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For scholars of free expression, whether speech or print communication is a primary focus, this material is an excellent review.
While there are a substantial number of Web sites that can be considered to promote hate speech, the work done by Dr. Barnett effectively selects 10 sites representative of the more than 200 sites he visited while doing his research. In this book, he introduces us to messages from white supremacists, black separatists, and arguments of the Jewish Defense League (JDL). Religion proves to be a key theme in the rhetoric explored by the author. Evidently, the promoters of hate line themselves up with their misuse of the ideas and principles of the faithful; the Judeo-Christian faiths usually associate with the God of love. The messages from white groups that can be identified as hate speech considerably target African-Americans and Jews, and homosexuals are prime targets as well. It is argued on several of the sampled sites that blacks are inferior, as well as that Jews are taking control of the media, American businesses, and are parasitical. From the perspective of the white hate organizations, Christianity is the superior faith, while the Nation of Islam (NOI) takes an opposing view.
Symbolic expression such as music, flag burning, or images on apparel can reflect messages protected under the First Amendment. Framing his analysis using appropriate court decisions, Dr. Barnett looks at hateful rhetoric in nontextual messages on the Internet presented by the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and the other organizations cited in his work. While Dr. Barnett clearly analyzes the nontextual rhetoric of the hate organizations, readers can easily access the sampled Web sites to confront the hate discussed by Dr. Barnett. The photographs, the computer-generated images and animations, and the sounds that are added all fit in a symbiotic way to convey hate in rhetorical forms. It is found, however, that the 10 hate groups Dr. Barnett investigated used still images as a main form of nontextual content on their sites. Within this nontextual content, the targets of hatred remain blacks, Mexicans, Jews, Muslims, and Arabs, and the distorted arguments for white Christians continue to be promoted.