The actual terroristic activities are illegal, and Klan members have been prosecuted (and successfully sued) for them. "Hate-mongering" isn't illegal in the US.
If the Klan would’ve been classified as a terrorist organization they would be illegal they haven’t.
The Nation of Islam is also classified as a hate group by the SPLC however they aren’t banned under the same laws that protect the KKK.
NOI members just like the KKK have been prosecuted in the past for many things, however outside of very limited circumstances there isn’t such thing as guilt by association in the US justice system.
I know this. The KKK, or at least a great many chapters, is an organization that helped coordinate crime. By this, I mean that hierarchical members of the KKK organized criminal acts to be perpetrated by other members of the organization in their hierarchical control. The KKK was 100% a criminal organization that could have been prosectured using RICO. It would not even have been the only overtly political group where this would have been done.
I always wonder what people are thinking when they suggest that the US could silence an entire viewpoint through invocation of RICO or FTO designation. If the government could have declared an entire line of thought illegal, don't people think we would have done so numerous times already? We couldn't even ban membership in the actual communist party at the height of the Cold War (not for lack of trying, though).
RICO exists. If the criminal activities were systematically prompted by a group, they can be sued and all their members may be prosecuted for these crimes, especially their leaders.
RICO is a pretty narrow tool, as it should be. It also isn’t based on group membership, it’s based on involvement in the planning / sponsorship of illegal activities.
It wouldn’t matter how many Hackernews members started coordinating bank robberies; RICO wouldn’t magically allow for the rest of the Hackernews user base to be prosecuted.
Sure. But if Hackernews had a hierarchy and a membership system in which lower-ranking members would do criminal acts organized by their ranking superiors, the organization could be sued under civil and criminal RICO, and then dismantled. While not all members would be prosecuted, a very large amount could be, and the subsequent criminal investigation would make it possible to indict a good proportion of the rest. It would also mean that even lower members could have been prosecuted based on their assistance to various criminal acts.
It is indeed a narrow tool, and yet can be applied to organizations such as the KKK.
I think your problem here is not so much that you don't know what RICO is, as that you don't have a tight grip on what the KKK is. It is probably the case that many, or even most, Klan members are also members of white supremacist criminal gangs. That those gangs are subject to RICO prosecution (a major Aryan gang was taken down that way just last year) illustrates the problem with your argument. The enterprise itself has to be focused on the racketeering-predicate crimes.