February 19, 1995: White Supremacist Owner of ‘Stormfront’ Explains ‘White Nationalist’ Views in Interview

Don Black, working on the Stormfront.org Web site. [Source: New Times / David Abel]Don Black, the owner of the overtly racist, “white nationalist” Web site Stormfront.org (see March 1995), gives an interview to a reporter from the progressive New Times. Black later posts the interview on his site, with a mocking introduction that calls the report full of “nasty invective” and “arguably the most malicious article I’ve ever had written about me since they started coming 30 years ago.” Black tells the reporter: “We see the breakup [of the United States] coming in about 20 years—it’s a natural progression of events. The Internet is a means of planting seeds for the future. There are a lot of middle-class people who feel disaffected—and in Stormfront they can find what they can’t in the mass media. It’s about building a community and attracting hard-core supporters. We don’t use the ‘n_gger, n_gger’ type of approaches. We don’t want to present the Jerry Springer or Geraldo Rivera image of rabid racists [referring to two confrontational talk show hosts whose guests routinely scream invective at one another]. There are a lot of people who want to agree with us. They just don’t want to be associated with that.” Black explains why he and his fellow white supremacists do not support the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, saying: “I’m not into Martin Luther King’s birthday, of course. It’s an example of a government that no longer represents the interest of the majority of its people. One that no longer represents the heritage of this country. But the minority liberal, multcultural orthodoxy in this country has determined him to be a national hero. And while most Americans opposed the holiday—white Americans, of course—they now have to accept it, like they have accepted everything imposed on them.” Of his West Palm Beach, Florida, neighborhood, Black says he is uncomfortable with the number of Latinos that live there: “It bothers me this area is more Guatemalan than American. It bothers me to wait in line at Publix [a local grocery store] for a Guatemalan to get out his food stamps. I don’t want to pay taxes for them. It’s too much like New York—it’s the front lines of the third world invasion.” He tells the reporter that he doesn’t hate people of other races, he just thinks they should not live in the US. Black works primarily as a Web designer, making commercial sites for local businesses and a few political clients around the country, and doing pro bono work for a number of other white supremacist organizations such as Aryan Nations, The Truth at Last Newspaper, the Church of the Creator’s Web site (COTC—see July-December 1995), a Ku Klux Klan history site, and an Aryan Dating Page. His wife also works to support the family. The majority of Black’s worktime goes into maintaining Stormfront. The latest addition to the site, a discussion forum, requires constant monitoring, he says, both to purge harshly critical comments from critics and to delete posts that advocate violence, give bomb-making instructions, and the like. He also spends a great deal of time defending the site from “cyber attacks,” saying that outside sources relentlessly bombard the servers with denial-of-service (DOS) attacks, “ping floods,” “email bombs,” and other attempts to crash the Stormfront servers and drive the site offline. He plans on adding a live call-in streaming-audio broadcast soon. The site features links to sites that deny the Holocaust, propound “scientifically” based racism, display graphic images of Nazi and SS emblems and paraphernelia, and a plethora of racist and anti-Semitic essays and documents. Michael Winograd of the Anti-Defamation League says of Black: “He is showing the way for Klansmen, neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and other haters who now utilize the World Wide Web to spread their propaganda and seek to attract new members. [Black] is a troubling character precisely because he is relatively articulate and intelligent and is not the knuckle-scraping neanderthal one might expect.” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, says: “The lunatic fringe has embraced this technology with a sophistication and a veracity that is frightening.… What started as a trickle has now evolved into an incredible deluge. In the last year alone, we’ve seen a 300 percent increase in the number of these pages put up on the World Wide Web.… We should be concerned about tomorrow’s Timothy McVeigh (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995) emerging and saying, ‘Well this turns me on,’ or ‘I’m really angry about this too.’” Black’s site is at the forefront of this movement. Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke says of Black: “Don is more than a very good friend, he is one of the leading individuals in the white-rights movement. He’s matured over time—like we all do with age—into a very calm and stoic individual. He has always been a dedicated individual that’s self-sacrificing.” [New Times, 2/19/1998]