Ku Klux Klan denialism is in vogue for the MAGA movement these days.
As the GOP uses Jim Crow-like racial profiling and voter suppression tactics such as gerrymandering, some Republicans are engaged in a campaign of obfuscation and misinformation to downplay allegations of racism.
And it increasingly seems that some of President Donald Trump’s supporters want to use falsehoods about the KKK to advance their goals.
Last week’s fact-free diatribe from Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., about the KKK supposedly being a leftist organization is a prime example. As I recently wrote, Republicans have used the Justice Department’s dubious indictment of the anti-racist Southern Poverty Law Center to falsely portray racist extremism, which the SPLC tracks and investigates, as either nonexistent or a liberal contrivance. This tactic mirrors rhetoric deployed by conservatives who sought to deny the threat of the KKK during its rise, or even its mere existence.
The aforementioned falsehoods about the SPLC were the subject of an exchange Hageman had with conservative podcaster Winston Marshall in which she made the demonstrably false claim that the KKK, Nazis and the Aryan Nation are “far-left organizations” and “always have been.”
Hageman told Marshall:
The Aryan Nation, the Nazis and the KKK are not far-right organizations. Those are far-left organizations, and they always have been. The KKK was created and started by the Democrats in the United States to prevent Blacks from being able to participate in the political arena, if you will. So I’m going to say they’ve never been associated with the right; they’ve always been associated with the left.
This is the kind of derangement that would make a reputable historian weep.
And you can see in Hageman’s comments why speaking of politics in directional terms (i.e., “right” vs. “left”) is flawed. The KKK has never been liberal and essentially has always been a conservative group of Christian white supremacists. Some Republicans — particularly Black supporters of Trump’s, as we have seen lately — like to portray Democrats as the party of the KKK because at the time of the organization’s rise, the white Christian conservatives most vehemently opposed to Black civil rights called themselves Democrats.
But in reality, the KKK didn’t belong to any particular party, and the Democratic Party didn’t create it. People suggesting otherwise are most likely trying to score cheap political points.
As historian Elaine Frantz explained in a 2011 essay titled “Klan Skepticism and Denial in Reconstruction-Era Public Discourse,” the conspiracy to turn a blind eye to the KKK and its racist terrorism was a bipartisan project:
While Klansmen and their Democratic political allies deliberately spread doubt about Klan reports, they could not have succeeded as thoroughly as they did without the substantial, if intermittent, collaboration of their Republican opponents.
Hageman and some of her fellow Trump supporters apparently don’t want Republicans to be associated with racists, but pseudointellectual diatribes on American history are not the way to avoid that. Instead, I’d suggest not using phrases popularized by the KKK decades ago, such as “America First,” and refraining from celebrating former klan leaders, like Nathan Bedford Forrest.
And, of course, ceasing the GOP’s demonstrable and devastating political crusade against Black people would go a long way.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.