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Brandon Lecroy was arrested last month after paying an undercover officer a $100 down payment to kill his black neighbor. The attempt at buying a hitman was made through a white supremacist website and was followed closely by police from the initial attempts of buying the service.
Lecroy supposedly wanted to pay the hit-man a total of $500 and had asked him to murder his neighbor, hang his body from a tree and burn the cross into his yard. He had also referenced possibly getting the hitman to murder more people after the initial murder was completed. He faces a fine of $250,000 and up to 10 years in prison if found guilty.
The crime took place in South Carolina which was also home to the Charleston Church shooting which claimed the lives of 9 people attending a Bible service. The shooter, Dylaan Roof, openly expressed sympathy for neo-Naziism and white supremacy and confessed to being radicalized by the shooting of Trayvon Martin.
Roof reportedly was deeply concerned about Black on White crime and committed the mass shooting as a means of starting a race war.
In a study conducted by The New America Foundation, they found that murders committed by Right-wing extremists outnumbered Islamists by a factor of 2:1. Moreover, the Anti-Defamation League that 372 murder occurred between 2007-2016 that were connected to acts of extremism and 74% of them were conducted by right-wing extremists.
“I am concerned that, in this highly polarized and divided society, more people who have stances that fall within the mainstream, on the left and right alike, may consider political violence an attractive option,” Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism said about the growing acceptance of violence on the left and right.
While the militant left may be having a resurgence under groups like Antifa they simply have not been tied to the same rates of violence and murder found in either right-wing or Islamist extremist groups.
A 2009 report conducted by the Department of Homeland Security titled “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” found that right-wing violence was on the rise and that “white supremacists, radical anti-abortionists, and a few “disgruntled veterans,” were the most susceptible to becoming radicalized in the coming years.
The study was condemned by House Republicans, including the Speaker of the House John Boehner, and was kept quiet by the Obama Administration for fear it may prove too divisive.
H/T: News9
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