“Packing our message inside of existing cultural memes and humor can be viewed as a delivery method. Something like adding cherry flavor to children’s medicine.” This is an excerpt from the Morals and Dogma section of the Daily Stormer’s Style Guide, and a revealing description of white nationalist recruitment strategies. The Daily Stormer is a now-defunct (as of early 2026) white nationalist news website, so the message the Style Guide refers to is an appalling one: a repulsive blend of neo-Nazism, white nationalism, and furious bigotry pointed in as many directions as it is possible to imagine. The delivery method is the subject of this piece: a rhetorical strategy that I call sugar-coating, which occurs when a speaker packages together an objectionable utterance—such as a racist, sexist, or transphobic one—with some additional reward mechanism for those who accept the utterance.
The Style Guide is a bizarre document, pivoting rapidly from instructions for appropriate grammar and formatting to techniques for dehumanizing the subjects of the articles until readers are ready to laugh about their deaths. On page four, it is explaining formatting requirements for images, and by page nine, it is giving lists of recommended and prohibited slurs. What slurs would a site like the Daily Stormer prohibit? Primarily those involving potty humor, which is apparently a bridge too far for the neo-Nazis. The Style Guide outlines the Daily Stormer’s official attitude towards propaganda, humor (or “lulz”), trolling, and more. It is an unlikely and off-putting origin point for philosophical inquiry.
Portions of the Style Guide had been leaked in September 2017, and the rest of it was then released completely by HuffPost later that year. In 2020, it was featured in expert testimony about white supremacist doublespeak in the Sines v. Kessler trial, after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. I first encountered the Style Guide in this context, while researching strategies used by racists to create deniability for their racist speech: things like dogwhistles, and especially figleaves.
Figleaves—a concept developed by Jennifer Saul—are bits of speech, like the artistic flourishes after which they are named, that “just barely cover” something objectionable, like racism or sexism. Roughly, the use of a figleaf prevents some members of an audience from (correctly) concluding that either a speaker or their utterance is racist.
For instance, consider the infamous “I’m not racist, but…” Those four words are sure to bring on a pre-emptive cringe for many of us, but for others they function as a figleaf. For some audience members, a preceding denial of racism is enough to remove suspicion that the speaker is actually racist. I would love to say that this example is outdated, and that such a blatant deflection wouldn’t work, but unfortunately, I cannot in good faith do so. Donald Trump and his supporters have often asserted that he is “the least racist person anywhere in the world,” to exactly this effect.
Originally, I started reading the Style Guide looking for white nationalist instructions about the use of figleaves (not put in those terms, of course). There are elements of that to be found, especially related to the use of humor as a figleaf, but ultimately a different phenomenon seems most central. Rather than covering up their racism, the Daily Stormer is more concerned with spreading it. It is, as the Style Guide suggests, an outreach site. To achieve this outreach, one of the things that the authors use is the strategy that I call sugar-coating: packaging the racism together with other things that make it more desirable to readers. The goal is not to hide the racism, but to get people to come back for more.
One reason that figleaves could be deemphasized in the Daily Stormer is related to its position in the broader media landscape. Despite being outreach-focused, it was still far removed from being a mainstream media outlet. It occupied a kind of transitory position, neither mainstream nor at the furthest extremes of movement sites. Figleaves are much more important for speech that aims to permeate the mainstream.
There are two main ways in which the Style Guide suggests that authors should sugar-coat their vitriol. The first is with humor, and the second is with heroism. Sugar-coating with humor occurs when the racist vitriol is buried under a joking tone: what the Style Guide describes as being “a racist joke that everyone laughs at because it’s true.” The Style Guide recommends that an author should seem like a self-deprecating racist, poking fun at their own stereotypes, rather than someone just spouting raging vitriol.
The second main way that the Style Guide advocates for sugar-coating is by way of heroism. In sugar-coating with heroism, authors present themselves and their white nationalist allies as ‘virtuous’ and ‘heroic,’ while anyone opposing them is ‘disgusting’ or ‘evil.’ People like to feel like the good guys, and the rousing heroic rhetoric that the Style Guide recommends is meant to elicit an emotional reaction to help secure uptake for the vitriol.
Some of this rousing rhetoric is so over-the-top as to possibly overlap with the humor sugar-coating we’ve already seen. When one reads a passage like “we stand as gods made flesh, bearing the light of truth and power,” one might be moved by the rousing language, or one might find it so ridiculous as to be entertaining. In the latter case, it can function as sugar-coating through humor, instead of heroism.
It’s worth being explicit that neither mechanism is going to be effective on every reader, or even most readers, of the sugar-coated writing. They don’t need to be. The idea that seems to motivate the sugar-coating approach is not to create something iron-clad that will convince everyone to get on board with the hatred, but rather to pump out a huge amount of content, in the hopes of luring in some people. There is a lot of content, sugar-coated in different ways by different authors, and as long as some of it draws some people back to engage more, it’s working.
There is also nothing exclusive about the two mechanisms I’ve described. Humor and heroism are the two mechanisms that most clearly emerge from the Style Guide, but I certainly don’t think that they’re the only two ways to sugar-coat hateful speech. There are probably lots of ways to go about the process of sugar-coating. I suspect that one of them is presenting hate speech wrapped in a sense of sympathy or solidarity, although this would be somewhat at odds with the Daily Stormer’s rhetorical standards.
Sugar-coating seems to have been an effective strategy for white nationalists. Though I don’t have the empirical background to measure it myself, the Style Guide boasts of the Daily Stormer’s month-to-month growth, and there seem to be more white nationalists running around than there used to be. What does that mean for us?
Figuring out exactly how to best interfere with white nationalist recruitment strategies is an additional thorny problem. There are two rough ways to approach this interference: censorship and counterspeech. The Style Guide emphasizes that all publicity is good publicity for the Daily Stormer, so there is a natural urge to deplatform and censor its content. Such an approach, though, is in tension with widely held ideals of free speech, which has led to a surging interest in counterspeech—the practice of thwarting harmful speech through additional speech. Counterspeech is tricky to get right, and has been the subject of a lot of recent work by philosophers, social scientists, and policy writers.
Philosophy probably doesn’t have the tools to solve white nationalism all by itself—and if it does, nobody has shared them with me. My hope is that by looking at the strategies white nationalists take themselves to be using, we can at least arrive at a clearer understanding of those strategies, and stand a better chance of interfering with them.
Kyle Adams
Kyle K. J. Adams is a PhD candidate in applied philosophy, at the University of Waterloo’s School of Social, Political, and Historical Research. His research is primarily in philosophy of language, where he is interested in communication of statistics, as well as racist, deceptive, and manipulative speech.
