SANTA CRUZ — Stormfront has everything a professional-looking Web site should have: bold graphics, quick links and a page for the kids.

But there is a disturbing message behind the slick-looking site. The kiddie page includes a bedtime story called “The Poisonous Mushroom,” showing a green fungus with a Jewish man’s face and a Star of David on its stem.

The caption reads, “Just as it is often hard to tell a toadstool from a mushroom, so it is often very hard to recognize the Jew as a swindler and criminal.”

The site also promotes white supremacist politician David Duke’s latest book, along with “facts” about Jewish evil and black inferiority. The site, according to Stormfront founder and Florida resident Don Black, gets 2,500 hits a day.

“That’s not bad for a content-driven Web site,” Black said Friday.

Anthony Pratkanis is familiar with the site and others like it. The UC Santa Cruz social psychology professor has done extensive studies on propaganda and hate groups.

Lately, Pratkanis, a 42-year-old Scotts Valley resident, has had an awful lot of material to study. Just two weeks ago Buford Furrow made international headlines by walking into a Jewish community center in Los Angeles and opening fire. He wounded five people, three of them children. About an hour after the shooting, he gunned down Filipino-American postal worker Joseph Ileto. Furrow, who confessed to the shootings after surrendering to the FBI, said he was trying to inspire similar acts against Jews.

Pratkanis and other hate-group observers say now is the time to respond to such hatred, specifically the hate-preaching Web sites that are often blamed for inciting such violence.

“This is the time for Americans of good will to think through what we should be doing about this,” said Pratkanis, who co-wrote a book about propaganda with pioneering UCSC social psychology Professor Elliot Aronson.

Klansmen in the streets

Hate groups have long fascinated Pratkanis. He grew up in the South, and his school was desegregated when he was in the second grade. He remembers seeing Ku Klux Klansmen walking around town in his childhood. Those experiences stimulated a life-long interest in America’s racial history.

He became intrigued with issues relating to ethnic groups and democracy. He studied how Nazi leader Adolf Hitler spoke of a German democracy even as he rounded up Jews and had them killed. Now he sees the Third Reich’s words being adopted into the rhetoric of new hate groups.

“A hate crime is more than just an attack on an individual,” Pratkanis said. “It’s an attack on democracy.”

He quotes U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said free speech is not the right to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater when there is no fire. And hate groups that use the Internet to call for race wars are doing the equivalent, Pratkanis argues.

The power of the Web

Indeed, the Web has become a new battle ground for hate groups — and those who fight them.

It’s easy to click onto the same pages that Furrow, who has ties to the Aryan Nation, might have studied, or eavesdrop on the latest chat room “imagining an America without (black people) or Jews.”

The news, however, is not all bad.

Pratkanis cited the triumphs of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the nation’s pre-eminent hate-group watchdog. Its workers monitor hate groups, prosecuting them when they cross the legal line.

“How do you fight them?” asked Mark Potok, who edits the Alabama-based center’s quarterly newsletter. “You fight bad information with good information. These groups will say they have 30,000 people. We point out they have 125.”

He said the center once “destroyed” a neo-Nazi group shortly before a planned Washington, D.C., rally simply by pointing out that its leader’s grandfather was Jewish.

Still, the hate information on the Web can be overwhelming.

One Web link called Hate Directory gives Net users access to 312 sites, almost all of them dedicated to white-supremacist causes. One is called Better Than Auschwitz. Another is the Aryan Resistance of Northern California.

And many groups are savvy to what they can and cannot get away with.

Black, the database builder whose site features the anti-Semitic “mushroom” cartoon, insists he’s doing nothing wrong.

He told the Sentinel on Friday that his organization is more of a forum of expression than an actual group. It does not have any offices outside Florida or engage in recruitment.

As for the explosion of new sites, Black said it is simply a function of the explosive growth of the Internet itself.

Black, like Pratkanis, grew up in the South in the midst of the civil rights era.

“There are other sites promoting the NAACP or Anti-Defamation League,” said the soft-spoken Black. “We’re promoting the interests of our people. We are white nationalists.”

Black said he does not wish to incite violence, though he added that it would be “disingenuous” of him to denounce violence altogether “because history is based on wars.”

But he said that sites that advocate violent acts are taking “a pretty ill-advised approach. Most (sites) are probably legitimate, but there is a lot of black propaganda on the Net, people pretending to be pro-white.”

Among the many “legitimate” sites is the National Alliance, which offers pages of anti-Semitic and anti-black missives similar to those found on Black’s site.

Asked to explain his views, Black — whose Web site openly characterizes Jews as rapacious demons — calmly talks about how Jews control the media and willfully impose a united agenda.

Conspiracy theorists

Hate group arguments that use such broad and false generalizations are a classic example of what psychologists call the “big lie,” Pratkanis said.

“There is absolutely no way to disconfirm them. Let’s say I brought evidence tomorrow showing that Jewish folks were not in a conspiracy and that (media owners) include a collection of individuals that happened to be Jewish.

“The bigot would say, ‘How clever the Jew is, they’re hiding it,’ ” Pratkanis said.

Targeting Jews gives identity to certain hate groups, Pratkanis said.

“It changes the battle from just someone doing you wrong to this epic, cosmological battle of good vs. evil,” he said.

Pratkanis said he has found that one way to counteract the arguments of hate groups is to pose a question to them: “What single piece of information can I tell you that will cause you to change your belief? That usually stops people in their tracks. No one wants to admit they have a closed mind.”

But hate sites don’t leave room for thoughtful rebuttal. Instead they give free reign to angry editorial writers. Most sites stop short of instructing proponents to harm or kill. Still, the loathing is palpable.

In the Free Speech newsletter featured on the National Alliance site, contributor William Pierce describes James Byrd, the black man who was dragged to death in Jasper, Texas, as a “criminal” and a “ne’er-do-well.”

Pierce writes that the “media circus” over Byrd’s death by white supremacists was masterminded by Jews who are pushing for hate-crime laws, which will stop whites from “defending themselves against Jews.”

A call to the National Alliance’s Sacramento voice mail was not returned. But the answering machine includes a lengthy message about the alliance’s struggle to eliminate racial and gay “bias” in schools.

Blue-collar frustrations

To the outsider, the conspiracy theories and alleged webs of treachery may seem bizarre. But there is plenty of raw anger in these sites’ chat rooms. The e-mails often mention layoffs, corporate downsizing and blue-collar frustration. Participants frequently mention forces beyond their control.

“When you are frustrated and anxious, this is a perfect time for rumors and ideology,” Pratkanis observed. “You accept any story that plays into your anxiety. One world order, Jews are in a conspiracy. Anything about Hispanics, blacks, Asians. Anything that starts to help you make sense of why you are frustrated.”

It’s not hard to imagine a troubled soul like Furrow taking such messages to heart — and the street.

But Black described Furrow as “crazy” and said it would be “very hard to see how anyone thinks (the Furrow shooting) benefited us in some way.” However, he also observed that visits to his site more than doubled in the days after the shooting.

White supremacists are not the only ones spreading hate-filled views, but links to hate groups show an overwhelming number of sites proclaiming “white pride.”

“I think there is the potential for a scary situation,” Pratkanis said. “Now that the economy is doing so well, a lot of us feel very comfortable. We’re not facing the anxieties these folks are facing.”

One problem is that the so-called “lone wolves” or “cells” of hate groups are much harder to stop than organized conspiracies.

The other trouble is that the Internet has changed the very definition of “hate group.”

They’re increasingly hard to trace, said Sgt. Steve Clark of the Santa Cruz Police Department, who said he has seen no overt hate-group activity locally since a group of skinheads briefly made a name for itself in Santa Cruz several years ago.

Since then, hate-group activities have been sketchy. Area resident Wayne Johnson walked through the mostly Hispanic Beach Flats area of Santa Cruz early this year dressed in full white supremacist regalia, but he had a history of mental troubles, and has since committed suicide.

The Net makes the truth about hate groups harder to pinpoint, Clark said. These days, “there’s no club house and no activities. You’ve got people claiming affiliation.”

Sometimes it’s hard to know if a group even exists.

Florida has most hate groups

California has 36 known hate groups. Only Florida has more. The Southern Poverty Law Center does not have records for Santa Cruz County, but has extensive records on hate organizations in San Francisco.

“Geography is so unimportant now because of technology like the Internet,” said Joe Roy, the law center’s intelligence director, who traces the movements of extremist groups. “You have organizations that work with European and Australian organizations.”

Anyone with Internet access can click a few buttons and access the Swedish-based Freja’s Web Page, which promotes the point that “a multicultural society just provides stress and confusion, and that isn’t good for anyone.”

Such hate groups, in Roy’s words, are merely “an exaggerated reflection of what’s going on in society. It’s hate on steroids.”

On the Net, hate comes in different shapes. Sometimes it comes in the form of pseudo-academic language. Other sites, like the Posse Comitatus, use deliberately shocking graphics, such as a cartoon of a lynching. Another, Jerry’s Aryan Battle Page, looks like it was slapped together in an afternoon.

While hate crimes and hate groups are distinct problems, observers like Pratkanis believe that anyone who holds and promotes racist beliefs can create a “breeding ground” for those who lash out with violence.

Indeed, the Southern Poverty Law Center, with 15 full-time researchers tracing extremist activities, has found a slight overlap in hate crimes and hate groups. The center estimates only 10 to 15 percent of so-called hate crimes — crimes motivated by race, political ideology, gender or sexual preference — are committed by people who belong to an actual organization.

But some of the more heinous crimes committed in this country can be linked to some of these organizations. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, suspected abortion-clinic bomber Eric Rudolph and Furrow all had links, according to the law center.

First Amendment protections

Potok of the law center acknowledged it’s hard to take an organization or Web site to task for the “lone wolves” it inspires, unless there is a provable conspiracy against a specific group or building.

“You can’t sue someone or prosecute them for creating an atmosphere of hate,” he said. “Those things are simply protected by the First Amendment.”

Besides, it’s dangerous to tinker with freedom of expression, Potok said. He pointed to Germany, where residents cannot utter the Nazi greeting “sieg heil” these days without running the risk of jail time.

“Yet these countries are suffering with neo-fascist movements that in some cases are much stronger than ours,” Potok said. “I don’t think suppressing free speech helps. It actually plugs up the safety valve to some extent.”

Thus, foes of hate sites must turn to other means, such as civil suits, which the law center used successfully against the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The group was found liable for inciting members to bomb a black church in South Carolina four years ago.

“But civil litigation and criminal prosecution is only a finger in the dike,” according to Bob Roy of the law center.

Pratkanis, meanwhile, said he believes the recent crimes and hate sites on the Web are not having their desired effect.

“I think Americans are shocked by this,” he said. “I think Americans haven’t had experience dealing with these kinds of crimes and are saying, “What’s going on?’ The reaction is the opposite of starting a so-called race war.”

The law center is somewhat less optimistic.

“The effect on the general public doesn’t matter, as long as (the hate crime) helps the group,” Roy said. “There are people out there, believe me, who say Buford Furrow is a hero.”

The sad truth, Roy said, is that hate groups know their activities offend most people but can often net a small percentage of those who stumble across their pages.

“My granddaddy told me you can take chicken poop and make chicken salad if you try hard enough,” Roy said. “And that’s what these groups are trying to do.”