In the early 1980s, white supremacist groups were early adopters (and masters) of the internet
Hate groups have been using computers since dial-up
In 1983, George P. Dietz was working endless hours on a personal Apple IIe computer. A naturalized citizen born in Germany known to brag of his time in Hitler Youth, Dietz ran a successful anti-Semitic publishing house. Now he was trying to teach himself “computerese,” to launch a new “bulletin board system,” so he could reach a wider audience to herald the Jewish threat in America. It was, he said, “the only computer bulletin board system and uncontrolled information medium in the United States of America dedicated to the dissemination of historical facts — not fiction!”
There was so much untapped white supremacist potential: Christian caucasians nursing xenophobia in isolated corners of the country, hungry for information, but unsure of how to get it. And Dietz was, unfortunately, on to something big.
Then, in the Spring of 1984, the Grand Dragon of the Texas Ku Klux Klan, Louis Beam, created Aryan Nations Liberty Net, which quickly surpassed Dietz’s efforts as the premiere cyberspace venue for white supremacy. Just a year later, Tom Metzger started a similar platform, White Aryan Resistance, or W.A.R. Using 300 bps modems and two-tone personal computers like the Commodor 64, these men believed they would help birth the white ethnostate.
“Finally, we are all going to be linked together at one point in time,” Beam wrote in all caps in his first online posts. “Imagine, if you will, all the great minds of the patriotic Christian movement linked together and joined into one computer. Imagine any patriot in the country being able to call up and access these minds… You are on line with the Aryan Nations brain trust. It is here to serve the folk.’’ Dietz, Beam, and Metzger would become some of the first hate group leaders — not to mention some of the first Americans — to organize using computers. His efforts “on line” would be largely overlooked at the time. But his vision of a vast white supremacist army grown in cyberspace has come to fruition in the so-called “alt-right.” “The possibilities” Beam wrote with terrifying prescience in 1984, “have only been touched upon.”
Beam conceived of Aryan Nations Liberty Net as “a pro-American, pro-white, anti-Communist network of true believers who serve the one and only God — Jesus, the Christ … for Aryan patriots only.” It was a computer bulletin board system (known as a BBS) where users could post messages, download or exchange documents, or read racist screeds.
In 1985, the Anti-Defamation League released the first public report on white supremacist groups use of computer technology called “Computerized Networks of Hate.” It found that in addition to disseminating white supremacist texts and sharing information about how to join white supremacist organizations, they were also doxxing people — a move that the “alt-right” has since mastered — by compiling a list of “enemies” and leaking their addresses and phone numbers. This list was mostly composed of Jewish groups and people who they considered “race-traitors” i.e. informers. North Carolina Klan leader Glenn Miller wrote, “We have an up-to-date list of many of the Jew headquarters around the country so that you can pay them a friendly visit.”
Anyone with a computer and a modem attached to a phone line could dial into the connection where they were asked for passwords to access information. Aware that government agents and anti-racist hackers might be watching, the network’s operators made it so that the most sensitive information required “level seven” clearance.
Typical postings read like this one, “I AM A WHITE CHRISTIAN DEFENDER OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH, AND MY CHRISTIAN RACE. I AM DESCENDED FROM A LONG LINE AND GLORIOUS LINEAGE THAT HAS SHED THEIR BLOOD AND TREASURE UPON THE BATTLEFIELDS THROUGHOUT THIS EARTH.”
The move online was viewed by outsiders primarily as a tool meant to attract youth, and not a signifier of a xenophobic sea change. The ADL report warned, of “its potential impact on impressionable young people, many of whom today are computer users.” But to the white supremacists, it was that and much more: both a recruitment tool and a structural revolution. “The older and less active spokesmen for the fold and faith are being replaced by the young lions,” read one post from 1985. “These dragons of God have no time for pamphlets or speeches. They are the armed party which is being born out of the inability of white male youths to be heard.’’
People were quick to discount the power of what white supremacists could do online. In the mid 1980s, few Americans had modems or computers. As political analyst Chip Berlet explained in a 2001 paper presented at the Northeast Sociological Association, when hate went online, few noticed — mostly because they didn’t really understand what the internet was. Berlet had been tracking the white supremacists use of computers from the very beginning, and confusion about how to treat hate speech online was rampant.
Berlet was having trouble explaining to people why they should care that white supremacists were using computers. He began bringing a thermal printer and a modem to his talks. While he was lecturing about the spread of white supremacy in the midwest, the printer would be downloading material from hate groups online and printing it. He would hand the pages out to flabbergasted audience members and tell them to take the texts home with them.
In 1985, The New York Times published one of the first major media reports on the subject. “An Idaho- based neo-Nazi organization has established a computer-based network to link rightist groups and to disseminate a list of those who it says ‘have betrayed their race,’” reporter Wayne King wrote. For years going forward, white supremacists online would be dismissed as isolated “basement trolls” whose actions online had no counterpart in the physical world, but King didn’t make that mistake. A splinter group of Aryan Nations, which ran Beam’s website, had already been linked to crimes including bank robberies and the murder of a radio host, he explained.
The ADL report authors thought that the significance of white supremacists computer-use might have been exaggerated. Though they cautioned against complacency, the emergence of white supremacy online was more of a gimmick than actual threat. “It does offer extremists a trendy way to spread hate propaganda,” the report read. Still, they argued, “there is little to suggest that this represents a great leap forward in the spread of anti-Semitic and racist propaganda.” A little more than three decades later, we are all finding out how wrong they were.
For a thorough look at the history of American white supremacy visit Timeline’s White Terror U.S.A. story collection.
