the white race,40 and The sooner race war begins,
the sooner North America will be partitioned along ethnic lines.41 As
evidenced in these excerpts, the level of hostility of digital hate culture is
perhaps greatest within the public forumthe discussion threads, open
letters, and video postswhere bigotry exposed at its core is perhaps the
most authentic. In this final section, grassroots racism is deconstructed to
examine the manner in which extremist ideologies are packaged online in
ritualized and coded language. Whereas the previous emphasis has been
on content that is provided by the authors and organizers of these sites,
this section considers the linguistic norms of the visitors that use them.
he Public Forum: Letting Them Own It

T
From a theoretical perspective, the employment of public forums repre-
sents a shift in the communication strategy of traditional propagandists.
Whereas prior to the web, extremist groups built a following via their
own messaging campaigns, now online forums provide the opportunity
for spontaneous, grassroots discourses to blossom from the ground, up.
Of course, organizers of these websites aid in the process of hate mon-
gering by providing discussion boards with catalytic topics like Science,
Technology, & Race, Revisionism, and White Freedom. These
actual subheadings are merely the seeds for conversation that prompt a
much darker dialogue to emerge among members. The unrestrained dis-
cussion that follows, in many ways, reflects the most honest sentiments of
modern-day bigotry.
Stormfront members offer their genuine perspectives on race in America.
From Money Talks, a visitor writes, the Jew wont need a middle class in
my opinion they will eradicate all whites and rule forever. From Youth:
My school has about ten blacks in it, and my English class is purely white.
Yet the school sees it is applicable to have us learn about the black culture.
Not only that, but we never read anything specific about white culture. We
never learn about our European heritage. While these racist grievances
might express an individuals resentments, for every statement made there
are numerous responses that follow, and the potential of a single post to
form a snowball effect of tirades is the community standard.
The growing implementation of open forums is important to the hate
websites recruitment strategy on two critical fronts. First, forums reflect
the preferences of the Net Generation, who actively want to be a part of
their digital communitiesthey want to shape them rather than feel they
are being shaped by them. As such, the inclusion of discussion boards,
chat rooms, and video-posting possibilities is an acknowledgment of the
new language spoken by this target audience. These orchestrated conver-
sation spaces allow visitors to essentially own the debate, which means
they will more likely buy into a particular ideology with a greater sense
of authorship. The journey is made complete when those visitors-turned-
members become the new leaders of the cause, generating their own
fanatic discussion forums.
Secondly, there is a social aspect to the forum that essentially turns
the stigma of hate speech into an acceptable and communal platform.
It begins with the web user that expresses his or her intolerant ideas in
the confines of a seemingly benign debate, on subject matters such as
the classroom, workplace, sports field, stock market, or popular culture.
However, the second stage of the process occurs within the conversation
where sentiments like school frustration or music tastes are conflated with
racial aggression or stereotypical observations about a given people. Snow
etal. called this communicative style frame bridging, whereby the inscriber
aligns an unrelated issue with the narrative of a central conflict or cause.42
This alignment enables the source to present the illusion of a unilateral
support, or in this case, common opposition to a group.
The sociable tone of hate speech is commonplace within the younger
community forums, where discussion board topics like high school cliques,
styles, or rap music can effortlessly branch out into stereotypical observa-
tions of people of color. Soon, the process of frame bridging fully evolves
into a forum-wide denouncement of, for example, black or Hispanic or
Asian culture, and so what began as a social experience quickly devolves into
a virtual temper tantrum. On the Stormfront website, a forum subheading
132 A. KLEIN
reads, Football. Its initial post ponders, Is anyone else a football fan!? I
love college the most but also watch some NFL. As the responses amass,
one below the other, many focus on the current season. But, it is not long
before other comments deviate into racial issues such as, Is it a white
mans sport at all now? or comments like Negro Felon League. As the
concepts of football and race contextually bridge together, they feed the
larger theme and purpose of the Stormfront community. One of the final
commentaries reads, So you are going to spend your money to watch a
bunch of negroes run and jump and help finance their college tuition and
pro multi million dollar contracts You are white race traitors.43 We can
learn a great deal about digital hate culture by investigating these sorts of
common exchanges inside this volatile marketplace of ideas. The rhetoric
and axioms that flow from these online breeding grounds of racism will
soon reveal a well-established vernacular that is shared among its members
through slang, innuendo, and symbolic code.
he Code Language ofHate

T
Rahowa! This is the secret mantra of the white power movement shared
by both Klansmen and neo-Nazis alike. And like the hate site homep-
age that presents only the outermost layer of this online community, the
word rahowa is also a cover for a much darker cause. Rahowa is a racists
battle cry that stands for racial holy war, and whether a hate movement
is presented as a religious calling or a patriotic faade, the inscription of
rahowa in that sites mission statement or public forums underlines its
true purpose. As the Sixteen Commandments of the Creativity Alliance
website demonstrates, We Creators forever pledge our Lives, our Sacred
Honor, and our Religious Zeal. RAHOWA!44 Like the furious call for
racial war, other fanatic initiatives have been carefully encoded into a
subversive language that is now common to this online culture, where
subtlety is actually preferred. One reason for the prolific use of code lan-
guage is the fact that certain forms of hate speech are illegal, and so those
individuals that regularly practice racist and radical discourse have learned
to carefully redirect their words through more cunning communications.
Enter the new lexicon of bigotry.
Code language in the white power arena can often be very benign in
appearance. By adopting some of the same terminologies found in politi-
cal discourse, the messages of intolerance are now being veiled beneath
the cloak of socially acceptable rhetoric. For example, the common expres-
sion anti-American seemingly denotes someone whose views are in
opposition to the values of the United States and its people. But in the
world of hate groups, anti-American refers to any citizen that supports
a multicultural society. The term is frequently found within the context
of radical right websites, meant to strike a chord with patriots that would
identify with any group claiming to be a part of real America. But, of
course, the term real America is also a code. By design, it speaks the
language of exclusion by simultaneously suggesting that there is an ille-
gitimate America.
Code words are also employed for the purpose of softening the mes-
sage of hate through more amiable and innocuous terms. For instance,
the CCC forums regularly feature the descriptor conservative minded
European-Americans, which really translates to white people. The
CCC website, which aspires for a higher standing within the politi-
cal arena, cannot communicate through blatantly racist sentiments like
white power, and instead uses these loaded euphemisms. On its news
feed, one can find story after story about the failings of multiculturalism
in nations, governments, politics, and even college campuses. Decoded,
multiculturalism really connotes race mixing, which is presented as
harmful to the American populace. Other examples of encoded language
include terms like White unity, Christian society, and Americanism.
At first glance, these words may suggest racial, religious, and patriotic
communities with which to identify, but in this context, they each draw an
ideological boundary of cultural supremacy that comes with the territory.
Zionism is another common and seemingly political word that is
often found in anti-Semitic corners of hate culture. By its literal defini-
tion, Zionism is the movement for national revival and independence
of the Jewish people in Israel.45 But within the walls of todays hate
websites, Zionism and Zionists mean but one thingthe Jewish enemy.
This intended conflation of meanings is a prime example of using politi-
cally correct language that does not directly implicate a people, but rather
the movement that is identified with their ethnicity. In some circles, it is
considered fair play to denigrate Zionists as a group because there is a
political context that exists between the word and the people it truly indi-
cates. Many might therefore presume that groups like white nationalists
are staying safely within the boundaries of the spectrum of debate when
they attack Zionists but not Jews, immigrants but not Latinos, or
non-Europeans but not African Americans.
Beyond its role to effectively politicize hate speech, there is also a social
function for coded racism that makes its presence in the community forum
134 A. KLEIN
so prevalent. More than just a mode of expression, language can often

serve as a cultural bond between people, such as within youth culture
where the sharing of slang signals a form of group affiliation, also called
convergence. Adler etal. noted that linguistic convergence is particu-
larly common in digital cultures: Members of online communities often
develop a shared language and conversational style, which is meant to
demonstrate their association.46 The encoded slang of the white power
subculture is no different, serving to emphasize ones identity in the
group. Code words, therefore, represent a secret handshake and shared
understanding among members that they are part of a club.
Among the most prominent code words are popular abbreviations
like Rahowa, but also ZOG and WPWW.The ZOG acronym stands
for Zionist-Occupied Government that is used to describe the American
government as being overrun by Jewish influence, or the Jewish con-
spirators at large. Examples of this rhetoric used within a Stormfront
forum include, It will be easy for the ZOG to take down a bunch of
small targets instead of 1 huge 1 and Death To ZOG!47 Here, as in
other references, the Jewish people are presented as a regime-like threat,
the perilous global enemy. Other uses can characterize an institution,
such as the American economy as being part of the zog machine.
Representing an opposition to such forces, the common WPWW acro-
nym promotes White Pride World Wide. This phrase is a recurrent rally
cry inside white power domains like Podblanc and the National Socialist
Movement. The white unity theme is often used as a closing salutation
in member forums, such as, The Aryan code is strong and shall not be
taken from us WPWW!
Even more prevalent than the use of verbal acronyms is the employ-
ment of numeric symbols. References to the numbers 14, 88, 100, 4/20,
and 311 are prevalent extensions to screen names, that is, Kevin14 or
Rahowa420. The number 14 refers to the underground motto of the
white power movement expressed in 14 words: We must secure the
existence of our people and a future for white children.48 According
to the Anti-Defamation League, the 100 or 100% numeric signifies an
individuals pure Aryan or white roots, while 4/20 is a celebration of
Adolf Hitlers April 20th birthday. The 311 stands for three Ks, which
is the 11th letter of the alphabet, thereby representing the KKK, while
88 likewise corresponds to HH for Heil Hitler, used in the National
Socialist Movements URL NSM88.org. These and other numbers are
flaunted like gang colors in the banter of web forums, where they are
featured as universal jargon, usernames, icons, and even punctuations.
But while the covert language of racism effectively establishes a mutual
bond between those members that speak it, their meanings still translate
into the toxic precepts of bigotry. The irony of digital hate culture is
well illustrated in these convivial online exchanges that, at their base, are
so deeply anti-social.
Conclusion
If we think of a hate website as a public structure of sorts, then the dig-
ital architecture of its design performs a function similar to the layout
of most houses or workspaces. In fact, one might argue that a website
like Stormfront or Daily Stormer is both a home and a workshop to the
visitors that inhabit their pages and produce content inside their forums.
But structurally, these extremist websites are built not unlike most model
facilities. From the outside, the visitor sees the fullest angle of a homep-
age, its features, its offerings, and interconnecting corridors. As they go
deeper into that site, the main pages are publicly presentable, both appeal-
ing in form and moderately professional in tone. However, like most pub-
lic domains, many of these websites also have a space reserved for the
informal interactions. Beneath the trusted exterior of the homepage and
features, it is the open forums that serve as the basements of this digital
culturealways thriving with activity in the interiors of these sites. And it
is within these public spaces where we will often find the truest nature and
character of this online community.
Exposed, the common viewpoints being communicated by these lead-
ing websites reveal their culture to be far more concerned with inspiring
hateful aggression, than with the passive celebration of the white identity.
Expressions of the white power movements fixation on racial holy war
and the constant talk of white resistance shape much of the discourse
here, while invigorating members with a communal sense that they are
really David preparing to stand up to Goliath. It is that steady banter of
us versus them, and of white against the rest, that has the capacity to
motivate and mobilize this online movement. Fortunately, as we will learn
in the final chapter, there are other movements and organizations that are
working to combat the propagation of digital hate.
136 A. KLEIN
Notes
1. Shane Borrowman, Critical Surfing: Holocaust Deniability and
Credibility on the Web, College Teaching 47, no. 2 (1999): 45.
2. Pamela Shoemaker, Intercoder Reliability, November 20, 2003,
accessed June 10, 2009, http://web.syr.edu/~snowshoe/con-
tent_analysis/Intercoder_reliability.doc
3. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organizational
of Experience (London: Harper and Row, 1974).
4. Robert Entman, Framing: Towards clarification of a fractured
paradigm, Journal of Communication 43 (1993): 54.
2003), 238.
Persuasion (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999), 16.
7. Paul Sheehan, The Racial War of Black Against White, last modi-
fied July 24, 2013, http://solargeneral.org/the-race-war-of-black-
against-white/
8. JewWatch Homepage, accessed August 26, 2015, http://jew-
watch.com
9. National Vanguard Forums, accessed August 30, 2015, http://
whitebiocentrism.com/search.php?search_id=active_topics
10. Ku Klux Klan Homepage, accessed August 30, 2015, http://

www.kkk.com/
11. MartinLutherKing.org Homepage, accessed September 1, 2015,
http://www.martinlutherking.org/
12. Adam Cohen, White Power Music is an Effective Recruiting

Tool, in White Supremacy Groups, ed. Claire Kreger (Farmington
Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2003), 37.
13. Josh Adams and Vincent J. Roscigno, White Supremacists,

Oppositional Culture and the World Wide Web, Social Forces 84,
no. 2 (2005): 761.
14. Fahrad Manjoo, True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact
Society (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011).
15. Council of Conservative Citizens Headlines, accessed October 1,
2015, http://conservative-headlines.com/
16. Jon Greenberg, Sally Kohn: White Men Account for 69% of
Those Arrested for Violent Crimes, Politifact, April 2, 2015,
accessed November 2, 2015, http://www.politifact.com/pundit-

fact/statements/2015/apr/02/sally-kohn/sally-kohn-white-
men-69-percent-arrested-violent/national/main5309836.shtml
17. Allie Gross, White Nationalist Group Defends Dylann Roofs
Legitimate Grievances, Mother Jones, June 21, 2015, accessed
August 16, 2015, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/
06/council-conservative-citizens-dylann-roof
18. Paul Bedard, 75% of Population Growth Since 2000 from

Immigration, 100 Million More by 2065, American Freedom
Party, last modified October 29, 2015, http://american3rdposi-
tion.com/?p=14858
19. Kevin MacDonald, Decline of the Economic Position of Whites,
Occidental Observer, last modified July 30, 2013, http://www.
theoccidentalobserver.net/?s=hispanic+immigration&x=15&y=14
20. Washington Watcher, Hispanic Americans Three Times More

Likely to be on Welfare than White Americans, VDARE, last
modified September 4, 2015, http://www.vdare.com/articles/
hispanic-immigrants-three-times-likely-to-be-on-welfare-than-
american-whites
21. Illegal Immigrant Accused of Killing Homecoming Queen,

Vanguard News Network, last modified April 13, 2009, http://
www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/2009/04/illegal-immigrant-
accused-of-murdering-homecoming-queen/
22. Karl Radl, Jewish and Zionist Influence at the BBC, Daily

Stormer, last modified October 10, 2015, http://www.dailys-
tormer.com/jewish-and-zionist-influence-at-the-bbc/
23. Headlines from the Occidental Observer news page.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. JewWatch Headlines, accessed October 1, 2015, http://jewwatch.
com
27. Pat Buchanan, Gay Rights, Civil Rights, and How Freedom

Dies, American Renaissance, last modified February 24, 2014,
http://www.amren.com/news/2014/02/gay-rights-civil-rights-
and-how-freedom-dies/
28. Family Research Institute, Scientific Articles, accessed November
3, 2015, http://www.familyresearchinst.org/category/articles/
29. Ibid.
138 A. KLEIN
30. Marine Funeral Picketing Event, Westboro Baptist Church,

accessed November 3, 2015, http://www.godhatesfags.com/
31. Andrew Anglin, Sickening Jew Media Calls Man a Coward for
Standing Up Against the Government and Faggots, Daily
Stormer, last modified March 29, 2015, http://www.dailystormer.
com/sickening-jew-media-calls-man-a-coward-for-standing-up-
against-the-government-and-faggots/
32. Headlines from the David Duke News Page, accessed November
3, 2015, http://davidduke.com/
33. Images from the American Freedom Party Homepage, accessed
November 3, 2015, http://american3rdposition.com/
34. Kevin Coe, David Domke, Erica S. Graham, Sue L. John, and
Victor W.Pickard, No Shades of Gray: The Binary Discourse of
George W.Bush and an Echoing Press, Journal of Communication
54, no. 2 (2004): 237.
35.
Metapedia, Jewish Group Evolution Strategy, accessed
November 5, 2015, http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Jewish_
group_evolutionary_strategy
36. Chip Berlet and Stanislav Vysotsky, Overview of U.S. White

Supremacists Groups, Journal of Political and Military Sociology
34, no. 1 (2006): 13.
37. Mission Statement, The Creativity Alliance, accessed November
2, 2015, http://www.creativityalliance.com/index.html
38. Ibid.
39. Posted by Islamophobe in Stormfronts form thread, Islam,

accessed October 16, 2015, https://www.stormfront.org/forum/
showpost.php?p=5978486&postcount=245
40. Posted by Werewolfblood in Stormfronts forum thread, If/

When the Race War Happens, accessed October 16, 2015,
https://www.stormfront.org/forum/showpost.php?p=5085628
&postcount=65
41. Posted by 14 Words Now in Stormfronts forum thread, On the
Verge of Civil War in America? accessed October 16, 2015,
http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=626602
42. David A. Snow, E. Burke Rochford, Jr., Steven K. Worden, and
Robert D.Benford, Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization,
and Movement Participation, American Sociological Review 51,
no. 4 (1986): 467.
43. The Stormfront Sports Forum, accessed October 16, 2015,

http://www.stormfront.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=169
44. Sixteen Commandments, Creativity Alliance, accessed October
20, 2015, http://creativityalliance.com/home/16commandments/
45. Susan Rolef, Political Dictionary of the State of Israel (Jerusalem:
The Jerusalem Publishing House Ltd., 1993), 3.
46. Ronald Adler, George Rodman, and Athena du Pr, Understanding
Human Communication (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014),
112.
47. The Stormfront Politics and Activism Forum, accessed October
20, 2015, https://www.stormfront.org/forum/f91/
48. Hate on Display: 14 Words, Anti-Defamation League, accessed
November 15, 2015, http://www.adl.org/combating-hate/hate-
on-display/c/14-words.html#.VliwIN-rTeQ
CHAPTER 8
Preserving theDigital Sphere
As of this writing, there are over one billion websites occupying the World
Wide Web, with five new URLs launched in just the last few seconds.1 In
a communication environment so infinite and globally diverse, one might
fairly ask, what impact can a few ten thousand hate websites have in a
medium of one billion web addresses, with each representing a different
voice and purpose? But in the digital world of cultural trending, mem-
ing, video-sharing, and political blogging, it is not always the most pro-
lific of web genres that carries the most influence, but rather, the most
attention-grabbing and incendiary. The same principle applies to other
forms of media, such as cable news where the markets and ratings often
surge whenever the news involves crashes, scandals, or violent crimes, in
spite of an abundance of other stories. Likewise, in politics, a Congress of
535 members will often give their attention to those few representatives
shouting the most belligerently above the rest. In other words, audiences
tend to notice the stories and characters that can shock and disturb us with
their words, and todays authors of bigotry well understand and thrive on
that potential. While the growing movement of racist and radical web-
sites is still just a fraction of the web, the fact that they have collectively
attracted a modest following, and perhaps even more significantly, built
inroads to the informational, political, and cultural arenas of cyberspace,
is no small feat.
The surfacing of hateful rhetoric inside of some of our most popu-
lar content-sharing and social-networking sites carries far-reaching impli-
cations for the manner in which public discourse is developing in this

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-51424-6_8
142 A. KLEIN
emocratic sphere. It would suggest a gradual normalization of intol-

d
erance in our most open of communication platforms. If digital trends
inform the greater social discourse, then for every degree to which the dial
of intolerance is moved closer to normal online, a higher tolerance for
hate speech is established among the masses. The lines between political
debate and cultural fanaticism become increasingly blurred as the flow of
opinions and information is corrupted by the racist currents that we have
been observing in hate websites, but also in everyday political blogs. Over
time, and without counter measures, these expressions of bigotry can qui-
etly become just another accepted part of the American vernacular.
As racist and radical websites continue to wire into the online infrastruc-
ture and establish new recruiting networks among the Net Generation,
political blogosphere, and information bases, a new motto must under-
score the road ahead for these platforms and the generations that use
themsocial responsibility. Just as public interests have had to modify
their prior notions of privacy, economics, even relationships, to adapt to
the digital age, so too does the present era require an updated approach to
practicing social responsibility to counter the malignant forces that have
thrived online. In this sense, we are not just talking about a renewed focus
on political correctness. After all, political correctness is merely a correc-
tion in language, and while the practice has at its base good intentions, it is
not a remedy for the underlying problem of cultural intolerance. So instead
of focusing on semantics in the new media landscape, this next generation
must move to counterattack hate speech in those places where it most
aims to breed: our web communities, mainstream media and politics, and
among our youth. The vulnerable and sometimes even culpable sectors
of the web that we have been exploring, and the echo chambers of the
media and political punditry, and, perhaps especially, the Net Generation,
must acknowledge a new kind of responsibility that comes with hosting,
broadcasting, and sharing cultural opinions in the modern era. In this final
chapter, we will examine these three sectors of society to explore the role
that each will need to play in opposing, rather than just ignoring, the rise
of digital hate culture.
But first, it is important to begin by recognizing a dialogue and col-
lective action that is already taking place behind higher education and the
powerful watchdog agencies, working to expose and combat extremism on
all fronts. While not to discount the vital work that law enforcement agen-
cies perform in the realm of investigating and prosecuting hate criminals
and extremist activities, the educators and the non-profit groups represent
PRESERVING THEDIGITAL SPHERE 143
an anti-hate activism that is converging at the source of these issues. Each

of these actors has taken critical steps toward exposing racist and radical
groups online and in our midst, while concurrently working to educate
the public and promote a countermovement of cultural understanding.
A New Vigilance
The subject of racism and hate speech has never been an easy classroom
topic for students, or for that matter, teachers. In her work on Talking
about Race, Learning About Racism, Tatum acknowledges that the sub-
ject of cultural differences and bigotry is still considered a taboo topic
for discussion in many classrooms, often striking uncomfortable feelings
of anxiety, guilt, or fear among students, especially in racially mixed set-
tings. In my own classrooms, in courses like Intercultural Communication,
Media, Culture and Society, and even the Dark Side of Communication,
which aims to tackle this very subject, I observe the blanket of silence
that falls over the room when we begin to broach the subject of racial and
ethnic stereotypes in media, or xenophobic and homophobic rhetoric in
politics. But in recent years, schools, particularly in higher education, have
begun an important transition from a philosophy of blocking out extrem-
ism, to acknowledging its influence in society and doing more to openly
confront these issues through programs and curriculum.
In her article on illegalizing hate on the web, Steele argues, The best
remedy for hate speech is more speech.2 In other words, the use of law to
punish expressions of bigotry has done little to curb the spread of hateful
belief systems and activities. In fact, many European countries have much
stricter anti-hate legislation than the US practices, such as Holocaust
denial and Nazism that is banned in Austria, Belgium, France, Poland,
Germany, and other nations. And yet, anti-Semitism still surges across the
continent where annual polls find more than a quarter of the populace
harbors anti-Semitic attitudes.3 So this brings us back to education and an
understanding that more speech and research about the history, motives,
and ideologies of hate can best bring about a global awareness to counter-
act these forces that will likely always exist in some form or another.
At the university level, an interdisciplinary approach to teach young
adults about extremism, and becoming more critical thinkers about the
media they consume, has taken shape in a variety of ways. Among the
leading schools, Gonzaga University now houses the Institute for Hate
Studies, which advances this burgeoning field through conferences, the
144 A. KLEIN
Journal of Hate Studies, and, most importantly, cross-disciplinary study

in majors like Communication, Criminal Justice, History, Media, Political
Science, Psychology, and Sociology. Likewise, the Centre for Hate Studies
at University of Leicester produces research, educational media, and train-
ing seminars tackling issues such as homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-
Semitism, and transphobic hate crimes. All across the globe, university
curricula are exploring cultural intolerance through a variety of course
subjects, from Hate Crimes and Extremism at California State University,
to the Politics of Extremism at Texas State University, Stereotyping and
Prejudice Across Cultures at University of Kansas, to Why People Hate
at Gonzaga University, to the Dark Side of Communication at Pace
University.4 These classes share in a growing dialogue that seeks to edu-
cate and expose students to those extremist ideologies edging into our
politics, social networks, and technologies. Of course, such discussion
offers not the antidote for radical ideas, which will always exist in some
form, but rather a cognitive resistance to them. William McGuires (1961)
Inoculation theory described a similar process where the individual first
becomes aware of a persuasive message prior to encountering it, such that
when they are confronted with the real thing, they will come to recognize
and reject it.5 Politicians use this strategy often to telegraph to their fol-
lowers the kind of rhetoric the opposition plans to use against them. But
inoculation theory is precisely the strategy that is needed in education, to
expose hate movements, so that students will learn to identify their many
costumes, subtexts, and advances.
In addition to advancing studies on hate, a continuing focus on media
literacy, especially as it pertains to Internet use, is a potent scholastic initia-
tive in promoting critical thinking about the new media landscape. Potter
defines media literacy as the set of perspectives from which we expose
ourselves to the media and interpret the meaning of the messages we
encounter.6 Both at the high school and college levels, educators have
been introducing media literacy curriculum and texts that are designed to
inspire students to question more deeply the material they readily absorb,
particularly on the web. Questions like Who is the author of this website,
and what are their goals? or, What is the nature of this message? Is it
informational or ideological? and What is missing from this picture?
Should I trust it? A digital media literacy will play a vital role in expos-
ing infiltrations of extremist discourse in mainstream websites and blogs
where the goal of the author is to poison the waters of social debate and
potentially gain new members to the cause. The National Association for
Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) shared a Plan of Action study that

cited exposure to hate sites that promote prejudice as one of the pri-
mary content risks of the digital age. The group further champions the
establishment of media education at younger learning levels for todays
generation that is independently going online as early as grade school.7
The work of educational partners like NAMLE represents the next major
front in countering extremism.
Beyond the walls of academia, the impactful work of powerful non-
profit watchdog agencies has been paramount to inspiring a greater social
responsibility and a new vigilance in the era of new media. In this text, we
have consulted the work of several watchdog agencies whose educational
materials and literature have helped to identify thousands of hate websites,
decipher their language, and monitor their online trends year round. In
relation to radical cultures, these counter organizations exist at the oppo-
site end of the democratic sphere, where they act as both online guides,
pointing out the perils of the digital environment, and as educational part-
ners, training teachers and students about the forms of hate that they
monitor closely. Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL),
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Simon Wiesenthal Center, Human
Rights Campaign (HRC), Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation
(GLAAD), and others speak to the counteractive civic potential of the
information age.
The ADL is well aware of the Internets new potential for allowing
hate groups to come together and recruit others. Each year, this inter-
national organization releases a report on hate activity across the globe,
while simultaneously offering outreach and anti-bias education, like their
Campus of Difference program that works with students and professors at
universities. In addition, the ADL also works with federal law enforcement
agencies to locate potential violent fanatics, whom they monitor online,
before they strike. The Simon Wiesenthal Center is another organization
dedicated to fighting online bigotry. The Center has built educational
museums dedicated to teaching tolerance while annually reporting on
Digital Terrorism and Hate. Its report tracks thousands of hate sites and
social media pages, which is distributed to government agencies, universi-
ties, and the media. On the legal side, the SPLC seeks justice for victims of
hateful discrimination through their historic foundation. The SPLC also
provides one of the most current sources on digital hate activity today,
publishing the Intelligence Report that uncovers the swells of bigotry in
websites, blogs, and social networks. Organizations like these represent
146 A. KLEIN
the counterbalancing power of civic groups that use education as the best
weapon against social intolerance.
One of the most influential ways that watchdog groups counter hate
speech is by making public statements that oppose the mainstream trends
of intolerance, such as incidents of racial stereotyping that become com-
monplace in political media discourse. These denouncements are often
made more for the sake of educating the greater community than they are
for vilifying select members. For example, during the national debate over
the healthcare system, the ADL responded on its website to a prominent
religious leader who had compared the healthcare reform measures to,
what the Nazis did and for bestowing a Josef Mengele Award on the
presidents chief healthcare advisor.8 Using this rhetoric as an oppor-
tunity to educate, rather than berate, the ADL publicly explained why
such comparisons are offensive and diminish the history and memory of
those 12 million murdered at the hands of the Nazis. The then Chairman
Abraham Foxman said, We hope that this episode will serve as a teachable
moment that will help to improve understanding about Jewish history,
anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, and that the use of Nazi analogies will
cease. The president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty
Commission, who made the analogy, apologized sincerely for equating
anyone in the Obama administration with Dr. Mengele.
Teachable moments represent perhaps the most effective form of
engaging a national discussion on the emergence of hateful rhetoric in
our digital spaces, politics, college campuses, and popular culture that we
share. But such an approach requires that we are both honest and critical
about our communications, especially online, where the least amount of
oversight exists. As educators and organizations shine more light on the
radical ideologies that permeate the online world, and segue into soci-
ety, other actors with equally important parts to play must join them. No
countermovement against viral hate can succeed without the activism of
the very players that extremists most aspire to co-opt: the web communi-
ties, political news media, and Net Generation.
Preserving aDigital Democratic Sphere

In this text, we have investigated the many ways that the Internet, as a
public information space, unwittingly acts as a conduit for advancing
racist and radical ideas, gradually turning propaganda into a form of
accepted discourse. In the digital world that was built for forward think-
ers, information seekers, and global scholars, there is no greater enemy to

enlightenment than falsified knowledge, and racist propaganda certainly
qualifies as that. Thus, a greater social responsibility must be assigned to
this new democratic sphere that has certainly brought more access and
flow of ideas, but, in exchange, has provided few gatekeepers to safeguard
the quality and nature of our input. That deficiency is what makes the
Internet and its content-sharing communities such prime real estate for
groups like white nationalists, terrorists, and anti-LGBT hate groups. To
counter their dogmatic intrusions into the open realm of cyberspace, it is,
therefore, the job of political blogs and information hubs, content-sharing
websites and social networks, to preserve their own intellectual grounds.
First, web communities of all formssocial, political, and content shar-
inghave to be more accountable for the day-to-day material they host
and effectively publish. A guiding question must be asked, How is this
open space being used, or misused, if that is the case? Websites, like any
hosting enterprise, are private entities that have both the right and respon-
sibility to deny their platforms to those that would use them for nefarious
purposes. Certainly, websites like YouTube, Twitter, and Wikipedia do
monitor their pages and user accounts, and have taken more proactive
measures in recent years in the massive task of removing fanatical content.
Notably, in 2016, Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, and Microsoft
pledged to support an online code of conduct, optimistically vowing to
purge existing hate speech and terrorist propaganda from their platforms
within 24 hours.9 A few months later, Twitter announced that it had sus-
pended over 235,000 accounts that were flagged for promoting terrorism
or extremist causes.10 But this weeding process should be a continuous
and highly publicized mission, as extremists will always find a new account
or means to slip back into these spaces, no matter how vigilant their hosts
are in trying to keep them out. So when videos or social media profiles
are removed, a message of social awareness can take their place, inform-
ing the next would-be viewer of ISISs latest terror video, or racist tirade,
or tweet, that such content was removed because it is hateful and has no
place in this or any like-minded community.
Other popular websites, like Reddit and 4Chan, as well as some politi-
cal blogs that also embrace a culture of raw, unabridged expression, must
take a harder look at how some of the current discourse is shaping in
their domains. When forum after forum, and blog after blog, convey
the same familiar narratives about black on white crime, or LGBT-
lifestyles threatening American freedoms, or the evil United States
148 A. KLEIN
and its people, then it is reasonable to conclude that the community

has moved toward the fundamentalist fringe. It is also fair to assume that
such an environment is either the result of the websites operators who
harbor these same views, or, fear that to curtail the fanatic content will
inhibit the popularity of their site. If the former is true, then it is time to
add that website to the growing list of online hate communities. But if it
is the latter, then immediately a question of digital social responsibility is
raised. The decision to allow a divisive discourse that is fixated on race,
religion, gender, or sexual orientation to take hold of ones community,
is to comply with a hate culture that is aggressively and overtly exploiting
this virtual world.
Beyond websites, the supporting infrastructure of the Internetweb
hosting and ISPsmust also take greater accountability for the websites
it presents and delivers. Rather than treating the client URLs like pri-
vate storage boxes, whose content they rent but do not judge, companies
like Optimum, Go Daddy, Comcast, and AT&T must acknowledge their
charge includes their obligation to maintain a vibrant, diverse, and safe
digital environment. While freedom of speech is of the utmost impor-
tance to our online expression, that guiding principle does not require
private companies to entertain the kind of hate mongering that websites
like Stormfront or the Daily Stormer practice. Just as an education center
should never turn a blind eye to the bully that terrorizes the schoolyard,
so too, should todays website hosts acquire a similar form of protective
vigilance.
Of course, some leading websites have been increasingly proactive in
countering the emergence of hate and antagonism, such as CNN.com,
which suspends their comment sections when the banter becomes too
hostile, effectively revoking the privilege of those who abuse it. Facebook
and Twitter are also working with law agencies in monitoring the alarm-
ing trend of terrorist social media activity, eliminating these accounts
when discovered, although such attempts only provide brief relief before
the next ISIS or Al-Qaeda handle emerges. In 2015, the shadowy group
Anonymous decided to put their collective hacktivist skills to the task of
collecting the user information behind ISIS supporters on Twitter, and
releasing the information worldwide.11 While law agencies do not autho-
rize these kinds of vigilante acts, such hacktivism does represent a new
form of civic retaliation against hate developing online, which we have
not seen before.
One of the greatest misconceptions about the Internet is that, there

can be no gatekeepers in this space. And it is true that governments have
neither the laws nor the capacity to take down egregious websites, which
was a question recently put before the FCC with regard to ISISs web
presence. The FCC chairman acknowledged, We do not have jurisdic-
tion over Facebook and all the other edge providers, many of which
are not within American borders.12 It is also true that the role of tradi-
tional media gatekeepers, such as book publishers or studio heads, is not
in keeping with the spirit of the Internet, which was a medium built for
the amateur voice, where anyone can be a publisher. So, without these
filtering agents, and free of government supervision, the common assump-
tion about online gatekeeping is that it simply cannot exist. In fact, it can.
In a medium created by, and for, the public, the gatekeepers are us. It is
the website owner and user, the forum contributor, and comment poster,
the social networker and blogger who have been charged with the careful
oversight of the virtual world. And with that knowledge, we must take
the utmost social responsibility in preserving the democracy and safety of
digital public sphere.
Press andPolitics Accountability

Technological advancements have always affected the news product. From
print to radio, and radio to television, new communication technologies
consistently impact the style and form of journalism, especially in shorten-
ing the time and space in which information can travel. So, too, has the
Internet transformed the nature and practice of journalism, but not only in
its further compression of the global community. The web has also altered
the flow of information itself. Today, traditional news providers have lost
their foremost control over the flow of news, as stories now emanate
online, influenced by the public through blogs and citizen journalism that
circumvent newspapers and TV networks in reaching audiences. Political
blogs are a prime example of this alternate flow of news. These public
editorial sites now receive larger followings than newspaper op-ed pages,
which are slowly disappearing in the electronic age. By way of the Internet,
todays news media are not only everywhere, but they are also everyone.
And yet, in this diversified news environment, our investigation has
demonstrated how some racist and radical groups have begun to tap into
the stream of political blogs, even building their own faux-news sites, to
150 A. KLEIN
present the illusion of a conventional standing for their extreme ideas.

Of course, we know that racist ideologies do not classify, in any sense, as
a political cause, despite modern propagandists savvy attempts to blur
these two concepts. But amid the fire and smoke of todays actual political
scene, legitimate issues like immigration, marriage equality, refugee crises,
and affirmative action policies, each provide opportune narratives along
which organized hate groups may align their extremist campaigns.
Unfortunately, some of the more common themes emanating from hate
websites are not so different than the rhetoric found in many mainstream
political and media discourses, including a rejection of multicultural ini-
tiatives, or the fear of losing traditional American values. And, in a free
press system, all citizens should have the right to express these concerns.
However, the slippery slope begins at that point where the debate shifts
from policy to the insinuations of an unnamed entity behind the social
changes, and grievances. That is how discriminatory movements often
begin, through political debates that cross over into sinister questions
about cultures and peoples that would normally never find expression in
the mainstream press. And so, we return to the theme of accountability.
In order to curb the ability of todays online extremists from establishing a
connection between politics and intolerance, it is a responsible news media
and political establishment that must reevaluate how their words some-
times fuel the fire of this particular audience. While we may assume that
inflaming racist sentiments is not the intent of cable news hosts, political
pundits, or the politicians themselves, the reality is that their fiery opinions
on matters relating to cultural issues, particularly of race and religion, are
being received and exploited by todays extremist communities.
Currently, a responsible journalist can combat the propagandist agenda
by first limiting its formulaic use of divisive binary discourse in the treat-
ment of political issues, which immediately separates every issue into two
opposing sides. While there may be entertainment value in that kind of
news product made popular by 24-hour cable networks, issues such as
national security, US citizenship, and crime rates are not about sides.
These and other pressing issues are consistently hyperpolarized by news
media into two opposing factionsright and leftwith each claiming the
moral high ground. This is a dangerous and divisive rhetoric in itself. What
is more, it simplifies what are very complex issues, shoehorning a spectrum
of opinions, into the same ideological boxes that are designed for produc-
ing conflict, not solutions. For groups like the white power movement,
which already think in absolutes, and speak strictly in binary terms, this
type of polarized news discourse feeds their mantra of oppositional cul-

tures in America, which in turn, caters directly to the racist belief system.
Political writers, hosts, and news pundits must also become more vigilant
about the words they use in framing social issues. One of the most pressing
examples of a need for greater restraint is the reporting of anti-government
sentiments. While government scrutiny and criticism is a healthy and vital
component of any true democracy, it is also responsible to recognize how
closely radicalism exists alongside some anti-government views in certain
debates. Forexample, the ADL reported how white supremacist groups
were using the then-emerging Tea Party anti-government platform to
disseminate their [own] hateful views and recruit a larger following.13
The watchdog group went directly to a common source, the Stormfront
website, from which forums were encouraging the community to, Take
these Tea Party Americans by the hand and help them go from crawling to
standing independently and then walking toward racialism. Another post
declared, A big crowd of irate White folks protesting the government
seems like the perfect time and place for us WNs [White Nationalists] to
promote our cause. And yet another respondent agreed, I think theyd
be ideal for spreading WN literature and gaining recruits in large numbers,
more quickly. But the same ADL report went on to attribute some of
the inflammation of anti-government sentiments to conventional sources
like a US representative that warned of 17 socialists in Congress, ala
Joseph McCarthy, or a Fox News host that had called President Obama
a fascist, a Nazi and a Marxist. Such sound bites from the mainstream
have not only been warmly embraced by white power communities, but
also reposted as headlines on their hate homepages. In an appearance on
the CNBC Show The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch, conservative com-
mentator Ann Coulter said, We [Christians] just want Jews to be per-
fected. We consider ourselves perfected.14 Her commentary quickly
surfaced among the online community of anti-Semitic websites, where it
was then celebrated in the headlines, video clips, and discussion boards of
those sites.
One of the biggest prizes for any extremist organization is publicity.
It is for this reason that groups like the Westboro Baptist Church send
out press releases before arriving on a local scene with their God Hates
signs, and websites like KKK.com instruct visitors how to contact their
local press offices. The news media, as well as prominent political figures,
sometimes fall into the trap of lending their powerful spotlight to outspo-
ken extremists, like anti-LGBT groups, and in doing so, help to publicize
152 A. KLEIN
the radical causes for which they stand. In response to these trends, the
SPLC has occasionally directed letters to some of the major cable news
outlets reemphasizing, Respectable news organizations should not be
peddling propaganda that supports the agenda of radical extremists who
are only interested in stirring up hate and fomenting violence.15
Does racial discord sell? Certainly, within American culture, matters of
diversity, including subjects of racial friction, are commonplace topics for
debate. But when the news media choose to inflame issues that live danger-
ously close to fanatical ideologies, or when they provide high-profile plat-
forms for those who espouse intolerance, one must ask whether this form
of journalism is selling something other than cultural debate. Did news
host Glenn Beck, for example, pique a particular public interest when he
argued the possibility of Mexico collapsing: Does anyone think there will
be a rush of people [on] our border? Have you heard that theyre going
to reclaim California? That theyre going to reclaim Texas?16 Did NBCs
Meet the Press draw higher ratings by giving airtime to a racist provocateur
like Louis Farrakhan who said on that program, They [the Jews] are the
greatest controllers of Black minds, Black intelligence?17 Do anti-Islamic
quotes sell more books when conservative commentator Ann Coulter uses
terms like ragheads in her speeches?18 Or does Rush Limbaughs fear-
driving hyperboles draw in more listeners when he broadcasts, Sharia
law has already been implemented in this country?19 If the answer to
these questions is yes, then reexamining the medias ability to stoke racial
fears for ratings must also take into account the role of the audience that
keeps coming back for more. Certainly, not every news outlet that dis-
cusses racial issues or hosts an inflammatory speaker is, therefore, a beacon
for bigotry. But with the knowledge that hate websites are beginning to
draw sentiments and followers from the same well as political news out-
lets, those mainstream voices of information must now realize an equally
important role to maintain a trusted voice of reason.
The Net Generation

Looking ahead, every special interest that we have examined to this point
the racist and radical websites, the popular social networks and political
blogs, the educators and watchdog agencieswill soon look to the Net
Generation that was born into this era of the Internet, to become their
next leaders in the fight for cultural perspective. And as the digital world
continues to develop and diversify, both productively and destructively, it
is the minds and message of the younger generation for whom groups like
educators and cultural supremacists will both be competing. Given the
high-stakes nature of this massive messaging campaign, it goes without
saying that the greatest share of social responsibility lies in the hands of
that target audience for which all of these interests and movements are
aiming.
The Net Generation stands at the epicenter of a turbulent and changing
world. And in the present evolution of global mass communication, they
are the constant recipients of an awesome amount of digital information
zooming in and out of their lives like non-stop traffic. It is only fair to
stop and recognize for a moment the heightened challenge that they face
in addressing some of the questions and decisions this age has put before
them. With which community do I identify? Which of these array of
messages do I support? What about the Internet? Should I trust this
information? Or this space? Is this social network or web community
part of my identity?
In fact, if the next generation is pondering questions like these in the
future, regardless of the answers, they are already taking an important
step toward becoming socially responsible digital citizens. They are sur-
veying the waters before diving in headfirst. Through introspection, and
maintaining a sensible dialogue about this virtual space they inhabit, the
Net Generation will soon have to become those gatekeepers that can
best influence how the Internet develops in its continued evolution. It
could be that this generation will be more capable of recognizing the
pitfalls and falsities of the virtual world, and more alert to the presence of
hate speech, because of their inherent knowledge of this medium and the
diversity of their own demographic. But with their firsthand perspectives,
young adults must become the students, and then the teachers, of subjects
like safely navigating the online landscape, identifying hateful rhetoric in
social networks and chat rooms, deciphering trusted information from the
deceptive, and rejecting propaganda.
It also important to remember that, today, our social identities are
being constructed online. As such, we must all think critically about this
virtual world, and about its spaces that are being accessed by kids logging
on at earlier ages. Gardner Jr. asserted that the Internet allows children
to travel daily to a world where parental supervision is almost impos-
sible and where a Lord of the Flies ethic rules.20 Perhaps nowhere is this
observation truer today than in the realm of social networks. The standard
of the social network or sharing community is one where the exposure of
154 A. KLEIN
private lives, opinions, pictures, and other personal content is embraced as

the norm. On Facebook, it is perfectly acceptable to befriend a friend of a
friend with whom you have had no prior exchanges, just a picture profile.
In online video-gaming and content-sharing communities, we find a simi-
lar standard of open exchanges and sharing. In this social environment, it
is impossible to deny that the web will have a monumental impact on this
next generations collective development.
For the racist and radical movements, this new setting for personal
exploration has meant an opportunistic shift in the kinds of followers they
are able to reach. As such, the Net Generation, in particular, must equip
themselves with the new awareness that many of the websites they visit are
not what they appear to be. Despite their familiarity in form and function,
or the games they might offer, or information they claim to provide, these
features represent the classic bait and switch model used by charlatans
throughout the ages. Instead of the promise of friendship or pledge of
information, the hate website, in its actual form, delivers a sophisticated
recruitment center for nurturing intolerance. As the new prospect steadily
becomes indoctrinated into these pseudo-social and political communi-
ties, their digital experience can sometimes lead back to the real world,
where we began our investigation. Berlet and Vysotsky (2006) describe
the typical pattern of youth recruitment that follows the phase of online
initiation:
Rock concerts, parties, and subcultural hangouts are locations where

new recruits are exposed to the politics of white supremacy and the subcul-
ture of the movement. Older members (who are respected by all the mem-
bers of the subculture, new and old alike) reinforce the ideals and norms in
these settings.21
For the younger recruit, they are filled with a new sense of value, impor-
tance, and belonging from their new friends. They might also begin to see
differences in the world around them, which they had never noticed
before, such as the way one race acts toward another, or how nonwhites
undermine or threaten the white society. This is the belief system that
racist propagandists are producing, packaging, and selling to the Net
Generation, but most desirably, to the nave.
In Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation, Tapscott con-
structed an early sketch of todays young adults to offer some insight into
their unique perspective.22 He portrayed this next generation as far more
globally oriented than their parents, having grown up with a World Wide
Web at their fingertips. At the same time, they are highly uninhibited
within the Internets anonymous environment. They believe strongly in a
right to information and being given access to explore their worlds at an
early age. They want options, Tapscott writes. Accustomed to years of
TV channel surfing and Internet surfing, they expect a world of limitless
choices.23 But through such unprecedented access, the Net Generation is
also more exposed to adult ideas than ever before, including the elements
of hate. As a result, their notion of reality represents something of a para-
dox. In one sense, they are given the reins to navigate through a mature
digital world, and at a much earlier phase of life. But, with so much vir-
tual experience, the constant test that confronts them is whether they can
differentiate the real information from the propaganda, and the genuine
community from the duplicitous.
And so, in addition to asking these kinds of questions, and thinking
more critically about the nature of the Internet, a socially responsible pas-
senger in a vehicle of new media must also acquire a practical understand-
ing about the sinister elements that purvey that world, and where they
can lead. Teaching about real intolerance and blunt racism is no easy task,
especially to an audience that has been inundated with lessons about racism
and bigotry since grade school. Such themes can begin to seem tiresome
when they will matter most, during the adolescent period of exploration
and development. Growing up during these times means understanding
that access to the Internet is actually not free. Rather, it is a privilege that
comes with the price of responsibility, and, like any trial of young adult-
hood, a test of character.
Conclusion
Regardless of the inroads that hate culture has made online, and respec-
tively in society, there remains one notable advantage to digital extremism.
Hate speech uncovers the haters.24 By stepping out of the shadows and
migrating onto the Internet, racist and radical groups have exposed their
identities, ideology, and strategies to those that know how to spot them.
Once unveiled, these cunning outlets of propaganda are simply revealed
to be the age-old expressions of small-minded prejudice and ignorance.
As this imaginary league of cultural freedom fighters views themselves to
be endangered targets of non-white society, they are really only victims
of their own warped mentality. But not the mentality of racist superiority,
156 A. KLEIN
because bigotry, like any hateful ideology, actually has little to do with
delusions of cultural supremacy. Rather, these beliefs are really the
product of the individuals conceived smallness in society, and always have
been. The digital hate culture is the next cultivated response to that condi-
tion, albeit a prolific one.
The first step in eradicating such bigotry is to recognize it. By illumi-
nating the truth hidden within the slick cyber dens of these racist and
radical communities, Internet watchdogs, educators, and everyday users
can begin to isolate and expose the presence of hate on the Internet. In
the new marketplace of ideas that has often been called the information
superhighway, these racist databases and hate networks are the insidious
hitchhikers that we must avoid trusting, despite the apparent sincerity of
their appeal. Beneath the allure of the message and flash of its presenta-
tion, the new racial propaganda is really just like any other bad piece of
information. Once recognized, the next sensible move is to crumple it up
and throw it away.
Notes
1. Total Number of Websites, accessed December 4, 2015, http://
www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/
23, no. 2 (1996): 14.
3. ADL Poll of Over 100 Countries Finds More than One-Quarter
of Those Surveyed Infected With Anti-Semitic Attitudes, Anti-
Defamation League, accessed December 1, 2015, http://www.
adl.org/press-center/press-releases/anti-semitism-international/
adl-global-100-poll.html#.VmGljt-rTeQ
4. Syllabus Project, Gonzaga University, accessed December 2,
2015, http://www.gonzaga.edu/Academics/hate-studies/for-
students-and-educators/class-syllabi.asp
5. William McGuire, Resistance to Persuasion Conferred by Active
and Passive Prior Refutation of the Same and Alternative
Counterarguments, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
63, (1961): 326332.
6. W.James Potter, Theory of Media Literacy: A Cognitive Approach
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publication, 2004), 5859.
7. Renee Hobbs, Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action

(Washington, DC: The Aspen Institute, 2010), 29.
8. ADL Welcomes Christian Leaders Apology for Insensitive
Remarks on Healthcare Debate, Anti-Defamation League,
accessed December 1, 2015, http://www.adl.org/PresRele/
ChJew_31/5623_31.html
9. Julia Fioretti and Foo Yun Chee, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,
Microsoft back EU hate speech rules, Reuters, last modified
May31, 2016, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-facebook-
twitter-hatecrime-idUSKCN0YM0VJ
10. Katie Benner, Twitter Suspends 235,000 More Accounts for

Extremism, New York Times, last modified August 18, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/19/technology/twitter-
suspends-accounts-extremism.html?_r=2
11. Dominique Mosbergen, Anonymous Declares War on ISIS After
Paris Attacks, Huffington Post, last modified November 16, 2015,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/anonymous-isis_564961
0ae4b045bf3defc173
12. Mario Trujillo, FCC Says it cant Shutdown ISIS Websites, The
Hill, last modified November 17, 2015, http://thehill.com/
policy/technology/260438-fcc-says-it-cant-shutdown-online-
terrorist-activity
13. White Supremacists and Anti-Semites Plan to Recruit at July 4 Tea
Parties, Anti-Defamation League, accessed November 20, 2015,
http://www.adl.org/main_Extremism/White_Supremacists_
July_4_Tea_Parties.htm
14. Wiesenthal Center, Denounces Ann Coulter for Remark that

Jews Need to be Perfected, Simon Wiesenthal Center, last modi-
fied October 11, 2007, http://www.wiesenthal.com/site/apps/
nlnet/content2.aspx?c=lsKWLbPJLnF&b=4442245&ct=
5851577#.VmXx-t-rTeQ
15. Mark Potok, SPLC Asks CNN to Remove Dobbs, last modified
July 24, 2009, https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2009/
07/24/splc-asks-cnn-remove-dobbs
16. Hate in the mainstream, Southern Poverty Law Center, last mod-
ified May 29, 2009, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/
intelligence-report/2009/hate-mainstream-0
158 A. KLEIN
17. Farrakhan in His Own Words, Anti-Defamation League,

accessed December 1, 2015, http://www.adl.org/special_
reports/farrakhan_own_words2/on_jews.asp
18. Max Blumenthal, Ann Coulter at CPAC on Ragheads and

Assassinating Bill Clinton, Huffington Post, last modified February
10, 2006, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/
ann-coulter-at-cpac-on-ra_b_15434.html
19. Caitlin Macneal, Limbaugh Defends Pam Geller: Sharia Law has
been Implemented in this US, Talking Points Memo, last modi-
fied May 8, 2015, http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/
rush-limbaugh-pam-geller-sharia
20. Ralph Gardner, Jr., Parenting: Is AOL worse than TV? New York
Magazine, accessed November 3, 2015, http://nymag.com/
nymetro/urban/family/features/3377/
21. Chip Berlet and Stanislav Vysotsky, Overview of U.S. White

Supremacists Groups, Journal of Political and Military Sociology
34, no. 1 (2006): 3032.
22. Donald Tapscott, Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net
Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998).
23. Ibid., 335.
Responsibilities 26, no. 4 (1999): 10.
CHAPTER 9
Conclusion
So what does the future hold for the racist and radical movements in the
digital age? While watchdog groups actively work to identify and expose
these user-friendly communities for what they are, it would appear from
this investigation that extremist groups are continuing to effectively adapt
to the new media environment. Their presence in YouTube, Twitter, and
Facebook signifies a movement that is easily keeping up with the times,
and endeavoring to merge with mainstream youth culture. On their own
websites, the abundance of convergent media like video and audio pod-
casts, discussion boards, extensive databases, and news feeds demonstrates
the high-tech capabilities and content that are necessary for attracting net-
savvy audiences. The further branding of fanatical symbols onto stickers
and jackets, as well as the sale of music and clothing, suggests an overall
radical culture that many of these movements are attempting to market
online. Moreover, the global networking of some of these groups, and,
in particular, terrorist solicitations through social media, also reveals the
intent to grow their causes into worldwide campaigns as so many other
social movements have successfully done in recent years. And perhaps
most notably, the remodeling of these fringe communities into forums of
information, politics, and friendship suggests an acute awareness of, and
fluency in, the language of the modern web user.
From these observations, one might conclude that the acclimatization
of hate culture into the digital age has been a success. Of course, only
time will tell the extent to which the success of this virtual community will

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-51424-6_9
160 A. KLEIN
manifest into advancements of intolerance in the concrete world, where

the public resides. But some suggest that this digital-to-physical journey
has already begun when we see virulent rhetoric consuming what were
once aboveboard political blogs, and then, surfacing in election cycle cam-
paigns and commentary. Some of the very sentiments we have uncov-
ered in this text have also emerged amid the 2016 presidential campaign,
encapsulating African American protesters as dangerous thugs, or
Muslims as probable terrorists, or LGBT equality as somehow endan-
gering American religious freedomeach carry some strain of bigotry
that can be traced to its rawer form within digital hate culture. Such dis-
cursive trends can quickly escalate into a new normal where intolerance
becomes customary in our political blogs as well as our political process,
and where hostility permeates our social networks, just as it does in our
social lives. In effect, by lowering the bar of what qualifies as acceptable
expressions of bigotry online, we simultaneously lower the bar of civility
and common sense in our culture.
Going Forward
Our navigation through the darker corridors of the web, and candid assess-
ment of the hostilities that have grown within our social networks and
blogs, have revealed some critical features of intolerance in the twenty-first
century. In many ways, this text has sought to contribute to a dialogue,
which is responding to the swell of extremist views that have permeated
the public sphere in a matter of years. For those that regularly study the
presence and evolution of extremismeducators and students, journalists
and watchdog organizations, national security and law enforcementthis
exploration of fanaticism, racism, and rage online has exposed some of
the new refrains of hate communities, which we have learned are more
refined, casual, and slicker than their fiery predecessors.
While the malicious neo-Nazi and KKK brands still abound, and are
vastly active online, this book has shown how their flagrant mission and
appearance are now pass as compared to those faux-social networks,
news blogs, and radical political organizations that transmit the same sen-
timents, but in a much more palatable tone to the online visitor. After
all, hate speech repackaged as information or political commentary, and
housed in websites that look just like any other online forum, provide
those on-the-fence racists with the very cover they desire to comfortably
wade into more extremist waters. The next generation hate websites, like
CONCLUSION 161
the Daily Stormer and Solar General, well understood this required pre-
tense when they designed their homepages.
Our passage through digital hate culture also identified an ironically
diverse collection of claims being made by modern racists, adding to a
critical field that has long examined the evolving messages of intoler-
ance in politics and society,1 as well as online.2 These include fear-driving
assertions that Hispanic immigrants are threatening to destroy a white-
European heritage, and that Jews have used multiculturalism and the
media to conspiratorially dismantle the American political system, or that
the white community is under constant siege from the deadly threat of
black-on-white crime. While many of these allegations are arguably the
reinventions of older racist mantras, made to fit the politics and reali-
ties of the twenty-first century, this research has shown how the intercon-
nected context of the Internet has uniquely allowed such ideas to meet
and cross-pollinate in ways that could never have been achieved in the real
world. But online, racism can blend seamlessly with xenophobic national-
ism, and a mockery cartoon of LGBT citizens fits well alongside a con-
spiracy theory about the black president. And underlying these themes,
perhaps the most unifying message uncovered, is the appeal to defend
ones endangered identity. Some of these petitions, emanating from both
Black Separatists and White Supremacists alike, have explicitly called for
physical acts of resistancewhich are then interpreted by some to mean
violent acts of offense.
But as recurrent as these lethal outbursts of the lone shooter have
become, the more ubiquitous and far-reaching implications of web-born
hate can be found in the toxic discourse pervading our politics and cul-
ture today. Advancing this area of research, future studies might focus on
the historic 2016US presidential campaign cycle to measure, first, those
dominant claims arising from any of the 25 hate websites covered in this
book, and then, from the mouths of mainstream politicians, surrogates,
and pundits, to determine if the latter are in fact echoing the former.
It is noteworthy and perhaps telling that, in 2016, former KKK leader
David Duke reentered the political fray, speaking on various news hours to
vocally support the anti-immigration policies and alarmist rhetoric about
violence in black neighborhoods, being espoused routinely by Republican
Candidate Donald Trump.3 Seasoned bigots like Duke will always gravi-
tate toward messages that appear nationalistic and xenophobic in nature,
because such ideas live closely to others.
162 A. KLEIN
Beyond research, the teaching of topics in Digital Culture, Internet and

Society, and Media Literacy, may also utilize hate websites as a tool to illus-
trate how intolerance onlinelike any other web contentis unabridged
and highly accessible. Through greater educational focus, students can
come to recognize extremisms myriad forms, messages, coded language,
symbols, and underlying ideology when these elements surface inside well-
traveled communities like Reddit. Significant theories on expressions of
violence in the media, and the effects thereof, have traditionally helped to
inform students about the need for more critical thought about the mes-
sages we all consume in news, music, movies, and videogame play. This
research has sought to contribute to such work, by exposing more than
just the message of hate, but also a process by which corrupt information,
born online, is gradually being filtered into the digital sphere.
Expanding Theoretical Applications

For media scholars, the more nuanced investigation of the constructs of
the Internet that allow for fraudulent ideas to become cataloged as new
information can also be instructive toward explaining how the web, for all
of its contributions, can still unwittingly compromise cultural discourse.
Traditional theories about violence in the media can have newfound rele-
vance when they are considered in the realm of the Internet. For example,
Gerbners theory of a mean world syndrome described a process in which
heavy viewers of media violence, as viewed inlocal news, action films, and
TV crime shows, can cultivate a state in which they come to believe that
their own world is a far more perilous and crueler place than it is in real-
ity.4 That misconception has also societal implications when, in turn, it
produces an irrational social paranoia about the other.
Placed into the context of the Internet, Gerbners theory would help
to explain how heavy web users are similarly affected by their exposure to
the meaner elements that reside here, from the disinhibited bloggers who
incessantly post livid tirades, to the racist or misogynistic sentiments that
contaminate information-sharing networks like Twitter. Gerbners theory
would suggest that digital citizens would come to view cultural discourse
as more divided and bitter than it really is, because we are accessing our
political opinions online, and perhaps perceiving the extremist minority as
the vocal majority.
The need for deeper theoretical examination of the virtual world is fur-
ther compounded by the overwhelming majority of information seekers
CONCLUSION 163
that now choose the Internet as their primary source of news, politics,
research, and social interconnection.5 This book has offered an Internet-
specific theory that endeavors to illustrate how the exclusive constructs of
the websearch engines, social networks, news and information sites, and
political blogsunintentionally act as the filtration systems for illegitimate
forms of information, allowing them to find their way into mainstream
networks as a form of authentic knowledge. The concept of information
laundering may extend upon other theories that have sought to illuminate
processes whereby the media have fostered a darker misperception of real-
ity. Like Gerbners mean world syndrome, the paradigm posited in this text
predicts that these steady doses of bigotry and rage in the digital medium
will have a subsequent effect on the greater public sphere that comes to
view the presence of extremism in our discourse as commonplace.
Insofar as the mechanisms of information laundering are not unique
to hateful content, the same process can be found and studied in other
areas of digital culture, such as the realm of conspiracy theories (i.e., Alex
Jones InfoWars), or unsupported tabloid gossip (Radar Online). Each
of these dubious genres has the same unprecedented access to tap into
the trusted network of the Internet, and to be found, associated, and
legitimized alongside authentic theories and media coverage, respectively.
Future theoretical research might focus on these less insidious sources of
misinformation to gauge whether they, like the various disguises of hate
speech, have also made successful insinuations into popular culture. To
test some of the broader assertions of information laundering, one need
only to track the development of a popular conspiracy or lie that develops
inside a particular base of dedicated blogs and websites, and then to moni-
tor whether and how that content emerges inside more trusted circles,
both online and in traditional media.
Importantly, the suggestion here is not that the Internet has changed
the publics capacity for being critical of fanatical ideas, conspiracies, or
tabloid lies for that matter. But what has changed is perhaps our percep-
tion of information itself in the digital age. Online, that word has
become less concrete than it once wascertainly more democratic
but also more porous. As the Internet continues to expand, stretching
with it our conception of knowledge to now include blogs, wikis, tags,
tweets, and podcasts, we must carefully resist the default position that
all that ascends from the grassroots is good. Angry mobs have proven
this notion false, and that is often what emerges inside websites that are
164 A. KLEIN
strategically built to ignite racial discord. So as we continue to study the

progression of radical websites that spread like ivy across the Internet,
students of new media must also scrutinize those extreme dialogues that
are stirring in our everyday web communities. Breitbart.com is among
the most popular political websites in the United States and Europe,
home to an average 70 million visits each month.6 A discussion tag there
currently connects visitors wishing to read articles on Black Crime.7
Why? The site is not a collective for criminologists. So whose appetite is
this meant to feed?
Future investigations into online bigotry must not be limited to the
cyber fringe. We have seen how the modern dog whistles that covertly hail
in the racist masses can come in the form of a simple discussion tag like
Black Crime, or a rolling compilation of news stories about the rise of
minority populations. A regular banner headline on the Drudge Report
reads, Whites now a minority! Matt Drudges site is a home to over 150
million visits each month, globally ranked among the 200 most trafficked
sites on the Internet.8 But headlines like these can serve only one purpose,
to jolt paranoia into the minds of readers with racist inclinations.
In their work on Propaganda and Persuasion, Jowett and ODonnell
described how deceptive fabrications have gradually become institu-
tionalized over the years in news, advertising, and politics, in ways that
society has come to accept, and neglect to see as propaganda.9 The impor-
tance of paying close attention to the hidden triggers of bigotry inside our
most accepted web communities is that they, too, now have the capac-
ity to institutionalize cultural discord, making it part of the scenery that
we have come to expect of the discourse happening in our digital world.
Furthermore, we have increasingly seen how such extremism has begun to
branch off from these online roots to make astonishing advancements into
mainstream politics. In 2016, the head of Breitbart.com, Steve Bannon,
was appointed Campaign Manager for Donald Trumps presidential
bid. That brought national attention to Bannons alt-right website and
some of its recent headlines that included, Birth Control Makes Women
Unattractive and Crazy, Hoist it High and Proud: The Confederate
Flag Proclaims a Glorious Heritage, and Bill Kristol: Republic Spoiler,
Renegade Jew.10 After Trumps historic 2016 win, Bannons journey
from digital-demagogue-to-political-authority was made complete when
he was named White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to the
President-elect.
CONCLUSION 165
Custodians
One of the shrewd byproducts of hateful ideology gaining ground in the
public square is that it effectively obstructs a dialectic about identity that
needs to advance in the global community. Cultural difference is a criti-
cal subject for these times, and it would be unproductive to assume that
we can remove identity from such issues as affirmative action, religious
liberty, or equal rights. There is room for debate, and even disagreement,
about matters that deal with race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and sexual
orientation. And significantly, we have recently seen these conversations
manifest in contentious, but also healthy ways. The subject of gay rights,
for example, arose internationally out of the 2014 Olympic games in
response to host Russias anti-gay legislation. It also forced many nations
to confront their own definitions of citizenship with regard to the LGBT
community. The Black Lives Matter movement has tried to call national
attention to the high rate of African American fatalities occurring during
police apprehensions and custodies. It has reactivated a profound debate
over the continued existence of systemic racism in America. Such debates
are far from perfect, and certainly not easy, but they are necessary.
Hate groups seek to engage these complex divisions through the guise
of politics and community, and do so for the pure purposes of derailing
progress. Online, the prospect of sparking racial outrage, or promoting
a mob mentality, has proven far more achievable than we once would
have imagined, with hashtags that can instantaneously unite attitudes of
bigotry, and web communities that do little to censor, or ensure a civic
decorum, which is simply not the culture of the come-as-you-are Internet
age. It is also perhaps the price for admission into a World Wide Web that
was built on the premise of free expression for all. But when we bravely
propped open the door to unconditional free speech in the virtual world,
we may have forgotten that this means everyone can enter.
Traditional media outlets, though not impenetrable to extremism, have
never had to contend with a reality where a recognized hate group gets to
write a weekly column, or host a national radio show. That is, of course,
because newspapers have editors, and public radio has producers and the
FCC, just as movies and television have studio heads and show runners
and other well-established gatekeepers that effectively filter out the hate
speech. The Internet has us. And while it is true that the limitless quality
of cyberspace is precisely what has enabled citizens to invent the blogo-
sphere or produce social networks, it is an error to assume that we need
166 A. KLEIN
no custodians. The charge lies with us, the Internet users that learn to
detect bigotry as bad information, reject it, and move on; or the content
hosts that choose to vigilantly monitor the vast materials that anonymous
authors post everyday; or the news blog that prohibits fanaticism from
finding a home inside its pages, even denying access to those who would
use the space to traffic in hate. If we neglect our role as caretaker, the
Internet does not necessarily fall into moral decay, but it does become
less of the public square we envisioned it to be. Littered with divisiveness,
overgrown with poisonous ideas, the web is no longer an infinite space.
Rather it is smaller, meaner, anddiminished by our disregard.
Notes
1. Ian Haney Lpez, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals
have Reinvented Racism & Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015); Carol Swain and Russell Nieli,
Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism in America (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).
2. Abraham H.Foxman and Christopher Wolf, Viral Hate: Containing
Its Spread on the Internet (New York: Macmillan Publishers, 2013);
Jessie Daniels, Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New
Attack on Civil Rights (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, 2009); Georgie Weatherby and Brian Scroggins, A
Content Analysis of Persuasion Techniques Used on White
Supremacist Websites, Journal of Hate Studies 4, no. 9 (2006).
3. Camila Domonoske, Former KKK Leader David Duke Says Of
Course Trump Supporters Are His Supporters, NPR.org, last
modified August 5, 2015, http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2016/08/05/488802494/former-kkk-leader-david-duke-
says-of-course-trump-voters-are-his-voters
4. George Gerbner, The Hidden Side of Television Violence, in
Invisible Crisis: What Conglomerate Control of Media Means for
America and The World, ed. George Gerbner, Hamid Mowlana,
and Herbert Schiller (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 2734.
5. UCLA Internet Project, Internet Peaks as Americas Most
Important Source of Information, last modified February 11,
2003, http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/x3829.xml
CONCLUSION 167
6. Breitbart.com, SimilarWeb, accessed October 7, 2016, https://

www.similarweb.com/website/breitbart.com#overview
7. Tag: Black Crime, Breitbart, accessed October 7, 2016, http://
www.breitbart.com/tag/black-crime/
8. Drudgereport.com, SimilarWeb, accessed October 7, 2016,
https://www.similarweb.com/website/drudgereport.com
Persuasion (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 1999),
164.
10. Adam Klein, In Trump, Extremism Found Its Championand
Maybe Its Demise, The Conversation, last modified November 7,
2016, https://theconversation.com/in-trump-extremism-found-
its-champion-and-maybe-its-demise-67765
Bibliography
About the Ku Klux Klan. Anti-Defamation League. Accessed September 2, 2015.

http://archive.adl.org/learn/ext_us/kkk/default.html
Active U.S.Hate Groups in 2008: Neo-Nazi. Southern Poverty Law Center. Accessed
June 28, 2009. http://www.splcenter.org/intel/map/type.jsp?DT=9
Adams, Josh, and Vincent J.Roscigno. White Supremacists, Oppositional Culture
and the World Wide Web. Social Forces 84, no. 2 (2005): 759777.
ADL Poll of Over 100 Countries Finds More Than One-Quarter of those Surveyed
Infected with Anti-Semitic Attitudes. Anti-Defamation League. Accessed
December 1, 2015. http://www.adl.org/press-center/press-releases/anti-
semitism-international/adl-global-100-poll.html#.VmGljt-rTeQ
ADL Welcomes Christian Leaders Apology for Insensitive Remarks on Healthcare
Debate. Anti-Defamation League. Accessed December 1, 2015. http://www.
adl.org/PresRele/ChJew_31/5623_31.html
Adler, Ronald B., George Rodman, and Athena du Pr. Understanding Human
Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Akdeniz, Yaman. Anonymity, Democracy, and Cyberspace. Social Research 69,
no.1 (2002): 224.
Alexa: The Web Information Company. Last accessed August 8, 2015. http://
alexa.com/
Alexa: The Web Information Company. Daily Stormer. Accessed October 2, 2015.
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/dailystormer.com
Alexa: The Web Information Company. Free Republic. Accessed October 2, 2015.
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/freerepublic.com
Allport, Gordon. The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison- Wesley
Publishing Company, 1954.

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-51424-6
170 Bibliography
American Freedom Party Mission Statement. Accessed October 1, 2015. http://

american3rdposition.com/?page_id=195
Anglin, Andrew. Sickening Jew Media Calls Man a Coward for Standing Up
Against the Government and Faggots. Daily Stormer. Last modified March 29,
2015. http://www.dailystormer.com/sickening-jew-media-calls-man-a-coward-
for-standing-up-against-the-government-and-faggots/
Anti-Defamation League. Poisoning the Web: Hatred Online. New York: ADL
Publication, 2001.
Arkin, Daniel, and Erik Ortiz. Dylann Roof Almost Didnt Go through with
Charleston Shooting. NBC News. Last modified June 19, 2015. http://www.
nbcnews.com/storyline/charleston-church-shooting/dylann-roof-almost-didnt-go-
through-charleston-church-shooting-n378341
Aryan Encyclopedia Takes Off. Southern Poverty Law Center. Last modified
December 1, 2007. http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?
aid=863
Bandura, Albert. Social Learning through Imitation. In Nebraska Symposium on
Motivation, edited by M.R.Jones. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962.
Bazyler, Michael. Holocaust Denial Laws and Other Legislation Criminalizing
Promotion of Nazism. Accessed August 1, 2009. http://www1.yadvashem.
org/about_yad/departments/audio/Bazyler.pdf
BBC News. Internet Used by 3.2 Billion People in 2015. BBC News. Last modi-
fied May 26, 2015. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32884867
Becker, Paul J., Bryan Byers, and Arthur Jipson. The Contentious American
Debate: The First Amendment and Internet-Based Hate Speech. International
Review of Law Computers 14, no. 1 (2000): 3341.
Bedard, Paul. 75% of Population Growth since 2000 from Immigration, 100
Million More by 2065. American Freedom Party. Last modified October 29,
2015. http://american3rdposition.com/?p=14858
Beirich, Heidi. Blog Wars: The Daily Stormer and its Racist Frenemies. Last modi-
fied March 10, 2015. https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/03/11/
blog-wars-daily-stormer-and-its-racist-frenemies
Benner, Katie. Twitter Suspends 235,000 More Accounts for Extremism. New
York Times. Last modified August 18, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/
2016/08/19/technology/twitter-suspends-accounts-extremism.html?_r=2
Berlet, Chip, and Stanislav Vysotsky. Overview of U.S.White Supremacists Groups.
Journal of Political and Military Sociology 34, no. 1 (2006): 1148.
Black Africans in the United States. Accessed October 1, 2015. http://en.meta-
pedia.org/wiki/African_Americans
Blumenthal, Max. Ann Coulter at CPAC on Ragheads and Assassinating Bill
Clinton. Huffington Post. Last modified February 10, 2006. http://www.huff-
ingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/ann-coulter-at-cpac-on-ra_b_15434.html
Bibliography 171
Borrowman, Shane. Critical Surfing: Holocaust Deniability and Credibility on the

Web. College Teaching 47, no. 2 (1999): 4454.
Bratich, Jack. Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture.
Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008.
Breitbart. Tag: Black Crime. Accessed October 7, 2016. http://www.breitbart.
com/tag/black-crime/
Buchanan, Pat. Gay Rights, Civil Rights, and How Freedom Dies. American
Renaissance. Last modified February 24, 2014. http://www.amren.com/
news/2014/02/gay-rights-civil-rights-and-how-freedom-dies/
Bureau of Justice Statistics. Hate Crime Victimization. By Meagan Wilson.
Washington, DC: 2014. Accessed July 20, 2015. http://www.bjs.gov/index.
cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4905
Caldwell, Leigh Ann. Immigration Speaker Sparks Controversy at CPAC.
Last modified February 11, 2012. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/
immigration-speaker-sparks-controversy-at-cpac/
Cannon, Angie, and Warren Cohen. The Church of the Almighty White Man.
U.S.News & World Report, July 19, 1999.
Charlton, Corey. Have ISIS Found a Sadistic New Way to Kill? Daily Mail, August
25, 2015. Accessed October 16, 2015. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/
article-3 210469/ISIS-introducing-new-k illing-style-Ominous-warning-
terror-g roup-s-latest-video-depicting-h orrific-murder-released-featuring-
prisoners-surrounded-Islamists-horseback.html
Chokshi, Niraj. The Year of Enormous Rage: Number of Hate Groups Rose by
14 Percent in 2015. Washington Post. Last modified February 17, 2016.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/02/17/hate-
groupsrose-14-percent-last-year-the-first-increase-since-2010/?tid=sm_tw
Cialdini, Robert, Rodney Bassett, and John Cacioppo. Low-Ball Procedure for
Producing Compliance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36, no. 5
(1978): 463476.
Cimons, Marlene. Dannemeyer Hires AIDS Quarantine Advocate. Los Angeles
Times, August 20, 1985. Accessed October 1, 2015. http://articles.latimes.
com/1985-08-20/news/mn-1965_1_aids-quarantine-advocate
Citron, Danielle. Hate Crimes in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2014.
Clayton, Mark. Terrorist Tweets: How Al Qaedas Social Media Move Could
Cause Problems. Christian Science Monitor, February 7, 2013. Accessed
October 15, 2015. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2013/0207/Terrorist-
tweets-how-AlQaeda-s-social-media-move-could-cause-problems
Coe, Kevin, David Domke, Erica S.Graham, Sue L.John, and Victor W.Pickard.
No Shades of Gray: The Binary Discourse of George W.Bush and an Echoing
Press. Journal of Communication 54, no. 2 (2004): 234252.
172 Bibliography
Cohen, Adam. White Power Music is an Effective Recruiting Tool. In White

Supremacy Groups, edited by Claire Kreger. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven
Press, 2003.
Cohen, Amy, Deborah Azrael, and Matthew Miller. Rate of Mass Shootings has
Tripled Since 2011, Harvard Research Shows. Mother Jones, October 15, 2015.
Accessed October 20, 2015. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/
10/massshootings-increasing-harvard-research
Conant, Eve. Rebranding Hate in the Age of Obama. Newsweek, May 4, 2009, 30.
Condon, Stephanie. Poll: One in Four Americans Think Obama was not Born in
the U.S. CBS News. Last modified April 21, 2011. http://www.cbsnews.com/
news/poll-onein-four-americans-think-obama-was-not-born-in-us/
Craig Cobb Celebrates Death of Rosa Parks. Southern Poverty Law Center.
Accessed October 20, 2015. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intel-
ligencereport/2009/craig-cobb
Creativity Alliance. Mission Statement. Accessed November 2, 2015. http://
www.creativityalliance.com/index.html
Creativity Alliance. Sixteen Commandments. Accessed October 20, 2015. http://
creativityalliance.com/home/16commandments/
Dahlberg, Lincoln. The Internet and Democratic Discourse: Exploring the
Prospects of Online Deliberative Forums Extending the Public Sphere.
Information, Communication & Society 4, no. 4 (2001): 615633.
Daily Stormer. Accessed October 1, 2015. http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/
Daily_Stormer
Daily Stormer Homepage. Accessed October 12, 2015. http://www.dailystormer.
com
Daniels, Jessie. Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on
Civil Rights. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009.
David Duke. Anti-Defamation League. Last modified August 1, 2009. http://
www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/david_duke/default.asp
Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. Southern Dreams and a New Theory of
First Amendment Realism. Emory Law Journal 65, no. 2 (2015): 303358.
Does your School Block this Site? Accessed August 4, 2009. http://www.storm-
front.org/forum/sitemap/index.php/t-269822.html
Domonoske, Camila. Former KKK Leader David Duke Says Of Course Trump
Supporters are his Supporters. NPR.org. Last modified August 5, 2015.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-w ay/2016/08/05/488802494/
former-kkkleader-david-duke-says-of-course-trump-voters-are-his-voters
Don Black: White Pride World Wide. Anti-Defamation League. Accessed
September 15, 2015. http://www.adl.org/poisoning_web/black.asp
Dornberg, John. Munich 1923: The Story of Hitlers First Grab for Power. NewYork,
NY: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1982.
Bibliography 173
Dretzin, Rachel. Growing Up Online. Documentary. Directed by Rachel Dretzin

and John Maggio. Boston: PBS, 2007. DVD.
Einzinger, Kurt. Media Regulation on the Internet. Accessed October 1, 2015.
http://www.osce.org/fom/13846?download=true
Eisner, Will. The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. NewYork:
W.W.Norton & Company, 2005.
Emery, Theo, and Liz Robbins. Holocaust Museum Shooter James von Brunn
had History of Hate. Seattle Times, June 12, 2009. Accessed November 20,
2015, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2009330156_
holocaustshooting12.html
Entman, Robert. Framing: Towards Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm. Journal
of Communication 43 (1993): 5158.
Facebook under Fire for Allow Hate Speech Against Jews to Proliferate Online. Last
modified September 17, 2013. http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/09/17/
facebookunder-fire-for-allowing-hate-speech-against-jews-to-proliferate-online/
Family Research Institute. Scientific Articles. Accessed November 3, 2015. http://
www.familyresearchinst.org/category/articles/
Farhi, Paul. From the Fringe to the Mainstream: How Scandals of Dubious
Validity or Relevance End Up Attracting so Much Media Attention. American
Journalism Review 32, no. 4(2010): 3237.
Farrakhan in his Own Words. Anti-Defamation League. Accessed December 1,
2015. http://www.adl.org/special_reports/farrakhan_own_words2/on_jews.
asp
Fears, Darryl, and Marc Fisher. A Suspects Long History of Hate, and Signs of
Strain. Washington Post, June 11, 2009. Accessed November 20, 2015, http://
www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/ar ticle/2009/06/10/
AR2009061003495.html
Federal Communication Commission. Future of Media and Information Needs of
Communities in a Digital Age. Washington, DC: 2010. Accessed August 31,
2015. http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=7020450549
Fioretti, Julia, and Foo Yun Chee. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Microsoft Back
EU Hate Speech Rules. Reuters. Last modified May 31, 2016. http://www.
reuters.com/article/us-eu-facebook-twitter-hatecrimeidUSKCN0YM0VJ
Foxman, Abraham H., and Christopher Wolf. Viral Hate: Containing Its Spread
on the Internet. NewYork: Macmillan Publishers, 2013.
Gardner, Jr., Ralph. Parenting: Is AOL Worse Than TV? New York Magazine.
Accessed November 3, 2015. http://nymag.com/nymetro/urban/family/
features/3377/
Geo, Chris. Full VideoElliot Rodgers Retribution Video. Last modified May
24, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-gQ3aAdhIo
Geraghty, Jim. Obama Could Debunk Some Rumors by Releasing His Birth
Certificate. National Review Online. Last modified June 9, 2008. http://www.
174 Bibliography
nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/9490/obama-could-debunk-somerumors-
releasing-his-birth-certificate
Gerbner, George. The Hidden Side of Television Violence. In Invisible Crisis:
What Conglomerate Control of Media Means for America and The World, edited
by George Gerbner, Hamid Mowlana, and Herbert Schiller, 2734. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1996.
Gerhards, Jrgen, and Mike S. Schfer, Is the Internet a Better Public Sphere?
Comparing Old and New Media in the USA and Germany. New Media &
Society 12, no. 1 (2010): 143160.
Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organizational of Experience.
London: Harper and Row, 1974.
Greenberg, Jon. Sally Kohn: White Men Account for 69% of Those Arrested for
Violent Crimes. Politifact, April 2, 2015. Accessed November 2, 2015.
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/apr/02/sally-
kohn/sallykohn-white-men-69-percent-a rrested-violent/national/main
5309836.shtml
Griffin, Drew, David Fitzpatrick, and Curt Devine. Was Dallas Cop Killer
Micah Johnson Radicalized Online? CNN.com, July 11, 2016. Accessed
September 28, 2016. http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/10/us/micah-
johnson-dallas-radicalizedonline/
Gross, Allie. White Nationalist Group Defends Dylann Roofs Legitimate
Grievances. Mother Jones, June 21, 2015. Accessed August 16, 2015.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/06/council-conservative-
citizensdylann-roof
Gross, Doug. Online Comments are Being Phased Out. CNN, November 21,
2014. Accessed October 4, 2015. http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/21/tech/
web/onlinecomment-sections/
Habermas, Jrgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick
Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.
Hannon, Elliot. Heres What We Know So Far About Umpqua School Shooter
Chris Harper Mercer. Slate, October 1, 2015. Accessed November 1, 2015.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/10/01/umpqua_commu-
nity_college_shooter_chris_harper_mercer_profile.html
Hate in the Mainstream. Southern Poverty Law Center. Last modified May 29,
2009. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2009/
hatemainstream-0
Hate on Display: 14 Words. Anti-Defamation League. Accessed November 15,
2015. http://www.adl.org/combating-hate/hate-on-display/c/14-words.
html#.VliwINrTeQ
Bibliography 175
Herbeck, Dale. Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire. In Free Speech on Trial:

Communication Perspectives on Landmark Supreme Court Decisions, edited by
Richard Parker. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2003.
Heres What Appears to be Dylann Roofs Racist Manifesto. Mother Jones. Last
modified June 20, 2015. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/06/
allegedcharleston-shooter-dylann-roof-manifesto-racist
Herf, Jeffrey. The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the
Holocaust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Hobbs, Renee. Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action. Washington, DC:
The Aspen Institute, 2010.
Hoskins, Guy T. Meet the Habermasses: Charting the Emergence of a Social
MediaEnabled Public Sphere in New Democracies. International Journal of
Technology, Knowledge & Society 9, no. 4 (2013): 2539.
Huffington Post. Facebook Tells Holocaust Survivors Denial Pages Can Stay. Last
modified July 28, 2011. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/28/
holocaustdenial-pages-can-stay-says-facebook_n_912116.html
Illegal Immigrant Accused of Killing Homecoming Queen. Vanguard News
Network. Last modified April 13, 2009. http://www.vanguardnewsnetwork.
com/2009/04/illegal-immigrant-accused-o fmurdering-homecoming-
queen/
Jew Watch Homepage. Accessed August 26, 2015. http://jewwatch.com
Johnson-Cartee, Karen, and Gary Copeland. Strategic Political Communication:
Rethinking Social Influence, Persuasion, and Propaganda. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003.
Jowett, Garth S., and Victoria ODonnell. Propaganda and Persuasion. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999.
Jumpshot Analytics. Stormfront.org. Accessed September 15, 2015. https://
www.jumpshot.com/report/stormfront.org/
Katz, Rita. Follow ISIS on Twitter: A Special Report on the Use of Social Media
by Jihadists. Last modified June 26, 2014. http://news.siteintelgroup.com/
blog/index.php/entry/192-follow-isis-on-twitter
Keller, Larry. The Second Wave: Evidence Grows of Far-Right Militia Resurgence.
Last modified November 3, 2009. http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/
intelligencereport/browse-all-issues/2009/fall/the-second-wave
Klapper, Joseph T. The Effects of Mass Communication. Glencoe, IL: The Free
Press, 1960.
Klein, Cecilie. Sentenced to Live. NewYork: Holocaust Library, 1989.
Klein, Adam. Slipping Racism into the Mainstream: A Theory of Information
Laundering. Communication Theory 22, no. 4 (2012): 427448.
Klein, Adam. In Trump, Extremism Found Its Championand Maybe Its Demise.
The Conversation. Last modified November 7, 2016. https://theconversation.
com/intrump-extremism-found-its-champion-and-maybe-its-demise-67765
176 Bibliography
Klite, Paul. Media can be Antibiotic for Violence. Quill 88, no. 4 (2000): 32.
Kopan, Tal. Donald Trump Retweets White Genocide Twitter user. CNN.com.
Last modified January 22, 2016. http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/22/poli-
tics/donaldtrump-retweet-white-genocide/
Kowalski, Robin. Teasing and Bullying. In The Dark Side of Interpersonal
Communication, edited by Brian Spitzberg and William Cupach, 169201.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2007.
Kreimer, Seth. Technologies of Protest: Insurgent Social Movements and the First
Amendment in the Era of the Internet. University of Pennsylvania Law Review
150, no. 1 (2001): 119125.
Ku Klux Klan Homepage. Accessed August 30, 2015. http://www.kkk.com/
Lazarsfeld, Paul F. Radio and the Printed Page: An Introduction to the Study of
Radio and Its Role in the Communication of Ideas. NewYork: Duell, Sloan, and
Pearce, 1940.
Lee, Alfred C., and Elizabeth B. Lee. The Fine Art of Propaganda. New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Co., Inc., 1939.
Lewandowski, Dirk. Search Engine User Behavior: How Can Users be Guided to
Quality Content? Information Services & Use 28 (2008): 261268.
Lpez, Ian Haney. Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals have Reinvented
Racism & Wrecked the Middle Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
MacDonald, Kevin. Decline of the Economic Position of Whites: Implications for
Republican Strategy. Last modified July 30, 2013. http://www.theocciden-
talobserver.net/?s=hispanic+immigration&x=15&y=14
Macmillan, Douglas. Facebooks Holocaust Controversy. Business Week, May 12,
2009. Accessed October 12, 2015. http://www.businessweek.com/
technology/
Macneal, Caitlin. Limbaugh Defends Pam Geller: Sharia Law has been Implemented
in this US. Talking Points Memo. Last modified May 8, 2015. http://talking-
pointsmemo.com/livewire/rush-limbaugh-pam-geller-sharia
Magdoff, JoAnn, and Jeffrey B. Rubin. Social and Psychological Uses of the
Internet. In Deciphering Cyberspace: Making the Most of Digital Communication
Technology, edited by Leonard Shyles, 201216. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications, 2003.
Mainstream Web Sites Flooded with Anti-Semitic Comments in Wake of Madoff
Scandal. Anti-Defamation League. Last modified December 19, 2008. http://
www.adl.org/PresRele/Internet_75/5422_12.htm
Manjoo, Fahrad. True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. Hoboken,
NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011.
Manjoo, Fahrad. UVA Debate: Does the Internet Help or Hurt Democracy?, June
10, 2010. Accessed October 2, 2015. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/
media-janjune10-miller_06-01/
Bibliography 177
Marine Funeral Picketing Event. Westboro Baptist Church. Accessed November 3,

2015. http://www.godhatesfags.com/
MartinLutherKing.org homepage. Accessed September 1, 2015, http://www.
martinlutherking.org/
McCosker, Anthony, and Amelia Johns. Contested Publics: Racist Rants, Bystander
Action and Social Media Acts of Citizenship. Media International Australia
151 (2014): 6672.
McGuire, William. Resistance to Persuasion Conferred by Active and Passive Prior
Refutation of the Same and Alternative Counterarguments. Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology 63 (1961): 326332.
McLaughlin, Eliot, and Catherine Shoichet. Police: Bryce Williams Fatally Shoots
Self after Killing Journalists on Air. CNN, August 27, 2015. Accessed November
1, 2015. http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/26/us/virginia-shooting-wdbj/
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1964.
McMasters, Paul K.Must a Civil Society be a Censored Society? Human Rights:
Journal of the Section of Individual Rights & Responsibilities 26 (1999): 110.
Meek, James G., and Richard Schapiro. Holocaust Museum Shooter. Daily News.
Accessed June 11, 2009. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/
holocaustmuseum-shooter-neo-nazi-james-von-brunn-ex-wife-vowed-boots-
article1.374005
Metapedia. Jewish Group Evolution Strategy. Accessed November 5, 2015.
http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Jewish_group_evolutionary_strategy
Metapedia. Last accessed September 14, 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Metapedia
Miller, Katherine. Communication Theories: Perspectives, Processes, and Contexts.
NewYork: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 2005.
Minister Louis Farrakhan: In His Own Words. Anti-Defamation League. Accessed
October 2, 2015. http://archive.adl.org/special_reports/farrakhan_own_
words/print.html
Mock, Brentin. Neo-Nazi Groups Share Hate Via YouTube. 2007. Southern
Poverty Law Center. Last modified April 20, 2007. https://www.splcenter.
org/fightinghate/intelligence-report/2007/neo-nazi-groups-share-hate-
youtube
Mosbergen, Dominique. Anonymous Declares War on ISIS After Paris Attacks.
Huffington Post. Last modified November 16, 2015. http://www.huffington-
post.com/entry/anonymousisis_5649610ae4b045bf3defc173
Nagesh, Gautham. Groups Want FCC to Police Hate Speech on Talk Radio, Cable
News Networks. The Hill. Last modified June 1, 2010. http://thehill.com/
blogs/hillicon-v alley/technology/100833-groups-want-f cc-topolice-
hate-speech
178 Bibliography
National Vanguard Forums. Accessed August 30, 2015. http://whitebiocentrism.

com/search.php?search_id=active_topics
New Black Panther Party Advisor Calls for Killing in Ferguson Aftermath.
AntiDefamation League. Last modified September 16, 2014. http://blog.adl.
org/extremism/new-black-panther-par ty-advisor-c alls-for-killingin-
ferguson-aftermath
New Black Panthers Party. Southern Poverty Law Center. Accessed October 5,
2015. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/new-
black-pantherparty
OBrien, Barbara. Blogging America: Political Discourse in a Digital Nation.
Portland, OR: William James & Company, 2004.
Pearce, Matt. What Happens When a Millennial Goes Fascist? He Starts Up a Neo-
Nazi Site. The Los Angeles Times, June 24, 2015. Accessed October 2, 2015.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-daily-stormer-interview-20150624
story.html
Potok, Mark. Books on the Right. Southern Poverty Law Center. Last modified
August 20, 2009. http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?
aid=904
Potok, Mark. Columnist Ann Coulter Defends White Supremacist Group. Last
modified February 13, 2009. https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2009/
02/13/columnist-ann-coulter-defendswhite-supremacist-group
Potok, Mark. SPLC Asks CNN to Remove Dobbs. Last modified July 24, 2009.
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2009/07/24/splc-asks-cnn-
remove-dobbs
Potter, W. James. Theory of Media Literacy: A Cognitive Approach. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2004), 5859.
Racist Council of Conservative Citizens Finds Home in Mainstream Politics.
Southern Poverty Law Center. Last modified March 15, 1999. https://www.
s p l c e n t e r. o r g / f i g h t i n g - h a t e / i n t e l l i g e n c e - r e p o r t / 1 9 9 9 / r a c i s t -
councilconservative-citizens-finds-home-mainstream-politics
Radl, Karl. Jewish and Zionist Influence at the BBC. Daily Stormer. Last modified
October 10, 2015. http://www.dailystormer.com/jewish-and-zionist-influence-
atthe-bbc/
Rasmussen Reports. 50% Say Hate Is Growing in America. Last modified June 23,
2009. http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/general_
lifestyle/june_2009/50_say_hate_is_growing_in_america
Reilly, Ryan. FBI: When It Comes To @ISIS Terror, Retweets = Endorsements.
Last modified August 7, 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/
twitter-terrorismfbi_55b7e25de4b0224d8834466e
Rolef, Susan. Political Dictionary of the State of Israel. Jerusalem: The Jerusalem
Publishing House Ltd., 1993.
Bibliography 179
Runions, Kevin. Toward a Conceptual Model of Motive and Self-Control in

CyberAggression: Rage, Revenge, Reward, and Recreation. Journal of Youth &
Adolescence 42, no. 5 (2013): 751771.
Rutenberg, Jim. The Man behind the Whispers about Obama. New York Times.
Last modified October 12, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/
us/politics/13martin.html?_r=0
Samoriski, Jan. Issues in Cyberspace: Communication, Technology, Law, and Society
on the Internet Frontier. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 2002.
Sanchez, Ray. ISIS Exploits Social Media to Make Inroads in U.S. CNN, June 5,
2015. Accessed September 15, 2015. http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/04/
us/isis-socialmedia-recruits/
Schein, Edgar, Inge Schneier, and Curtis Barker. Coercive Pressure. New York:
Norton, 1961.
Scientific Articles. Accessed October 13, 2015. http://www.familyresearchinst.
org/category/articles/
Segel, Binjamin. A Lie and a Libel: The History of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
Sheehan, Paul. The Racial War of Black against White. Last modified July 24,
2013. http://solargeneral.org/the-race-war-of-black-against-white/
Sheffield, Haze. ISIS Has Built a Global Brand Using Celebrity and Social Media.
Belfast Telegraph Online, March 9, 2015. Accessed October 16, 2015. http://
www.lexisnexis.com.rlib.pace.edu/hottopics/lnacademic/?
Shenk, David. Data smog: Surviving the Information Glut. San Francisco:
Harperedge, 1999.
Shoemaker, Pamela. Intercoder Reliability. November 20, 2003. http://web.syr.
edu/~snowshoe/content_analysis/Intercoder_reliability.doc
Shyles, Leonard. Deciphering Cyberspace: Making the Most of Digital Communication
Technology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003.
Simi, Pete, and Robert Futrell. Cyberculture and the Endurance of White Power
Activism. Journal of Political and Military Sociology 34, no. 1 (2006): 115142.
SimilarWeb. Breitbart.com. Accessed October 7, 2016. https://www.similarweb.
com/website/breitbart.com#overview
SimilarWeb. Drudgereport.com. Accessed October 7, 2016. https://www.simi-
larweb.com/website/drudgereport.com
Simon Wiesenthal Center. District Attorney Vance and Rabbi Abraham Cooper
Announce the Simon Wiesenthal Centers Report on Digital Terrorism and
Hate. Last modified May 1, 2014. http://www.wiesenthal.com/site/apps/
nlnet/content.aspx?c=lsKWLbPJLnF&b=8776547&ct=13928897
Snow, David A., E.Burke Rochford, Jr., Steven K.Worden, and Robert D.Benford.
Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation.
American Sociological Review 51, no. 4 (1986): 464481.
180 Bibliography
Snyder, Louis L. Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. NewYork, NY: Paragon House,
1989.
Speier, Hans, and Margaret Otis. German Radio Propaganda in France During the
Battle of France. In Radio Research, 19421943, edited by Paul Lazarsfeld and
Frank Stanton, 208247. NewYork: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1944.
Statement of Principles: CofCC. Accessed October 14, 2015. http://conserva-
tiveheadlines.com/introduction/statement-of-principles/
Steele, Shari. Taking a Byte Out of the First Amendment. Human Rights: Journal
of the Section of Individual Rights & Responsibilities 23, no. 2 (1996): 1422.
Stempel, Carl, Thomas Hargrove, and Guido Stempel III. Media Use, Social
Structure, and Belief in 9/11 Conspiracy Theories. Journalism & Mass
Communication Quarterly 84, no. 2 (2007): 353372.
Stormfront En Franais. Last modified October 25, 2007. http://www.storm-
front.org/forum/forumdisplay.php/stormfront-en-fran-ais-69.html
Stormfront Forums. Accessed September 15, 2015. https://www.stormfront.
org/forum/f8/
Suler, John. The Online Disinhibition Effect. CyberPsychology & Behavior 7, no. 3
(2004): 321326.
Swain, Carol, and Russell Nieli. Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism in
America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Syllabus Project. Gonzaga University. Accessed December 2, 2015. http://www.
gonzaga.edu/academics/Hate-Studies/for-students-and-educators/classsyl-
labi.asp
Tactics for Recruiting Young People. Accessed September 19, 2015. http://
www2.sd35.bc.ca/saverill/OnlineKidz/Violent-Hate_Sites.html
Tam, Donna. Facebook by the Number: 1.06 Billion Monthly Active Users. Last
modified January 30, 2013. http://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-by-the-
numbers-1-06-billionmonthly-active-users/
Tapscott, Donald. Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation. NewYork:
McGraw-Hill, 1998.
Thomas, Jo. Behind a Book that Inspired McVeigh. Last modified June 9, 2001.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/09/us/behind-a-book-that-inspired-
mcveigh.html
Thompson, Keith. White Supremacist Sites MartinLutherKing.org Marks 12th
Anniversary. Last modified January 16, 2011. http://www.huffingtonpost.
com/keith-thomson/white-supremacist-sitema_b_809755.html
Todd, Bridget. Does Anything Go? The Rise and Fall of a Racist Corner of Reddit.
The Atlantic, July 16, 2013. Accessed October 4, 2015. http://www.theatlan-
tic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/does-anything-go-therise-and-
fall-of-a-racist-corner-of-reddit/277585/
Total Number of Websites. Accessed December 4, 2015. http://www.inter-
netlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/
Bibliography 181
Total Number of Websites. Accessed October 2, 2015. http://www.internetlives-

tats.com/total-number-of-websites/
Trujillo, Mario. FCC says It Cant Shutdown ISIS Websites. The Hill. Last modi-
fied November 17, 2015. http://thehill.com/policy/technology/260438-
fcc-says-it-cantshutdown-online-terrorist-activity
UCLA Internet Project. Internet Peaks as Americas Most Important Source of
Information. Last modified February 11, 2003. http://www.anderson.ucla.
edu/x3829.xml
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Der Sturmer. USHMM Propaganda
Collection: Gift of the Museum fur Deutsche Geschichte, Berlin.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In Memoriam. Last modified
November 3, 2015. http://www.ushmm.org/information/press/in-memo-
riam/stephen-tyronejohns-1969-2009
van Dijck, Jos. Facebook as a Tool for Producing Sociality and Connectivity.
Television & New Media 13, no. 2 (2012): 160176.
van Dijk, Jan. The Network Society: Social Aspects of New Media. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage Publications, Second Edition, 2005.
van Ostaeyen, Pieter. The Flames of WarThe Fighting has Just Begun. Last
modified September 28, 2015. https://pietervanostaeyen.wordpress.
com/2014/09/28/the-flames-of-war-thefighting-has-just-begun/
VDARE Articles. Accessed October 2, 2015. http://www.vdare.com/articles
VDARE Homepage. Accessed May 1, 2015. https://www.vdare.com/circle-
of-support
Warner, Benjamin. Segmenting the Electorate: The Effects of Exposure to Political
Extremism Online. Communication Studies 61, no. 4 (2010): 430444.
Washington Watcher. Hispanic Americans Three Times More Likely to be on
Welfare than White Americans. VDARE. Last modified September 4, 2015.
http://www.vdare.com/articles/hispanic-immigrants-three-times-likely-to-be-
onwelfare-than-american-whites
Weatherby, Georgie, and Brian Scroggins. A Content Analysis of Persuasion
Techniques Used on White Supremacist Websites. Journal of Hate Studies 4,
no. 9 (2006): 9.
Westboro Baptist Church. Anti-Defamation League. Accessed October 15, 2015.
http://archive.adl.org/learn/ext_us/wbc/
What is the Nation of Islam? Anti-Defamation League. Last modified September
1, 2015. http://www.adl.org/anti-semitism/united-states/c/what-is-the-
nation-of-islam.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/#.WC4lZKIrLeQ
Whillock, Rita. The Use of Hate as a Stratagem for Achieving Political and Social
Goals. In Hate Speech, edited by Rita Whillock and David Slayden, 2854.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995.
White People. Urban Dictionary. Last modified August 12, 2011. http://www.
urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=white+people
182 Bibliography
White Supremacists and Anti-Semites Plan to Recruit at July 4 Tea Parties.

AntiDefamation League. Accessed November 20, 2015. http://www.adl.org/
main_Extremism/White_Supremacists_July_4_Tea_Parties.htm
Wiesenthal Center. Denounces Ann Coulter for Remark that Jews Need to be
Perfected. Simon Wiesenthal Center. Last modified October 11, 2007. http://
www.wiesenthal.com/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=lsKWLbPJLnF&b=4
442245&ct=5851577#.VmXx-t-rTeQ
Wilson Center. Report: ISIS Has At Least 46,000 Twitter Followers. Last modi-
fied March 6, 2015. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/report-isis-has-
least-46000twitter-followers
YouGov.com. America Divided on Hate Speech Laws. Accessed August 21, 2015.
https://today.yougov.com/news/2014/10/02/america-divided-hate-
speech-laws/
Zeskind, Leonard. Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement
from the Margins to the Mainstream. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2009.
Index
A Anti-Defamation League (ADL),

Adams, Josh, 118, 136n13 13n5, 21, 34, 60, 64, 65, 68, 77,
affirmative action, 68, 21, 80, 110, 105n34, 134, 145, 146, 151,
126, 150, 165 156n3, 157n8. See also watchdog
African Americans, 2, 4, 20, 33, 70, 71, agencies
75, 77, 88, 98, 100, 109, 112, antigovernment radicals, 201
11924, 128, 129, 133, 160, 165 militias, 5, 34
Al-Awlaki, Anwar, 36 anti-Hispanic, 7, 31, 34, 76
Alexa.org, 30, 38n10, 58, 61, 70, anti-immigrant, 5
83n4, 89, 102n6 anti-LGBT, 5, 114, 126, 147, 151
Allport, Gordon, 11, 14n21 anti-LGBT websites
Al Qaeda, 36, 93, 103n16, 104n25, Family Research Institute (FRI), 61,
148 757, 125, 126, 137n28
Amazon, 32 Westboro Baptist Church, 61, 68,
American Freedom Party (AFP), 61, 84n15, 115, 123, 125, 151
75, 85n29, 114, 122, 127, anti-Muslim, 5
137n18, 138n33 anti-Semitic, 5, 11, 1618, 2932, 34,
American Renaissance, 30, 59, 61, 69, 72, 88, 99, 113, 123, 133, 143,
71, 76, 83, 121, 123, 124, 126 151, 156n3
Anglin, Andrew, 69, 70, 138n31 anti-Semitic websites
anonymous, 12, 26, 34, 44, 45, 49, Jew Watch, 61, 72, 114, 124
130, 148, 155, 166 Vanguard News Network, 61, 72,
anti-Christian, 5 80, 114, 122, 137n21
Note: Page numbers followed by n refers to notes.

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-51424-6
184 INDEX
B code language, 108, 110, 1305

Bandura, Albert, 78, 82n36, 96, conspiracy theories. See also Jones, Alex
104n23. See also Social Learning Birther movement, 89, 90
theory Holocaust denial, 20, 21, 28, 41,
Bannon, Steve 42, 58, 65, 72, 79, 124, 143
Breitbart.com, 164, 167n6 InfoWars, 97, 104n25, 163
Trump, Donald J., 164 copycat violence, 96
Barbour, Haley (Governor), 74 Coulter, Ann, 74, 76, 85n26, 151,
Beck, Glenn, 152 152, 157n14, 158n18
Berlet, Chip, 129, 138n36, 154, Council of Conservative Citizens
158n21 (CCC), 13, 34, 35, 61, 735,
binary discourse, 18, 110, 128, 150 85n28, 89, 120, 121, 133,
Bing, 29, 30 136n15
Birther movement, 89, 90 Creativity Alliance, 9, 45, 61, 67, 78,
Black, Donald, 19. See also Stormfront 113, 115, 128, 129, 132
Black Lives Matter, 100, 123, 165 culture war, 6, 8
Black Separatists
Nation of Islam (NOI), 73, 74, 76,
77, 100 D
New Black Panthers, 34, 123 Daily Stormer, 2, 58, 59, 61, 6971,
blood libel, 16 78, 80, 83n2, 84n17, 84n19,
Boko Haram, 93, 101 84n21, 89, 1247, 135, 148, 161
Borrowman, Shane, 26, 28, 38n5, data smog, 25
38n8, 108, 136n1 deceitful web design, 108, 11118
Breitbart.com, 164, 167n6 Der Sturmer, 12, 17, 69
Brimelow, Peter, 73 digital media literacy, 144
Bush, George W. (President), 21, 92, digital sphere, 45, 14158, 162. See
138n34 also public sphere
disinhibiting effect, 98
Dog Whistle Politics, 51, 56n24, 166n1
C Drudge Report, 78, 97, 104n24, 164
Cameron, Paul, 75 Duke, David, 21, 22, 24n18, 61, 66,
Carto, Willis, 1921 72, 115, 127, 138n32, 161,
CA-TV, 115 166n3
CCC. See Council of Conservative
Citizens (CCC)
Centre for Hate Studies, 144 E
Chaplinsky vs. New Hampshire, 50 Eisner, Will, 23n4
CNBC, 151 Emanuel AME Church, 2
CNN, 33, 48, 63, 92, 98, 103n13, Entman, Robert, 109, 120, 136n4
104n20, 105n30, 105n32, extremist websites
105n35, 114, 148, 157n15 faux-news & research, 61, 149
INDEX 185
faux-social networks & forums, 9, Giroux, Henry, 24n13, 72

61, 658, 160 Goebbels, Joseph, 18
mainstream political organizations, Google, 26, 29, 30, 35, 49, 59, 63,
9, 61, 737 71, 75, 119, 147
self-identifying supremacists, 615
H
F Habermas, Jrgen, 4, 13n10
Facebook, 1, 10, 13n9, 35, 36, Hale, Matthew, 9, 67, 78. See also
39n23, 413, 52, 54n13, 67, Creativity Alliance
80, 88, 89, 92, 94, 99, 100, 111, hate music
115, 1479, 154, 157n9, 159. See Final Stand Records, 81
also social networking Resistance Records, 81
Holocaust denial and, 41, 42 hate speech, 2, 3, 59, 11, 12, 16, 17,
Farrakhan, Louis, 73, 77, 84n25, 152, 19, 23, 2539, 413, 46, 47,
158n17. See also Nation of Islam 504, 56n18, 56n21, 58, 68, 69,
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 97, 99, 102, 108, 126, 1313,
49, 55n17, 88 142, 143, 146, 147, 153, 155,
Federal Communications Commission 157n9, 160, 163, 165
(FCC), 33, 34, 38n16, 43, 46, Hispanic Americans, 75, 122, 137n20
149, 157n12, 165 Hitler, Adolf, 3, 1618, 624, 71, 99,
Final Stand Records, 81. See also hate 134
music Holocaust, 11, 14n22, 16, 20, 21, 30,
Flanagan, Vester, 95, 96 32, 41, 42, 49, 54n1, 54n3,
foot-in-the-door technique, 7981, 55n12, 71, 73, 87, 88, 113, 124,
110, 116 146
Ford, Henry, 16 Holocaust denial, 20, 21, 28, 41, 42,
Foxman, Abraham, 68, 84n16, 146, 55n12, 58, 65, 72, 79, 124, 143
166n2 Holocaust denial websites, 28
Fox News, 32, 33, 114, 151 Institute for Historical Review
framing, 109, 119, 124, 136n4, 151 (IHR), 61, 72, 73, 113
Free Republic, 32, 34, 89, 90, 102n6 Human Rights Campaign (HRC), 60,
Futrell, Robert, 14n12, 80, 81, 86n42 145
G I
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 72 immigration, 4, 68, 63, 64, 74, 76,
Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against 110, 122, 126, 150
Defamation (GLAAD), 145 information laundering theory, 9, 26,
Gerbner, George, 162, 163, 166n4. 29, 30, 357, 38n3, 49, 70, 90,
See also Mean World Syndrome 114, 163. See also propaganda
Giffords, Congresswoman Gabrielle, 95 techno-ethos, 28, 29, 108
186 INDEX
InfoWars, 97, 104n25, 163. See also Lazarsfeld, Paul, 19, 24n9, 24n10
Jones, Alex LGBT community, 49, 68, 1246, 165
inoculation theory, 144 Limbaugh, Rush, 152, 158n19
Institute for Hate Studies, 143 Lpez, Ian Haney, 51, 56n24, 166.
internet See also Dog Whistle Politics
accountability in, 47, 48, 50, 148 Loughner, Jared, 95
legality of hate speech in, 503 low-ball technique, 79
locality in, 44, 46, 47
Internet Service Provider (ISP), 9, 44,
48 M
Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS), Macdonald, Kevin, 72, 129, 137n19
10, 36, 39n24, 49, 55n17, 913, Malkin, Michelle, 76
101, 123, 1479, 157n11, Manjoo, Fahrad, 90, 103n8, 120,
157n12 136n14
Islamophobia, 144. See also Martin, Judith, 72
anti-Muslim MartinLutherKing.org, 60, 72, 73,
84n23, 114, 117, 136n11
Martin, Trayvon, 35
J McCarthy, Joseph, 151
Jerry Springer Show, 57 McGuire, William, 144, 156n5
Jew Watch, 61, 72, 114, 124 McLuhan, Marshall, 46, 52, 55n10
John Birch Society, 100 McMasters, Paul K., 6, 14n16, 56n20,
Johnson, Micah Xavier, 100 56n26, 158n24
Johns, Stephen Tyrone, 88 McVeigh, Timothy, 21
Jones, Alex, 104n25, 163. See also mean world syndrome, 162, 163. See
conspiracy theories also Gerbner, George
Jowett, Garth S., 26, 27, 38n4, 38n6, media literacy, 9, 144, 145, 162. See
111, 136n6, 164, 167n9 also digital media literacy
Mein Kampf, 16, 32
Mercer, Chris Harper, 95, 96, 101
K millennials, 69. See also net generation
Kill the Best Gentiles!, 88. See also von Ministry for Public Enlightenment,
Brunn, James 1718
KKK. See Ku Klux Klan (KKK) minorities, 2, 62, 76
Klapper, Joseph, 100, 105n37 MySpace, 95. See also social
Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 2, 3, 21, 22, 32, networking
57, 624, 66, 116, 117, 134,
151, 160, 161, 166n3
N
Nakayama, Thomas, 72
L NAMLE. See National Association for
law enforcement, 4, 10, 46, 53, 54, Media Literacy Education
97, 100, 142, 145, 160 (NAMLE)
INDEX 187
National Association for Media ODonnell, Victoria, 26, 27, 38n4,

Literacy Education (NAMLE), 38n6, 111, 136n6, 164, 167n9
1445 online gaming, 81
National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), 60 P
National Association for the Pierce, William, 202, 128
Advancement of White People Pinckney, Clementa, 2
(NAAWP), 5 Podblanc, 658, 80, 134
nationalism, 7, 8, 213, 64, 75, 81, political blogosphere, 4, 33, 101,
122, 161 142
Nation of Islam (NOI), 73, 74, 76, political correctness, 6, 125, 142
77, 100 Potok, Mark, 38n13, 85n26, 157n15.
Nazi Propaganda, 78 See also Southern Poverty Law
Neo-Nazi website(s) Center
National Alliance website, 20, 62, Potter, W.James, 144, 156n6
65, 114 propaganda
National Socialist Movement black, 27
website, 62, 114 gray, 27
NSM88.org, 62, 63 white, 279, 111
White Aryan Resistance website, 62, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 15,
81 16, 22, 23, 23n1, 23n4, 32, 132.
Women for Aryan Unity, 62, 65, 81 See also propaganda
Net Generation, 9, 10, 28, 36, 52, public sphere, 4, 90, 149, 160, 163.
803, 115, 131, 142, 146, 1525 See also digital sphere
network links, 111, 114
New York Times, 32, 33, 90, 114
Nieli, Russell, 14n13, 14n18, 202, R
24n14, 24n19, 24n21, 60, racial holy war (Rahowa), 50,
83n5, 85n35, 86n45, 136n5, 129, 132, 135. See also code
166n1 language
NOI. See Nation of Islam (NOI) Reddit, 10, 68, 78, 89, 98, 99, 101,
Noontide Press, 20. See also Carto, 147, 162
Willis; von Brunn, James Reno vs. ACLU, 44
Resistance Records. See hate music
Revisionism, 130
O Rodger, Elliot, 946
Obama, Barack (President), 32, 34, Rogen, Seth, 99
68, 75, 77, 87, 104n25, 116, Roof, Dylann, 13, 12n1, 12n2, 35,
124, 125, 127, 146, 151 39n22, 60, 69, 74, 88, 119, 121,
Birther movement, 89, 90 137n17
Occidental Observer, 72, 112, 114, Rosigno, Vincent J., 136n13
122, 124 Rushton, Philippe, 76
188 INDEX
S transphobia, 144
scholarly signifiers, 108, 111, 113, trolling, 90, 98
114, 125 Trump, Donald J., 161, 164, 167n10
search engines, 5, 9, 26, 2831, 35, Twitter activity of, 99
73, 107, 163. See also Bing; Twitter, 10, 36, 39n24, 43, 49, 67,
Google; Yahoo! 89, 915, 99101, 111, 115,
selective exposure theory, 100 147, 148, 157n9, 157n10, 159,
Shenk, David, 25, 37n2 162. See also social networking
SimilarWeb, 59, 61, 83n4 2016 Presidential Campaign, 99, 160
Simi, Pete, 14n12, 80, 81, 86n42
Simon Wiesenthal Center, 13n6,
14n15, 41, 58, 83n1, 145. See U
also watchdog agencies United States
Smith, Benjamin, 2, 3, 129. See also hate crimes in, 2, 88, 110, 144
Hale, Matthew Obama, President Barack, 32, 34,
social learning theory, 78, 79, 96. See 38n14, 68, 75, 77, 87, 89, 90,
also Bandura, Albert 103n9, 104n25, 116, 124,
social networking, 4, 10, 36, 60, 141. 125, 127, 146, 151
See also Facebook; MySpace; U.S.Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Twitter See also von Brunn, James
Solar General, 71, 72, 80, 113, 128, shooting at, 88
161 U.S.Institute for Propaganda Analysis,
Southern Poverty Law Center, 4, 32, 19
34, 74, 145
Steele, Shari, 14n19, 55n9, 156n2
Stormfront, 3, 19, 22, 23, 30, 45, V
55n8, 5861, 65, 66, 6870, 72, van Dijk, Jan, 43, 54n4
79, 813, 83n9, 84n11, 114, video-sharing
115, 117, 126, 12832, 134, Podblanc, 61, 658, 80, 134
135, 138n3941, 139n43, YouTube, 10, 13n7, 26, 36, 43, 50,
139n47, 148, 151 52, 60, 63, 66, 67, 80, 81, 89,
Swain, Carol, 14n13, 14n18, 202, 91, 94, 95, 101, 111, 114,
24n14, 24n19, 24n21, 60, 83n5, 115, 118, 147, 157n9, 159
85n35, 86n45, 136n5, 166n1 Virginia Dare (VDARE), 61, 70, 73,
74, 76, 77, 85n32, 85n33, 100,
122
T von Brunn, James, 879, 101, 102n2.
Tapscott, Donald, 154, 155, 158n22 See also Kill the Best Gentiles!
Taylor, Jared, 76, 78 U.S.Holocaust Memorial Museum,
Tea Party, 75, 151 73, 88
techno-ethos, 28, 29, 108 Vysotsky, Stanislav, 129, 138n36, 154,
The Turner Diaries, 20, 22, 32, 37 158n21
INDEX 189
W Stormfront, 3, 19, 22, 23, 30, 45,

Watchdog Agencies 55n8, 5861, 65, 66, 6870,
Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 72, 79, 813, 83n9, 84n11,
13n5, 21, 34, 60, 64, 65, 68, 114, 115, 117, 126, 128,
77, 85n34, 105n34, 134, 1302, 134, 135, 139n43,
145, 146, 151, 154, 156n3, 139n47, 148, 151
157n8 Whiteness Studies, 72
GLAAD, 145 white power movement, 21, 22, 53,
NAACP, 60 66, 81, 132, 134, 150
Simon Wiesenthal Center, 14n15, recruitment strategies, 80, 117, 131
41, 58, 145 Wikipedia, 31, 35, 38n12, 63, 68, 70,
Southern Poverty Law Center, 4, 114, 147
32, 34, 74, 145 Williams, Benjamin, 2, 3
Weatherby, Georgie Ann, 79, 85n38, Wolf, Reno, 5, 68, 78. See also National
86n41, 166n2 Association for the Advancement
Weltner, Frank, 114. See also Jew of White People (NAAWP)
Watch
Whillock, Rita, 11, 14n20
White Genocide, 99, 127 X
White nationalist and supremacist xenophobia, 122
websites
American Renaissance, 30, 59, 61,
69, 71, 76, 83, 121, 123, 124, Y
126 Yahoo!, 26, 29, 30, 63. See also search
Charles Darwin Research Institute, engines
76 YouTube, 10, 13n7, 26, 36, 43, 50,
Council of Conservative Citizens, 52, 60, 63, 66, 67, 80, 81, 89,
13, 34, 35, 61, 73, 85n28, 89, 91, 94, 95, 101, 111, 114, 115,
120, 136n15 118, 147, 157n9, 159. See also
Creativity Alliance, 9, 45, 61, 67, video-sharing
78, 113, 115, 128, 129, 132,
138n37, 139n44
Metapedia, 31, 38n12, 49, 55n14, Z
59, 61, 70, 71, 80, 83, 113, Zionism, 133
128, 138n35 Zuckerberg, Mark, 41

Fanaticism, Racism, and Rage Online

Încărcat de

Informații document

Titlu original

Drepturi de autor

Formate disponibile

Partajați acest document

Partajați sau inserați document

Opțiuni de partajare

Vi se pare util acest document?

Este necorespunzător acest conținut?

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Fanaticism, Racism, and Rage Online

Încărcat de

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Fanaticism, Racism, and Rage Online

ISBN 978-3-319-51423-9ISBN 978-3-319-51424-6(eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016963223

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover design by Henry Petrides

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

speak with the impersonal voice of researchers, scholars and intellectuals;

2 From Bookshelves toDesktops15

3 Hate Speech intheInformation Age25

4 Virtual Pleasure Island41

7 Deceit by Design: ATwo-Part Analysis107

8 Preserving theDigital Sphere141

Fig. 1.1 Race-related debates versus hate speech 8

Table 5.1 Hate websites under review by average web traffic 61

The Author(s) 2017 1

a scowl on his face and a prominent patch of the Rhodesian flag on

Like Roof who visited the race-obsessed Council of Conservative

Corrupting theDigital Sphere

Approaching Online Hate

Separating Web Debate fromDigital Hate

Spectrum of Debate Spectrum of Hate

Fig. 1.1 Race-related debates versus hate speech

Chapter 3 will present a theoretical foundation that illustrates how the

4. Meagan Wilson, Hate Crime Victimization (Washington, DC:

From Bookshelves toDesktops

The Author(s) 2017 15

The Ministry forPublic Enlightenment

The practice of sowing hateful bigotry into legitimate sources of infor-

Hitler also understood and used the mobilizing power of household

White Nationalists, Intellectual Media

Specifically, Carto was referring to African Americans, who, he often sug-

r adicals, including Timothy McVeigh.17 In 1995, McVeigh blew up a fed-

Into theComputer Age andtheBeginnings

Don Black started his career as a white nationalist in Alabama following

through college campuses and publishing houses, faux-news journals and

Hate Speech intheInformation Age

The Author(s) 2017 25

A Theory ofInformation Laundering

arly pursuits in the field of propaganda, some of which we have already

When academic ethos is at work, a reader is convinced that the writer is a

Beyond the contextual methods for constructing the appearance of an

searches of other cultural terms like homosexuality and Islam. It is

Meanwhile, internally, the websites of fringe movements have also sought

Social Networks andVideo Sharing

course, to recruit. In addition to offering another digital passageway into

Wikis & Political

Extremism The Internet Mainstream

Fig. 3.1 Model of information laundering in cyberspace

3. The theory of information laundering was first introduced in an

18. Mainstream Web Sites Flooded with Anti-Semitic Comments in

Virtual Pleasure Island

The Author(s) 2017 41

it had become a recruiting ground for white power fanatics, Facebook

issues such as violence, obscenity, hate speech, and, in particular, chil-

Adding to the complexity of information flow is the reality that Internet

Perhaps the diversity of that human thought can best be attributed to a

have received it. On the Internet, however, no such traditional gatekeep-

The Legal Landscape ofHate Speech

Americans who would support more legislation outlawing public com-

locates, tracks, exposes, and informs us about the dangerous elements

avatars, and a decentralized network that presents a liberating environment

5. Kurt Einzinger, Media Regulation on the Internet, accessed

2 From Bookshelves toDesktops15

3 Hate Speech intheInformation Age25

4 Virtual Pleasure Island41

7 Deceit by Design: ATwo-Part Analysis107

8 Preserving theDigital Sphere141

Fig. 1.1 Race-related debates versus hate speech 8

Table 5.1 Hate websites under review by average web traffic 61