White supremacists have long framed censorship as violent information cleansing

Evidence

An essay posted on Stormfront in 1996 by L. R. Beam warns of “The Conspiracy to Erect an Electronic Iron Curtain,” stating that any attempts at censorship will be met by what the author calls “acts of random electronic violence.” The author then goes on to compare attempts at censorship to “a sort of information cleansing of the Internet” and quotes one activist as saying “I’ll give up my information when they pry my cold dead fingers from the keyboard.” — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2578

Categorization

• SHARE: The “cold dead fingers” quip and “acts of random electronic violence” from a 1996 Stormfront post reads like a predecessor of today’s free-speech discourse online - worth a specific friend who studies extremism rhetoric.