Stormfront (website)

Stormfront

Web address	www.stormfront.org
Slogan	"White Pride World Wide"
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Forum
Registration	Required to post (except in open sub-fora)
Available in	English, with sub-forums in multiple languages
Owner	Don Black
Created by	Don Black
Launched	November 1996 (1996-11)
Alexa rank	28,125 (September 2017)
Current status	Online

Stormfront is a controversial white nationalist Internet forum that is often described as the Web's first major racial hate site.

Stormfront began as an online bulletin board system in the early 1990s before being established as a website in 1996 by American white nationalist and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Don Black. It received national attention in the United States in 2000 after being featured as the subject of a documentary, Hate.com. Stormfront has been the subject of significant controversy after being removed from French, German, and Italian Google indexes, for targeting an online Fox News poll on racial segregation, and for having political candidates as members. Its prominence has grown since the 1990s, attracting attention from "anti-racist" watchdog organizations that oppose racism and antisemitism.

In August 2017, Stormfront's registrar seized its domain name due to complaints from both left-wing and mainstream conservative voices that it promoted unacceptable xenophobic speech, causing the site to go offline. Various media reports at the time claimed that some members were linked to violence and even murder. Since then, the site has been able to restore a more limited online presence.

History

Early history

Stormfront began in 1990 as an online bulletin board for white nationalist David Duke's campaign for United States Senator for Louisiana. The name "Stormfront" was chosen for its connotations of a political or military front (such as the German stormtroopers, the Sturmabteilung or SA) and an analogy with weather fronts that invokes the idea of a tumultuous storm ending in cleansing. It was opened to the public in 1994, and the Stormfront.org website was founded in 1996 by Don Black, becoming the first website associated with white nationalism.

Until this point, attempts at using the Internet for the white pride movement had met with limited success, but Stormfront quickly became popular with the growth of the Internet at this time, according to Black. A former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s and a member of the National Socialist White People's Party, Black first received computer training while he was imprisoned for his role in an abortive 1981 attempt to overthrow the government of Dominica.

National attention

The site received considerable attention in the United States, in reports such as Hate.com, a 2000 CBS/HBO documentary television special which focused on the perceived threat of white nationalist and white supremacist organizations on the Internet. Narrated by Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), it featured interviews with Black and his son Derek as well as interviews with other white nationalist groups and organizations.

Controversies

Due to the highly politically incorrect nature of Stormfront, as well as founder Don Black's involvement with the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party, the website has been involved in a number of controversies.

In 2002, Google complied with French and German legislation forbidding links to websites which host white nationalist and historical revisionist material by removing Stormfront.org from their French and German indexes.

Stormfront returned to the news in May 2003, when Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly reported on a racially segregated prom being held in Georgia and posted a poll on his website asking his viewers if they would send their own children to one. The next night O'Reilly announced that he could not report the results of the poll as it appeared Stormfront had urged its members to vote in the poll, thus skewing the numbers.

Doug Hanks, a candidate for the city council of Charlotte, North Carolina, withdrew his nomination in August 2005 after it was revealed that he had posted on Stormfront. Hanks had posted more than 4,000 comments over three years, including one in which he described black people as "rabid beasts". Hanks said his postings were designed to gain the trust of Stormfront users to help him write a novel: "I did what I thought I needed to do to establish myself as a credible white nationalist."

In 2012 Italian police blocked the website and arrested four people for allegedly inciting racial hatred. The measure was taken after the publication of a blacklist of "prominent Jews and people who support Jews and immigrants" on the Italian section of the website. The list included possible targets of violent attacks, including gypsy camps. The subsequent year, Italian police raided the homes of 35 Stormfront posters, in November 2013. One man who was arrested in Mantua had two loaded weapons, a hand grenade casing, and a flag with a swastika in his possession.

A 2014 two-year study by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)'s Intelligence Report claimed that registered Stormfront users had been disproportionately responsible for some of the most lethal hate crimes and mass killings since the site was put up in 1995. In the five years leading up to 2014, some Stormfront members were stated to have murdered nearly 100 people. Notably, 77 were massacred by Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer who perpetrated the 2011 Norway attacks, who had posted on the forum four times back in 2008.

Public profile and later history

The total of registered users is just shy of 300,000, a fairly astounding number for a site run by an ex-felon and former Alabama Klan leader. And that doesn't include thousands of visitors who never register as users. At press time, Stormfront ranked as the Internet's 13,648th most popular site, while the NAACP site, by comparison, ranked 32,640th. – The Year in Hate and Extremism, 2015

In a 2001 USA Today article, journalist Tara McKelvey called Stormfront "the most visited white supremacist site on the net". The number of registered users on the site rose from 5,000 in January 2002 to 52,566 in June 2005, by which year it was the 338th largest Internet forum, receiving more than 1,500 hits each weekday and ranking in the top one percent of Internet sites in terms of use. By June 2008, the site was attracting more than 40,000 unique users each day. Operating the site from its West Palm Beach, Florida headquarters is Black's full-time job, and he was assisted by his son and 40 moderators. The public profile of the site attracted attention from groups such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL describes Stormfront as having "served as a veritable supermarket of online hate, stocking its shelves with many forms of anti-Semitism and racism".

In 2006, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reported a discussion on Stormfront in which white nationalists were encouraged to join the U.S. military to learn the skills necessary for winning a race war. The 2008 United States presidential candidacy of African-American Democrat Barack Obama was a cause of significant concern for some Stormfront members: the site received 2,000 new members the day after Obama was elected as President, and went offline temporarily due to the increase in visitors. Stormfront posters saw Obama as representing a new multicultural era in the United States replacing "white rule", feared that he would support illegal immigration and affirmative action, and that he would help make white people a minority group.

During the 2008 primary campaigns, The New York Times mistakenly reported that Stormfront had donated $500 to Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul; in fact, it was site owner Don Black who had contributed the money to Paul. Following an April 2009 shooting, Richard Poplawski, a poster on the site, was charged with ambushing and killing three Pittsburgh Police officers and attempting to kill nine others.

During the 2016 election season, site founder Don Black said that the site was experiencing huge spikes in traffic corresponding to controversial statements by Donald Trump, who is popular among white supremacists. In response, Black upgraded the site's servers.

Black's son Derek, who was a long-time participant in the site, has since distanced himself from the controversial beliefs held by his father and family and the Stormfront site, according to an article in The Washington Post. Through his years in college, Derek Black came to feel that white nationalism is not supportable.

In August 2017, Stormfront's domain name was seized by its registrar for "displaying bigotry, discrimination or hatred." Earlier the same month, The Daily Stormer, another highly controversial white supremacist news and commentary website, had been removed from the public Internet for its involvement in the Unite the Right rally.

Content

Stormfront is a resource for those courageous men and women fighting to preserve their White Western culture, ideals and freedom of speech and association—a forum for planning strategies and forming political and social groups to ensure victory.

— Stormfront mission statement.

Stormfront is a white nationalist website, widely described as a hate site.

It is a site on which National Socialist mysticism and the personality cult of Adolf Hitler are commonly supported, and the display and development of National Socialist iconography is encouraged. The Stormfront.org website is organized primarily as a discussion forum with multiple thematic sub-fora including "News", "Ideology and Philosophy" ("Foundations for White Nationalism"), "Culture and Customs", "Theology", "Quotations", "Revisionism", "Science, Technology and Race" ("Genetics, eugenics, racial science and related subjects"), "Privacy", "Self-Defense, Martial Arts, and Preparedness", "Homemaking", "Education and Homeschooling", "Youth", and "Music and Entertainment". There were boards for different geographic regions, and a section open to unregistered guests, who were elsewhere unable to post, and even then, only under heavy moderation.

Similar to The Daily Stormer, Stormfront frequently publicizes instances of black-on-white violence, including South African farm attacks and racism in Zimbabwe, that it claims are being ignored or suppressed by the mainstream media due to alleged race censorship. It has expressed less opposition to high performing north and east-Asian minorities, but still believes they can't coexist with whites.

Stormfront board members claim the ongoing national anthem protests against systemic racism and police brutality are part of a process of cultural convergence that is meant to subjugate whites in order to weaken them. As part of its anti-Islamization coverage, Stormfront has published many negative comments about refugee groups entering the West in the 2010s, which it says actually represent a demographic invasion that is part of an intended process of population replacement. This may escalate to outright white genocide, a goal which its writers claim is funded by wealthy financiers like George Soros, among other antisemitic allegations. Members of the site supported the 2017 Unite the Right rally, which helped lead to its shutdown.

Services

Stormfront's logo, featuring a Celtic cross surrounded by the motto "white pride, world wide".

Stormfront.org hosted files from and links to a number of white nationalist and more extreme websites, an online dating service (for "heterosexual White Gentiles only"), and electronic mailing lists that allowed the white nationalist community to discuss issues of interest. It featured a selection of current news reports, an archive of past stories, live streaming of The Political Cesspool radio show, and a merchandise store featuring literature and music. Stormfront reportedly published stories aimed at children.

A 2001 study of recruitment by extremist groups on the Internet noted that Stormfront came close to offering most of the standard services offered by web portals, including an internal search engine, web hosting, and categorized links, and lacking only an Internet search engine and the provision of free email for its members (though a limited email service was available at the price of $30 a month).

Design

Prominently featured on the homepage was a Celtic cross surrounded by the words "white pride, world wide." A mission statement praised courage and freedom. Stormfront has stated it discourages racial slurs, and has prohibited violent threats and descriptions of anything illegal. Mostly liberal critics stated that blatant hate and calls for violence were only kept off the opening page.

The site used the Fraktur font, which was the favored font of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) when it emerged in the early 1920s. Official Nazi documents and letterheads employed the font, and the cover of Hitler's Mein Kampf used a hand-drawn version of it.

Funding

On the organization's website Black set a $7,500 a month goal for donations to cover costs. People could join as Sustaining Members for $5 a month, $50 a year or $1,000 to be a lifetime supporter or as Core Members at $30 a month. Contributions could be paid in Bitcoins.

Purpose and appeal

Don Black has long worked to increase the mainstream appeal of white nationalism. Black established Stormfront to heighten awareness of perceived anti-white discrimination and government actions detrimental to white people, and to create a virtual community of white extremists. Black owns the site's servers so he is not dependent upon website hosting providers.

Black's organization inculcated enough white pride to make "its worldwide aspirations meaningful and socially significant". Stormfront kept the rhetoric in its forums muted, discouraged racial slurs, and prohibited violent threats and descriptions of anything illegal. Site moderator Jamie Kelso was reportedly "the motivating force behind real community-building among Stormfront members" due to his energy and enthusiasm in organizing offline events. Black's positioning the site as a community with the explicit purpose of "defending the white race" helped sustain the community over its long lifetime, as it attracted white people who define themselves in opposition to ethnic minorities, particularly Jews.

Stormfront established MartinLutherKing.org to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr. In a 2001 study of white nationalist groups including Stormfront, liberal academics Beverly Ray and George E. Marsh II commented that "Like the Nazis before them, they rely upon a blend of science, ignorance, and mythology to prop up their arguments".

Ideology

Stormfront has presented itself as being engaged in a struggle for unity, identifying culture, speech and free association as its core concerns, though members of Stormfront are especially passionate about racial purity. It has promoted a lone wolf mentality, which links it to white nationalist political theorist Louis Beam's influential work on leaderless resistance and offers a sympathetic assessment of Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, a white supremacist who committed suicide after a racially motivated killing spree in July 1999. Violet Jones notes that Stormfront credited its mission to "the founding myth of an America created, built, and ideologically grounded by the descendants of white Europeans." Don Black has specifically compared his views to those of the Founding Fathers, whom he asserts "did not believe that an integrated black and white society was possible in America." Asked in 2008 by an interviewer for the Italian newspaper la Repubblica whether Stormfront was a 21st-century version of the Ku Klux Klan without the iconography, Black responded affirmatively, though he noted that he would never say so to an American journalist.

In addition to its promotion of antisemitism and Holocaust revisionism, Stormfront increasingly became active in its opposition to the alleged Islamization of Western countries.

See also

• List of white nationalist organizations
• List of Internet forums