'They’re losing': Author explains why white supremacist groups are dissolving

Journalist and author Wesley Lowery explained on Saturday's edition of The Saturday/Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart how the American white supremacist movement has evolved away from "big organizational, hierarchical groups" such as the Ku Klux Klan into a peppering of acts of vigilante violence throughout the United States.

"So one thing that's very interesting right, is that there's a historian, David Chalmers. He writes 'the definitive history of the Klan' in a book called Hood Americanism. And he writes that for most of its history, the Klan and other white supremacist groups were dispositionally conservative, meaning that they were winning. We lived in a white supremacist society. Their goal was to keep things the way they were," Lowery recalled.

"But following the entrance of our country into multiracial democracy in the late Sixties, their tactic changes," Lowery continued. "They become radical and revolutionary. They're no longer winning, they're losing. And so now they're fighting to restructure the country back to the way it was. Now that justifies more aggressive violence or aggressive acts of terror. We start to see the rise of these extremely complex groups who are literally trying to spark a race war."

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Lowery noted that "beyond that, they shift — white supremacist leader Louis Beam writes in the Eighties — they shift to a quote-unquote 'leaderless resistance model.' We think about this as quote-unquote 'lone wolves' very often, that their aim is to build these bureaucratic systems and goals and membership organizations. But their aim is to put their toxic propaganda out into the world via the internet, via pamphlets, via television shows, via the mainstream politics, so that an individual can become radicalized."

Lowery also cited recent examples of these occurrences.

"We see this with Timothy McVey. We see this with Dylann Roof. We see this with the shooter in El Paso and in Buffalo. They're not members of these big organizational, hierarchical groups," Lowery said. "They — these are white Americans who have racialized prejudice, who locate the writings and the message boards of these, of these violent white supremacists. And what their marching orders are, become very clear, and then they carry them out."

Watch MSNBC's clip below or at this link.

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