The Kids Are Alt-Right: How Media and the Law Enable White Supremacist Groups to Recruit and Radicalize Emotionally Vulnerable Individuals

Zoom-ing in on White Supremacy

Right-wing extremism is a global phenomenon that has significantly transformed in the last 20 years due to several factors that will be described in this chapter. In the West, the growth of white supremacist extremist groups is a growing challenge. These groups include white nationalists, white supremacist groups, Christian identity adherents, militias, and the alt-right. They espouse many different ideologies including anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic views. These groups are cooperating internationally more than ever before, as highlighted in a United Nations report in 2020. The growth of these groups is supported by shared ideological writings, conspiracy theories, tactics, and technological competencies. They have learned how to spread their ideologies, recruit, finance their operations, and mobilize their followers. They have learned many of their modi operandi from other successfully established global extremist groups.Modern right-wing extremists do not live in a vacuum; they are also constantly being influenced by each other as well as politicians, online conspiracy theories, and a growing pool of disinformation and fake news. Many of these ideas are being driven by algorithms and bots on the internet and social media. Right-wing extremists today no longer subscribe to the narrow concept of nationalism but instead imagine themselves as participants in a global struggle against both a national and a global enemy. Consequently, networking and cooperating not only locally but across borders is seen as a necessity. The conflict between Ukraine and Russia is helping these groups to create transnational links and build strategic and military competencies. The chapter concludes with recommendations on how relevant stakeholders should respond to this distinct form of political violence.

Trust Me, I’m Trolling: Irony and the Alt-Right’s Political Aesthetic

Hate Source: White Supremacist Hate Groups and Hate Crime

This study uses Social Network Analysis (SNA) to examine a network of domestic white supremacist groups associated with one or more ideologically motivated homicides between 1990 and 2008. SNA has rarely been used to study domestic extremist and/or terrorist organizations. Prior research using SNA has focused on foreign individual members of terrorist networks like Al Qaeda. This project begins to fill gaps in the literature by analyzing whether group role/location within this white supremacist group network is associated with greater levels of lethality. We find that the network is decentralized but ideologically integrated. Groups centrally located in the network are associated with more deaths. The study provides a foundation for future research investigating the connection between network location and lethality, the evolution of dangerous networks over time, and lone-wolf ties to the larger white supremacist movement.

Hate group activity may incite criminal behavior or serve as protection from bias-based violence. I find that the presence of one or more active white supremacist chapters is associated with higher hate crime rates. I reject the hypothesis that chapter presence and hate crimes are symptomatic of the overall level of bias-based violence. Moreover, I reject the hypothesis that white supremacist groups form in response to an increase in antiwhite hate crimes, particularly those perpetrated by nonwhites.

In this paper we use methods of social network analysis to examine the interorganizational structure of the white supremacist movement. Treating links between Internet websites as ties of affinity, communication, or potential coordination, we investigate the structural properties of connections among white supremacist groups. White supremacism appears to be a relatively decentralized movement with multiple centers of influence, but without sharp cleavages between factions. Interorganizational links are stronger among groups with a special interest in mutual affirmation of their intellectual legitimacy (Holocaust revisionists) or cultural identity (racist skinheads) and weaker among groups that compete for members (political parties) or customers (commercial enterprises). The network is relatively isolated from both mainstream conservatives and other extremist groups. Christian Identity theology appears ineffective as a unifying creed of the movement, while Nazi sympathies are pervasive. Recruitment is facilitated by links between youth and adult organizations and by the propaganda efforts of more covertly racist groups. Links connect groups in many countries, suggesting the potential of the Internet to facilitate a whitesupremacist “cyber-community” that transcends regional and national boundaries.

Currently, White supremacy is the greatest terror threat, domestic or international, for the United States, accounting for 73 percent of domestic terror fatalities between 2009 and 2018. As such, this unique aspect of terrorism demands the attention of not only society but also researchers. The first section of this chapter examines the historical roots of White supremacy and White supremacist violence. The second section examines the underlying ideologies that drive these movements and the violence they engage in. The third section explores many of the White supremacist groups that operate within the United States, organizing them by the group’s motivations such as political influence, religious, or youth culture. The fourth section focuses on the current empirical research on White supremacy, specifically the extent of this violence, entry into these groups, and desistance from White supremacy. The chapter concludes by noting areas for future research on White supremacy and domestic terrorism.

New media technologies and social networks have not only opened up spaces for civic engagementand democratic participation, but have also offered alternative sites for the proliferation andcirculation of racist, homophobic and xenophobic sentiment. This article draws on Ahmed’s ideaof “affective economies” and Ekman’s (2019) notion of “affective publics” to investigate how whitesupremacist groups in South Africa have used social media to express racist views, attitudes andsentiments. The internet in general and social networks in particular are based on a libertarianlogic that emphasises freedom of speech at the expense of the rights of minorities whose viewsmay not meet the required algorithmic thresholds of specific social media sites. While governmentsaround the world have put in place laws to deal with overt racism and hate speech, online platformsremain new battlegrounds for the articulation of racist views and sentiments. The findings of thestudy show that white supremacist groups in South Africa use social media as a platform to recontextualiseand re-mediate topical issues in South African society and ramp up group solidarityby circulating racist views that undermine and de-legitimise the ruling party (the African NationalCongress) and its policies.

Most of the research dealing with hate and hate speech has examined the practices and discourses of hate groups and hate crimes. This work has tended to focus on hate and hate speech directed at African Americans, Jews, and other nonwhites by white supremacist groups. An emerging and growing literature examines hate and hate speech that is used by men to target and harass women. Research in this area has focused on the ways that hate speech produced by organized hate groups and men’s rights activist groups is used to recruit new members, to socialize new members, to radicalize people, and to encourage ethnoviolence. The Internet has had a revolutionizing influence on these groups’ use of hate speech. Additionally, hate novels and “hate music” have played important roles in the recruitment of people into the hate movement and promoted violence against those perceived as enemies of Aryans.

How do white supremacist organizations respond, strategize, and understand counterprotests? With a unique dataset of 2 million chat messages from 2016 to 2020, we argue that white supremacist groups struggle to mitigate the harmful effects of counterprotesters. On the one hand, counterprotesters increase the collective action costs for white supremacists, forcing them to adopt avoidance tactics, such as organizing secretive or less visible rallies. Yet such evasive strategies often hinder efforts to mobilize large numbers of supporters. On the other hand, in an effort to maximize security, white supremacist groups may equip participants with protective gear or weapons. While this approach enhances preparedness, it simultaneously damages their public image by amplifying the movement’s social stigma. Moreover, their perceptions of counterprotester threats play a crucial role in shaping both their tactical choices and broader strategic orientations. Our findings shed light on the interconnectedness of these dynamics, offering new insights into countermovements.

White supremacist groups have traditionally been viewed as fringe groups to be ignored, dismissed, or at most, observed warily. White Lies investigates the white supremacist imagination, and argues instead that the ideology of these groups is much closer to core American values than most of us would like to believe. The book explores white supremacist ideology through an analysis of over 300 publications from a variety of white supremacist organizations. It examines the discourse of these publications and the ways in which whites, blacks, and Jews are constructed within that discourse.

This article analyses what the disavowal of abject forms of white supremacy reveals about the racial logic of the global preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) agenda. We argue that the global P/CVE agenda is built on racialised concepts such as prevention, radicalisation and community – concepts that render it incommensurate with the newly identified problem of white supremacist violent extremism or domestic terrorism. Through analysis of interviews with experts and practitioners working within the broad field of P/CVE, we discursively analyse how the enmeshment of the agenda within the development and peacebuilding space exposes the agenda’s primary intent to manage presumably ungovernable populations in or from the so-called Global South. Taking the theoretical insights culled from textual analysis of practitioner interviews, we then consider the inclusion of right-wing extremism, and specifically white supremacy, within Western states’ domestic P/CVE agendas, primarily in the US. Our argument – that the move to consider far-right extremism within domestic CVE policy reveals rather than disrupts the P/CVE agenda’s racist foundations and intentions – contributes to a growing body of research that insists on attending to race, racialisation and racism within security studies and international relations, and which includes an emphasis on whiteness as an organising principle.

Scholarly treatments of white supremacy have tended to focus on groups over individuals, examining belief systems, framing mechanisms, and operational dynamics. White supremacist discourse and dialogue often include descriptions of the processes through which one “awakens” to support these ideologies. This article considers how individuals report discovering their affinity for white supremacist belief systems. Data are culled from personal accounts available on Web pages, postings to electronic discussion forums, literature published by white supremacist groups, and biographical/autobiographical works. The authors discuss the common themes emerging from accounts of personal “awakenings” to better understand how adherence to white supremacist ideologies emerges within the individual. Implications for broader understandings of white supremacy are discussed.

Putting the Toothpaste Back in the Tube: Against Online Hate Speech.