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Stormfront (website)
Encyclopedia
Stormfront is a white nationalist and supremacist neo-Nazi
Internet forum
that has been described as the Internet's first major hate site.
Stormfront began as an online bulletin board system
in the early 1990s before being established as a website in 1995 by former Ku Klux Klan
leader and white nationalist activist 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 controversy after being removed from French
and German
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 watchdog organizations
that oppose racism
and antisemitism.
The website is structured as a theme-based discussion forum with numerous boards for topics including ideology
, science
, revisionism
, homeschooling
, and self defense. Stormfront also hosts news stories, a merchandise store, content aimed at children, and extensive links to racist organizations. The site has a logo featuring a Celtic cross
common to neo-nazi iconography
surrounded by the motto "White Pride World Wide".
's campaign for United States Senator of Louisiana. The name "Stormfront" was chosen for its connotations of a political or military front
and an analogy with weather front
s 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 1995, becoming the first website associated with white supremacy. Until this point, attempts at using the Internet for the white pride movement met with limited success, but Stormfront quickly began to become popular with the growth of the Internet at this time, according to owner Don Black. A former Grand Wizard
of the Ku Klux Klan and in the 1970s a member of the National Socialist White People's Party (which had changed its name from the American Nazi Party
in 1967), Black first received computer training while imprisoned for his role in an abortive 1981 attempt to overthrow the government of Dominica
.
/HBO documentary television special which focused on the perceived threat of white nationalist and white supremacist organisations on the Internet. Narrated by Morris Dees
of the Southern Poverty Law Center
, it featured interviews with Black and his son Derek as well as other white nationalist groups and organisations, and was criticised by Black as conflating Stormfront with unrelated websites and individuals. Carol M. Swain
, assessing Hate.com and similar broadcasts of the period, found that the commentators "never seriously discuss the issues that have angered white nationalists", noting that Hate.com omitted any coverage of Stormfront's articles on crime, affirmative action
and other social issues. She characterised the documentaries' approach as "typical of media policy" in emphasising racial hate against minority groups and avoiding mention of racially motivated attacks on white people, thereby reinforcing "white nationalists' claim of a double standard". Stormfront had previously been accused of citing crime statistics out of context in order to support claims of reverse discrimination
in I Found It on the Internet, a 1999 book on internet content by Frances Jacobson Harris.
in order to comply with French and German legislation forbidding links to websites which host white supremacist, Holocaust-denying
, historical revisionist
or similar material. Stormfront returned to the news in May 2003, when its members targeted an online poll on a racial issue. 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. A link to the poll was posted on Stormfront and messages subsequently posted there implied that a mass of readers had duly voted in order to skew the poll in favor of segregation. O'Reilly reported this the following week and refused to read the final results due to this, citing Stormfront as the culprit by name and referring to it as a "Neo-Nazi organization". Doug Hanks, a candidate for the Charlotte, North Carolina, city council, 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 blacks as "rabid beasts". Hanks claimed his postings were intended 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."
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, received more than 1,500 hits each weekday and ranked 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 is assisted by his son and 40 moderators. The popularity of the site attracted attention not only from racists, but also from groups such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center
and the Anti-Defamation League
(ADL), whose efforts against the site have been so far ineffective. 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 reported a discussion on Stormfront in which white nationalists were encouraged to join the U.S. Military in order to learn the skills necessary for winning a race war
. The 2008 United States presidential candidacy
of African-American Barack Obama
was a cause of significant concern for some Stormfront members; the site got 2,000 new members the day after Obama was elected as President, and went temporarily off-line due to the overwhelming amount of activity. 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 would help make white people a minority group. During the primary campaigns
, The New York Times
mistakenly claimed that Stormfront had donated $500 to Republican Party candidate Ron Paul
; in fact, it was site owner Don Black who had contributed the money to Paul. In 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.
and the personality cult of Adolf Hitler
are sustained and Nazi iconography is popular. 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 are boards for different geographic regions, and a section open to unregistered guests, who are elsewhere unable to post.
Stormfront.org is comprehensive and frequently updated, hosting files from and links to a number of white nationalist and white racist websites, an online dating service (for "heterosexual White Gentiles only"), and electronic mailing lists that allow the white nationalist community to discuss issues of interest. It also features 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 has 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 in 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).
of white extremists. Black owns the site's servers so he need not depend on website hosting providers.
Black's organization inculcates enough white pride to make "its worldwide aspirations meaningful and socially significant". Stormfront keeps the rhetoric in its forums muted, discourages racial slurs, and prohibits violent threats and descriptions of anything illegal. Site moderator Jamie Kelso
is "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" has helped sustain the community over its long lifetime, as it attracts white men and women 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, 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".
mentality, linking to white nationalist theorist Louis Beam
's influential work on leaderless resistance and offering a sympathetic assessment of Benjamin Nathaniel Smith
, a white supremacist who committed suicide after a racially-motivated killing spree in June 1999. Scholar Violet Jones notes that Stormfront credits its mission to the founding myth of an America "created, built, and ideologically grounded by the descendants of white Europeans." Asked in 2008 by an interviewer for Italian newspaper la Repubblica
whether Stormfront was a twenty-first 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.
courthouse in response to a recent school bus beating which some had claimed was racially motivated. The rally had been promoted and organized in part by Stormfront users. It lasted for roughly one hour before being broken up by police.
Neo-Nazism
Neo-Nazism consists of post-World War II social or political movements seeking to revive Nazism or some variant thereof.The term neo-Nazism can also refer to the ideology of these movements....
Internet forum
Internet forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...
that has been described as the Internet's first major hate site.
Stormfront began as an online bulletin board system
Bulletin board system
A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...
in the early 1990s before being established as a website in 1995 by former Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as the Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically...
leader and white nationalist activist 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 controversy after being removed from French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
and German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
Google indexes, for targeting an online FOX News
Fox News Channel
Fox News Channel , often called Fox News, is a cable and satellite television news channel owned by the Fox Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of News Corporation...
poll on racial segregation
Racial segregation
Racial segregation is the separation of humans into racial groups in daily life. It may apply to activities such as eating in a restaurant, drinking from a water fountain, using a public toilet, attending school, going to the movies, or in the rental or purchase of a home...
, and for having political candidates as members. Its prominence has grown since the 1990s, attracting attention from watchdog organizations
Watchdog journalism
Watchdog journalism aims to hold accountable public personalities and institutions, whose functions impact social and political life. The term "lapdog journalism", for journalism biased in favour of personalities and institutions, is sometimes used as a conceptual opposite to watchdog...
that oppose racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
and antisemitism.
The website is structured as a theme-based discussion forum with numerous boards for topics including ideology
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
, science
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...
, revisionism
Historical revisionism (negationism)
Historical revisionism is either the legitimate scholastic re-examination of existing knowledge about a historical event, or the illegitimate distortion of the historical record such that certain events appear in a more or less favourable light. For the former, i.e. the academic pursuit, see...
, homeschooling
Homeschooling
Homeschooling or homeschool is the education of children at home, typically by parents but sometimes by tutors, rather than in other formal settings of public or private school...
, and self defense. Stormfront also hosts news stories, a merchandise store, content aimed at children, and extensive links to racist organizations. The site has a logo featuring a Celtic cross
Celtic cross
A Celtic cross is a symbol that combines a cross with a ring surrounding the intersection. In the Celtic Christian world it was combined with the Christian cross and this design was often used for high crosses – a free-standing cross made of stone and often richly decorated...
common to neo-nazi iconography
Nazi symbolism
The twentieth century German Nazi Party was notable for its extensive use of graphic symbolism, most notably the Hakenkreuz , which it used as its principal symbol, and, in the form of the swastika flag, became the state flag of Nazi Germany....
surrounded by the motto "White Pride World Wide".
History
Early history
Stormfront began in 1990 as an online bulletin board for white nationalist activist David DukeDavid Duke
David Ernest Duke is a former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan an American activist and writer, and former Republican Louisiana State Representative. He was also a former candidate in the Republican presidential primaries in 1992, and in the Democratic presidential primaries in...
's campaign for United States Senator of Louisiana. The name "Stormfront" was chosen for its connotations of a political or military front
Front (military)
A military front or battlefront is a contested armed frontier between opposing forces. This can be a local or tactical front, or it can range to a theater...
and an analogy with weather front
Weather front
A weather front is a boundary separating two masses of air of different densities, and is the principal cause of meteorological phenomena. In surface weather analyses, fronts are depicted using various colored lines and symbols, depending on the type of front...
s 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 1995, becoming the first website associated with white supremacy. Until this point, attempts at using the Internet for the white pride movement met with limited success, but Stormfront quickly began to become popular with the growth of the Internet at this time, according to owner Don Black. A former Grand Wizard
Grand Wizard
Grand Wizard was the title given to the leader of the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan which existed from 1866 to 1871.In 1915, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was created, initially as a fraternal organization. The highest-ranking leader of the latter organization was the Imperial Wizard. National...
of the Ku Klux Klan and in the 1970s a member of the National Socialist White People's Party (which had changed its name from the American Nazi Party
American Nazi Party
The American Nazi Party was an American political party founded by discharged U.S. Navy Commander George Lincoln Rockwell. Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, Rockwell initially called it the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists , but later renamed it the American Nazi Party in...
in 1967), Black first received computer training while imprisoned for his role in an abortive 1981 attempt to overthrow the government of Dominica
Dominica
Dominica , officially the Commonwealth of Dominica, is an island nation in the Lesser Antilles region of the Caribbean Sea, south-southeast of Guadeloupe and northwest of Martinique. Its size is and the highest point in the country is Morne Diablotins, which has an elevation of . The Commonwealth...
.
National attention
The site received considerable attention in the United States, such as in Hate.com, a 2000 CBSCBS
CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a major US commercial broadcasting television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of...
/HBO documentary television special which focused on the perceived threat of white nationalist and white supremacist organisations on the Internet. Narrated by Morris Dees
Morris Dees
Morris Seligman Dees, Jr. is the co-founder and chief trial counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center , and a former direct mail marketeer for book publishing. Along with his law partner, Joseph J...
of the Southern Poverty Law Center
Southern Poverty Law Center
The Southern Poverty Law Center is an American nonprofit civil rights organization noted for its legal victories against white supremacist groups; legal representation for victims of hate groups; monitoring of alleged hate groups, militias and extremist organizations; and educational programs that...
, it featured interviews with Black and his son Derek as well as other white nationalist groups and organisations, and was criticised by Black as conflating Stormfront with unrelated websites and individuals. Carol M. Swain
Carol Miller Swain
Carol M. Swain is an American political scientist and Professor of Law and Political Science at Vanderbilt University. She is an expert on race relations, immigration, black leadership, representation, evangelical politics and the Constitution. Her most recent book is Be the People: A Call to...
, assessing Hate.com and similar broadcasts of the period, found that the commentators "never seriously discuss the issues that have angered white nationalists", noting that Hate.com omitted any coverage of Stormfront's articles on crime, affirmative action
Affirmative action
Affirmative action refers to policies that take factors including "race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or national origin" into consideration in order to benefit an underrepresented group, usually as a means to counter the effects of a history of discrimination.-Origins:The term...
and other social issues. She characterised the documentaries' approach as "typical of media policy" in emphasising racial hate against minority groups and avoiding mention of racially motivated attacks on white people, thereby reinforcing "white nationalists' claim of a double standard". Stormfront had previously been accused of citing crime statistics out of context in order to support claims of reverse discrimination
Reverse discrimination
Reverse discrimination is a controversial term referring to discrimination against members of a dominant or majority group, including the city or state, or in favor of members of a minority or historically disadvantaged group such as African Americans being slaves. Groups may be defined in terms of...
in I Found It on the Internet, a 1999 book on internet content by Frances Jacobson Harris.
Controversies
In 2002, search engine Google acted to remove Stormfront.org from their French and German indexesIndex (search engine)
Search engine indexing collects, parses, and stores data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. Index design incorporates interdisciplinary concepts from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, physics, and computer science...
in order to comply with French and German legislation forbidding links to websites which host white supremacist, Holocaust-denying
Holocaust denial
Holocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...
, historical revisionist
Historical revisionism
In historiography, historical revisionism is the reinterpretation of orthodox views on evidence, motivations, and decision-making processes surrounding a historical event...
or similar material. Stormfront returned to the news in May 2003, when its members targeted an online poll on a racial issue. Fox News Channel
Fox News Channel
Fox News Channel , often called Fox News, is a cable and satellite television news channel owned by the Fox Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of News Corporation...
host Bill O'Reilly
Bill O'Reilly (commentator)
William James "Bill" O'Reilly, Jr. is an American television host, author, syndicated columnist and political commentator. He is the host of the political commentary program The O'Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel, which is the most watched cable news television program on American television...
reported on a racially segregated prom
Segregated prom
A segregated prom refers to the practice of United States high schools, generally located in the "Deep South", of holding racially segregated proms for white and black students. The practice spread after these schools were integrated, and persists in a few rural places to the present day...
being held in Georgia and posted a poll on his website asking his viewers if they would send their own children to one. A link to the poll was posted on Stormfront and messages subsequently posted there implied that a mass of readers had duly voted in order to skew the poll in favor of segregation. O'Reilly reported this the following week and refused to read the final results due to this, citing Stormfront as the culprit by name and referring to it as a "Neo-Nazi organization". Doug Hanks, a candidate for the Charlotte, North Carolina, city council, 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 blacks as "rabid beasts". Hanks claimed his postings were intended 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."
Popularity and later history
In a 2001 USA TodayUSA Today
USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003...
article, journalist Tara McKelvey
Tara McKelvey
Tara Shannon McKelvey is an American journalist who is a senior editor at The American Prospect.McKelvey began her journalism career as a clerk at The New York Times, following her 1987 graduation from Georgetown University.McKelvey, a research fellow at New York University School of Law's Center...
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, received more than 1,500 hits each weekday and ranked 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 is assisted by his son and 40 moderators. The popularity of the site attracted attention not only from racists, but also from groups such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center
Simon Wiesenthal Center
The Simon Wiesenthal Center , with headquarters in Los Angeles, California, was established in 1977 and named for Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter. According to its mission statement, it is "an international Jewish human rights organization dedicated to repairing the world one step at a time...
and the Anti-Defamation League
Anti-Defamation League
The Anti-Defamation League is an international non-governmental organization based in the United States. Describing itself as "the nation's premier civil rights/human relations agency", the ADL states that it "fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects...
(ADL), whose efforts against the site have been so far ineffective. 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 reported a discussion on Stormfront in which white nationalists were encouraged to join the U.S. Military in order to learn the skills necessary for winning a race war
Race war
Race war is a term referring to developing hostilities between ethnic groups divided on the basis of racial group or skin color. The term may refer to specific violent acts or to general overt or covert hostilities between ethnic groups; compare ethnic conflict.-Manson:The murders perpetrated by...
. The 2008 United States presidential candidacy
Barack Obama presidential campaign, 2008
Barack Obama, then junior United States Senator from Illinois, announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States in Springfield, Illinois, on February 10, 2007. On August 27, 2008, he was declared nominee of the Democratic Party for the 2008 presidential election...
of African-American Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
was a cause of significant concern for some Stormfront members; the site got 2,000 new members the day after Obama was elected as President, and went temporarily off-line due to the overwhelming amount of activity. Stormfront posters saw Obama as representing a new multicultural era in the United States replacing "white rule", feared that he would support illegal immigration
Illegal immigration
Illegal immigration is the migration into a nation in violation of the immigration laws of that jurisdiction. Illegal immigration raises many political, economical and social issues and has become a source of major controversy in developed countries and the more successful developing countries.In...
and affirmative action
Affirmative action
Affirmative action refers to policies that take factors including "race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or national origin" into consideration in order to benefit an underrepresented group, usually as a means to counter the effects of a history of discrimination.-Origins:The term...
, and would help make white people a minority group. During the primary campaigns
Republican Party (United States) presidential primaries, 2008
The 2008 Republican presidential primaries were the selection process by which voters of the Republican Party chose its nominee for President of the United States in the 2008 U.S. presidential election...
, The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
mistakenly claimed that Stormfront had donated $500 to Republican Party candidate Ron Paul
Ron Paul
Ronald Ernest "Ron" Paul is an American physician, author and United States Congressman who is seeking to be the Republican Party candidate in the 2012 presidential election. Paul represents Texas's 14th congressional district, which covers an area south and southwest of Houston that includes...
; in fact, it was site owner Don Black who had contributed the money to Paul. In an April 2009 shooting, Richard Poplawski, a poster on the site, was charged with ambushing and killing three Pittsburgh Police
Pittsburgh Police
The Pittsburgh Police, or officially the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, is the largest law enforcement agency in Western Pennsylvania and the third largest in Pennsylvania...
officers and attempting to kill nine others.
Content
Stormfront is notable for the white supremacist views of its members, a characterization that is contested by Don Black as an inaccurate description; Black believes the term "supremacy" implies a system which "isn't descriptive of what [the members] want". It is also a Neo-Nazi website, on which Nazi mysticismNazi mysticism
Speculation about Nazism and occultism has become part of popular culture since 1959. Aside from several popular documentaries, there are numerous books on the topic, most notably The Morning of the Magicians and The Spear of Destiny ....
and the personality cult of Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
are sustained and Nazi iconography is popular. 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 are boards for different geographic regions, and a section open to unregistered guests, who are elsewhere unable to post.
Services
The Political Cesspool
The Political Cesspool is a weekly talk radio show founded by James Edwards, and syndicated by Liberty News Radio Network and Accent Radio Network in the United States...
radio show, and a merchandise store featuring literature and music. Stormfront has 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 in 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 is a Celtic cross surrounded by the words "white pride, world wide." A mission statement praises courage and freedom. Stormfront states it discourages racial slurs, and prohibits violent threats and descriptions of anything illegal. Others state that only blatant hate and calls for violence are kept off the opening page.Purpose and appeal
Don Black has long worked to increase the mainstream appeal of white supremacism. His medium is Stormfront.org. Black established the website to heighten awareness of perceived anti-white discrimination and government actions detrimental to white people, and to create a virtual communityVirtual community
A virtual community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals...
of white extremists. Black owns the site's servers so he need not depend on website hosting providers.
Black's organization inculcates enough white pride to make "its worldwide aspirations meaningful and socially significant". Stormfront keeps the rhetoric in its forums muted, discourages racial slurs, and prohibits violent threats and descriptions of anything illegal. Site moderator Jamie Kelso
Jamie Kelso
Jamie Kelso is Administrator and owner of the American White Nationalist websites WhiteNewsNow.com and TheWhiteRace.com . He hosts daily webradio programs, including The Jamie Kelso Show on the Voice of Reason Broadcast Network ReasonRadioNetwork.com.-Early life and background:Kelso was born in...
is "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" has helped sustain the community over its long lifetime, as it attracts white men and women who define themselves in opposition to ethnic minorities, particularly Jews.
Stormfront established MartinLutherKing.org to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was an American clergyman, activist, and prominent leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for being an iconic figure in the advancement of civil rights in the United States and around the world, using nonviolent methods following the...
In a 2001 study of white nationalist groups including Stormfront, 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 presents itself as 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 promotes a lone wolfLone wolf (trait)
-Animal:A lone wolf is a wolf that lives independently rather than with others as a member of a pack. The term is also used in reference to people who exhibit characteristics of introversion or a strong preference for independence....
mentality, linking to white nationalist theorist Louis Beam
Louis Beam
Louis Beam is a Texan white nationalist. After high-school he served as a helicopter door-gunner in Vietnam. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Back in the U.S. he became a Klansman, leading a maritime Louisiana KKK element against government help to Vietnamese immigrant fishermen. He...
's influential work on leaderless resistance and offering a sympathetic assessment of Benjamin Nathaniel Smith
Benjamin Nathaniel Smith
Benjamin Nathaniel Smith was a spree killer who targeted members of racial and ethnic minorities in random drive-by shootings in Illinois and Indiana, USA during the weekend of July 4, 1999.- Early life :...
, a white supremacist who committed suicide after a racially-motivated killing spree in June 1999. Scholar Violet Jones notes that Stormfront credits its mission to the founding myth of an America "created, built, and ideologically grounded by the descendants of white Europeans." Asked in 2008 by an interviewer for Italian newspaper la Repubblica
La Repubblica
la Repubblica is an Italian daily general-interest newspaper. Founded in 1976 in Rome by the journalist Eugenio Scalfari, as of 2008 is the second largest circulation newspaper, behind the Corriere della Sera.-Foundation:...
whether Stormfront was a twenty-first 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.
Activism
In 2009, roughly two dozen white supremacists demonstrated outside the St. Clair County, IllinoisSt. Clair County, Illinois
St. Clair County is a county located in the U.S. state of Illinois. In 1970, the U.S. Census Bureau placed the mean center of U.S. population in St. Clair County. According to the 2010 census, it has a population of 270,056, which is an increase of 5.5% from 256,082 in 2000. Its county seat is...
courthouse in response to a recent school bus beating which some had claimed was racially motivated. The rally had been promoted and organized in part by Stormfront users. It lasted for roughly one hour before being broken up by police.