Assistant Professor Hanna E. Morris published Apocalyptic Climate Change Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation in White-Nationalist Communities Online: An Analysis of 25 Years of Discourse on Stormfront in Environmental Communication.
ABSTRACT
This study examines the ways in which white nationalists have been using climate change debates to further and extend racist, misogynistic, and antidemocratic narratives. Using a mixed-method approach, the Analysis of Topic Model Networks (ANTMN), we combine an unsupervised machine learning topic model, community detection, and theory-driven in-depth qualitative analysis to identify dynamic changes in climate-related discourse on the U.S.-based Stormfront website between 2001 and 2025 (N = 11,285 posts). We identify four themes (Science, Conspiracies, Race, and Politics) and analyze arguments in favor and against the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change used by white nationalists to question the validity of scientific evidence and the integrity of scientists, while promoting apocalyptic fears of a New World Order and justifying violent, extremist, and authoritarian solutions for mitigation of such imagined threats. The data demonstrate consistent trends over time, where the prominence of debates around scientific evidence has been in decline and was steadily replaced with racist and political appeals.