According to an extensive investigation by Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Hate Watch” and “Intelligence Report” reporter Leah Nelson, the late David Mills, a popular blogger whose online handle was “Undercover Black Man,” identified the pattern of unique terms referenced by the NBFSN blogs. He hoped to conclud they were a hoax perpetrated by someone trying to provoke whites into hating blacks. But he couldn’t and actuallly did more to confirm their existence.

Mills, a former newspaper reporter and Emmy-winning writer for HBO’s “The Wire,” devoted substantial effort to exposing them, and several times exchanged angry words online with various members of the network, who were especially enraged when they learned that he was black.

The NBFSN also has been much discussed on white nationalist hate site.

After Mills died from an aneurism in 2010, a post on one network blog implied that Mills, though black, was essentially white and had earned his early demise. “David Mills’ soul got blue eyes,” it said.

Members of Stormfront, the Web’s largest white racist forum, seem to agree with Mills’ theory, while posters on the racist and anti-Semitic Vanguard News Network believe the blogs are created by Jews as a way to foment tension between blacks and whites.

These theories, however, seem dubious at best. Far more likely, judging from the scant evidence available on their websites, the people who make up the NBFSN are drawn from the world of racist black nationalism.

In fact, it seems very likely that they include many of the hundreds of Nuwaubians who largely disappeared from view after their leader’s imprisonment. They also may well include former followers of Yahweh ben Yahweh, a terrifying cult leader who was convicted of conspiracy to murder white people as an initiation rite at his Florida-based Nation of Yahweh, which reportedly once owned properties around the country valued at $100 million. Since his death in 2007, hundreds of his followers in the U.S. and Canada have dropped out of sight as well.

Whether they are active Nuwaubians, people drawn from other black supremacist cults like the Nation of Yahweh, or freelancers who have created an entirely new concept, the National Black Foot Soldiers Network has brought Dwight York’s apocalyptic hatred of whites into the 21st century. York, whose release isn’t scheduled until the 22nd century, would be proud. Nelson says.