Whiteness feels good here: interrogating white nationalist rhetoric on Stormfront
September 18, 2023
This essay adopts a critical rhetorical perspective attuned to affect to investigate white nationalist rhetoric on Stormfront, a popular white nationalist message board. My analysis illuminates how Stormfront attempts to appeal to mainstream white audiences by resisting normative expectations and affects articulated with white supremacy and (re)constructing white nationalism as a formation of white racial ...
White pride worldwide: Constructing global identities online
September 18, 2023
To see the Internet as only a ‘tool’ or ‘resource’ for disseminating ideas and products, as much of the literature has done, is to miss an even more significant aspect of online venues. The Internet is also a site of important ‘identity work’, in which collective identities can be accomplished interactively. This chapter explores how ...
A Safe Space to Hate: White Supremacist Mobilisation on Telegram
September 18, 2023
The briefing highlights how through its limited content moderation policies Telegram has become a safe space for white supremacists to share and discuss a range of explicit extremist material. Furthermore, it shows that through the many of these Telegram communities have become permissive environments where overt calls for violence and support for terrorism is widespread. ...
Extreme Speech: The Digital Traces of #whitegenocide and Alt-Right Affective Economies of Transgression
September 18, 2023
This article explores how the notion of “extreme speech” can advocate a context-specific, practice-oriented approach to alt-right digital culture while also foregrounding its imbrication in larger histories of racial formation. Designating the popular White-nationalist hashtag #whitegenocide as an alt-right structure of feeling, it uses a data-critical discourse on “digital traces” to support a form of ...
The Kids Are Alt-Right: The Intellectual Origins of the Alt-Right
September 18, 2023
The electoral success and increased media presence of the Far-Right ideology known as the Alternative Right has catapulted the once marginal fringe movement into popular political discourse. The term Alternative Right is used in contrast to Alt-Right, which is a specific subsection of the broader Alt-Right who are associated with Richard Spencer. This dissertation examines ...
“Deplorable” Satire: Alt-Right Memes, White Genocide Tweets, and Redpilling Normies.
September 18, 2023
In the past decade, people associated with what is known as the alt-right have employed a strategy similar to that of progressive, antiracist satirists to advance a decidedly white supremacist, anti-Semitic, misogynist, and deadly serious agenda. As this article documents, the alt-right weaponizes irony to attract and radicalize potential supporters, challenge progressive ideologies and institutions, ...
Triggered by Defeat or Victory? Assessing the Impact of Presidential Election Results on Extreme Right-Wing Mobilization Online
September 18, 2023
The theoretical literature from criminology, social movements, and political sociology, among others, includes diverging views about how political outcomes could affect movements. Many theories argue that political defeats motivate the losing side to increase their mobilization while other established models claim the winning side may feel encouraged and thus increase their mobilization. We examine these ...
This is Not a Game: How Steam Harbors Extremists
September 18, 2023
Steam, the largest and most important online store for PC gamers with over $4 Billion in revenue in 2017, has recently gained popularity among white supremacists for being a platform, like Gab and Telegram, where they can openly express their ideology and calls for violence. The difference between Steam and social media platforms like Telegram ...
Accelerators, Amplifiers, and Conductors: A Model of Tertiary Deviance in Online White Supremacist Networks
September 18, 2023
As recent perpetrators of racially-motivated mass-shootings were visitors and contributors to online white supremacist networks, this article presents a preliminary model that attempts to understand the social psychological effects of interacting in these networks. Combining Jonathan Turner’s theory of the social psychological roots of extreme violence, scholarship on the white supremacist movement, and research on ...
Voices Of White Resistance: Democratic Theory And The Task Of Contending With White Nationalist Voice
September 18, 2023
As white nationalists have come to increasing prominence in recent decades, their presence presents a significant challenge to democratic societies. Motivated by a sense of racial imperilment, and opposed, sometimes violently, to core democratic ideals, white nationalists cannot be meaningfully incorporated into the political life of societies which promote inclusiveness and pluralism without threatening those ...