Do White Nationalists Encourage Each Other to Join the Military?

This paper questions the conventional wisdom about the extent of white nationalist recruitment into the United States Military. While researchers have come to expect that white nationalists are actively interested in joining the military for the sake of acquiring training or threatening the institution from the inside, we find that this population expresses low levels of interest in military topics, as well as highly mixed and often negative perspectives on the potential of joining. Our findings were derived from analysis of white nationalist conversation on Stormfront and Iron March between 2003 and 2023. As highly active and visible spaces within the English-speaking white nationalist world, Stormfront and Iron March offer a representative look into the motivations and behaviors of such extremists. Although many users value the training and professional benefits of joining the military, these positives are frequently balanced against overriding fears of Zionist infiltration of military leadership. Further, we found that motivations related to posing an insider threat the military were relatively unimportant.