As I mentioned at the end of my last post, there’s another, more extreme, example of cyber racism, over at Stormfront, a long-running white supremacist site. In the days following the election, white Internet users rushed to Stormfront.org to vent their anger and disbelief that voters had chosen an African American president. In fact, so many visited the site that they caused the server to crash at the site. And, the numbers there are quite astonishing.

I include data about Stormfront in my forthcoming book, and as it went to the publisher in August, I had included the number of registered users as 124,000. As of Friday, 11/21/08 when I last checked, Stormfront now has 152,734 members, an increase of over 28,000 since August. If the numbers at the site continue to increase at this rate, Stormfront will be very close to half a million members at the end of Obama’s first term, according to my back-of-the-envelope calculation (28,000 every 3 months over 48 months of the first term, comes to 448,000 – feel free to let me know if my math is wrong). Of course, there’s not necessarily going to be a steady and consistent increase over a four year period of time, but it should give anyone concerned about racism pause.