Last week a former member of the World Church of the Creator, Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, committed suicide after allegedly killing two and wounding eight Asians, blacks and Jews over a three-day shooting spree. Smith was likely introduced to white supremacy the old-fashioned way–through leaflets and face-to-face meetings. But he’s just the type of recruit hate groups are looking for: youthful and well educated. Organizations like the Ku Klux Klan want to expand their ranks beyond aging, less affluent whites, and the Web gives them a powerful tool to attract savvy and privileged Netsters. “The Net has changed everything,” says Don Black, a former Klan member who hosts one of the pioneering white-supremacist Web sites–and hopes one day to start his own TV network online. “We suddenly have a mass audience rather than a small clique of subscribers.”
Hate groups have always used high-tech means to pass what many say is their nonviolent message. But no other medium has the global reach or the audience (more than 100 million) of the Internet. It’s also cheap, allowing users to set up sites from scratch. And fringe groups say they can spread their message unedited and uncensored by the media. “Bright, alienated kids may be particularly susceptible to these efforts,” says Jordan Kessler, one of scores of online researchers at the Anti-Defamation League. “The extremists creating these Web sites are not your fathers’ Nazis.”
Their methods are deceptive. Hate hawkers hold out virtual candy to kids, enticing them with online games, comic strips and music or simply a friendly pitch from another kid. Don Black’s Stormfront Web site, brimming with white-supremacy manifestoes, devotes a section to youth. Black says his 10-year-old son runs it, and the site is dressed up with animated banners that read WHITE PRIDE WORLD WIDE. “I have decided to make this a kids’ page to reach other kids of the globe,” says the son. “I will be adding fun games, contests, polls, etc.”
Any kid with a modem can click on carnivals of hate. At the Posse Comitatus site, scroll past the cartoon of a lynched black man (caption: “It’s time for old-fashioned American Justice”) and you come upon a section dubbed “Jeff’s Advice.” Jeff is said to be a teenage student, recruited off the Internet, who rails against “government-sponsored lies” (sample: “Hitler slew 10 million Jewish people”). Click over to the Web site of the National Socialist Hitler Youth Legion and you can download “Mein Kampf” or tunes titled “Violent Solution” and “Go Back to Africa.” Another section of the same site doles out anti-Semitic software, including a lengthy interactive comic strip depicting Jews as conspiring rodents grubbing for money and power.
Some sites exploit rebellious teens. The Ku Klux Klan site tells teens that they were brainwashed as children (“shows like Sesame Street telling you how great it was to go to an integrated school”), and discriminated against (“there is no White College Fund”). Resist and you’ll be a hero, says the Klan site. If Mom and Dad get in the way, resist them too: “Young people today can’t let the lack of support from their family get them down in the dumps.”
Hatemongers boast that the Net has swelled their ranks. Pastor James Wickstrom of the Posse Comitatus says his message has reached 250,000 people online, some from as far away as New Zealand. “What’s really beautiful,” says Wickstrom, “is that we have a tremendous amount of colleges and universities hitting our sites.” The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Rabbi Abraham Cooper, who has been tracking online hate groups for years, estimates that some 2,000 Web sites variously contain hate, racism, terrorism and bomb-making instructions, up from only one such site in the mid-’90s. If hate groups can reach kids early, Cooper worries about “much younger, more committed bigots than we’ve ever seen before in our nation.”
There are ways to fight back, but none are perfect. Some civil-rights groups want Net companies like Yahoo! to get more involved in scouring their message boards, despite hate groups’ protection under the First Amendment. Watchful parents can get help from software such as CyberPatrol, SurfWatch and HateFilter that shields kids from accessing known hate sites.
The threat is real. Matt Hale, the head of the World Church of the Creator, who allegedly recruited shooter Ben Smith but disavows his violence, used the Net to help save his organization from near extinction. Since he took over in 1996, the WCOTC (which is violently anti-Christian) has grown from eight chapters to 31, civil-rights groups say. Though the ADL says Hale has only a couple hundred members, he claims as many as 9,000.
Hale’s own Internet guru is a model recruit. The 20-year-old church member founded a small Web-design group that has produced more than two dozen white-supremacy sites. In an online chat, the apparently affable young man, who speaks lovingly of his girlfriend, talks about his church involvement as if he were the luckiest man in the world. “I never imagined I would one day be webmaster of HQ’s site,” he says, referring to the WCOTC “headquarters.” Describing himself as a loner, the educated, middle-class young man joined the group when a friend, whose nom de doom was Hate Monger, gave him a copy of the book “Building a Whiter and Brighter World.” “It was as if I was reading my own thoughts,” he says. He was 15 years old at the time.
