One of the Biggest White Supremacist Websites, Stormfront, Is Shutting Down Today

Here’s a German word the neo-Nazis at Stormfront.org probably don’t like: Schadenfreude. The Southern Poverty Law Center has just announced that Stormfront’s unable to pay its web-hosting bills, so it’s reducing its website to a private forum for users who contribute money. As for the main, public-facing server? It’s a victim of the Stormfront shutdown, and will be archived and shuttered today.

On the Stormfront forums — which we won’t be linking to — founder Don Black announced the shutdown. Black is known among the white supremacist community for threatening to shut down the site over the costs. This time, though, it’s real. He writes:

I appreciate everybody’s support. But it’s that time of month again, when the big, scary bills hit. Our contributions have once again totaled less than $2000, which is not enough to cover our basic server and radio bills, and this month we no longer have enough personal money to make up the difference.

Black founded Stormfront in 1995 while in federal prison. He was serving a three-year sentence for his role in Operation Red Dog, a neo-Nazi/Ku Klux Klan plot to overthrow the Dominican government. Stormfront, the first major internet hate site, has long been considered essential in introducing new white supremacists to the movement. The SPLC also discovered that, between 2009 and 2014, Stormfront members murdered nearly 100 people.

This comes at a bad time for white supremacists — a sentence we’ve never relished writing more.

Richard Spencer has cancelled his college tour after being protested at every stop by anti-fascist protesters. Matthew Heimbach, head of the Traditionalist Worker Party, has been arrested after a brawl with TWP spokesman Matthew Parrott. The fight was about Heimbach allegedly sleeping with Parrott’s wife.

And Atomwaffen, the white nationalist group implicated in five murders from May 2017 to January 2018, is splintering over accusations it’s a Satanist front.

As for the Stormfront shutdown, Black says the radio show will continue, and he promises the site will come back once he figures out how to reduce expenses. But the financial crisis has also scuppered Black’s planned appearance at a League of the South conference honoring former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke.

Featured image by Michael Warren/iStock