As neo-Nazis, Confederate leagues, “alt-right” fight clubs and emo, lone-wolf white boys compete in the crowded arena for the white supremacist world championship, everyone seems to have forgotten about the old-school, perennial powerhouse that has reigned supreme since the Civil War.
The Ku Klux Klan are the New York Yankees of white supremacy; the Alabama Crimson Tide of American hatemongers. Long before some ruddy-cheeked troll in a custom-fit suit decided to rename the movement “alt-right,” the Klan were out there lynching, burning crosses and doing the grassroots work of right-wing terrorism. The KKK were literally blazing a trail with torches and pitchforks when Adolf Hitler was still working with watercolors. Everyone seemed to have forgotten them. But not anymore.
The Ku Klux Klan are back like they’d never left (because they never left), and this weekend they reminded everyone that when it comes to using hate and fear to spread the message of white supremacy, they will take a back seat to no one. This weekend, amid the current climate of online radicalization and social media solicitation, the KKK led a nationwide, door-to-door recruiting effort to remind everyone that—though they might be 152 years old—they still have some hate left in their bones.
According to ABC News10, Klan members distributed flyers all over Northville, N.Y., sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning. The Fulton County, N.Y., Sheriff’s Office’s Facebook page warned residents of the town that “there are individuals going around representing themselves as members of the KKK. Recent activity has them in Northville over night where they are leaving small bags containing informational pamphlets and kitty litter. This is NOT harmful and can be thrown out.”
The packages—in which the Klan advertised themselves as the “Kool Kids Klub”—contained flyers for an upcoming Charlottesville, Va., rally sponsored by the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan to protest the removal of a Confederate monument. The protest is scheduled for July 8, and one can only surmise that ticket sales for the event are slow, if the KKK is recruiting all the way in New York.
Although counterprotests haven’t been announced, it would be beautiful if people of color showed up, peacefully joined in and just sang songs while roasting marshmallows on the burning crosses.
While the cowards drove pickup trucks through Northville (I assume all Klansmen drive pickup trucks or Trans Ams), KPRC in Houston reports that the KKK recruiting team left flyers soliciting members in a Houston neighborhood late Friday night. The flyers spoke out against interracial marriage and homosexuality, because everyone knows that the sight of white men in Casper the Friendly Ghost costumes automatically makes a person reconsider falling in love.
Similar flyers were found on the lawns of at least 17 homes in Texas City, Texas, in late May, but the Houston flyers included a callback number and a P.O. box, just in case residents wanted to hear more about the Klan firsthand. It seems as if Wikipedia, Google and everywhere else on the internet have a smear campaign against the group, who only want to stop the white genocide occurring in, um ... well ... mostly in the same areas as bigfoot sightings and alien abductions.
After a jury acquitted a black 16-year-old in the killing of a white man in Hoover, Ala., the Klan distributed flyers that read, “A jury has acquitted Negro Charleston Wells of murder in the 2016 shooting death of White Hoover resident Mike Gilotti, a veteran and father of two. You better wake up whitey!”
The flyers showed up Friday on lawns in the same neighborhood as the victim of the 2016 killing, proving that the local Klan chapter probably doesn’t have a sensitivity-training course. Authorities have no leads on who may have distributed the flyers, but since this area is only a mile from my home, I have noticed police pulling over more white men as they investigate the incident that scared so many residents.
I’m just kidding. You know police would never do that.
Although it is impossible to say how many members are part of the secret organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch says that there were 72 Klan chapters in 2014 and 130 in 2016, adding to the 917 hate groups operating in the U.S.
So the next time you hear about the Klan coming to town, don’t think of them as a relic of the past. Apparently they still exist, need members and know how to operate dot-matrix printers. They may have had a few down years, but they will be back, because if there is one thing history teaches us, it’s that there are three things that can never be eradicated:
- love
- roaches
- white people’s chickenhearted grip on their slowly dissolving state of supremacy