Not surprisingly, most Stormfront users do not want to announce their white nationalism to the world. But about 100 Americans say on Facebook that they like Stormfront and are publicly searchable. This small, selected sample can offer suggestive clues to the membership of such sites. Are, for example, white nationalists unpopular and social pariahs?

Nearly 80 percent of Stormfront fans had more than 100 Facebook friends. Nearly 60 percent had more than 200 friends. By comparison, a 2011 study found only half of Facebook users had more than 100 friends.

Finally, another thing that was interesting was the percent of people who are atheists on the site. But I wasn't sure exactly what to compare that to, so that got cut too.

- Seth

I would actually be wary of the lurkers, I suppose there is a significant amount of people who are 'interested' in stormfront without actually sharing the belief who have accounts there.

The Facebook statistic would be very interesting if it had been of the average Stormfront user. There's a chance the sort of person who has extreme opinions on their FB just has more friends, with only 100 out of 200.000 it's hard to tell.

It's funny you are skeptical of the linguistic analysis thing while you opened the article with a quote from a girl who was impressed by the linguistic analysis of that NYT quiz ;) You can make this sort of analysis without any specific knowledge at all, a very generic n-gram analysis could give you anything from common phrases used by stormfront users to linking their identities across mediums (i.e. stormfront to twitter/facebook).

You can't really tell if they are "social [media] pariahs" unless you compare them to a representative sample. You could control for the average number of likes, and compare that to the average number of friends. Or even better, you could compare them to several groups of users who like other fringe topics (from all parts of the political spectrum) and see if they're significant outliers. In fact, this is going on my idea list. :)

Do you actually not know? Or are you asking rhetorically? The reasons seem pretty obvious to me, not sure why they would be hard to figure out.

The other obvious answer is censorship. Why don't we have a Stormfront TV channel? Because such a channel could never get a cable license, and if it did, it would get sued out of existence. Surely some lawsuit can be conjured up to shut down Stormfront, and make it impossible for other web hosts to host such sites?

So either address the grievances and make peace or crush them underfoot and leave no doubt - those are always the two traditional ways to deal with hateful dissenters.

Legitimate grievance? How is blaming the world's problems on "the Jews" (as if they all operated as one) anything remotely resembling legitimate grievance?

Poor, rural white Americans are getting a raw deal (thanks, in large part, to right-wing politicians they were misled into electing) but that's because poor, rural people everywhere are getting a bad deal these days. "Whites are an oppressed group" is complete idiocy and an indefensible position.

Add to that faulty logic.

Add to that the general degradation of morals and the kids of today, I tell you.

---

Let's completely forget the centuries long history of white on black oppression that has led to the unequal socio-economic conditions between blacks and whites. I'd, you know, cut them some slack.

---

You do realise that every generation has claimed that the "youth of today" are nothing compared to how things were "back in the day". I mean, really?

---

The only thing you said that made sense is tribalism. I would jettison the rest if I were you.

By saying "cut them some slack" you are implying that I am doing the opposite. IE, I you are implying that I am being too hard on black people. How is this case? I pointed out a legitimate problem - black-on-white crime. Is it not a problem that multiple friends and people like my friends (ie white or Asian) were assaulted or killed in nearby neighborhoods? Is it not a problem? Should I just be silent about these problems? What on earth does "cutting them some slack mean"? I'm not endorsing stormfronts views on the matter, I am just saying that the base of their hatred there are some real, legitimate problems.

"You do realise that every generation has claimed that the "youth of today" are nothing compared to how things were "back in the day". I mean, really?"

Yes, I realize that. It also true. Most of the people who ever complained about the decline of the youth, were in fact correct. That is how the rise and fall of civilizations works. Civilizations explode out of a small tribes of ultra-militant, ultra-fertile, ultra-patriarchal, utlra-disciplined people. See for instance, the Puritan settlers of America who had fertility rates of nearly 10 per woman, who conquered New England, begot 16 million descendants and established the American empire. Each generation was slightly more decadent than the previous. But the momentum from the starting culture was so great that there was a lot of expansion before the cultural decay becomes apparent, and the decline phase sets in. Eventually, the society becomes too decadent and corrupt, and a new hard-core tribe comes in and conquers. So the cycle goes. How many years before ISIS rules us all? Hopefully it won't be in my lifetime.

One side note - the decline is not uniform or all one-way. Within the broader trend there are ebbs and flows among subpopulations of being more or less vulgar, more or less decadent, etc. Vulgarity actually probably decreases for a while as the break-out tribe becomes more "civilized", and then starts to rise again as order declines. (I think the 1950's were probably an absolute minimum of vulgarity in the U.S.)

"I would jettison the rest if I were you."

Is that a threat?

I'm doing more than that. I'm calling you out. That word `legitimate' is very sneaky. I'd say it's close to racist to assert that black on white crime is a "legitimate problem" rather than just a "social problem" or a plain old "problem". There are _fucking_ well documented systemic _reasons_ for why there may be statistically more (per capita or whatever) black on white crime than white on white crime. So it's _not_ a legitimate problem. It would _only_ be legitimate if all other things being equal black on white crime was higher than other types purely because black people are black. If you can't or don't want to or won't see that you're racist. It _is_ a problem, all crime is a problem, it's _not_ a legitimate problem in that it does not legitimate racist attitudes towards blacks because only wilful ignorance could be blind to the socio-economic conditions that give rise to this crime.

> Yes ... "Each generation was slightly more decadent than the previous." ... ISIS ... my lifetime

Hey, you know, horseshit. Or bullshit, or whatever. I'm not even going to debate your there.

> "Is that a threat?"

No. It was advice to you to drop the more idiotic claims you are making so that you stop being an idiot. I am not joking.

Though I agree that his paragraph about decadency through the ages is a bit nutty, everyone has their strange beliefs. Nothing wrong with that.

I have no idea what you are talking about. By legitimate, I simply mean "real" or "not imagined". I mean that the problem actually exists in reality, as a opposed to a problem that exists only in the heads of the stormfronters.

"...because only wilful ignorance could be blind to the socio-economic conditions that give rise to this crime."

I used to believe as you believe. I've read all the books - William Julius Wilson, The New Jim Crow, Tally's Corner, etc. etc. I used to be willfully ignorant of the more "race realist" positions, because, well, I thought they were racist. But then a friend I respected convinced me to study further. I did and the facts and evidence was compelling. It would be better for me personally if I actually took your advice and re-adopted my original views on the issue, which were more like yours. But the evidence has convinced me that socio-economic conditions are not at the root of the urban crime problem, and so I now believe otherwise.

In the 1890's Philadelphia was a far poorer (in terms of any measure of median income), and far more unequal city than it is today. It was the gilded age and extremely wealthy people lived right in the city, rather than the distant suburbs. The city teemed with immigrants of all sorts. Yet the murder rate was 1/10th of what it is today. Why?

Or look at London, England in the 1910's. Massive inequality, massive problems of poverty. Yet the homicide rate was a tiny fraction of what it is in modern Philadelphia.

You can do the exercise at home. Find the homicide rates for a couple dozen U.S. cities, from both present day and from the early 1900's. Correlate the crime rate with income, then try correlating with race.

Look at South Korea in the 1950's. Take the problems that John Kozol writes about in Savage Inequalities, compare to the South Korean schools of that period, and you'll see the South Koreans had it much worse. Yet the crime rate was low, and the dire school situation did not prevent their economic growth.

Or look at 1850's Japan or Germany in 1700's where it was the upper class committing a lot of the crime. Why? Because they could get away with it. If you were a young punk from a Samurai family you could terrorize and steal from a merchant and suffer no punishment. Now in Japan, the murder rate is ridiculously low and you can leave a purse on a public bench and not have it taken. Why? Read up on Japan policing tactics. And murder clearance and conviction rate is over 90%. People do not get away with murder. Compare to Baltimore where the solving rate is closer to 30%.

Socio-economics has little to do with crime rates. Crime is committed by people who do not fear its consequences, for one reason or another.

I went to college in a city with a large underclass black population. Multiple friends were mugged or assaulted. Then I visited China, a country that went through hell and back in the last sixty years, and is still way poorer than my college town. And yet I was safer anywhere I walked, than I was a few blocks away from my own dorm.

Also, this not just a matter of correlations. Read the links. In many of the attacks, the attackers are not out for money, and they are saying stuff like, "get whitey." These are racially motivated, black-on-white crimes.

For the record, I do not think that black people are incapable of low crime rates. Rather, they live in communities where a) the police only show up to bust some heads now and then, but do not provide an ongoing presence to deter crime b) there are no fathers to instill discipline c) teachers don't sufficiently discipline students for fear of being called racist d) there is an entire culture of victimhood and "blame whitey" Schools teach more about slavery and how whitey oppressed them, rather than teaching about science or engineering. Thus teenage thugs looking for some fun feel it morally acceptable to enact violence against whites.

What is the solution? Restore the same policing practices that made 1900's London, 1890's Philadelphia, or modern Japan safe. Stop teaching racial grievance in the schools. Allow white people to sue the schools for teach racial grievances, or for getting bullied for racial reasons, just as black people can sue schools when they get the same from white people. Make sure teenagers from broken homes are under the supervision of male authority figures one way or another, many via after-school activities, longer school days, or by having convent style living arrangements. You would also need to figure out a way to create a constructive black leadership. A leadership that would focus on opening black-owned businesses and then getting black people to spend money at those businesses rather than on products made by giant outside corporations. In other words, the leadership needs to drop the grievance/hand-out culture and replace it with the same type of culture used by every other ethnic group, ever, to get ahead.

Not centuries of subjugation and mistreatment.

Not racism.

By your own admission you've come to adopt a viewpoint you once regarded as racist.

What's more likely, (a) that you don't view the (still racist) position as racist now that you hold it _or_ (b) the position has somehow become un-racist. I'm going with a.

Also, I sure as heck do not believe that white people are blameless in this whole crime and urban decay situation. There is a lot of blame to go around. I really do not care about blame or about who is at fault, just in identifying cause and effect and solving the problem. Denying the problem as legitimate, or attributing false reasons to the crime problem is neither useful nor constructive. (Subjugation and mistreatment of blacks by whites is and was a huge problem, but it is not causing the crime problem, and it is not helping anyone to pretend that it is).

> (Subjugation and mistreatment of blacks by whites is and was a huge problem, but it is not causing the crime problem, and it is not helping anyone to pretend that it is).

Centuries of subjugation and mistreatment has led to a socio-economic underclass. This is _fact_. There is plenty of documentation. Even though things are getting better the fact remains that this is the cause of the crime problem.

Rather than attribute the obvious source to the problem you have said:

1) That black on white crime is racially motivated, "get whitey". You can't just say that, you can't just trot out unsubstantiated claims. I just don't believe that's true.

2) That if only blacks got their act together in the way other races have that they'd improve their lot.

3) That there are poor people or underclasses in other societies and they don't carry on the way blacks in the US do.

Or words to that effect.

For me that is not pattern matching, that _is_ prejudicial thinking. And you accuse blacks of racism! You state implicitly and explicitly that it is because of their race that the crime rates are higher and that the urban decay is worse than other places at other times. That is prejudicial thinking and we can leave morality out of it. My concern in analysing the language and the logic that you use is if you are using the same standards for every group of people. I clearly see that you are not. That means you are exhibiting bias, that your thinking is prejudicial. You've learnt this, you need to unlearn it. I know it's not easy to confront that which is within us that is biased and prejudicial but there you go.

Tell you what. You point me towards the stats and the literature (not the anecdotes!) that have led you to these conclusions and we'll explore this topic together.

Send me an email at henry.k.mercer at google's email service. I'll reply back this weekend with a reading list.

In short, there is lots of black crime.

Why?

Because of the shitty socio-economic position they find themselves in due to centuries of subjugation, institutional and social mistreatment. And that happened because of their race. In that way it's a racial issue. White racism. Blacks were for a long time not even classed as human, which is a classic dehumanizing tactic used to view the other as an object to be used rather than respected.

Comparing black crime in the USA to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory or to the Belgian initiated ethnic violence in Rwanda is wrong-headed and very prejudicial thinking.

This. When people fall out of the bottom of the officially sanctioned narrative space, whether it be true, false or especially (as it probably always is) some really complex combination of the two they need to rely on their own judgement and sometimes that judgement will lead to Nazis or Reptilians or some combination thereof.

One part legitimate grievance. For instance, black on white crime is a huge problem that is not talked about and not addressed in mainstream discourse. In Philadelphia, a close friend of mine got mugged at gunpoint outside of her apartment. Two blocks away, recently, a twenty-something woman who could have been any of my friends, was mugged, shot, and killed. In another incident, a man fitting my own demographic profile, was mugged, shot and paralyzed, a few blocks away. Elsewhere, a group of yuppies walking home were attacked by a "flash mob" and had the crap beaten out of them ( http://www.phillymag.com/news/2011/06/27/fk-flash-mobs/ ). My friend now fears to go to the grocery store after dark. Young professionals fear sending their kids to public schools because their kids will get beaten up and be made miserable ( see http://thenotebook.org/blog/125398/looking-back-on-racial-vi... or http://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/1lfr7l/as_a_n... )

When you have legitimate grievances, and discussion of those grievances is actively suppressed (see http://whitegirlbleedalot.com/ ), then it is easy to get carried away with further conspiracies that are not actually true. That leads us to the next ingredient.

One part pattern-matching that leads to plausible, but false, grievances. For instance, it is undeniably true that "Jews totally run Hollywood" ( see http://articles.latimes.com/2008/dec/19/opinion/oe-stein19 ). It is also arguably true that the output of Hollywood is poisoning our culture and leading to the destruction of our civilization. If you believe those two things, then it is not that much of a leap to believe that Jews are ruining the country. Personally, I believe that Hollywood is poisonous, but I do not blame it on the Jews. I think the Jewish people have a disproportionate number of savvy businessman, they ended up running the studios for historical reasons, and that they are mainly producing the films that people want to see. If Hollywood was run by gentiles, the output would be largely the same. Perhaps the main problem is actually the First Amendment - civilization might not be able to survive the freedom to watch addictive trash on television.

One part tribal instinct. When you feel like you have been lied to, called evil, and excluded, well, you want to find other fellow travelers to bond with. And then the internal dialogue feeds on itself, and it exacerbates the "us-against-them" mentality.

One part general vulgarity due to a break down in character education in our society. My mother has frequently commented on the general rudeness, vulgarity, uncivilness, etc. in recent generations versus when she grew up in the 1950's. I suspect this is not just nostalgia. Especially on the internet, people say awful things.

Put it all together, and Stormfront is what you get.

Um, well you can believe what Seth (the article's author) says, or, um, you can make a very quick trip to the Stormfront home page. Seems to me that maybe ~20% of the thread subjects relate to Jews. The other big two topics are black-on-white violence and immigration. It is in those two topics where I think there is a considerable amount of legitimate grievance.

"It's hard to believe that "Jews run Hollywood" is enough to explain that."

No it's not enough, that was just one of many examples of pattern matching.

That is interesting. It would be nice if there was a source for these ideas (well besides human nature) and if it was curable. We want to think these people a basically good but sick. Something happened to them and they became like this. If we could only prevent or even undo that.

Could it be for example that by default people are racist and will automatically dislike others from different groups (social, religious, national, intellectual, professional).

Hate of "others" is used for group cohesiveness.

Maybe it isn't them that are "abnormal" but us, who maintain that we don't have these beliefs, biases and stereotypes (at least rationally). Wouldn't that be scary...

Historically and geographically maybe instead of a sea of tolerance with island of hatred, it is the other way around. A sea of hatred and division with islands of tolerance.

It is also interesting that we often attribute craziness to these people. I do it all the time. They are mentally sick, they are hallucinating etc etc. But if you read manifestos of killers and how these people behave towards each other, how they function in real life, you might find they are are disturbingly "normal". That that is really disturbing to me at least.

As someone who has been seriously hurt by someone else (they're in gaol for life) I know how hard it is to forgive. I still haven't succeeded, and I probably never will.

But, I have succeeded in gaining the knowledge that revenge would just continue the cycle of violence, so it's in my power to stop it.

Revenge solves nothing, and only causes more pain.

This would seem to be a solvable problem. We can break down communication barriers. The internet is already transforming the world in this way, and we've already come so far in the past few decades. Surely we can keep going, until nobody lives in a small corner of the world that's isolated from the rest of us.

It's so easy to talk with someone on the internet without knowing anything about their ethnic background. In fact I have no idea whether you're black, white, Jewish, Indian, whatever. So if I were a chauvinistic white supremacist, I could just pretend that everyone who writes thoughtful comments on HN is a white dude. This contrasts sharply with the real world, where you can't help noticing a person's gender and skin color before you ever exchange a word with him or her.

The internet also helps people erect strong barriers that might otherwise have been too weak to sustain. Stormfront.org helps turn potential neo-Nazis into actual neo-Nazis, helps them unite despite their geographical dispersion, empowers them to publicly boast their bigotry, and worst of all, gives them a comfortable environment where they never have to confront any other opinion. The fragmentation of online communities keeps prejudices alive in the gaps.

I don't think humans are racist by default, but rather that the way in which most societies have evolved so far are conducive to racism. Most communities around the world are either ethnically homogeneous, or if they're not, they have active conflict among ethnic groups in adjacent regions/towns/villages/neighborhoods. It's easy to be an armchair racist when there's no Jew within a hundred miles of you. It's also easy to be a practicing racist when other ethnic groups are threatening to kill you.

Historically, it has been very unusual for people of different ethicities to live together in the same block (let alone the same building) unless one ethnicity was regarded as superior politically and/or economically. Only in the modern world do Africans, Caucasians, Chinese, Indians, and Native Americans even have a chance to live as equals in close proximity. It is a rare phenomenon indeed.

But people do get used to it. At first there's conflict, but then a new generation is born who have never experienced ethnic homogeneity. The kids grow up playing with all the other neighborhood kids, unless bigoted adults tell them not to. This is the generation that can finally overcome racism. Not because they're better people, nor because they're better educated, but simply because their best buddy is red, their girlfriend is yellow, and their favorite football star is black. When these kids become leaders, and their racist parents die off, that's what a non-racist community looks like. History is made, one funeral at a time.

So the source of racist ideas is not some crazy dude with a funny moustache, but the very existence of homogeneous or segregated comunities. It is no coincidence that the places with the highest Stormfront membership rates are also the places with the lowest ethnic diversity. The geography and demographics of Montana breeds racists. Hawaii, on the other hand, is a rather unsuitable place for a person to grow up to become a racist. Even in other parts of the world, relatively homogenenous countries like Japan and Korea tend to be incredibly racist.

The only way to combat racism is to make people live together.

This is how I see it too. It has to start earlier, in kindergarten. By the time kids hit highshcool they already carry prejudices that might be hard to undo.

The best antidote is to personally know someone from the other "group".

The cliche defense for "I am not racist" is "I have a <race> friend, I swear". But there is truth in there. Having a friend, a coworker or acquaintance, is a good way to reduce racism probably.