The Ku Klux Klan Party: #Democrats Hate Without End

Peter Gottschalk, at the Los Angeles Times, elaborates the point I've stressed since the Kansas Jewish Community Center murders: the Democrat/KKK/Party has been the home of eliminationist racist hatred from the Reconstruction era to present times.

See, "Kansas, the KKK and hate without end":

The news that a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan is suspected of shooting and killing three people near Jewish community centers in Kansas seems at first glance like a disparaged past flaring briefly into the present. Americans like to imagine that the KKK belongs to a long-gone South and anti-Semitism to a distant 20th century. Sadly, this better reflects a naive faith in the nation's history of religious tolerance than the realities experienced by many religious minorities. Although the KKK has evolved and its membership has dwindled, it remains part of an American [Democrat Party] legacy of religious intolerance.

A central tenet of U.S. nationalism rests on a notion of welcoming huddled masses, but the idea of American exceptionalism also runs deep. When Americans have imagined their country's uniqueness as defined racially, religiously or culturally, those outside those parameters are immediately suspect. Sadly, religion has often served as the catalyst for prejudice....

The KKK has manifested this dynamic [of Democrat eliminitionist racist hatred] since it emerged in the South in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Targeting newly freed blacks in an effort to maintain white supremacy, the KKK terrorized the region. However, passage of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 and, later, the institutionalized segregation of Jim Crow laws led to the Klan's rapid fading popularity.

The 20th century saw the return of a KKK that may have drawn inspiration from its past in the Reconstruction South and now sought prominence as a modern national organization. Further agitating already inflated fears of East European immigration in the 1920s, its leadership around the country seeded branches called "klaverns" (part of an invented vocabulary exalting Klan secrecy and exclusivity). Although blacks suffered again at the hands of the revived Klan, immigrants became new targets.

The Klan of the 1920s [endorsed by Democrat President Woodrow Wilson] successfully channeled such sentiments into a national organization that claimed 4 million members from the Carolinas to California. Societies boasting the KKK name emerged on American university campuses at a time when perhaps 40% of fraternities limited membership to "Aryans" and "Caucasians." Anaheim — future home of Disneyland — boasted such a public and political Klan presence that it was nicknamed "Klanheim." In 1925, the imperial wizard led tens of thousands of members in a parade down Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue.

The KKK's nativism welded racism to religious prejudice to create a powerful cudgel aimed at East European immigrants in general and Jews in particular.

This second generation of the Klan dissipated in a welter of infighting and scandals, even as most Americans rejected its message and ostracized its members. However, the civil rights movement of the 1960s spurred a third emergence. Never reaching the popularity of the previous incarnations, this one nevertheless wrought havoc, especially on black communities...

PREVIOUSLY: "Frazier Glenn Miller, Jr., Kansas Jewish Murder Suspect, Made Democrat Congressional Bid in 2006," and "The Democrat Party's Racial Regression."