XPost: ba.politics, dc.media, soc.penpals   
   XPost: alt.burningman   
   From: holohoax@splc.org   
      
   VIKINGMAIDEN88 is 26 years old. She enjoys reading history and   
   writing poetry. Her signature quote is from Shakespeare. She was   
   impressed when the dialect quiz in The New York Times correctly   
   identified where she was from: Tacoma and Spokane, Wash.   
   “Completely spot on,” she wrote, followed by a smiling green   
   emoji.   
      
   I gleaned all this from her profile and posts on Stormfront.org,   
   America’s most popular online hate site.   
      
   I recently analyzed tens of thousands of the site’s profiles, in   
   which registered members can enter their location, birth date,   
   interests and other information. Call it Big Hatred meets Big   
   Data.   
      
   Stormfront was founded in 1995 by Don Black, a former Ku Klux   
   Klan leader. Its most popular “social groups” are “Union of   
   National Socialists” and “Fans and Supporters of Adolf Hitler.”   
   Over the past year, according to Quantcast, roughly 200,000 to   
   400,000 Americans visited the site every month. A recent   
   Southern Poverty Law Center report linked nearly 100 murders in   
   the past five years to registered Stormfront members.   
      
   The white nationalist posters on Stormfront have issues with   
   many different groups. They often write about crimes committed   
   by African-Americans against whites; they complain about an   
   “invasion” of Mexicans; and they love to mock gays and   
   feminists. But their main problem appears to be with Jewish   
   people, who are often described as super-powerful and clever —   
   the driving force, generally speaking, behind the societal   
   changes they do not like. They sometimes call the Holocaust the   
   “Holohoax.”   
      
   Stormfront members tend to be young, at least according to self-   
   reported birth dates. The most common age at which people join   
   the site is 19. And four times more 19-year-olds sign up than 40-   
   year-olds. Internet and social network users lean young, but not   
   nearly that young.   
      
   Profiles do not have a field for gender. But I looked at all the   
   posts and complete profiles of a random sample of American   
   users, and it turns out that you can work out the gender of most   
   of the membership: I estimate that about 30 percent of   
   Stormfront members are female.   
      
   The states with the most members per capita are Montana, Alaska   
   and Idaho. These states tend to be overwhelmingly white. Does   
   this mean that growing up with little diversity fosters hate?   
      
   Probably not. Since those states have a higher proportion of non-   
   Jewish white people, they have more potential members for a   
   group that attacks Jews and nonwhites. The percentage of   
   Stormfront’s target audience that joins is actually higher in   
   areas with more minorities. This is particularly true when you   
   look at Stormfront’s members who are 18 and younger and   
   therefore do not themselves choose where they live.   
      
   Among this age group, California, a state with one of the   
   largest minority populations, has a membership rate 25 percent   
   higher than the national average.   
      
   One of the most popular social groups on the site is “In Support   
   of Anti-Semitism.” The percentage of members who join this group   
   is positively correlated with a state’s Jewish population. New   
   York, the state with the highest Jewish population, has above-   
   average per capita membership in this group.   
      
   In 2001, Dna88 joined Stormfront, describing himself as a “good   
   looking, racially aware” 30-year-old Internet developer living   
   in “Jew York City.” In the next four months, he wrote more than   
   200 posts, like “Jewish Crimes Against Humanity” and “Jewish   
   Blood Money,” and directed people to a website, jewwatch.com,   
   which claims to be a “scholarly library” on “Zionist   
   criminality.”   
      
   Stormfront members complain about minorities’ speaking different   
   languages and committing crimes. But what I found most   
   interesting were the complaints about competition in the dating   
   market.   
      
   A man calling himself William Lyon Mackenzie King, after a   
   former prime minister of Canada who once suggested that “Canada   
   should remain a white man’s country,” wrote in 2003 that he   
   struggled to “contain” his “rage” after seeing a white woman   
   “carrying around her half black ugly mongrel niglet.” In her   
   profile, Whitepride26, a 41-year-old student in Los Angeles,   
   says, “I dislike blacks, Latinos, and sometimes Asians,   
   especially when men find them more attractive” than “a white   
   female.”   
      
   POLITICAL developments certainly play a role. The day that saw   
   the biggest single increase in membership in Stormfront’s   
   history, by far, was Nov. 5, 2008, the day after Barack Obama   
   was elected president.   
      
   The top reported interest of Stormfront members is “reading.”   
   Most notably, Stormfront users are news and political junkies.   
   One interesting data point here is the popularity of The New   
   York Times among Stormfront users. According to the economists   
   Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, when you compare   
   Stormfront users to people who go to the Yahoo News site, it   
   turns out that the Stormfront crowd is twice as likely to visit   
   nytimes.com.   
      
   Perhaps it was my own naïveté, but I would have imagined white   
   nationalists’ inhabiting a different universe from that of my   
   friends and me. Instead, they have long threads praising   
   “Breaking Bad” and discussing the comparative merits of online   
   dating sites, like Plenty of Fish and OkCupid.   
      
   There was also no relationship between monthly membership   
   registration and a state’s unemployment rate. States   
   disproportionately affected by the Great Recession saw no   
   comparative increase in Google searches for Stormfront.   
      
   Some of this research adds to recent literature in the field   
   that is frankly shocking and should change the way we think   
   about hate.   
      
   In the 1930s, Arthur F. Raper reported a correlation between bad   
   economic conditions and lynchings of blacks. This led many   
   scholars to the intuitive conclusion that people turn to hate   
   because their lives are going poorly.   
      
   But evidence is increasingly casting doubt on this idea. In   
   2001, the political scientists Donald P. Green, Laurence H.   
   McFalls and Jennifer K. Smith used more data and found that   
   there was actually no relationship between lynchings and   
   economic hardship. Lynchings actually fell during the Great   
   Depression.   
      
   The economist Alan B. Krueger has shown that terrorists are not   
   disproportionately poor. And the economists Roland G. Fryer Jr.   
   and Steven D. Levitt found that Ku Klux Klan members were   
   actually better educated than the typical American.   
      
   Return to VikingMaiden88. When you read her 189 posts since   
   joining the site, she often seems like a perfectly nice and   
   intelligent young woman.   
      
   But she also has a lot of hatred. She praises a store for having   
   “100% white employees.” She says the media is promoting a   
   “Jewish agenda.” And she says she finds Asians “repulsive   
   physically, socially, religiously, etc.”   
      
   Why do some people feel this way? And what is to be done about   
   it? I have pored over data of an unprecedented breadth and   
   depth, thanks to our new digital era. And I can honestly offer   
   the following answer: I have no idea.   
      
   Correction: July 15, 2014   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)