White Nationalism on the Rise?

Over at ThinkProgress, in a post entitled "The Rise of White Nationalism in America, as Explained by Google," Jack Jenkins and Dylan Petrohilos "check[] Google trends to see how often people searched for terms and phrases commonly used by White Supremacists over the past few years." They find increasing interest for a lot of different queries: "White Genocide," "Pro-White," "Black On White Crime," "Alt-Right," and "European Nationalism."

I was surprised to see "white nationalism" itself left off the list. One reason is that Google doesn't seem to have good data on it:

But Google does have a new feature, still in beta, that measures interest in broad topics rather than specific queries — and interest in white nationalism is decidedly down:

So is interest in the specific term "white pride," but with a spike in June 2015, the month of Dylann Roof's massacre:

And "Aryan Nations":

And "Stormfront," the website that started as a bulletin board for David Duke's campaign in Louisiana — though there was an enormous spike the month of President Obama's election:

Not much going on with "KKK," at least until the hate group broke back into the news:

And finally, "Council of Conservative Citizens," again with a spike apparently driven by Roof:

So, the evidence here seems mixed. Some of these terms have rising interest, while others are steady or even declining.

Robert VerBruggen is editor of RealClearPolicy. Twitter: @RAVerBruggen