White Supremacy, LMFAO, LOL

Inside the lightning-fast, wildly absurd, occasionally terrifying world of app-based teenage white supremacy.

John Paczkowski/BuzzFeed

Becoming a member of a private mobile group chat for white supremacist teenagers was surprisingly easy. There was no secret password. There was no initiation. I didn't need to recite any Aryan pride credos, disparage any minorities, or even divulge my identity — which is probably a good thing, since I'm a 30-year-old reporter with a last name that isn't fooling anybody.

No, all I had to do to join up was create an account on Kik, the mobile messaging service that boasts more than 200 million users, as many humans as there are in Brazil. And then I had to have a 14-line chat with the gatekeeper to the group, a guy who calls himself "Pa." It went exactly like this:

Me: Hey- can I join the sf [Stormfront] group?

Pa: Yeah,you affiliated with any aryan gangs?

Me: Nah

Pa: Religious in anyway?

Me: Not particularly

Pa: Like how?

Me: I don't really go to church or anything

Pa: So you'd be Christian,sort of like me tho
Don't bother going to mass
Kind of person

Me: Yeah sounds about right

Pa: Where are you from?

Me: Maryland

Pa: Alright I'm from Ireland
I'll add you in so,

Me: Oh cool, thanks pa

Pa: Alright then

With that, I was free to observe "White Pride World Wide," where every day 50 mostly anonymous teenage users, 50 mostly anonymous users claiming to be teenagers, or most likely some combination thereof, gather in a rolling discussion of the imperiled future of the white race, the nefarious influence of immigrants and hot-blooded interlopers dating back to Romans in Celtic Ireland, and the dangers posed by Jewish control of contemporary culture. They also discuss selfie sticks, steel beams, and rare Pepes. It's 2015, and they're teenagers.

I learned of White Pride World Wide (WPWW) through a thread in the "Youth" subsection of Stormfront, the internet's leading white nationalist forum. In the aftermath of last month's massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, dozens of reporters — including myself — swarmed the white supremacist web in an attempt to track terrorist Dylann Roof's ideological roots. "Youth," dedicated to "White Nationalist issues among teens," was a natural place to try to figure out how the old ideas of white supremacy are being translated to a new generation — to Roof's generation.

While federal authorities have disclosed that Roof was in contact with white supremacists online, he doesn't seem to have left behind much writing on the web besides his now-infamous 2,500-word manifesto. That document trotted out tried and true, even hoary, tropes of American white supremacism; with the exception of a few mentions of the internet, much of it could have been written at any point since the end of Jim Crow.

And while that could well turn out to be the extent of his online communication, my time in WPWW convinced me that our picture of the white supremacist internet is strikingly outdated, incomplete. For all the press it has received in recent weeks, Stormfront (and its ilk) is old and ugly technology, a web forum (with flat membership) and a complementary talk radio show run and hosted by a 61-year-old former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan whom some posters on WPWW deride as an old crank. The 'Youth' subforum receives a few posts a day, if that.

On the other hand, the Kik group is optimized, instantaneous, integrated. Some days see hundreds of posts. This is white supremacism that looks like today's social internet — comprising many forms of media and users from around the world, weirdly irreverent, continuous. As one poster, who said he is an 18-year-old living in Stockholm, told me, "We use it because we are able to communicate across borders and timezones, instantly without the delay of a forum or website."

This shouldn't come as a surprise. While the basic messages of white supremacy remain constant, the media by which they are delivered change with technology. From fabricated "firsthand" pamphlets (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), to mass market paperbacks (The Turner Diaries), white supremacist messages migrated to ham radio, entered the digital era on bulletin board systems like the Liberty Bell Net, skipped over to Usenet groups and then made the jump to the World Wide Web on sites like Stormfront. But today, of course, it's in an app. And an instant delivery messaging app, one that is likely valued at billions of dollars, at that.

This is the white supremacism of the future, and for two weeks I had a front row seat.

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