The Public Face of White Supremacy: How Extremist Organizations Market Hate

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 6. Far-Right Movements & Extremist Discourse

Abstract

Extremist organizations face a core strategic dilemma: people are broadly averse to hate, yet these groups must still attract, mobilize, and retain supporters. How, then, do hate-based organizations craft marketable public identities in an era of mass visibility and digitally mediated communication? This paper examines this puzzle through a multimodal analysis of the White Lives Matter (WLM) movement. Using a unique dataset of nearly 8,000 hand-coded posts produced by all U.S. state-level WLM Telegram channels between April 2022 and April 2025, paired with a systematic collection of WLM’s publicly distributed flyers, I analyze how WLM constructs a brand capable of circulating within mainstream environments while advancing white supremacist objectives. I show that WLM pursues a two-stage marketing strategy oriented around predicted audience. Its offline materials—designed for accidental or incidental public exposure—rely heavily on positive, prosocial, and motivational frames that depict the organization as caring, community-oriented, and historically grounded. By contrast, WLM’s online messaging—targeting individuals who actively engage with extremist content—contains heightened sensationalism, reciprocal promotion across chapters, explicit racialized fear appeals, and calls for in-group solidarity and collective defense. This two-stage strategy moves observers from passive onlookers to concerned individuals, and from concerned individuals to would-be agents of change. By repackaging hate in prosocial terms, WLM corrupts legitimate desires (e.g., belonging, safety, and security) toward exclusionary ends, minimizing reputational risk while cultivating resonance among potential recruits. These findings bridge research on the production of cultural goods, social movement framing, and organizational branding and impression management, revealing how extremist organizations strategically market fringe ideas to make them appear both legitimate and necessary.

Author

• Jack Gabriel Risien Wippell, The Ohio State University