The massive crackdown on the internet’s festering white supremacist contingent claimed another victory yesterday: Stormfront.
The neo-Nazi forum has a much longer and deadlier history than more recent sites such as the Daily Stormer or The Right Stuff, with Holocaust denial posts from the site’s founder Don Black appearing on USENET newsgroups as early as 1985. Stormfront grew out of those pre-internet newsgroups — such as alt.skinheads, alt.revisionism, alt.politics.nationalism.white — eventually becoming a standalone site whose members have been directly linked to almost 100 bias-related murders. Attempts at purpose-built white nationalist sites were made prior to Stormfront, but it was the first to gain traction. Before going dark, the long-running site drew close to half a million unique monthly visitors, according to Alexa data.
Black, a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, learned the skills to build Stormfront during his three years in federal prison, which he served for attempting a violent overthrow of Dominica, an island just north of Martinique. The New York Times reports that “Nazi and Confederate flags, dynamite and 30 high-powered rifles” were among the items found by authorities when he and nine other men were caught.
Read the full article by Bryan Menegus at Gizmodo.