Journal of Right-Wing Studies

Despite growing research on American hate movements, the history of digital hate prior to 2000 has received little attention. Recent work on American white power movements has identified a rhetorical and organizational tradition of white supremacy in the United States but stopped short of identifying the specific mechanisms by which this rhetoric and organization moved online. Recent web histories, however, have opened the door for inquiry into the online past of white power movements. To recover white power’s early digital history, this article focuses on the efforts of George Dietz to operate and maintain Liberty Bell BBS, the first hate site ever put online. While digital hate is often traced back to websites of the early 2000s like Stormfront or viewed as a precursor to the alt-right of the 2010s, Liberty Bell BBS and contemporaneous peer sites demonstrate that digital hate began in the 1980s. Recovering the earliest computerized hate network establishes a direct organizational link between far-right extremists of the digital age and white power organizations of the twentieth century, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the National Alliance.