The internet has made the Ku Klux Klan as dangerous as the Islamic State because people who feel marginalized "can pick this stuff up just the way ISIS does," author Laurence Leamer told Newsmax TV on Thursday.
"The Klan doesn't exist as a major social force, but these kinds of marginalized people can go on the Internet," Leamer told "The Hard Line" host Ed Berliner. "They can pick it up and go and do these things.
"That's why it's so frightening for the authorities. How do you hunt these people? How do you know that somebody like this is going to do this? It's almost impossible to trace them beforehand."
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Leamer is the author of the new book,
"The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan."
Those who turn to the internet for support and encouragement from groups like ISIS and the Klan "are very dangerous," he told Berliner.
"What do you do? We don't want to limit American freedoms, but yet they spew this hatred — and some ignorant and desperate people pick this stuff up."
Leamer's book details the 1981 killing of a 19-year-old African-American man by two members of the United Klans of America Inc. in Mobile, Ala.
They sought to retaliate after a mostly black jury failed to convict a black man for killing a white police officer.
The Klansmen, Henry Hays and James Knowles, beat the African American, Michael Donald, to death with a tree limb, slashed his throat and hung Donald from a tree in a racially mixed neighborhood.
Hays was sentenced to death, making it the first time in more than 50 years that Alabama had leveled the penalty on a white man for killing a black man. He was executed in 1997.
Knowles was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to murder and testifying against Hays.
In 1984, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Klan on behalf of Donald's mother, Beulah Mae Donald.
She won a $7 million judgment in 1987, bankrupting the organization. Beulah Donald died the following year at age 67.
While Leamer told Berliner that he was surprised that the Klan was still a force in 1981, he described their form of terror at the time as "missionary work."
"That meant you go out and you find a black man and you beat him up," he said. "You beat him half to death.
"And then, he was lying there on the ground and you'd say: 'If you say anything, if you go to the police, it's not going to do any good because the police are Klansmen — and we're going to come back and kill you.'"
"Find Laurence Leamer's new book, "The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan," at Amazon.com.
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