Framing Atrocity in Their Own Terms: Two Decades of White Supremacist Memory Politics Online

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

Abstract

Numerous atrocities have been justified through logics of white supremacy. Yet, while scholars of culture and collective memory have long examined how societies narrate violent pasts, less research has analyzed how those aligned with the ideologies that produced atrocity remember the events themselves. Because dominant moral narratives widely condemn slavery, genocide, and racial terror, we argue that white supremacists must actively reinterpret the past within the present to preserve ideological legitimacy and self‐conceptions of moral righteousness. Through a mixed‐method analysis of over 10 million Stormfront posts (2000–2020), we examine how white supremacists frame historical atrocities. Qualitative coding of a sample of relevant posts isolates three recurring mnemonic strategies: denial, justification, and deflection. Using word-embedding techniques applied to the entire corpus, we show that atrocity discourse is a persistent feature of white supremacist communication, and increasingly so since 2003. Denial and justification are favored over dismissal, suggestive of a tendency for active engagement over avoidance. Importantly, different atrocities invite distinct rhetorical responses, revealing how historical violence is selectively reworked to legitimate contemporary ideological projects.

Authors

• Jack Gabriel Risien Wippell, The Ohio State University

• Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira, The Ohio State University

• Anneliese M Schenk-Day, The Ohio State University