Racists are returning in droves to Stormfront, the internet’s longest-running white supremacist site, more than a month after the online neo-Nazi hub nearly went dark over a dispute with its domain registrar.
Stormfront administrator and former Ku Klux Klan leader Don Black has reclaimed the site’s original web address, Stormfront.org, meaning white supremacists displaced by the site’s sudden disappearance last month can once again visit the internet’s oldest operating hate site with ease.
The site abruptly vanished Aug. 26 after Network Solutions, an internet registrar with control over its web address, seized the Stormfront.org domain name after receiving complaints brought by a legal group that said the site had violated its terms of service, effectively making it impossible to access the site simply by visiting Stormfront.org.
Network Solutions has since relinquished control of the Stormfront.org domain name to Mr. Black, 64, and on Friday the site went live at its original web address of 22 years after he took his business to a different registrar, Perfect Privacy LLC, according to public records.
Stormfront’s online message boards boasted nearly 330,000 registered users at its peak, but last month’s domain seizure practically brought traffic to a halt. Only a handful of users maintained access to the site after Network Solutions took action, with only a meager half-dozen members logged on during a normally thriving Friday afternoon the following week, The Washington Times previously reported.
Stormfront reclaimed its domain name at about 12 p.m. Friday, said Mr. Black, and more than 788 people were browsing its forums the following afternoon, including 62 registered members and 726 guests, per the site’s statistics.
More than 400 registered Stormfront members have signed on to its forums in a 24-hour period beginning Friday afternoon, according to the figures, and active discussions taking place Saturday revolved around subjects such as “How to break bad news to a white child” and “Skills for a New White Homeland.”
“I cannot believe I’m back here,” one Stormfront user wrote Saturday. “Thank you so much to everyone who worked so hard to bring this about. I was so alarmed and upset when that onslought [sic] against justice and free speech seemed to be succeeding and I am equally relieved to see that, in the long run, such rampant bullying cannot ultimately win out.”
“I hate negroes for what they are, how they act and how they’re taking over all of white society bit by bit with their grotesque overbreeding. But I am completely alone in this demographic because I am an educated white person and that’s why I am so very grateful to have Stormfront as a place where I can go and not be alone,” the same user wrote in a separate post Saturday.
Neither Mr. Black nor Web.com, the parent company of Network Solutions and Perfect Privacy, has responded to multiple requests for comment.
In a Stormfront posting, however, Mr. Black indicated the website’s woes are hardly over.
“With anti-White hysteria running high, we may need to move again,” he wrote this weekend. “Don’t become complacent just because we are back now.”
Mr. Black, a former KKK grand wizard and member of the American Nazi Party, launched Stormfront in 1995. It’s widely regarded as the internet’s longest-running website geared towards white nationalists, white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and its members have been tied to nearly 100 murders by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a watchdog that monitors hate groups and extremists.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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