Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rccc20

Whiteness feels good here: interrogating white

nationalist rhetoric on Stormfront

Stephanie L. Hartzell

To cite this article: Stephanie L. Hartzell (2020) Whiteness feels good here: interrogating white
nationalist rhetoric on Stormfront, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 17:2, 129-148, DOI:
10.1080/14791420.2020.1745858

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2020.1745858

Published online: 26 Mar 2020.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 3321

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Citing articles: 2 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rccc20
COMMUNICATION AND CRITICAL/CULTURAL STUDIES
2020, VOL. 17, NO. 2, 129–148
https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2020.1745858

Whiteness feels good here: interrogating white nationalist

rhetoric on Stormfront
Stephanie L. Hartzell
Department of Communication Studies, California State University, Long Beach, CA, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This essay adopts a critical rhetorical perspective attuned to affect to Received 1 October 2018
investigate white nationalist rhetoric on Stormfront, a popular white Accepted 14 August 2019
nationalist message board. My analysis illuminates how Stormfront
KEYWORDS
attempts to appeal to mainstream white audiences by resisting whiteness; white nationalism;
normative expectations and affects articulated with white white supremacy;
supremacy and (re)constructing white nationalism as a formation colorblindness; affect
of white racial consciousness articulated with communal
belonging, common sense, and pride. On Stormfront, affect is
mobilized discursively to challenge colorblindness, construct
rhetorical distance between white nationalism and white
supremacy, and strategically negotiate white (dis)comfort with
direct discourse on race to compel affective investments in white
nationalism.

For the past several decades, the belief that the United States has virtually eradicated
racism has been common among white US Americans.1 In a society structured by
white supremacy and steeped in racial inequality, this illusion of postracism has inhibited
progress toward racial equality. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva explains, whereas pre-Civil
Rights era racism was overtly embedded in laws and commonly manifested in open pro-
clamations of white supremacy, explicit hate speech, and physical violence, post-Civil
Rights Era racism has operated primarily through the framework of colorblindness2—a
racial ideology premised on the refusal to “see” race as meaningful in contemporary con-
texts.3 Within this framework, racism is equated with its most explicit manifestations (e.g.,
slavery, Jim Crow, and widespread public lynching) and imagined as a historical aberra-
tion that has been largely overcome by treating all people as equal individuals rather than
members of racial groups.4 In turn, contemporary racism is (mis)understood as an indi-
vidual vice that manifests rarely through interpersonal (inter)actions, where racial hatred
is expressed explicitly.5 Rhetorically, colorblindness circulates via coded discourse that
denies the significance of race and racism while rationalizing persisting racial inequalities
through deracialized frames.6 Therefore, what some see as a progressive perspective actu-
ally bolsters racism by obscuring the material realities of racial injustice and (re)framing
antiracist efforts as unwarranted and/or discriminatory.7 Colorblindness thus provides the

CONTACT Stephanie L. Hartzell stephanie.hartzell@csulb.edu

© 2020 National Communication Association
130 S. L. HARTZELL

comfort of ideological shelter from the uncomfortable realities of racial injustice for those
with the privilege to keep their eyes closed.
In recent years, however, the dominance of colorblindness has waned as various
formations of racial consciousness have gained mainstream traction. On the one hand,
antiracist groups such as Black Lives Matter are leading powerful grassroots efforts to
expose and fight systemic racism and critical discourse on whiteness and racial privilege
circulates through mainstream and social media.8 On the other hand, overt expressions
of racism proliferate and the United States has a sitting president who has earned the
enthusiastic support of white supremacists and whose racist rhetoric has been directly
connected to recent explosions of white supremacist violence.9 In our contemporary socio-
political landscape, it is nearly impossible to cling to the fantasy of postracialism, even for
white folks whose privileged position has afforded protection from the horrors of racial
inequality.
The contemporary proliferation of discourse on race, racism, and white privilege has
forced white US Americans out of their colorblind comfort as they attempt to reckon
with their position in a racial landscape fraught with conflict and injustice. Yet, decades
of privileged apathy have inhibited white folks’ ability to engage productively with antira-
cist discourse. When white people are confronted with direct discourse on race and racism,
they often experience discomfort that manifests as anxiety, avoidance, anger, and guilt.
These emotional reactions shift energy away from addressing racial injustice by privileging
the restoration of white comfort.10 Moreover, the legacy of colorblindness and the pre-
sumption of personal innocence for any lingering manifestations of racism has opened
space for white folks to imagine themselves as victims of racial injustice by, for example,
being disadvantaged by affirmative action or interpreting discourse on racism as a per-
sonal attack on their good character.11 White audiences are thus positioned to experience
racially conscious discourse as affectively negative—to feel bad when thinking and talking
about race and racism.
As mainstream white audiences awaken to the contemporary significance of race, they
are positioned to seek affectively positive formations of racial consciousness—ways of
acknowledging race, in general, and whiteness, in particular, that feel good. This
impetus is a problem in and of itself, as white comfort is once again privileged over
empathy for and action against racial inequality. Yet, for rhetorically savvy white supre-
macist groups, this is a kairotic moment. In attempts to appeal to mainstream white audi-
ences and break (back) into public discourse, many contemporary white supremacist
groups have worked to negotiate taboos around overt expressions of white supremacy
in public contexts.12 One strategy has been the rejection of the label “white supremacy”
in favor of alternatives, such as “racial realist,” “white identitarian,” “pro-white,” “alt-
right,” and “white nationalist.”13 While most of these labels have been used interchange-
ably by a variety of white supremacist advocates, “white nationalism” warrants particular
attention, both for the mainstream traction it has developed in the “Trump era” and its
longstanding durability as a “distinct” formation of white supremacy.14
This essay investigates white nationalist rhetoric on Stormfront, the oldest and most
influential white nationalist website.15 With a focus on introductory content designed
for new visitors, I examine how Stormfront’s white nationalist rhetoric attempts to
appeal affectively to mainstream white audiences by strategically negotiating their norma-
tive discomfort with direct discourse on race and racism. My analysis reveals that
 COMMUNICATION AND CRITICAL/CULTURAL STUDIES 131

Stormfront mobilizes affects of common sense, communal belonging, and pride to con-
struct rhetorical distance between white nationalism and white supremacy, challenge col-
orblindness, and imagine white nationalism as a way to feel good about being white. Before
turning toward this analysis, I review relevant existing literature and construct a theoreti-
cal framework for a critical perspective on rhetoric and race attuned to affect. First, I
unpack dis/connections between white supremacy and white nationalism and introduce
readers to Stormfront.

White supremacy, white nationalism, and Stormfront

White nationalism is a formation of white supremacy premised on racial separatism, the
desire for a white ethnostate, and the preservation of white racial hegemony.16 White
nationalists argue that, unlike white supremacists who are fueled by hatred of other
races, they are driven by a desire to protect and preserve white identity and culture,
which they argue is threatened by diversity and multiculturalism.17 Here, white national-
ists exploit common misunderstandings of white supremacy as explicit, intentional, often
interpersonal manifestations of race-based hatred and/or violence. However, Charles Mills
demonstrates that white supremacy is better understood as a racialized system of discur-
sive power that structures material life, governs bodies, and guides symbolic identifications
in ways that normalize whiteness and privilege white people while disadvantaging people
of color.18 When I use the terms “white supremacist” and “white supremacy” here, I mean
to invoke Mills’ systemic perspective; when I use the terms “white nationalist” and “white
nationalism,” I do so to attend to the ways that white nationalism has been strategically
constructed as different from white supremacy. As I have argued elsewhere, it is important
to attend to how various discursive formations of whiteness attempt to distance them-
selves from white supremacy, but this work must be done in ways that avoid obscuring
fundamental interconnections to white supremacy.19 Ultimately, white nationalism is
inseparable from white supremacy.
One particularly noteworthy place where efforts to rebrand white supremacy through
the rhetoric of white nationalism have unfolded is Stormfront.org. Created in 1995 by
former Ku Klux Klan leader Don Black, Stormfront was the “first major hate site on
the Internet” and has been called “the most powerful active influence in the White Nation-
alist movement.”20 In 2001, Stormfront transitioned from a standard website to an inter-
active message board, which set the site apart from other content-presentation-focused
white nationalist webpages and enabled Stormfront to harness the growing power and
popularity of participatory social media. Over the next decade, Stormfront grew steadily.
In January 2002, the message board had 5,000 registered users. By 2005, that number had
grown to over 40,000 and Stormfront was independently ranked as the 338th largest elec-
tronic forum, placing it within the top 1 percent of all websites.21 Since then, Stormfront
has grown by hundreds of thousands of members, spiking in popularity closely following
the election of Barack Obama in 2008.22 Today, Stormfront boasts over 344,000 registered
members and regularly tracks tens of thousands of unregistered guest browsers each day.23
Though its popularity has ebbed and flowed, at times temporarily eclipsed by newer web-
sites and threatened by financial troubles, Stormfront remains a highly significant pillar in
the online white supremacist network and provides an accessible archive of nearly 20 years
of white nationalist discourse.24
132 S. L. HARTZELL

Even as new (and old) white nationalist voices abound, Stormfront is an important and
unique site of analysis for white nationalist rhetoric. Whereas other popular white supre-
macist/nationalist websites (e.g., Daily Stormer, American Renaissance, VDARE) are
news-oriented and focus on presenting opinion pieces authored by prominent contribu-
tors, Stormfront is an interactive message board community. As others have demonstrated,
this communal structure invites members to network, strategize, and construct online per-
sonae as they share racist perspectives under the protection of virtual anonymity.25
Although other white nationalist outlets are similarly interested in reaching mainstream
audiences, they lack the affective pull of belonging offered by Stormfront’s interactive
“community.” Here, additional research is needed to attend to Stormfront’s mobilization
of communal affects strategically oriented toward introducing mainstream white audi-
ences to white nationalism in ways that welcome them in and make them feel comfortable
enough to stay.
Additionally, Stormfront has made concerted efforts to mobilize rhetoric designed to be
more palatable than the overtly hateful speech traditionally associated with white supre-
macy. As others have revealed, Stormfront attempts to make itself appear “reasonable”
in the ways it rationalizes the purported inferiority of racialized Others.26 Yet, existing
research has not attended to the rhetorical construction of white nationalism on Storm-
front, which will provide important insight into the longevity, influence, and popularity
of Stormfront, in particular, and white nationalism in general. Whereas white nationalist
rhetoric can (and should) be analyzed from a variety of sources, Stormfront’s interactive
“community” offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the coconstruction of white nation-
alism and the innovation of strategies to appeal affectively to mainstream white audiences.
These efforts, while not necessarily new, are newly significant in a contemporary context
characterized by crumbling colorblindness and proliferating racial consciousness.

Researching whiteness within and against colorblindness

Given the longstanding dominance of a colorblind racial ideology, there is a scarcity of
critical/cultural communication research into more explicit formations of white supre-
macy. Most scholarship on contemporary formations of whiteness frames rhetoric that
overtly and unapologetically promotes whiteness as an exception to how racism operates
in contemporary contexts. Accordingly, scholars have turned toward investigations of how
whiteness mobilizes covertly through race-evasive discourse, how media representations
of race implicitly (re)center whiteness, and how white people who engage in racist
speech and action strategically maneuver around accusations of racism.27 These studies
are fundamentally about white supremacy, but the artifacts considered therein support
white supremacy precisely by deemphasizing whiteness rather than explicitly promoting
it. Thus, this scholarship provides valuable insight into how systemic white supremacy
is maintained through the promotion of colorblindness, postracialism, and race-neutral
rhetoric.
A small collection of interdisciplinary scholarship has investigated contemporary
rhetoric that promotes white supremacy by emphasizing whiteness explicitly. Recently,
scholars have investigated white supremacy in the “Trump era,” demonstrating connec-
tions between the resurgence of overt white supremacy in contemporary contexts and
the political persona of Donald Trump.28 Previously, research on contemporary white
 COMMUNICATION AND CRITICAL/CULTURAL STUDIES 133

supremacist rhetoric focused primarily on the significance of the Internet, demonstrating

that the emergence of participatory forms of online social media have enabled white supre-
macists to network with one another and build “virtual communities” across geographic
regions.29 Further, the Internet provides a way for white supremacists to mobilize anon-
ymously, which is less risky in a post-Civil Rights era wherein identification with white
supremacy has become taboo.30 Additionally, the Internet has facilitated white suprema-
cists’ outreach efforts, providing easy access to white supremacist perspectives and propa-
ganda and making it easier to reach mainstream audiences than with traditional methods
such as pamphlets, brochures, and talk radio.31 Together, this scholarship demonstrates
the continued significance of overt white supremacist rhetoric and the importance of
new media for the viability and growth of organized white supremacy.
Existing scholarship has yielded valuable knowledge about how white supremacy
functions rhetorically in contemporary contexts—through race-evasive discourse charac-
teristic of colorblindness, on the one hand, and in overt, race-direct formations on the
other. Yet, we know relatively little about how mainstream white audiences are coaxed
out of colorblindness and interpellated into formations of racial consciousness rooted in
white supremacy. Additionally, existing scholarship has collapsed all formations of
rhetoric explicitly promoting whiteness together as white supremacist and has not yet
attended to the significance of white nationalist rhetoric as a particular formation of
white supremacy. Although it is politically important to emphasize inextricable connec-
tions between white nationalism and white supremacy, the strategic construction of
white nationalism as distinct from white supremacy warrants particular attention pre-
cisely because it is doing the work of white supremacy. The recent rise in public atten-
tion toward white nationalism suggests that more mainstream audiences are being
introduced to this formation of white supremacy and, should they seek additional infor-
mation from white nationalist perspectives, the oldest and most popular white nation-
alist message board provides easy access.32 Before proceeding with my analysis of
Stormfront’s attempts to appeal affectively to mainstream white audiences, I turn to a
discussion of the relationship among rhetoric, affect, race, and common sense to
provide a theoretical foundation.

Knowing and feeling: rhetoric, affect, race, and common sense

Our understandings of race and racism have a profound impact on our everyday lives. As
scholars of race and affect have demonstrated, the historical circulation and accumulation
of beliefs, values, and assumptions about race mobilize affective energies that structure our
“(dis)identifications and (dis)affiliations” to shape our felt, embodied experiences.33 Racial
knowledge, like all knowledge, is not detached from the visceral; rather, these are all bound
up together in what Sara Ahmed has termed “affective economies.”34 Herein, bodies,
objects, ideas, and emotions circulate together through discourse, becoming saturated
with meaning and value as they form contingent articulations with one another.35 Knowl-
edge and ideology are thus profoundly affective—what we come to know and believe are
processes and products of how we move through the world and, in turn, how knowledge
moves us. What we believe about race helps to shape who and what we will be attached
and attuned to, who and what we will invest attention and care in, and who and what
we will distance ourselves from.36
134 S. L. HARTZELL

Post-1990s proliferations of affect theory have produced a range of perspectives on

affect.37 My perspective resonates with Christian Lundberg’s conceptualization of affect
as “the set of forces, investments, logics, relations, and practices of subjectivization that
are the conditions of possibility for emotion.”38 This definition helps to clarify the
murky relationship between affect and emotion, where emotion is understood as the sub-
jectively felt states made possible by the circulation of affect through public collectivities.
Yet, even as affect and emotion are separable in theory, Ahmed and Juana María
Rodríguez each argue that they become deeply entangled in practice and reject the
impetus to dwell on their distinctions.39 I embrace the messy entanglements of affect
and emotion and hope readers will forgive related slippages between language used to
describe affect and emotion. Further, whereas some theorists conceptualize affect in
ways that emphasize its transcendental capacities and extradiscursivity, this project
takes a critical approach to affect in order to illuminate the interrelationship among
affect, discourse, and power.40 This perspective affirms that, although affect may be pre-
discursive, investigations of how power mobilizes through affect-laden discourse are
necessary to understand the role of feelings in constructing, maintaining, resisting, and
transforming social relations.41
A critical perspective on rhetoric attuned to affect reveals the role of collective feelings
and emotions (the perceptible manifestations of affect) in mobilizing, maintaining, and
resisting racialized structures of power and knowledge. Affect circulates through public
discourse in ways that reiterate particular associations among bodies, values, and feelings.
This process of affective circulation and accumulation through discourses of power con-
strains and enables particular ways of being, knowing, doing, and feeling with regard to
race, wherein some possibilities are opened and others are foreclosed.42 By tracking rhe-
torical circulations of affect in discourse to reveal their articulations with bodies, beliefs,
and ideas, critics can illuminate how publics are motivated to form certain attachments,
perceptions, and identifications, and reject others, a process that scholars have termed
“affective investments and divestments.”43 In contemporary contexts, mainstream white
audiences have made significant investments in the affective economy of colorblindness,
which protects their own racial comfort while negating people of colors’ felt experiences
with race and racism.
As an affective economy, colorblindness is structured by the attachments, perceptions,
and identifications that frame white folks’ felt knowledge about race—it is, as Bonilla-
Silva argues, “post-Civil Rights white common sense.”44 As knowledge presumably attained
through direct observation untainted by “superstition, prejudice, or philosophy,”45 common
sense is a particularly powerful rhetorical construct because it appears to invoke self-evident
knowledge in ways that make denial difficult.46 Moreover, the qualities presumed to set one’s
capacities for common sense (objectivity, reasonability, “normal” understanding) have long
been associated with dominant groups, suggesting that normative common sense is con-
structed and maintained by the privileged and powerful.47 Colorblind common sense is,
thus, constructed by and works to shape white perspectives on the (in)significance of race
and racism (“if I don’t see/experience racism, it must not be happening”), which are
framed as objective, thereby universalizing whiteness, deracializing white perspectives,
and strengthening white folks’ presumptions of race neutrality.48 In turn, the perceptions
and experiences of people of color are particularized and racialized, positioning them in
opposition to normative common sense and rendering them unreasonable and biased.49
 COMMUNICATION AND CRITICAL/CULTURAL STUDIES 135

Common sense, like all knowledge, is affective. Within the framework of colorblind
common sense, white folks are affectively positioned as comfortable—because they do
not have felt experiences with the negative realities of racism, colorblindness makes
sense to them in ways that feel right. When white people are confronted with the realities
of persisting racial inequality, and, especially, the ways they have benefited from systemic
racism, the affective economy of colorblindness is taxed and discomfort is triggered. As
Robin DiAngelo demonstrates, discomfort manifests in a variety of emotional reactions
that signal white folks’ fragility, including denial, avoidance, anger, and guilt.50 These reac-
tions shift attention away from race/ism and toward restoring white folks’ emotional
comfort, thereby bolstering the normative power of colorblindness as a framework for
avoiding division and conflict.51
Moving mainstream white folks out of racial unconsciousness and toward racial con-
sciousness is, therefore, a fundamentally affective process. The circulation of affective ener-
gies compels invested identification with a particular formation of racial consciousness
and divestment from alternative ways of understanding race/ism. Moreover, compelling
investment in a particular racial ideology entails more than convincing people to accept
certain beliefs—it involves orienting them toward who and what they should care
deeply about and who and what they should turn away from.52 Of particular interest to
this project are the ways that white nationalist rhetoric mobilizes affect to coax main-
stream white folks out of colorblind common sense and compel investments in white
nationalist racial consciousness while strategically negotiating their (dis)comfort. To illus-
trate this process, I turn now to an analysis of Stormfront’s efforts to interpellate main-
stream white audiences into white nationalism.

Interrogating white nationalist rhetoric on Stormfront

Stormfront.org hosts a variety of content, including a blog, chat room, and radio show, but
its interactive message board, which boasts over 344,000 members (as of August 2019), is
its main attraction. Registration is required to post messages on a majority of the site’s 60
forums, but most content is available for viewing by the general public, enabling new visi-
tors to browse over 20 years of white nationalist discourse on a near infinite array of
topics.53 The breadth of topics to which Stormfront has dedicated interactive forums
(which include dating, environment, education, homemaking, and entertainment) sets
it apart from other white nationalist websites’ focus on presenting news, current events,
and philosophy. However, new visitors to Stormfront are encouraged to begin their
foray into this white nationalist archive by engaging first with a curated selection of posts.
Given this project’s interest in how white nationalist rhetoric attempts to appeal to
mainstream white audiences, I focus my analysis primarily on a set of “sticky posts”
oriented toward introducing new visitors to Stormfront and white nationalism. Sticky
posts are threads pinned to the top of forums by moderators because their content is per-
tinent for new visitors to read and/or of high interest to most members. Whereas the
ordering of regular posts changes frequently as new posts and comments are submitted
and old posts become buried, sticky posts are always the first that visitors encounter
and thus promote greater engagement over time. After examining 15 sticky posts on intro-
ductory forums, I selected four particularly popular, relevant, and representative posts
housed in three forums: two posts in “Introduction and FAQ,”54 one post in “Guidelines
136 S. L. HARTZELL

for Posting,”55 and one post in “Questions about this Board.”56 These posts are directly
aimed at introducing new visitors to Stormfront and familiarizing them with foundational
white nationalist beliefs—they are the first posts that new visitors read and, when ques-
tions arise or rule violations occur in other threads, moderators link users back to these
posts for a refresher. As a result, these posts have notably high view counts (currently
between 38,000 and 540,000 views since their respective dates of creation).57
Focusing on highly viewed introductory content grounds my analysis in the discourse
on Stormfront with which most new visitors engage, which provides the clearest insight
into attempts to appeal to mainstream white visitors. Whereas most other discussions
on Stormfront focus on particular issues and topics, this introductory content focuses
on introducing visitors to white nationalism, challenging their normative assumptions
about colorblindness and white supremacy, and welcoming them to join the community.
Here, visitors encounter information on Stormfront’s rules as well as a carefully crafted
overview of foundational white nationalist beliefs written by prominent Stormfront
members and influential white nationalists.58 While many of these perspectives and
voices have been circulated on other fringe platforms for decades, they have struggled
to reach audiences beyond insular groups of committed white nationalists.59 Stormfront
thus offers an ever-expanding collection of white nationalist perspectives and voices on
an easily accessible and popular platform, and exposing as many people as possible to
these perspectives is ultimately more important than expanding Stormfront’s member-
ship. As Don Black has argued, “anyone can work to promote our ideas without being
a member [of Stormfront]. I used to be annoyed by people who didn’t join my organiz-
ation, but I see the advantage now.”60 Engaging with Stormfront’s introductory content
provides visitors with resources to do the work of white supremacy through the rhetoric
of white nationalism whether they choose to join Stormfront or not.
In the analysis that unfolds below, I investigate how Stormfront’s introductory content
appeals to mainstream white audiences by mobilizing affect to negotiate (dis)comfort and
construct rhetorical distance between white nationalism and white supremacy. First, I con-
sider how Stormfront’s homepage welcomes new visitors to white nationalism and invites
them to engage with introductory posts. Then, I examine how these introductory posts
articulate white supremacy with negative affects and white nationalism with positive
affects as they imagine white folks as victims of racial inequality in need of communal
belonging and protection. Finally, I turn to Stormfront’s unique discursive rules to
reveal how they enable and constrain white nationalist rhetoric in ways designed to
restore the comfort of mainstream white audiences.

Welcome to white nationalism: who we are (not)

Upon navigating to Stormfront, visitors encounter an image-based banner with the site’s
logo, a rendition of the Celtic cross that has long been used by white supremacists circled
by the words “WHITE PRIDE WORLD WIDE.”61 Whereas this graphic signals Storm-
front’s articulations with recognizable white supremacist symbols in ways that might
trigger negative affects among mainstream visitors ranging from discomfort to revulsion,
the words that follow attempt to complicate those articulations to pique curiosity and
restore comfort. Underneath this image, visitors find a text-based banner that reads,
“Welcome to Stormfront. We are a community of racial realists and idealists. We are
 COMMUNICATION AND CRITICAL/CULTURAL STUDIES 137

White nationalists who support true diversity and a homeland for all peoples, including
ours. We are the voice of the new, embattled White minority!”62 This message begins to
disarticulate white nationalism from white supremacy by eliding explicit formations of
hatred and superiority associated with white supremacy in favor of common sense
appeals to racial realism and truth alongside affects of common sense, communal belong-
ing, and righteous advocacy against oppression. As I reveal below, these affects are
common across Stormfront’s introductory material and work strategically to encourage
divestment from colorblindness and affective investment in white nationalism. At the
bottom of Stormfront’s welcome banner, new visitors are directed to visit the “Introduc-
tion and FAQs” forum, where they find the first set of introductory sticky posts and begin
their foray into foundational white nationalist perspectives.63
In this first set of introductory posts, Stormfront members work to construct rhetorical
distance between white supremacy and white nationalism by affirming the irrationality of
white supremacy while imagining white nationalism as reasonable. Whereas most people
are familiar with the term “white supremacy” and its common associations with historical
examples of explicit hatred and violence, “white nationalism” is less familiar to main-
stream audiences, as evidenced by the recent barrage of mainstream journalism examining
the meaning of the term.64 This ambiguity works in Stormfront’s favor, enabling members
to argue that the rejection of the label “white supremacist” signifies their divestment from
racism and its negative affects and investment in a substantively and affectively different
set of ideological commitments. Specifically, Stormfront members emphasize distinctions
between racist efforts to hate, dominate, and oppress others (white supremacy) and noble
efforts to promote love of white people and protect white interests and culture (white
nationalism).
For example, in the most widely viewed “Introduction to Stormfront” thread, one
member shares a post made elsewhere on Stormfront by former KKK leader David
Duke.65 Here, Duke takes issue with the media’s tendency to label Stormfront “as
racists, haters, and even the ridiculous tag: White supremacists.”66 In the process of
attempting to distinguish Stormfront and white nationalism from these labels, Duke
affirms mainstream common sense definitions of racism and white supremacy as
“hating or oppressing other races” which, as he notes, “evokes a visceral feeling of
disgust” in most people.67 Indeed, “racism” and “white supremacy” have become
“sticky words,” as Ahmed argues, which mobilize negative affects such as hatred, repul-
sion, and disgust and compel disengagement with and divestment from that with which
they are articulated.68 Rather than attempt to challenge these sticky articulations, Duke
—one of the most infamous leaders of the United States’ most recognizable white supre-
macist organization—appeals to these common understandings of racism and white
supremacy to minimize their systemic functions and suggest that he and others have
been mislabeled and, by extension, misunderstood.
To disarticulate white nationalism from the negative affects articulated with racism and
white supremacy, white nationalists commonly mobilize an affective slide from hate (of
others) to love (of self and community).69 Duke sets this slide in motion here, arguing,
“obviously love of one’s own homeland, people, traditions, and values is not racist. In
reality, destruction of one’s people is true racism in the most extreme sense.”70 Similarly
to Stormfront’s welcome message, Duke constructs white nationalism as a loving commu-
nity among white people and warns that white traditions, values, and people are under
138 S. L. HARTZELL

threat of destruction. Negating the destructive history of white supremacy, Duke mobilizes
positive affective energies around love, communal belonging, and cultural preservation as
he imagines whiteness as innocent and in need of protection.
Further, by framing applications of the labels “racists,” “haters,” and “White suprema-
cists” to Stormfront and white nationalists as “ridiculous” and white nationalism as
“obviously … not racist,” Duke attempts to construct a common sense frame. Here,
white supremacy and white nationalism are imagined as clearly and obviously different
and any (mis)understanding of them as similar is a preposterous manifestation of the col-
orblind impetus to understand all formations of racial consciousness as racist. In the
process, Duke strategically negotiates mainstream white audiences’ commitment to color-
blindness by affirming the reasonability of rejecting white supremacy and its negative
affective articulations. The message becomes: when the illusions of colorblindness are
revealed, it is clear that white nationalism is different from white supremacy—love feels
good, hate feels bad.
Constructions of white supremacy-as-hate and white nationalism-as-love are mobilized
across Stormfront’s introductory content. For example, in a sticky post on frequently
asked questions about white nationalism, Stormfront member “Yggdrasil” answers the
question, “what is a White supremacist?” with,
that is a White who wishes to subjugate other races by force, ordinarily by military conquest.
White supremacists are very rare [today], there is no visible trend or base of support which
would allow them to carry such a political program into effect.71

Here, “subjugation,” “force,” and “conquest” affirm mainstream associations of white

supremacy with negative affects that mirror Duke’s articulation of “racism” with hatred
and oppression which, in this formation, take on the more direct contours of violence.
The (re)location of white supremacy to the distant past affirms the colorblind assumption
that white supremacy is limited to the most egregious manifestations of hatred and dom-
ination and has been virtually eradicated. To the question, “what is White Nationalism?”
“Yggdrasil” responds, “the idea that Whites may need to create a separate nation as a
means of defending themselves.”72 Importantly, the call to create a separate nation is
framed as being motivated not by hatred of other races, but by a need for white people
to defend themselves from yet-unnamed injustices, thereby mobilizing positive affective
energies articulated with the righteous reasonability of self-defense. On Stormfront,
white people are imagined as an “embattled minority” excluded from mainstream under-
standings of diversity and in need of advocacy and protection.

Promoting “true diversity” and protecting an “embattled minority”

Across Stormfront’s introductory posts, arguments that white people are the victims of
racial injustice are mobilized to compel divestment from the apathetic comfort of color-
blindness and affective investment in white nationalism. These efforts involve imagining
a myriad of ways that white people have been harmed by mainstream approaches to diver-
sity, multiculturalism, and antiracism, suggesting that white people would be able to “see”
these injustices clearly were it not for the illusions of colorblindness. Rather than rejecting
the powerful signifier of “diversity” outright, however, white nationalists affirm its
inherent value and attempt to capitalize on its polysemy. Specifically, white nationalists
 COMMUNICATION AND CRITICAL/CULTURAL STUDIES 139

challenge mainstream understandings of diversity-as-multiculturalism and work to rear-

ticulate diversity with racial separatism, where racial separatism is necessary to preserve
distinction among different racial groups.
For example, Stormfront member “Dr. Ford” shares a quote from prominent white
nationalist Greg Johnson, who argues,
[Whites] are the only group that is not allowed to think of ourselves as a distinct group with
distinct interests. … we whites are supposed to pretend that we do not exist as a people, but
only as adherents of the abstract “color-blind” ideology of human equality.73

Here, Johnson makes a common sense appeal for white racial consciousness and solidar-
ity, which he argues has been prohibited by mainstream commitments to colorblindness.
Johnson’s call is steeped in affective resentment toward other groups’ racial solidarity as he
suggests that if collective racial identity is acceptable for other groups, it should be accep-
table for white people. This argument takes a more radical turn as Johnson continues, “if
we persist in this long enough, of course, we will physically cease to exist as a people. We
will succumb to miscegenation, demographic collapse, or outright murder, as conquered
and enslaved peoples often do.” Implying that racial mixing and demographic diversity
constitute literal threats to the survival of white people as a distinct group, Johnson
mobilizes a sense of affective urgency around raising white racial consciousness, which
he frames as necessary for survival. By imagining white people as vulnerable to be “con-
quered” and “enslaved,” Johnson engages a dramatic rhetorical reversal premised on fear,
suggesting that white people should be afraid of becoming a minority precisely because
they have seen the effects of conquest and slavery (at their own hands). While eliding
the history of systemic white supremacy in his allusion to conquest and enslavement,
Johnson implies that white people should rightly fear becoming the victims of the injus-
tices they themselves have perpetrated.
To “protect and preserve” white people from threatening “others,” the ultimate goal of
white nationalism is the creation of a separate nation (or “homeland”) for white people.74
However, white nationalists admit that this goal is largely idealistic and, at least for the
time being, unrealistic.75 As such, Stormfront’s introductory content promotes the
abstract goal of creating a white nation while working more directly toward compelling
white folks to divest from colorblind comfort to “see” that their interests and, indeed,
their lives are threatened by the status quo. Because of these threats, white nationalists
argue that it is entirely reasonable and imperative to engage in collective efforts to
protect their interests and preserve their culture. In the process, Stormfront works
against the colorblind commitment to individuality and invites white people to identify
with white nationalism as a relational subjectivity—a community of white people invested
in their shared interests as white people.
White nationalists affirm that the process of racial awakening will trigger discomfort,
but this is framed as a necessary step on the path to seeing “the truth.” For example, in
the most heavily viewed introductory post focused on “What [White Nationalists]
Want, and Why,” “Dr. Ford,” acknowledges the affective pull toward colorblindness,
noting, “if given a choice, most people will choose a comforting delusion over the
truth.”76 Framing colorblindness as a delusion, “Ford” challenges its position as normative
common sense and suggests that mainstream audiences have been tricked into compro-
mising their objectivity for an illusion that may provide personal comfort, but is ultimately
140 S. L. HARTZELL

destructive to white people as a group. Because colorblindness positions white people as

apathetic to racial inequality, “Ford” suggests, they have been deceived into ignorance
of their own disadvantaged condition. By buying into the misguided belief in racial equal-
ity and denying the significance of race, “Ford” argues, white people have participated pas-
sively in their own oppression.
As new visitors browse Stormfront’s introductory content, they continuously encounter
the refrain that white nationalists do not “seek to dominate other races” and do not “feel
they are superior to other races,” but are simply attempting to “avoid exploitation.”77 To
illustrate these supposed exploitations, contributors offer a range of examples likely to res-
onate with disgruntled mainstream white audiences. “There are a variety of ‘triggers’ that
can cause an otherwise ‘normal’ White person to arrive here and want to listen,” says “Dr.
Ford.” These “triggers” include frustrations with “all the Mexicans, Africans, or Muslims
who are coming into and taking over your country or state” and the presumption that
“Whites are prohibited from having a racial collective identity, while every other racial
group is rewarded and encouraged to openly and zealously pursue their own group inter-
ests.”78 Additional “triggers” include “racial preference schemes” in hiring, university
admissions, and business practices, “the denial of rights of free speech and due process
to Whites,” forced contributions to “the welfare state,” “hatred in the hearts of non-
Whites,” and the perception that “the more Whites sacrifice, the more non-Whites
demand.”79
Together, the rhetoric of white victimhood woven through Stormfront’s introductory
content mobilizes rhetorical appeals to rights and equality while imagining white people
as having been excluded from freedoms enjoyed by communities of color and harmed
by mainstream approaches to diversity and multiculturalism. As previous research
demonstrates, many of the forms of “exploitation” and exclusion imagined on Stormfront
are expressed as frustrations by mainstream white folks, but are typically coded in the race-
evasive rhetoric of colorblindness.80 As such, new visitors are likely to identify with these
frustrations and, in turn, may perceive Stormfront as a place where their concerns can
“finally” be expressed openly, without fear of being labeled “racists” and the accompanying
affects of guilt and shame. By imagining white people as a marginalized community,
Stormfront mobilizes an affective slide from guilt to pride as rhetors attempt to absolve
whiteness from guilt associated with racial inequality. In the process, Stormfront
compels members to enact solidarity with one another as they embrace their purportedly
marginalized identity and fight righteously against their perceived oppression.
On Stormfront, white folks are applauded for expressing their racialized frustrations
and invited to feel the affective warmth of pride and righteousness associated with claim-
ing a marginalized identity, working toward justice, and refusing to be a passive victim.
Yet, Stormfront members are not free to express their frustrations as openly as one
might expect. Maintaining the rhetorical distance between white nationalism and white
supremacy imagined by Stormfront’s introductory material requires more than just sub-
stantive claims that white nationalism is not racist. Stylistically, white nationalist rhetoric
must reject mainstream expectations of “racist” rhetoric to look and feel different from
white supremacist rhetoric—airing racialized frustrations must be done in a particular
way. To unpack stylistic attempts to imagine white nationalism as a common sense, posi-
tive formation of white racial consciousness, I turn now to an examination of the sites’
discursive rules.
 COMMUNICATION AND CRITICAL/CULTURAL STUDIES 141

Regulating white nationalist discourse

While most content on Stormfront is available for unrestricted browsing, visitors who
wish to post on the message board must abide by a set of rules. These rules facilitate Storm-
front’s efforts to negotiate mainstream white audiences’ normative (dis)comfort with
direct discourse on race by creating and enforcing stylistic distinctions between white
nationalism and white supremacy. Examining the presentation and negotiation of Storm-
front’s discursive rules reveals calculated attempts to resist mainstream perceptions of
white supremacist groups as ignorant, hateful, and violent and to imagine Stormfront
as an alternative, affectively positive atmosphere—an educated, reasonable, peaceful
“pro-white community.”
After browsing introductory content, new visitors are directed to the “Guidelines for
Posting” forum, where they encounter a sticky post with a short list of discursive rules.
Here, Don Black mandates that members engage only in “civil and productive” discus-
sions, avoid the suggestion of violence or any illegal activities, and resist the use of
profanity and racial epithets, urging members to “remember that words have conse-
quences, both for you and others.”81 Although they once proliferated on Stormfront,
common racial slurs (e.g., “the n word”) are now automatically censored, traditionally
racist imagery (especially the swastika) is banned, and overt calls to violence are for-
bidden. This particular set of rules was instituted in 2008 as Stormfront received an
influx of new visitors following the first election of Barack Obama to the US American
presidency.82 As others have demonstrated, although it has been frequently heralded as
evidence of a “postracial” United States, Obama’s election and presidency marked a
period of significant white racial anxiety and a resurgence of white supremacist
activity.83 It is no surprise, then, that 2008 also marks the peak of Stormfront’s popu-
larity, with both guest visitors and new registrations rising to an all-time high.84 That
the introduction of mandates against recognizable white supremacist symbols coincides
with this spike in popularity is no accident. As new visitors flocked to the site in
droves, moderators made purposeful efforts to make Stormfront a more welcoming
place for mainstream white audiences.
Beyond strict prohibitions against particular symbolic representations of white supre-
macy that are likely to make mainstream white audiences uncomfortable, Stormfront
makes concerted efforts to enable and constrain a particular formation of white nationalist
rhetoric. Proper spelling and grammar are encouraged in an effort to reach a wider audi-
ence and construct rhetorical distance between white nationalists and white supremacists,
who are commonly perceived as ignorant and uneducated.85 As one moderator noted, “we
are trying to encourage many more people to come and read what we have to say. We can
do a much better job if our posts show that we actually take care in making ourselves look
good.”86 Moderators screen all posts by new members before they appear on the message
board, and members are required to build a good reputation before they are able to bypass
moderation and post directly to the site.87 Moderators are clear that the purpose of Storm-
front’s rules is to enhance outreach efforts in mainstream white communities by promot-
ing white nationalism as a “positive” orientation to white racial consciousness.
“Stormfront has a purpose,” one moderator notes, “to give our people hope and infor-
mation, to feel positive about being white, and to suggest constructive solutions to our
142 S. L. HARTZELL

problems. When you significantly violate our guidelines you may be undermining the
purpose of this site.”88
Within introductory threads, most members affirm the importance of Stormfront’s
rules. As member “LilithaVain” notes, “if we go out there sounding like a bunch of
racists, we will never win. How will we ever win if we go out there and say, ‘Black
people are bad! We really need to take our country back!’89 If Stormfront is to effectively
interpellate mainstream white audiences, in other words, a majority of members must par-
ticipate in the coconstruction of a “positive community” that resists normative expec-
tations around how white supremacy looks, sounds, and, especially, feels. Yet, even as
members affirm the importance of the site’s rules, they are clear that they are “play[ing]
a game.”90 As “LilithaVain” reveals, “I would LOVE nothing MORE than to be able to
go out there and yell that very thing, but it’s just not viable.”91 This candid post demon-
strates that white nationalists are willing to compromise their own desires (to communi-
cate explicit hatred) in order to maximize their viability, revealing that white nationalism’s
emphasis on love (of white people) is merely one side of the white supremacist coin. The
expressed desire to “protect and preserve white culture” belies the implications of promot-
ing the continued dominance of an already-dominant group—the further marginalization
and oppression of minoritized groups.
Although members generally adhere to Stormfront’s discursive rules and regulations,
there is occasional pushback. When resistance is expressed, moderators and members
justify the site’s rules through appeals to common sense rooted in observed reactions to
overtly hateful rhetoric. For example, in a linked response to a sticky post on Stormfront’s
discursive rules, one disgruntled member posted,
I can not believe what I’ve been reading here. You people say that NAZI’S are bad … and
talk of the swastika as if you were a bunch of 1930s JEWS! Savage *****s are running ramped,
Mexicans are flooding our country, and jews have taken over our media, government, and
even our religions. And every mud monkey in the world is moving in next door. And you
are worried about hurtting someones feelings. has political correctness taken you over?92

Several members responded by underscoring the practical purpose of Stormfront’s rules—

to present a positive public image for white nationalists. One member chastised the orig-
inal poster’s aggressive style, noting, “We really need smart arguments if we are actually
going to win this.”93 Another member added,
some of the volk who have been around awhile are against the swastika because they have also
been around long enough to see the RESULTS that parading it around in public have netted.
In short, not only zero results but tons of backlash.94

This discussion illustrates how appeals to common sense are mobilized to justify expec-
tations of the rhetorical form white nationalism should take in public contexts. White
nationalists have seen that mainstream white audiences are resistant to certain racist
words and imagery. So, if they want to foster a sense of identification and belonging
among mainstream white folks, they should obviously avoid using those symbols in
order to minimize discomfort and resistance.
As a whole, discourse on Stormfront’s rules illuminates the strategic negotiation of
mainstream white folks’ commitments to colorblindness. White nationalists must make
white folks feel good about being white in order to coax them out of colorblindness and
 COMMUNICATION AND CRITICAL/CULTURAL STUDIES 143

interpellate them into white nationalist racial consciousness. Thus, even as white nation-
alists lambaste the purported suppression of their free speech in the public sphere, they
have prioritized appealing to mainstream white audiences’ comfort over promoting
unrestricted expression on their largest and most influential platform.

As colorblindness crumbles
Stormfront purports to be a welcoming online community wherein white people can learn
about what it means to be white and develop a sense of pride, solidarity, and communal
belonging with one another. Mainstream white audiences are invited to alleviate their dis-
comfort with proliferating discourse on race in the mainstream public sphere by imagining
themselves as the “real” victims of contemporary racial inequality, left behind by decades
of antiracist progress and precluded from any claim to “positive” white identity in a society
that holds them personally responsible for historical aberrations in which they had no
hand. And although there is plenty of explicit racism to be found on Stormfront, the enfor-
cement of discursive rules has scrubbed it of the most recognizable forms of hate speech
and its introductory content would have new visitors believe that white nationalists, unlike
white supremacists, have no interest in hatred or domination—they simply seek a commu-
nity that will protect their interests and preserve their culture. A place to feel good about
being white.
On Stormfront, white nationalism is imagined as a common sense alternative to both
colorblindness and white supremacy. Yet, it should be clear at this point that white
nationalism is white supremacy and efforts to downplay this interconnection are part
and parcel of white supremacist rhetorical strategy. Stormfront is a toxic community
that provides disgruntled white people with over 20 years of propaganda that teaches
them how to do the work of white supremacy while evading accusations of racism
and minimizing personal risk. Operating in the interstices between race-evasive rhetoric
and overt proclamations of race-based hatred, white nationalist rhetoric on Stormfront
strategically negotiates white folks’ (dis)comfort to coax them out of colorblindness and
into a formation of racial consciousness in which whiteness is openly privileged and
praised.
With a sitting US American president who ran on a platform of racist nostalgia and
won the enthusiastic support of avowed white supremacists, white supremacy has been
thrust back into the spotlight. Moreover, with an ever-growing list of violently racist
crimes and the knowledge that many perpetrators were active in online white supremacist
networks, including Stormfront, we are learning the consequences of allowing organized
and explicit hatred to fester in the ugliest and darkest corners of the Internet—out of sight
and out of mind.95 The contemporary resurgence of white supremacy that seems to many
in the mainstream to have come “out of nowhere” has come, instead, from decades of
behind-the-scenes strategizing that is capitalizing on a kairotic moment. We need to be
vigilantly attentive to the myriad ways in which white supremacy mobilizes and manifests
in and across particular contexts if we hope to work against racism in our scholarship,
teaching, and/or activism. Ultimately, all formations of white supremacy are intercon-
nected. The formations that are most prevalent or persuasive at any given time certainly
warrant particular attention, but so do those that are simmering just below the surface,
awaiting an opportune moment to work their way into the mainstream.
144 S. L. HARTZELL

To that end, additional research is needed to examine the various formations of racial
consciousness—racist and antiracist—by which mainstream white audiences are being
hailed in order to illuminate how whiteness maneuvers as the illusion of common sense
colorblindness crumbles. Moving white folks from racial unconsciousness toward racial
consciousness is a deeply affective process, and investments in any particular racial ideol-
ogy hinge on who and what white folks are compelled to care about. However, asking how
to compel white people to care deeply about people of color and racial injustice feels mis-
guided. White feelings have long been centered in mainstream discourse on race and
racism, and the impetus to maintain white comfort has consistently shifted energy and
attention away from concerted efforts to dismantle white supremacy. Yet, we cannot dis-
regard white people or white feelings outright, precisely because they have systemically
foiled antiracist progress. Critical scholars—particularly those who share with me the
racial privilege to wade through the rhetoric of whiteness in its most toxic formations—
must continue to grapple with the messy relationship among whiteness, affect, and
(anti)-racism to excavate the productive potentials and problematic implications of
appealing and attending to white feelings. I do not purport to have clear answers on
how best to do this work, but I do know one thing for certain—if white antiracist scholars,
educators, and activists are unwilling to foster white folks’ affective investments in antira-
cism, there is no shortage of white supremacists waiting to offer a warm welcome.

Notes
1. Maria Krysan and Sarah Patton Moberg, “Trends in Racial Attitudes,” University of Illinois
Institute of Government and Public Affairs, August 25, 2016, https://igpa.uillinois.edu/
programs/racial-attitudes.
2. The term “colorblind/ness” perpetuates ableism by appropriating language rooted in a
medical condition (the inability to see/distinguish certain colors). I continue to use this
term because of its widespread use and recognizability across interdisciplinary critical race
and whiteness studies scholarship, but the innovation of more inclusive language should
be pursued.
3. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial
Inequality in America, 4th ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014), 3–5.
4. Ibid.
5. Joe R. Feagin, Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 2006), 4–5.
6. Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists, 25–9.
7. Lisa A. Flores, Dreama G. Moon, and Thomas K. Nakayama, “Dynamic Rhetorics of Race:
Califiornia’s Racial Privacy Initiative and the Shifting Grounds of Racial Politics,” Communi-
cation and Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 3 (2006): 183–4.
8. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and others, Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against
Black Women (New York: African American Policy Forum Center for Intersectionality and
Policy Studies, 2015), http://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f20d90e4b0b80451158d8c/t/
560c068ee4b0af26f72741df/1443628686535/AAPF_SMN_Brief_Full_singles-min.pdf; Theresa
L. Petray and Rowan Collin, “Your Privilege is Trending: Confronting Whiteness on Social
Media,” Social Media + Society (2017): 1–10.
9. Center on Extremism, New Hate and Old: The Changing Face of American White Supremacy
(New York: Anti-Defamation League, September 2018), https://www.adl.org/media/11894/
download; Chaucey DeVega, “Donald Trump, White Supremacist Violence, and American
Surrender: The Connections are Clear,” Salon, August 5, 2019, https://www.salon.com/
2019/08/05/donald-trump-white-supremacist-violence-and-american-surrender-the-connec
tions-are-clear/.
 COMMUNICATION AND CRITICAL/CULTURAL STUDIES 145

10. Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why it’s so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2018), 54.
11. Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists, 83–7; DiAngelo, White Fragility, 118–22.
12. See Dreama G. Moon and Anthony Hurst, “‘Reasonable Racism’: The ‘New’ White Supre-
macy and Hurricane Katrina,” in Through the Eye of Katrina: Social Justice in the United
States, eds. Kristin A. Bates and Richelle S. Swan (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press,
2007), 125–45; Stephanie Hartzell, “Alt-White: Conceptualizing the ‘Alt-Right’ as a Rhetori-
cal Bridge between White Nationalism and Mainstream Public Discourse,” Journal of Con-
temporary Rhetoric 8, no. 1/2 (2018): 6–25.
13. For a review on (dis)similarities among many of these formations, see Lorraine Bowman-
Grieve, “Exploring ‘Stormfront’: A Virtual Community of the Radical Right,” Studies in
Conflict & Terrorism 32, no. 11 (2009): 989–1007.
14. Adam Serwer, “Conservatives Have a White-Nationalism Problem,” Atlantic, August 6, 2019,
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/trump-white-nationalism/595555/;
Hartzell, “Alt-White.”
15. Southern Poverty Law Center, “The Forums,” Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law
Center, 2015, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2015/forums.
16. Southern Poverty Law Center, “White Nationalist,” Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law
Center, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/white-nationalist
(accessed May 21, 2019).
17. Hartzell, “Alt-White,” 10.
18. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 1–15, 63.
19. Hartzell, “Alt-White,” 9.
20. T. K. Kim, “Hate Website Stormfront Sees Rapid Growth of Neo-Nazi Community,” Intelli-
gence Report, July 27, 2005, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/
2005/hate-website-stormfront-sees-rapid-growth-neo-nazi-community.
21. Ibid.
22. Keegan Hankes and Sam Zhang, “A Waning Storm: Once the World’s Most Popular White
Nationalist Website, Stormfront is Running out of Steam,” Montgomery, AL: Southern
Poverty Law Center, February 22, 2017, https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/02/22/
waning-storm-once-world%E2%80%99s-most-popular-white-nationalist-website-stormfro
nt-running-out.
23. Longitudinal data compiled via the WayBack machine, https://web.archive.org/web/
*/stormfront.org; Daily statistics available at Homepage, Stormfront, accessed August 22,
2019, http://www.stormfront.org.
24. Hankes and Zhang, “A Waning Storm”; Kelly Weill, “Stormfront, the Internet’s Oldest White
Supremacist Site, Says it’s Going Broke,” The Daily Beast, April 10, 2018, https://www.
thedailybeast.com/stormfront-the-internets-oldest-white-supremacist-site-says-its-going-broke.
25. Bowman-Grieve, “Exploring ‘Stormfront’,” 989–1007; Willem De Koster and Dick
Houtman, “Stormfront is Like a Second Home to Me: On Virtual Community Formation
by Right-Wing Extremists,” Information, Communication, & Society 11, no. 8 (2008):
1155–76.
26. Priscilla Marie Meddaugh and Jack Kay, “Hate Speech or ‘Reasonable Racism?’ The Other in
Stormfront,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 24 (2009): 254.
27. Carrie Crenshaw, “Resisting Whiteness’ Rhetorical Silence,” Western Journal of Communi-
cation 61, no. 3 (1997): 253–78; Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness:
A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 297; Rachel Alicia Griffin, “Pro-
blematic Representations of Strategic Whiteness and ‘Post-Racial’ Pedagogy: A Critical Inter-
cultural Reading of The Help,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 8,
no. 2 (2015): 147–66; Phil Chidester, “May the Circle Stay Unbroken: Friends, the Presence of
Absence, and the Rhetorical Reinforcement of Whiteness,” Critical Studies in Media Com-
munication 25, no. 2 (2008): 157–74; Eric King Watts, “Postracial Fantasies, Blackness,
and Zombies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14, no. 4 (2017): 317–33;
Michelle A. Holling, Dreama G. Moon, and Alexandra Jackson Nevis, “Racist Violations
146 S. L. HARTZELL

and Racializing Apologia in a Post-Racism Era,” Journal of International and Intercultural

Communication 7, no. 4 (2014): 260–86; Michelle A. Holling, “Patrolling National Identity,
Masking White Supremacy: The Minuteman Project,” in Critical Rhetorics of Race, eds.
Michael G. Lacy and Kent A. Ono (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 98–116.
28. See “White Supremacy in the Age of Trump,” ed. George McHendry, Jr., special issue,
Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric 8, no. 1/2 (2018).
29. Denise M. Bostdorff, “The Internet Rhetoric of the Ku Klux Klan: A Case Study in Web Site
Community Building Run Amok,” Communication Studies 55, no. 2 (2004): 340–61; Pete
Simi and Robert Futrell, “Cyberculture and the Endurance of White Power Activism,”
Journal of Political and Military Sociology 34, no. 1 (2006): 115–42; Bowman-Grieve, “Explor-
ing ‘Stormfront’.”
30. Christopher Brown, “WWW.HATE.COM: White Supremacist Discourse on the Internet and
the Construction of Whiteness Ideology,” The Howard Journal of Communications 20 (2009):
190.
31. Jessie Daniels, Cyberracism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights
(New York: Roman and Littlefield, 2009).
32. Vann R. Newkirk II, “Trump’s White-Nationalist Pipeline,” The Atlantic, August 23, 2018,
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/trump-white-nationalism/568393/;
Graeme Wood, “His Kampf,” The Atlantic, June 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/
magazine/archive/2017/06/his-kampf/524505/; Anna Merlan, “Inside a White-Nationalist
Cookout,” Rolling Stone, April 16, 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-
features/anna-merlan-republic-lies-white-nationalist-cookout-kentucky-822598/.
33. Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez, “Nightmares of Whiteness,” in Interrogating the Com-
municative Power of Whiteness, eds. Dawn Marie D. McIntosh, Dreama G. Moon, and
Thomas K. Nakayama (New York: Routledge, 2018), 202.
34. Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 79, vol. 22, no. 2 (2004): 117–39.
35. Ibid., 120.
36. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2006), 126–8.
37. See Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010).
38. Christian Lundberg, “Enjoying God’s Death: The Passion of the Christ and the Practices of an
Evangelical Public,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 4 (2009): 390.
39. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 230–1;
Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings
(New York: New York University Press, 2014), 17.
40. Deleuzian inflections of affect theory tend to emphasize affect’s transcendental capacities and
extradiscursivity, see Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” in Deleuze: A Critical
Reader, ed. Paul Patton (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996), 217–39. For an overview of a critical
perspective on affect, see Jenny Edbauer Rice, “The New ‘New’: Making a Case for Critical
Affect Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 2 (2008): 200–12.
41. Clare Hemmings, “Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn,” Cultural
Studies 19, no. 5 (2005): 559–62.
42. Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” 119.
43. King Watts, “Postracial Fantasies,” 318; Ashley Noel Mack and Bryan J. McCann, “‘Strictly
an Act of Street Violence’: Intimate Publicity and Affective Divestment in the New Orleans
Mother’s Day Shooting,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14, no. 4 (2017): 335.
44. Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists, 13 (emphasis mine).
45. Hamid Mowlana, “On the Common Sense of Communication and the Communication of
Common Sense,” China Media Research 12, no. 3 (2016): 2.
46. Derek Edwards, Discourse and Cognition (London: Sage, 1997), 256.
47. Mowlana, “On the Common Sense,” 2; Stuart Hall, “Signification, Representation, Ideology:
Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2, no.
2 (1985): 105.
 COMMUNICATION AND CRITICAL/CULTURAL STUDIES 147

48. Ian Haney López, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race, 10th ed. (New York:
New York University Press, 2006), 115–16; Bethan Benwell, “Common-sense Anti-Racism in
Book Group Talk: The Role of Reported Speech,” Discourse & Society 23, no. 4 (2012): 360–1.
49. Nakayama and Krizek, “Whiteness,” 298–303.
50. DiAngelo, White Fragility, 54.
51. Mamta Motwani Accapadi, “When White Women Cry: How White Women’s Tears Oppress
Women of Color,” College Student Affairs Journal 26, no. 2 (2007), 213–14.
52. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 126–8.
53. There are four “open forums” for unregistered guests to ask questions and one “private
forum” restricted to donors.
54. Dr. Ford, “Part I: An Introduction to Stormfront and the Pro-White Movement” [Msg. 1],
Stormfront, May 23, 2013, https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t968576/ (accessed June 7,
2019). 298,300 views, 8,912 words, 250 replies; Jack Boot, “White Nationalism FAQ—Ygg-
drasil” [Msg. 1], Stormfront, October 21, 2013, https://www.stormfront.org/forum/
t1001939/ (accessed June 7, 2019). 158,407 views, 1,184 words, 93 replies.
55. Don Black, “Welcome: Guidelines for Posting” [Msg. 1], Stormfront, October 26, 2001, http://
www.stormfront.org/forum/t4359/ (accessed June 7, 2019). 539,493 views, 319 words, replies
disabled.
56. John Law, “FAQ New Members Please Read This Before Posting” [Msg. 1], Stormfront,
November 15, 2007, http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t437170/ (accessed June 7, 2019).
38,222 views, 400 words, 18 replies. Toward the end of my analysis, I also consider a
thread linked in this post to offer a representative example of pushback.
57. View counts for other posts in these forums tend to range between a hundred and several
thousand.
58. I place Stormfront users’ names in quotation marks unless their identities have been verified
to distinguish between anonymous and well-known voices.
59. Hartzell, “Alt-White,” 19.
60. Don Black, as quoted by Southern Poverty Law Center, “Stormfront,” Montgomery, AL:
Southern Poverty Law Center, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/
group/stormfront (accessed May 30, 2019).
61. Anti-Defamation League, “Celtic Cross,” New York: Anti-Defamation League, https://www.
adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/celtic-cross (accessed February 4, 2019).
62. Homepage, Stormfront, http://www.stormfront.org (accessed May 31, 2019; emphasis in
original).
63. There are five posts in this forum; however, I focus on the most relevant two, which provide
a comprehensive overview of foundational white nationalist beliefs. The other three posts
focus on white supremacist books, immigration, and perspectives on Jewish people
respectively.
64. Ray Sanchez, “Who Are White Nationalists and What Do They Want?,” CNN, August 13,
2017, https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/13/us/white-nationalism-explainer-trnd/index.html;
Eric K. Ward, “As White Supremacy Falls Down, White Nationalism Stands Up,” Pop
Culture Collab, October 31, 2017, https://popcollab.org/white-supremacy-falls-white-
nationalism-stands/.
65. David Duke, as quoted by vikingcelt, “Re: Part I: An Introduction to Stormfront and the Pro-
White Movement” [Msg. 115], Stormfront, January 7, 2015, https://www.stormfront.org/
forum/t968576-12/ (accessed June 7, 2019).
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” 122.
69. Ibid., 117–18.
70. Duke, as quoted by vikingcelt, “Re: Part I.”
71. Yggdrasil, as quoted by Jack Boot, “White Nationalism FAQ.”
72. Ibid.
148 S. L. HARTZELL

73. Greg Johnson, as quoted by Dr. Ford, “Part I: An Introduction to Stormfront and the Pro-
White Movement” [Msg. 1], Stormfront, May 23, 2013, https://www.stormfront.org/forum/
t968576/ (accessed June 7, 2019).
74. Yggdrasil, as quoted by Jack Boot, “White Nationalism FAQ.”
75. Ibid.
76. Dr. Ford, “Part I.”
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid.
79. Yggdrasil, as quoted by Jack Boot, “White Nationalism FAQ.”
80. Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists; DiAngelo, White Fragility; Holling, “Patrolling
National Identity.”
81. Don Black, “Welcome: Guidelines for Posting.”
82. Southern Poverty Law Center, “Stormfront.”
83. King Watts, “Postracial Fantasies,” 318; Mark Potok, “President Obama? Many White Supre-
macists are Celebrating,” Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center, June 11, 2008,
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2008/06/11/president-obama-many-white-
supremacists-are-celebrating.
84. Hankes and Zhang, “A Waning Storm.”
85. Hawthorn, “FAQ New Members Please Read This Before Posting” [Msg. 7], Stormfront,
January 17, 2009, http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t437170/ (accessed June 7, 2019), 359
words.
86. Ibid.
87. John Law, “FAQ New Members Please Read This Before Posting.”
88. Hawthorn, “FAQ New Members Please Read This Before Posting” [Msg. 4], Stormfront, July
8, 2008, http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t437170/ (accessed June 7, 2019), 84 words
(emphasis mine).
89. LilithaVain, “Re: Part I: An Introduction to Stormfront and the Pro-White Movement” [Msg.
118], Stormfront, February 2, 2015, https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t968576-12/
(accessed June 7, 2019), 407 words.
90. Ibid.
91. Ibid.
92. Hank, “When Political Correctness Is Not Correct,” [Msg. 1], Stormfront, April 26, 2002,
https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t20098/ (accessed June 7, 2019), 113 words (errors and
censorship in original post).
93. Frej, “When Political Correctness Is Not Correct,” [Msg. 3], Stormfront, April 26, 2002,
https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t20098/ (accessed June 7, 2019), 151 words (emphasis
mine).
94. New Hickory, “When Political Correctness Is Not Correct,” [Msg. 5], Stormfront, April 27,
2002, https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t20098/ (accessed June 7, 2019), 715 words.
95. Center on Extremism. “White Supremacist Violence and Crime,” New Hate and Old: The
Changing Face of American White Supremacy (New York: Anti-Defamation League, 2018),
https://www.adl.org/new-hate-and-old#white-supremacist-violence-and-crime; Heidi Beirich,
“White Homicide Worldwide,” Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2014,
https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/d6_legacy_files/downloads/publication/white-
homicide-worldwide.pdf.

ORCID
Stephanie L. Hartzell http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9005-1327