Joseph Lowdes: 'some far-right groups want a growing racial conflict in the US'
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In the last decade, the UN has issued early warnings to five countries, asking them to tackle racial tensions: Burundi, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Kyrgyzstan and Nigeria. Now, incredibly, the United States has joined this club. A UN committee has cited the overtly racist slogans, chants and salutes in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a civil rights activist was killed by a suspected neo-Nazi. The UN's warning won't have surprised our guest.
In a blog three months before Charlottesville, he wrote: ‘There is now a fully-realized fascist social movement in this country.’
Joseph Lowndes is a political scientist at the University of Oregon and a nationally respected authority on conservatism and race. He sees the recent clashes in Charlottesville as an attempt by the diverse far-right movement “to build a national presence”. According to him, fascists existed in the US for decades, but are now ‘moving from being online to being in the streets.’
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