Research & Analysis

“White Genocide” is a term coined by white supremacists for propaganda purposes as shorthand for one of the most deeply held modern white supremacist convictions: that the white race is “dying” due to growing non-white populations and “forced assimilation,” all of which are deliberately engineered and controlled by a Jewish conspiracy to destroy the white race. This same conviction can be seen in the so-called “14 Words” slogan, the most popular…

Traditional white supremacists are one of the major segments of the white supremacist movement in the United States, as well as the oldest. The term is used to refer to a variety of groups and individuals whose white supremacy centers around or originated from the struggle to deny equal rights to African-Americans. Ku Klux Klan groups are the most common type of traditional white supremacist, but the movement also includes other groups, such as the Council of Conservative Citizens, the League…

Racist skinheads are a variation of the skinhead subculture that arose in Great Britain the late 1960s and early 1970s and have come to compose one of the major segments of the white supremacist movement in the United States. In contrast to “traditional” skinheads or anti-racist skinheads, racist or “white power” skinheads adopt many neo-Nazi beliefs and trappings. At the same time, they share many common elements of the skinhead subculture, such as head shaving,…

Neo-Nazis are one of the main segments of the white supremacist movement in the United States and many other countries. They revere Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany and sometimes try to adopt some Nazi principles to their own times and geographic locations, though many neo-Nazis primarily adopt the trappings, symbology and mythology of the Third Reich.

Asatru is a religious sect that attempts to revive ancient Norse religious beliefs and practices of pre-Christian Europe. Asatru is not, in itself, a racist religion, though some white supremacists consider themselves Asatruists. Other white supremacists have adopted a more explicitly racial form of Asatru that is most frequently termed Odinism (sometimes Wotanism). It appeals to white supremacists because it is a “warrior religion” in contrast to the ostensibly pacifist…

Holocaust Denial is a type of anti-Semitic propaganda that emerged after World War II and which uses pseudo-history to deny the reality of the systematic mass murder of six million Jews by the Nazis and their allies during World War II. Holocaust deniers generally claim that the Holocaust never happened, or that some much smaller number of Jews did die, but primarily to diseases like typhus. They also claim that legitimate accounts of the Holocaust are merely propaganda or lies generated by…

A hate crime is a criminal act against a person or property in which the perpetrator chooses the victim because of the victim's real or perceived race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability or gender. Some state-level statutory definitions in the United States may include additional (or fewer) categories. Hate crime and hate speech are not synonymous and most hate speech is not hate crime.

Extreme Right The term “extreme right” is used to describe right-wing political, social and religious movements that exist outside of and are more radical than mainstream conservatism. In the United States, the extreme right consists primarily of two large, slightly overlapping spheres. In one sphere is the white supremacist movement, including its various submovements, such as neo-Nazis, racist skinheads, and the alt right, among others. In the other sphere are anti-government…

Terrorism is a pre-planned act or attempted act of significant violence by one or more non-state actors in order to further an ideological, social or religious cause, or to harm perceived opponents of such causes. Significant violent acts can include bombings or use of other weapons of mass destruction, assassinations and targeted killings, shooting sprees, arsons and firebombings, kidnappings and hostage situations and, in some cases, armed robberies. Domestic terrorism consists of acts or…

The alt right (short for “alternative right”) is a segment of the white supremacist movement consisting of a loose network of racists and anti-Semites who reject mainstream conservatism in favor of politics that embrace implicit or explicit racism, anti-Semitism and white supremacy. Many seek to re-inject such bigoted ideas into the conservative movement in the United States. The alt right also includes many racist users of image boards and message forums such as 4chan, 8chan and…

Christian Identity is a religious sect and one of the longstanding segments of the white supremacist movement. Its beliefs center on a racist and anti-Semitic variation of British-Israelism or Anglo-Israelism, which teaches that people of European ancestry are actually descended from the so-called “Lost Tribes” of ancient Israel and are thus the chosen people of God. Identity believers claim that non-whites were created by God not when God made “man,” but rather when he…

The oldest wing of the “Patriot” movement, the tax protest movement dates back to the mid-1960s. In contrast to people who merely dislike taxes, adherents of the tax protest movement claim that they have a Constitutional or legal right not to pay income taxes. Tax protesters use pseudo-legal arguments to assert that they have no such obligations, such as the notion that income taxes apply only to corporations, not individuals, or that the Sixteenth Amendment, which authorized the…