Hate groups in decline, but inspire lone wolf terrorists

Kelsey Davis | Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — The Southern Poverty Law Center is one of the nation’s premier trackers of hate groups — except more and more often it’s not groups that the center is worried about.

There are groups that still greatly concern the Montgomery, Ala.-based Southern Poverty Law Center, such as the Alabama-based League of the South, which has chapters in 27 states and whose leader lives in Killen, Ala., and state chairman lives in Wetumpka, Ala.

But as acts of terror are carried out more and more by lone perpetrators, the threats from groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi skinheads seem about as relevant as polio — something once massively feared, but now, while still a threat, largely an anachronism.

Still, it is the ideologies of these hate groups that are fueling the acts of lone wolf terrorists, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

From the 1920s to the 1970s, the Ku Klux Klan boasted hundreds of thousands of members and political power, and it carried out countless acts of violence throughout the country.

Mark Potok, a Southern Poverty Law Center senior fellow considered one of the nation’s leading experts on extremism, says that’s no longer the case.

“The Klan is split, very poorly led and really weak politically,” said Potok. “It has nothing remotely like the pull it once had.

“Once upon a time the Klan really did control governorships, all kinds of politicians and police departments, but that’s not true today.”

But the Klan still has a different type of influence: infecting lone-wolf terrorists with its ideology of hate.

INDIVIDUALS GET HARDER TO TRACK

Because they aren’t tied to specific groups, lone wolves are even more difficult to fight than hate groups.

“The thing about a lone wolf is that he is almost impossible to stop,” Potok said. “If somebody makes a plan and doesn’t talk to anyone else about it and is not getting any kind of help from anyone else and one day walks out of his door and starts to shoot people, that’s very hard to stop in advance.”

The advent of the lone wolf has been exacerbated by the digital era, but Pete Simi, a criminology professor at the University of Nebraska who has studied white supremacist groups for 18 years, said the lone wolf movement has been decades in the making.

“The idea of going out on your own and acting on behalf of the cause, but doing so individually, is very much a strategy that has been advocated for by propagandists and leaders and so forth,” said Simi, citing white supremacist fantasy fiction novels that have inspired lone wolves in the past to commit acts of terror.

As authorities have learned with the Islamic State, the Islamic terrorist organization that recruits lone terrorists through the Internet, there is no easy answer to this problem.

​“They are the very most difficult thing there is to prevent,” Potok said. “Putting out materials that teach tolerance is some kind of effort that may help us out down the line, but that doesn’t help us out this week.”

As far as anyone knows, Dylann Roof, the alleged Charleston, S.C., shooter, had no direct contact with organized hate groups.

“He encountered this whole world of white nationalism through the Internet entirely,” Potok said.

Potok said more and more extremists are leaving organized hate groups for the Internet.

“Of course someone could have made that argument 15 years ago,” Potok said. “The Internet was already a big thing by the late ’90s, but it’s become much more pervasive today. For a guy like Dylann Roof who’s 21 years old, that’s the language he speaks. He gets all this information from the Internet and social media.”

Another reason extremists have left organized groups is that the cost of being outed as a member of one has risen, causing people to lose their jobs or sometimes spouses.

“So more and more people are going off into the anonymity and safety of the Internet and that world is increasingly producing lone wolves like Dylann Roof,” Potok said.

IDEOLOGIES OF VIOLENCE

While lone wolf terrorism has become much more of a physical threat, hate groups actively spread ideologies of violence that fuel the acts of these lone terrorists.

For example, Alabama is at the center of the neo-Confederate movement — an ideology that pushes for the South to secede.

League of the South, the “premier neo-Confederate organization” is based in Alabama, but has chapters in 27 states.

According to Southern Poverty Law Center reports, its leader, Michael Hill, has hinted at a “race war” in his writing. This is only one of the military related theories he has alluded to.

“Although there’s no political violence that we know of at all associated with League of the South, still their leader has in the last few years been telling his followers to, incredibly enough, gather tools for derailing trains,” Potok said.

“Nobody really knew what he was talking about with this derailing trains. They have also started a secret kind of paramilitary wing that they call the Indomitables. Exactly what they’re doing, we don’t really know, but it is supposed to be paramilitary.”

Six phone calls and two messages left in attempts to seek a comment from Hill were unsuccessful as were two phone calls made and one message left for the chairman of the Alabama chapter.

Porter Dowling, a former member of the League of the South, said he wouldn’t characterize the league as a hate group. He also said he never heard anything about a paramilitary group or gathering tools for derailing trains while he was a member.

But as the League of the South and other extremist groups lose political relevance, they become more defensive, Potok said.

“The South is becoming multicultural. Race relations are very slowly improving. The Confederate battle flag seems to be on the way out,” Potok said. “So (these groups) haven’t had any good news from their point of view for a long time. And as a result as they get pushed further and further out of the political mainstream, they become more radical.”