Radical right parties typically endeavor to build an outer image of moderation in order to present themselves as more credible parties of government. But how much do these effort correspond to a real ideological change on the part of these actors? We advance a theory of backstage and frontstage— two ideal types of contexts for political communication. In the former case, communication is private; in the latter case, it is public. We argue that in general, far-right politicians should make more counternormative claims in a backstage setting than in a frontstage one. Moreover, this gap should widen after events of ingroup violence and shrink after events of outgroup violence. We also formulate the hypothesis that the size of the frontstage-backstage gap depends on the actor’s characteristics (experience, rank within the party, gender) and, consequently, their incentives and capability to strategically conceal part of their ideology. We test these arguments using newly collected data on how politicians of the German far-right party AfD communicate in more private (Telegram) and more public (parliament) settings. Using state-of-the-art computational text analyses methods, we measure a number of characteristics of their communication in both settings, including overall negativity, use of sensitive language, and proximity to Nazi rhetoric. Our findings highlight the incentives that stigmatized political actors have to communicate with different levels of radicalism, and the types of factors that can alter said incentives.