The SPLC has done an analysis of Stormfront’s contribution to murder. It’s a bit unsettling: it has story after story of proud racists posting unashamedly on Stormfront, and then going off to gun someone down. And so many of them fit this profile!
A typical murderer drawn to the racist forum Stormfront.org is a frustrated, unemployed, white adult male living with his mother or an estranged spouse or girlfriend. She is the sole provider in the household. Forensic psychologists call him a “wound collector.” Instead of building his resume, seeking employment or further education, he projects his grievances on society and searches the Internet for an excuse or an explanation unrelated to his behavior or the choices he has made in life.
His escalation follows a predictable trajectory. From right-wing antigovernment websites and conspiracy hatcheries, he migrates to militant hate sites that blame society’s ills on ethnicity and shifting demographics. He soon learns his race is endangered — a target of “white genocide.” After reading and lurking for a while, he needs to talk to someone about it, signing up as a registered user on a racist forum where he commiserates in an echo chamber of angry fellow failures where Jews, gays, minorities and multiculturalism are blamed for everything.
Assured of the supremacy of his race and frustrated by the inferiority of his achievements, he binges online for hours every day, self-medicating, slowly sipping a cocktail of rage. He gradually gains acceptance in this online birthing den of self-described “lone wolves,” but he gets no relief, no practical remedies, no suggestions to improve his circumstances. He just gets angrier.
And then he gets a gun.
Also chilling: Anders Breivik was a fan. Such a fan that he took care to protect Stormfront by lying about his involvement.
Hours before he began his terror campaign, Breivik E-mailed a copy of his racist manifesto to two other influential Stormfront members, Billy Joe Roper (see related story, p. XX) and Timothy Gallaher Murdock, who runs the racist WhiteRabbitRadio.net. In his manifesto, Breivik claimed he was banned from Stormfront, though a search shows no suspension. Breivik later admitted he was not removed as a registered member.
“I was never kicked out of Stormfront,” he said last September. “Instead, I attacked them in the compendium in order to protect them … [as] an army of leftist journalists otherwise would strike hard.”
Read it and learn how horrible human beings can be…and how participation in Stormfront can be a useful marker for evil.
Surely the NSA is all over this — aren’t they?
Aggrieved entitlement. There are a whole lot of people who think the world owes them everything on a silver platter. Scary.
machintelligence:
Stormfront has been around for ages.
From the same source.
In the last 5 years, Stormfronters have murdered 100 people.
There are other similar websites with their own collection of bigots.
The actual number of people murdered by White Supremacists has to be higher than 100 for last 5 years. The Overland Park guy was on one called VNN.
I consider myself a civil libertarian and I’ve been a card-carrying member of the ACLU for nearly forty years, but I think every single member of Stormfront should be under constant observation. They constitute a clear and present danger to decent people. If they never “graduate” to violence, they can fulminate in peace; but if they start stalking and planning “revenge” against their imaginary oppressors, they need to be swiftly nipped in the bud. These haters don’t go to Stormfront merely to vent their frustrations. They go there to build up their anger to the sticking point. Give them some eternal vigilance.
I’m sure they are. That is what the NSA is supposed to be doing.
They do stuff like this a lot.
J.T. Ready killed his ex-wife, his daughter, his daughter’s boyfriend, and his grandaughter.
This somehow made the world safer for white people. Or something.
Holy shit. I knew they were a collection of vile racists, but I had no idea they had such connections to actual white supremacist murderers. I always thought of them as the assholes who tried to launch a racist board invasion of a Star Wars discussion forum I participated in years ago.
While the NSA has an extensive surveillance program, they are required by statute to confine their analyses to non-US citizens. Many US citizens get caught up in the data collection, but are only to be pursued if links to foreign threats are shown. They are (supposed to be) constrained by law to leave domestic terrorism to the FBI.
Whether individuals at NSA have abided by these constraints (and Snowden said that many didn’t), their mission is to keep us from being surprised by foreign threats. With all the publicity, I’m sure the oversight on this is much tougher now.
The NSA and the media in the USA tend to focus on murders that have a muslim terrorist slant rather than a domestic white supremacist slant. Meanwhile, our domestic “lone wolves” who are not really alone kill more U.S. citizens.
Salon posted an article today about the guy who founded the “White Man March.”
Excerpt below:
Related links: Rachel Maddow: Right Wing Press “Playing With Fire” Making Bundy A Hero
Rachel Maddow presents history and current news, including stats on how many “lone wolf” crazy white U.S. “patriots” kill people.
I just knew it was Obama’s fault.
Breitbart -> Whirled Nuts Daily/Free Republic -> Stormfront
It’s not even farfetched.
The nice thing about Stormfront is that it puts so many of the terrorists in one place. This makes the FBI’s surveillance job much, much easier. If it were closed down they’d have to wait until some other turd floated to the top of the septic tank.
@11 Lynna, OM
Notice how White Christians who do this are either heroes on FOX “News” or “lone nuts”.
If they were radical Black racists or Muslims or Negotiation is Over types they’d be (rightly) labelled terrorists. But you just can’t say that blood-swilling, flesh-eating Manly Men who get down on their knees and let Jesus enter them are terrorists because it makes Republicans sad.
The older Tsarnaev brother responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing kept a stash of rightwing white supremacist propaganda in his apartment.
Talking Points memo link.
No need, I’m already quite aware, thanks.
Adolf Hitler was a far greater man than Stalin, Churchill and FDR combined. Hands down. He stands head and shoulders above any of the so-called leaders of today.
Aside form everything else, this was a man whose bungling cost Germany any chance to win the war. He was an incompetent military strategist, who made many strategic mistakes before the war even started and numerous strategic mistakes after the war began,which were exacerbated by his pre-war blunders. It is profoundly amusing that so many right wing nutcases admire this fellow. One could write an essay of considerable length detailing his record of military incompetence but I don’t think that Prof. Myers would appreciate the use of so much bandwidth.
No: they’re either “lone nuts”, or made out to be liberals or leftists, or somehow the fault of liberals and leftists.
Cliven Bundy is a mormon who has ties to white supremacist. Steve Benson’s cartoon.
Discussion on ex-mormon forum of white supremacy, KKK, etc:
http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1240908,1240981
Many of the former mormon prophets, including Ezra Taft Benson, were racists. They believed in white supremacy and in mormon supremacy. You will find discussions on the Stormfront forum of all the white babies born to mormons.
Tea Part activists are planning “Operation American Spring.” Text on signs, “We came unarmed (this time)”.
There’s quite a bit overlap between Tea Party members and militia members.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/19/1293168/-Tea-Party-Militias-plan-American-Spring?
One fact that stands out to me is that many of the anti-government Stormfront/militia/libertarian types are actually benefitting quite a bit from both state and federal government.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/04/17/3428051/nevada-rancher-re-run/
That is what the NSA is supposed to be doing.
No, that’s what the FBI is supposed to be doing. The NSA is supposed to do international espionage, only.
Of course, they are also spying domestically, which is illegal, but
#define SARCASM
they do it anyway, because otherwise the terrorists will win.
#undef SARCASM
Cliven Bundy is a Welfare Queen. A Moocher. A Taker.
1. The grazing fee is $1.43 per AUM, a cow and calf per month. Or 72 cents per animal per month. For Cthulhu’s sake, you can’t even buy a cup of Starbucks for that any more. I spend that much in two days for my cats!!!
A cow at auction can be worth $2,000.
2. It’s about 10% of the private and state grazing fees, per AUM, animal unit month.
As Lynna just pointed out, its Food Stamps and Welfare for the ranchers. A great deal that Bundy threw away to declare himself his own nation not under US law.
3. The whole grazing allotment system was set up in the ’40’s at the urging of the ranchers. Before it was a Tragedy of the Commons. Anyone could graze the land so you had every rancher out to get as much as they could. Plus sheepherders. They would have “range wars” over who got the public grass.
The result was land with no vegetation whatsoever, that couldn’t support your cows, your neighbor’s cows, or those pesky migrating sheepherders. So they partially privatized it just like Adam Smith would have done with the grazing allotment system.
There are 16,000 or 23,000 (depending on the source) law abiding more or less normal ranchers with grazing allotments. There is one Sovereign Citizen homicidal kook Mormon i.e. Cliven Bundy.
Side note, but does this sound like some MRAs to anybody else?
Three words: Rote Armee Fraktion.
There are certain attitudes and groups that engender, support, lead to and thrive on violence.
Let the Founders ALWAYS be our guide.
I love that shit. The founders were a bunch of greedy oligarchs. Just the wrong sort of people to worship, authoritarian bootlickers!!
Not much surprising in the profile. I’ve seen my share of them, and they generally don’t show any intellectual talent worth employment.
Alteredstory:
It’s all aggrieved entitlement. While it can cause people to take different paths, it’s from the same source. There’s a deep sense of a loss of power; these folks don’t want a level playing field,* they want power and dominance.
*There’s a lot of talk about a level playing field, but y’know, it’s not what they actually want.
Alteredstory
It sounds exactly like MRAs.
In fact, I’d like to see a similar study into the online history of predatory stalkers and domestic abusers.
Yes, I’ve been convinced for some time now that libertarians are not actually “anti-statists” in any real sense. The useful idiots might feel they are “anti-government”, but I think the movement leaders understand that “anti-government” really only means pro-corporations. The libertarian base are not thinkers.
That pretty much describes me exempt I blame everything on religiosity
Does this report of ‘more than a hundred’ Stormfront-related murders include Breivik’s 77 victims?
If Breivik is included, what would the inauguration of Barack Obama have to do with the activities of a Norwegian islamophobe? Breivik’s ‘success’ as a killer tends to bias all the figures anyway if he’s included.
According to the Guardian article on this subject, the report found 10 murderers on Stormfront, including Breivik. Does this leave 9 USian murderers killing 33+ people since ?? Those events should be easily listable?
It would also be interesting to have an analysis of the ethnicity of the victims. As I recall, an astonishing number involved mistaken identity (I’m thinking of the Sikh temple attack as well as this latest one where the intended targets were Jewish), whereas Breivik deliberately decided to go after his own, majority ethnic group. Kind of makes you think again about who, exactly, these idiots are a danger to.
@Lynna, OM
Thanks so much for your informative posts. Never heard of “Operation American Spring” before. These people are very scary and I can see that they are planning violence when their stupid tactics do not work to depose President Obama and his administration. Straight up racists. I will place any violence fully at the feet of the Republican party which has failed to stand up to the bigots in its own party.
While I am not a rightist in any sense, this borders on the just-world fallacy. Many people are genuinely suffering due to the economic system, especially during this long recession. Dramatic rises in the rate of unemployment aren’t due to millions of people suddenly becoming incompetent at their jobs. It is unfortunate that people turn to racism or conspiracy theories to try to explain their suffering.
@Alteredstory #24
Same process, different privilege.