tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca/topics/kkk-23261/articles
KKK – The Conversation
2023-12-15T16:25:51Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/219287
2023-12-15T16:25:51Z
2023-12-15T16:25:51Z
100 years ago, the KKK planted bombs at a US university – part of the terror group’s crusade against American Catholics
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565618/original/file-20231213-17-rh1lm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C2879%2C2288&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A KKK rally in Dayton, Ohio, on Sept. 21, 1923.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dayton Metro Library</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It was Dec. 19, 1923 – 100 years ago. The first day of Christmas break at the University of Dayton, with fewer than 40 students still on campus.</p>
<p>At 10:30 p.m., the quiet was shattered by <a href="https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=hst_fac_pub">a series of explosions</a>, as 12 bombs went off throughout campus. Frightened students discovered that, while damage was minimal, there was an eight-foot burning cross on the edge of campus. Running to tear it down, they were confronted by several hundred Klansmen screaming threats from 40 to 50 cars.</p>
<p>It wasn’t the first time Dayton’s residents <a href="https://www.daytondailynews.com/sports/college/recalling-the-day-football-routed-the-kkk/aGCpGKbQrF1wDENVDxRTEP/">had endured terror from the Ku Klux Klan</a>. Hundreds of neighbors poured out of their houses and charged at the hooded invaders. The Klansmen sped away, and the students and others extinguished the fire and tore down the cross.</p>
<p>The KKK is most infamous for violently terrorizing African Americans. But in the 1920s its hatred also had other targets, especially outside the South. This version of the KKK, known as the Second Ku Klux Klan, harassed Catholics, Jews and immigrants – including students and staff at Catholic universities like Dayton, where I am <a href="https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/trollinger_bill.php">a historian of American religion</a>. All of this is the focus of my 2013 article, “<a href="https://works.bepress.com/bill_trollinger/15/">Hearing the Silence</a>.”</p>
<h2>The Second Ku Klux Klan</h2>
<p>The KKK emerged in the South in the years immediately after the Civil War. Its goal was to use whatever means necessary – including <a href="https://eji.org/report/reconstruction-in-america/documenting-reconstruction-violence/#chapter-3-intro">a great deal of murderous violence</a> – to force newly freed African Americans into conditions close to slavery.</p>
<p>Having succeeded, the original Klan all but disappeared by the end of the 19th century. But in the wake of <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/08/383279630/100-years-later-whats-the-legacy-of-birth-of-a-nation">the blockbuster film</a> “Birth of a Nation” – which celebrated the original KKK as having “redeemed” the defeated South – the organization <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631493690">was reborn in Georgia in 1915</a>.</p>
<p>This second KKK <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631493690">only attracted a few hundred members</a> over the next few years. But it exploded upon the national scene in the early 1920s, thanks to anxieties about immigration, race and communism. In fact, the white-robed Klansmen with their <a href="https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/cross-burning/">fiery crosses – a symbol borrowed from “Birth of a Nation</a>” – very soon attracted between 1 million and 5 million members. </p>
<p>The second KKK was truly national, with more members in the Midwest and West than in the South. As the reporter <a href="https://www.timothyeganbooks.com/">Timothy Egan</a> powerfully chronicles in his book, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/558306/a-fever-in-the-heartland-by-timothy-egan/">A Fever in the Heartland</a>,” “the Klan owned the state” of Indiana. In 1925, “most members of the incoming state legislature took orders from the hooded order, as did the majority of the congressional delegation.”</p>
<p>It is possible that Ohio had nearly as many members in the 1920s. Historian David Chalmers – <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/hooded-americanism">who counted 400,000 Ohioans</a> in the KKK at the organization’s peak – commented that “there was a time when it seemed the mask and hood had become the official symbol of the Buckeye State.”</p>
<p>The second KKK presented itself as a supremely patriotic organization: “100% American.” And to be 100% American, in their eyes, you had to be white and determined to keep African Americans in their place. Emulating the first KKK, <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/behind-the-mask-of-chivalry-9780195098365">the second Klan used horrific violence</a>, including lynchings, to try to terrify African Americans into submission.</p>
<p>To be “100% American” also meant that you were Christian. The second KKK was <a href="https://kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700624478/">the quintessential white Christian nationalist organization</a>, and it defined ideal citizens by their race, creed and birth. When Klansmen were initiated into the organization, members sang “Just as I am Without One Plea,” a hymn that adores Jesus as the “Lamb of God.” Yet the group portrayed Jesus as one of them: the First Klansman.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565694/original/file-20231214-29-vitpg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A black and white photograph of two women with a baby between them, all dressed in white robes and white hoods, with their faces showing." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565694/original/file-20231214-29-vitpg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565694/original/file-20231214-29-vitpg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=770&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565694/original/file-20231214-29-vitpg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=770&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565694/original/file-20231214-29-vitpg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=770&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565694/original/file-20231214-29-vitpg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=968&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565694/original/file-20231214-29-vitpg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=968&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565694/original/file-20231214-29-vitpg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=968&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Anna Doss and Mrs. Theodore Heck, wife of the Ohio Commander of the Klan, with a baby at a Klan event in Ohio around 1925.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/klanswomen-at-great-ohio-rally-here-are-shown-the-eldest-news-photo/515134196?adppopup=true">Bettmann via Getty News</a></span>
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<h2>Anti-Catholic campaigns</h2>
<p>Actually, being Christian wasn’t enough. To be 100% American, in the Klan’s view, meant that you were a white Protestant Christian.</p>
<p>In the years between 1890 and 1920, <a href="https://pluralism.org/catholic-and-jewish-immigrants">a flood of immigrants</a> from southern and eastern Europe came to America, a large percentage of whom were Catholic or Jewish.</p>
<p>While the Klan was – <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/ku-klux-klan">and still is</a> – strongly antisemitic, in the 1920s its members were particularly worried about Catholics, as there were many more of them. This was certainly the case in Dayton, where <a href="https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/13949806v1ch1.pdf">35% of churchgoers were Catholic</a>, thanks to an influx of immigrants who worked in the city’s factories.</p>
<p>In response to the Catholic “threat,” at least 10% of Daytonians – some 15,000 people – <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780929587820/The-Ku-Klux-Klan-in-the-City-1915-1930">joined the KKK in the early 1920s</a>, with some estimates placing the number as high as 40,000.</p>
<p>As was the case elsewhere in the Midwest, the Klan’s presence in Dayton was visible in rallies and parades that attracted thousands of Klansmen, Klanswomen and supporters – not to mention the burning crosses intimidating Catholics and Jews in working-class neighborhoods. As one Dayton resident of those years later recalled, the “<a href="https://works.bepress.com/bill_trollinger/15/">threat of Klan violence was always there</a>.” </p>
<p>The Klan directed much of its anti-Catholic hostility <a href="https://works.bepress.com/bill_trollinger/15/">against the University of Dayton</a>, which was founded by the <a href="https://www.marianist.com/">Society of Mary, also known as the Marianists</a>. As part of their intimidation campaign, KKK members repeatedly slipped onto campus to set crosses on fire. Rumor had it that the police force was filled with Klansmen; whether or not that was true, city authorities made little effort to intervene.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565695/original/file-20231214-15-b6cp2f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man in a white robe and cap that says '69 Ohio' sits on a low stool outside pouring a drink from a pitcher." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565695/original/file-20231214-15-b6cp2f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565695/original/file-20231214-15-b6cp2f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=824&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565695/original/file-20231214-15-b6cp2f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=824&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565695/original/file-20231214-15-b6cp2f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=824&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565695/original/file-20231214-15-b6cp2f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1035&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565695/original/file-20231214-15-b6cp2f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1035&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565695/original/file-20231214-15-b6cp2f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1035&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">N.W. Cleverly, a member of the Klan from Ashtabula, Ohio, before a Ku Klux Klan parade in Washington, D.C., in 1925.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/cleverly-a-member-of-the-ku-klux-klan-from-ashtabula-ohio-news-photo/1211315045?adppopup=true">FPG/Archive Photos/Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>But as <a href="https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/linda-gordon.html">historian Linda Gordon</a> <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631493690">has noted</a>, “targets of Klan aggression were not always passive or nonviolent themselves.” Students at the University of Notre Dame, for example, <a href="https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268104344/notre-dame-vs-the-klan/">stopped a KKK parade and rally</a>, then damaged the headquarters of the local Klan. </p>
<p>University of Dayton students fought back, too. They repeatedly chased Klansmen off campus, calling on them to “show their faces.” At one point, football coach <a href="https://footballfoundation.org/hof_search.aspx?hof=1476">Harry Baujan</a>, hearing that another cross burning was about to commence, exhorted his players to “take off after them” and “<a href="https://works.bepress.com/bill_trollinger/15/">tear their shirts off</a>” or “whatever you want to do.”</p>
<h2>Lingering legacy</h2>
<p>The second KKK peaked in influence and membership around 1925. Over the next few years, however, the Klan was afflicted by a series of scandals, the most famous of which involved the leader of the Indiana KKK – in effect, the most powerful Klansman in America – <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/558306/a-fever-in-the-heartland-by-timothy-egan/">who raped and murdered his secretary</a>. The KKK had faded from view by 1930, but not without achieving many of its aims.</p>
<p>For one thing, <a href="https://eji.org/report/reconstruction-in-america/documenting-reconstruction-violence/#chapter-3-intro">its extraordinary violence, including lynchings</a>, helped ensure that white supremacy would remain the order of the day in the South – as it did for the next few decades.</p>
<p>In addition, the Klan and its sympathizers won the fight on immigration. In 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1924-law-slammed-door-immigrants-and-politicians-who-pushed-it-back-open-180974910/">which remained on the books until the 1960s</a>. This law drastically reduced the number of immigrants who could enter the U.S. from Southern and Eastern Europe – that is, reducing the number of Catholic and Jewish immigrants – and essentially cut off all immigration from Asia. </p>
<p>One of the tragic effects came in the 1930s and 1940s, as the act <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/united-states-immigration-and-refugee-law-1921-1980">made it very difficult for Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust to get into the U.S.</a>.</p>
<p>While the second KKK faded from view in the late 1920s, <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/ku-klux-klan">a third emerged in the 1950s and 1960s</a> to lead the charge against the Civil Rights Movement. Today, Klan membership is miniscule, as the KKK has been supplanted by more tech-savvy hate groups.</p>
<p>The Second Ku Klux Klan argued that to be truly and fully American one must be the right race, the right ethnicity, the right religion. One century after the Dayton bombing, such sentiments persist in the United States.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219287/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>William Trollinger does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Most of the Klan’s victims were African American, but many other groups have been targeted during the hate group’s century and a half of history.
William Trollinger, Professor of History, University of Dayton
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/215760
2023-10-25T12:33:34Z
2023-10-25T12:33:34Z
Antisemitism has moved from the right to the left in the US − and falls back on long-standing stereotypes
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555439/original/file-20231023-29-xvca3a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C8%2C5991%2C3979&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An Oct. 19, 2023, rally in New York City's Times Square demanding the freeing of hostages taken in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/people-gather-for-a-rally-in-times-square-demanding-the-news-photo/1745461296?adppopup=true">Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The U.S. is currently <a href="https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/us-antisemitic-incidents-hit-highest-level-ever-recorded-adl-audit-finds">experiencing one of the most</a> <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/reports-of-antisemitic-incidents-in-u-s-spike-after-attack-on-israel-anti-defamation-league-says-195578437929">significant waves of antisemitism</a> <a href="https://antisemitism.adl.org/antisemitism-in-american-history/">that it has ever seen</a>. Jewish communities are shaken and traumatized. </p>
<p>Jewish and civil rights organizations both in the U.S. and in other Western countries reported a rise in antisemitic incidents following the <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/International/timeline-surprise-rocket-attack-hamas-israel/story?id=103816006">Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel</a> and the subsequent Israeli military response. The Anti-Defamation League reported that in the first week after Hamas’ deadly attack, in which 1,400 Israelis were killed, antisemitic incidents in the U.S. <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/reports-of-antisemitic-incidents-in-u-s-spike-after-attack-on-israel-anti-defamation-league-says-195578437929">tripled in comparison to the same week last year</a>. </p>
<p>Similarly, London police recorded a 1,353% increase in antisemitic crimes <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/antisemitic-islamophobic-offences-soar-london-after-israel-attacks-2023-10-20/">compared with the same period a year earlier</a>. </p>
<p>In addition, antisemitic symbols and rhetoric seem to be part of a growing number of protests that erupted around the globe following the escalation of the <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12607931/Times-Square-Palestine-rally-Hamas-Israel.html">conflict between Israel and Hamas</a>. </p>
<p>Most scholars agree that the term “antisemitism” describes animosity and discrimination against Jews. Broader definitions, such as the one adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, include the singling out of Israel and the demonization of its character, such as the claim that “the existence of a <a href="https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definitions-charters/working-definition-antisemitism">State of Israel is a racist endeavor</a>.” </p>
<p><a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xBQYKHwAAAAJ&hl=en">My team of researchers</a> at UMass Lowell and Development Service Group, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, compiled and analyzed a comprehensive dataset of antisemitic incidents in the U.S. between 1990 and 2021. We wanted to understand what factors led to antisemitism. We covered violent antisemitism as well as incidents of antisemitic intimidation and vandalism. We included any attacks against Jews which were motivated by the religious identity of the victims – even if it was motivated by anger about Israeli policies. </p>
<p>Our study, which will be published soon, found a startling new phenomenon: The ideology underlying antisemitism in the U.S. now encompasses both sides of the political spectrum. And it allowed us to develop three other insights regarding the intensifying linkage between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and antisemitism in the U.S. </p>
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<h2>1. Antisemitism is not exclusive to the far right</h2>
<p>Traditionally, antisemitism in the United States was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/08/14/jews-will-not-replace-us-why-white-supremacists-go-after-jews/">promoted by far-right organizations and movements</a>, such as the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi groups and skinheads. Such groups focused on propagating <a href="https://theconversation.com/anti-semitism-in-the-us-today-is-a-variation-on-an-old-theme-123250">traditional antisemitic narratives</a> alleging Jews’ racial inferiority, their control of the financial sector and their role in global cabals aiming to undermine America and Western civilization. </p>
<p>More recently, progressive and left-leaning movements that are critical of Israel’s policies – especially with regard to the Palestinian population in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 – have become linked to antisemitic practices, too. </p>
<p>In a survey conducted in 2018 in 12 European Union countries <a href="https://fra.europa.eu/en/publication/2018/experiences-and-perceptions-antisemitism-second-survey-discrimination-and-hate">among victims of antisemitism</a>, 21% indicated that they were physically or verbally attacked by what participants called “left-wing” activists. In the U.S., our data shows that 95% of antisemitic incidents motivated by Israel’s policies were perpetrated by far-left or unidentified activists. Just 5% were perpetrated by known far-right activists. </p>
<p>Further indication that antisemitic violence is no longer the sole domain of far-right extremists can be gleaned from an analysis of our data that looked at the geographic characteristics of antisemitism. </p>
<p>We find that antisemitic hate crimes are occurring especially in politically progressive areas of the country. The New York metropolitan area and the Northeast in general, and urban centers in Florida, California, the Northwest and the Midwest are experiencing the majority of antisemitic incidents. </p>
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<p>While these regions of the U.S. were usually <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/opportunity/equality">considered hospitable to minorities</a>, our data reflects that in the past decade they are the most substantial hubs of antisemitic violence. </p>
<h2>2. US antisemitism is strongly correlated to escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict</h2>
<p>The outbreak of violence between Israel and Palestinians seems to inflame antisemitism in the U.S. and is exploited to amplify long-standing antisemitic tropes. </p>
<p>Rigorous analysis of our dataset found conclusive evidence that these escalations in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – such as the violent clashes between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip in the past few years – are accompanied by an increase in antisemitic incidents in the U.S. </p>
<p>For example, in the months leading up to the Israel-Hamas war of May 2021, there was a gradual increase in antisemitic attacks that peaked in May 2021 and gradually declined in the following months. </p>
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<h2>3. Israel’s policies and antisemitism abroad are connected</h2>
<p>The growing connection between Israel’s policies and antisemitic violence abroad, and especially in the U.S., reflects the view among many Americans that American Jews unquestioningly support Israel’s government. </p>
<p>The Anti-Defamation League’s leader put it bluntly when he stated following the May 2021 Israel-Hamas war that “<a href="https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/adl-audit-finds-antisemitic-incidents-united-states-reached-all-time-high">the violence we witnessed in America during the conflict last May</a> was shocking … it seemed as if the working assumption was that if you were Jewish, you were blameworthy for what was happening half a world away.”</p>
<p>Thus, it is not surprising that following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, Jewish organizations on American campuses became the <a href="https://forward.com/fast-forward/561683/university-pennsylvania-hillel-antisemitism-adl-vandalism/">main targets of violent activism by Palestinian rights supporters</a>. Nor was it surprising that the first reaction of U.S. law enforcement agencies in the wake of the Hamas attack was <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/security-tightens-around-jewish-schools-communities-due-to-tension-in-middle-east/">enhancing the protections</a> of Jewish schools and communal facilities. </p>
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<span class="caption">Thousands of demonstrators waving Palestinian flags and signs denouncing ‘Israeli apartheid’ march in support of Palestinians in Los Angeles on Oct. 14, 2023.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/thousands-of-demonstrators-waving-palestinian-flags-and-news-photo/1724697003?adppopup=true">David Swanson/AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>4. Antisemitism today exploits long-standing antisemitic tropes</h2>
<p>American Jewish communities had <a href="https://theconversation.com/as-israel-turns-70-many-young-american-jews-turn-away-95271">traditionally strong links to the state of Israel</a>, and many extended their support in various ways. They included contributing money to Israeli cultural, educational and social institutions, as well as advocating for U.S. support. This was explicit acknowledgment of the importance to the Jewish people of having a homeland. </p>
<p>In recent years, however, many Jewish communities, especially their younger members, <a href="https://theconversation.com/as-israel-turns-70-many-young-american-jews-turn-away-95271">became increasingly critical of Israeli policies</a> and the country’s ongoing military control of the occupied Palestinian territories.</p>
<p>Despite such developments within the Jewish community, efforts by organizations sympathetic to the Palestinian cause to link American Jews as a whole to Israel’s policies seem to have intensified. Such linkages reflect an extension of one of the most resilient and long-standing antisemitic tropes, in which <a href="https://theconversation.com/anti-semitism-in-the-us-today-is-a-variation-on-an-old-theme-123250">American Jews are portrayed as having a dual loyalty</a> and a preference to support Israel’s interests over American ones, especially in times in which they may conflict. </p>
<p>In the past, sentiments regarding American Jews’ alleged dual loyalty were mainly exploited by extremists on <a href="https://jewishjournal.com/news/united-states/336589/florida-van-with-palestinian-flag-and-hitler-was-right-sign-circles-around-pro-israel-rally/">the far right</a>. Lately, it seems also to be manifested in left-wing discourse and actions that support or legitimize marginalization of Jews in the U.S. by blaming them for Israel’s policies.</p>
<p>Examples of this new manifestation of antisemitism include the exclusion of American Jewish organizations from <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/23/us/womens-march-anti-semitism.html">progressive campaigns</a> and <a href="https://forward.com/opinion/562543/rice-university-hillel-lgbtq-israel/">events</a> and the <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/were-jewish-berkeley-law-students-excluded-in-many-areas-on-campus">exclusion of Jewish activists from progressive associations</a>. </p>
<h2>Combating the new antisemitism</h2>
<p>The reactions to the recent escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict illustrate a profound change in the ideological roots of antisemitism in the U.S.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/support-hamas-terror-anti-israel-rallies-across-us">The many cases in which professional</a> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/10/18/university-israel-hamas-college-tensions/">and student associations</a> as <a href="https://time.com/6323730/hamas-attack-left-response/">well as political organizations</a> were quick both to legitimize Hamas terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians and direct their animosity toward U.S. Jews showing solidarity and sympathy with Israeli victims are prime examples. </p>
<p>That means any effort to combat antisemitism in the U.S. must take into consideration the growing ideological diversity behind contemporary incidents of antisemitism.</p>
<p>Those efforts will need to understand the nuances that shape American Jews’ relationships with Israel – and recognize that despite the substantial progress U.S. Jews experienced in the U.S. in all aspects of public life, antisemitism is still a part of the American political landscape.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/215760/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Arie Perliger receives funding from the National Institute of Justice</span></em></p>
Antisemitism in the US is growing – and that growth appears to be related to the escalation of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. It also reflects a different political ideology than in the past.
Arie Perliger, Director of Security Studies and Professor of Criminology and Justice Studies, UMass Lowell
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/186896
2022-08-02T12:59:16Z
2022-08-02T12:59:16Z
Fueled by virtually unrestricted social media access, white nationalism is on the rise and attracting violent young white men
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476585/original/file-20220728-1306-lawf6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=512%2C148%2C3987%2C2462&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">White nationalist Dylann Roof appears in court on June 19, 2015, after his arrest in the mass shootings at a Black church in South Carolina. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/in-this-image-from-the-video-uplink-from-the-detention-news-photo/477782306?adppopup=true"> Grace Beahm-Pool/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>White nationalists keep showing up in the hearings of the U.S. House committee investigating <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/10/politics/jan-6-us-capitol-riot-timeline/index.html">the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection</a>.</p>
<p>Evidence is mounting that <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/jan-6-committee-tuesday-1.6517650">white nationalist groups</a> who want to establish an all-white state played a significant role in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol that left five dead and dozens wounded.</p>
<p>Thus far, the hearings “<a href="https://theintercept.com/2022/06/17/jan-6-hearings-right-wing-white-nationalists/">have documented how the Proud Boys helped lead the insurrectionist mob</a> into the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C,” journalist James Risen wrote in the Intercept. </p>
<p>Based on July 12, 2022, testimony from a <a href="https://theconversation.com/former-oath-keeper-reveals-racist-antisemitic-beliefs-of-white-nationalist-group-and-their-plans-to-start-a-civil-war-185006">former Oath Keepers member</a>, the white nationalist group <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/new-evidence-reveals-coordination-oath-keepers-three-percenters-jan-6-rcna30355">coordinated with</a> the <a href="https://www.start.umd.edu/publication/three-percenters-look-inside-anti-government-militia">Three Percenters</a>, another group of white nationalists, and the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/04/09/985104612/conspiracy-charges-bring-proud-boys-history-of-violence-into-spotlight">Proud Boys</a> in <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/07/12/1111132464/jan-6-hearing-recap-oath-keepers-proud-boys">mobilizing their extremists groups</a> to rally in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, as asked by President Trump in his Dec. 16, 2020, tweet. </p>
<p>As <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=MwUgXPsAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">a cultural anthropologist</a> who has studied these movements for over a decade, I know that membership in these organizations is not limited to the attempted violent overthrow of the government and poses an ongoing threat, as seen in massacres carried out by <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/05/16/1099034094/what-is-the-great-replacement-theory">young men radicalized by this movement</a>. </p>
<p>In 2020, for instance, the Department of Homeland Security described domestic violent extremists as “<a href="https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/2020_10_06_homeland-threat-assessment.pdf">presenting the most persistent and lethal threat</a>” to the people of the United States and the nation’s government.</p>
<p>In March 2021, FBI Director Christopher Wray <a href="https://apnews.com/article/fbi-chris-wray-testify-capitol-riot-9a5539af34b15338bb5c4923907eeb67">testified to Congress</a> that the number of arrests of white supremacists and other racially motivated extremists has almost tripled since he took office in 2017.</p>
<p>“Jan. 6 was not an isolated event,” Wray testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now, and it’s not going away anytime soon.” </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map">Southern Poverty Law Center</a>, a nonprofit civil rights group, tracked 733 active hate groups across the United States in 2021.</p>
<p>Based on <a href="https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/fea2.12011">my research</a>, the internet and social media have made the problem of white supremacist hate far worse and more visible; it’s both more accessible and, ultimately, more violent, as seen on Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol and <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/for-buffalo-shooting-victims-and-survivors-it-was-like-every-other-day">the shooting deaths</a> of ten Black people at a Buffalo grocery story, among other examples.</p>
<h2>An expansive, online network</h2>
<p>In the 1990s, <a href="https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/david-duke-donald-trump-tucker-carlson-rcna3413">former KKK leaders including David Duke</a> rebranded white supremacy for the digital age. </p>
<p>They switched <a href="https://www.thestoryoftexas.com/discover/artifacts/grand-dragon-ku-klux-klan-robe-and-hood">KKK robes</a> for business suits and connected neo-Nazi antisemitic conspiracies with broader anti-Black, anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic racism. </p>
<p>From the 1990s to the late 2000s, <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780742561588/Cyber-Racism-White-Supremacy-Online-and-the-New-Attack-on-Civil-Rights">this movement largely</a> built discreet online communities and websites peddling racist disinformation. </p>
<p>In fact, for years one of the <a href="https://www.mic.com/articles/165540/googling-martin-luther-king-returns-neo-nazi-propaganda-why-won-t-google-fix-it">first websites about Martin Luther King Jr.</a> that a Google search recommended was a website created by white nationalists that spread neo-Nazi propaganda. </p>
<p>In 2005, the <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/it-s-toxic-place-how-online-world-white-nationalists-distorts-population-genetics">white nationalist website Stormfront.org</a> had 30,000 members – which might sound like a lot. But as social media expanded, with both <a href="https://www.facebook.com/facebook/">Facebook</a> and <a href="https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-is-twitter">Twitter</a> opening to anyone with an email address in 2006, its views got a lot more attention. By 2015, 250,000 people had subscribed to become members of Stormfront.org. </p>
<p>Between 2012 and 2016, white nationalists on Twitter saw a <a href="https://apo.org.au/node/67247">600% increase in Twitter followers</a>. They have since worked to <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0966369X.2019.1710472?journalCode=cgpc20">bring white supremacism into everyday politics</a>. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/white-supremacist-groups-are-thriving-on-facebook">Tech Transparency Project</a>, a nonprofit tech industry watchdog group, found that in 2020 half of the white nationalist groups tracked by the <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2000/internet-hate-and-law">Southern Poverty Law Center</a> had <a href="https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/white-supremacist-groups-are-thriving-on-facebook">a presence on Facebook</a>.</p>
<p>Without clear regulations preventing extremist content, digital
companies, in my view, allowed for <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/hate-and-tech">the spread of white nationalist conspiracies</a>. </p>
<p>Racist activists used algorithms as virtual bullhorns to reach previously unimaginable-sized audiences.</p>
<h2>Enter the ‘alt-right’</h2>
<p>White nationalist leaders, such as <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/11/4/20947833/richard-spencer-white-nationalism-audio-milo-alt-right">Richard Spencer</a>, wanted an even bigger audience and influence. </p>
<p>Spencer coined the term “alt-right” to this end, with the goal of blurring the relationship between white nationalism and white conservatism. He did this by establishing nonprofit think tanks like the <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/01/10/once-political-force-richard-spencer-and-national-policy-institute-go-quiet">National Policy Institute</a> that provided an academic veneer for him and other white supremacists to spread their views on white supremacy.</p>
<p>This strategy worked. </p>
<p>Today, many white nationalist ideas once relegated to society’s fringes are embraced by the broader conservative movement.</p>
<p>Take, for instance, <a href="https://theconversation.com/replacement-theory-isnt-new-3-things-to-know-about-how-this-once-fringe-conspiracy-has-become-more-mainstream-183492">the Great Replacement Theory</a>. The conspiracy theory misinterprets demographic change as an active attempt to replace white Americans with people of color.</p>
<p>This baseless idea observes that Black and Latino people are becoming larger percentages of the U.S. population, and paints that data as the result of an allegedly active attempt by unnamed multiculturalists to drive white Americans out of power in an increasingly diverse nation.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/09/nearly-half-republicans-agree-with-great-replacement-theory/">A recent poll showed</a> that over 50% of Republicans now believe in this conspiracy theory. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Protesters waving Trump flags storm the U.S. Capitol while police officers try to hold them back." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476749/original/file-20220729-24-19pzpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476749/original/file-20220729-24-19pzpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476749/original/file-20220729-24-19pzpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476749/original/file-20220729-24-19pzpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476749/original/file-20220729-24-19pzpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476749/original/file-20220729-24-19pzpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476749/original/file-20220729-24-19pzpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pro-Trump protesters and police clash on Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/pro-trump-protesters-and-police-clash-on-top-of-the-capitol-news-photo/1230465345?adppopup=true">Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 2016, during Trump’s presidential campaign, Vice Magazine co-founder <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-secret-history-of-gavin-mcinnes">Gavin McInnes</a> formed the <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/proud-boys">Proud Boys</a> to further the goals of the alt-right by protecting white identity with the use of violence if necessary. </p>
<p>Proud Boys members are affiliated with white nationalist ideas and leaders, but they deny any explicit racism. Instead, <a href="https://ctc.westpoint.edu/pride-prejudice-the-violent-evolution-of-the-proud-boys/">they describe themselves</a> as “Western chauvinists” who believe in the supremacy of European culture but also welcome members of any race who support this idea.</p>
<p>Along with pro-gun militias such as the <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/oath-keepers">Oath Keepers</a> and <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/three-percenters">Three Percenters</a>, the Proud Boys are an experiment in spreading white nationalist ideas to an online universe of potentially millions of social media users.</p>
<h2>Why do people join these groups?</h2>
<p>Data from manifestos posted online by white nationalist groups shows that many mass shooters share a few common characteristics – they are young, white, male and they spend significant time online at the same websites. </p>
<p>The alleged shooter in the killing of 10 Black people in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo on May 14, 2022, described his reason as wanting to stop what he feared as the elimination “<a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/06/16/1105776617/buffalo-shooting-suspect-says-his-motive-was-to-prevent-eliminating-the-white-ra">of the white race</a>.” </p>
<p>His fears that people of color were “replacing” white people <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/09/25/absolutely-everything-you-need-to-know-to-understand-4chan-the-internets-own-bogeyman/">came from 4chan</a>, a social media company popular among the alt-right.</p>
<p>In 2019, nine African American church members were murdered in Charleston by a young white man who became radicalized through <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/10/508363607/what-happened-when-dylann-roof-asked-google-for-information-about-race">Google searches</a> that led him to openly white supremacist content. </p>
<p>Massacres in a <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/04/business/el-paso-shooting-8chan-biz/index.html">Walmart in El Paso, Texas</a>, at <a href="https://time.com/5648479/8chan-ban-new-zealand/">two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand</a>, and at a <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-poway-synagogue-shooting-follows-an-unsettling-new-script">synagogue in Poway, California</a>, all took place after the shooters began <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2019/11/8chan-8kun-white-supremacists-telegram-discord-facebook.html">spending time on 8chan</a>, an imageboard popular with white supremacists and the home of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-qanon.html">QAnon posts</a>. </p>
<p>For many of these individuals, the most important part of their radicalization was not about their home life or personality quirks, but instead about where they spent time online.</p>
<h2>A racially diverse democracy at stake</h2>
<p>The reasons men join groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers - and even some liberal groups – is less clear. </p>
<p>A former <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/25/us/ex-proud-boys-member/index.html">Proud Boy member offered one reason</a>: “They want to join a gang,” Russell Schultz told CNN on Nov. 25, 2020. “So they can go fight antifa and hurt people that they don’t like, and feel justified in doing it.” </p>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-antifa-trump.html">Antifa</a> is a loose-knit group of usually nonviolent activists <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-or-who-is-antifa-140147">who oppose fascism</a>. </p>
<p>Other <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/06/21/proud-boys-recruitment-targets-men-looking-community/7452805002/?gnt-cfr=1">former extremist group members describe</a> seeking camaraderie and friendship, but also finding racism and antisemitism.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A middle-aged white man with gray hair and brown beard answers questions from a congressional committee." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476575/original/file-20220728-1306-3w4yt5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476575/original/file-20220728-1306-3w4yt5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476575/original/file-20220728-1306-3w4yt5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476575/original/file-20220728-1306-3w4yt5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476575/original/file-20220728-1306-3w4yt5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476575/original/file-20220728-1306-3w4yt5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476575/original/file-20220728-1306-3w4yt5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Former Oath Keeper Jason Van Tatenhove testifies on July 12, 2022, during a hearing by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/jason-van-tatenhove-who-served-as-national-spokesman-for-news-photo/1408302341?adppopup=true">Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But more than any other issue, <a href="https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/improved-race-ethnicity-measures-reveal-united-states-population-much-more-multiracial.html">racial demographic changes</a> are providing recruitment opportunities for white nationalists, many of whom believe that by <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/03/14/the-us-will-become-minority-white-in-2045-census-projects/">the year 2045</a> white people will become the minority in the United States.</p>
<p>In July 2021, the most recent date for which statistics are available, the U.S. Census Bureau notes that of <a href="https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045221">the estimated population of 330 million American citizens</a>, 75.8% are white, 18.9% are Hispanic, 13.6% are Black and 6% are Asian. </p>
<p>What is also becoming clearer is that the spread of white nationalism endangers the idea of a democratic nation where racial diversity is considered a strength, not a weakness.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/186896/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sophie Bjork-James does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Since 2017, the FBI has warned US Congress that the rise of white nationalism and the violence of extremist militia groups is a dangerous domestic terrorism threat.
Sophie Bjork-James, Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/181548
2022-06-02T18:56:15Z
2022-06-02T18:56:15Z
What 5 previous congressional investigations can teach us about the House Jan. 6 committee hearings
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/466595/original/file-20220601-49081-yb92dg.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=10%2C0%2C3652%2C2422&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee Sam Ervin sits with Chief Counsel Sam Dash, Sen. Howard Baker, staffer Rufus Edmiston and others as they listen to a witness during the Watergate hearings. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/chairman-of-the-senate-watergate-committee-sam-ervin-sits-news-photo/576823048?adppopup=true">Wally McNamee/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Public hearings to be held in June by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection will attempt to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/23/capitol-attack-panel-public-hearings-trump">answer the question of whether</a> former President Donald Trump and his political allies broke the law in seeking to overturn the 2020 election results.</p>
<p>The Jan. 6 hearings are part of a <a href="https://time.com/5944289/jan-6-commission-history/">long history</a> of congressional investigation.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.levin-center.org/congress-first-investigation-general-st-clairs-defeat/">first congressional inquiry</a> occurred in the House in 1792 to investigate Gen. Arthur St. Clair’s role in the U.S. Army’s defeat in the Battle of the Wabash against the tribes of the Northwest Territory. The Senate conducted its <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3124558.pdf">first official investigation</a> in 1818, looking into Gen. Andrew Jackson’s conduct in the Seminole War.</p>
<p>A look back at five of the most noteworthy congressional investigations since those initial probes suggests that Congress regularly has used its constitutional authority to gather facts and draw public attention to important issues in the country.</p>
<h2>Ku Klux Klan hearings</h2>
<p>In 1871, Congress <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/01/08/1871-provides-roadmap-addressing-wednesdays-pro-trump-insurrection/">established a committee</a> to investigate violence against and intimidation of Black voters in several states.</p>
<p>A year later, the committee produced <a href="https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/metabook?id=insurrection1872">13 volumes</a> of evidence containing the testimony of over 600 witnesses describing systemic violence – including killings, beatings, lynchings and rapes – committed by the Ku Klux Klan, known also as the KKK. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/466604/original/file-20220601-49330-yh83ah.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A drawing depicts a man labeled 'White League' shaking hands with a Ku Klux Klan member over a shield illustrated with an African American couple holding a possibly dead baby. In the background is a man hanging from a tree." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/466604/original/file-20220601-49330-yh83ah.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/466604/original/file-20220601-49330-yh83ah.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/466604/original/file-20220601-49330-yh83ah.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/466604/original/file-20220601-49330-yh83ah.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/466604/original/file-20220601-49330-yh83ah.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/466604/original/file-20220601-49330-yh83ah.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/466604/original/file-20220601-49330-yh83ah.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Congress investigated the racist violence of the KKK in 1871.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/cph.3c28619/">Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Despite extensive media coverage and the wealth of information uncovered by the committee, many Americans at that time <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/27919387">still questioned</a> the KKK’s existence.<br>
Such skepticism was supported by the Democratic minority report that accompanied Congress’ investigation. At a time when Democrats represented the party that had supported slavery, their report legitimized the KKK’s actions in undeniably racist language. Segments of the public <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/03/13/what-history-says-about-jan-6-committee-investigation/">adopted</a> the bigoted language and ideas contained in the minority report for decades to come.</p>
<h2>Teapot Dome scandal</h2>
<p>In 1922, news broke that President Warren G. Harding’s administration had secretly leased federal oil fields to political allies. At the time, these no-bid contracts were valued at around <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2008/01/11/bought-off-by-big-oil?context=amp">$200 million</a> – the equivalent of over $3 billion today.</p>
<p>The contracts were awarded by <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Teapot-Dome-Scandal">Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall</a>, a former senator and a friend of the president’s. </p>
<p>Congress opened an investigation into the matter, <a href="https://www.upi.com/Archives/1924/01/22/Senate-Committee-to-use-all-legal-powers-to-investigate-Teapot-Dome/8404631771198/">and a UPI news story said</a> on Jan. 22, 1924, “The assistance of Department of Justice agents, United States marshals and the federal courts will be invoked if necessary, senators said, to force the truth from reluctant witnesses.” </p>
<p>As a result of the investigation, Fall resigned and was later convicted of bribery. He was the <a href="https://millercenter.org/president/harding/essays/fall-1921-secretary-of-the-interior">first former Cabinet official</a> in history to be sentenced to prison because of misconduct in office.</p>
<p>Harding is <a href="http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1879648_1879646_1879696,00.html">considered</a> to be one of the country’s worst presidents, in part because of the scandal and corruption brought to light by Congress’ investigation. </p>
<h2>Organized crime and the Kefauver Committee</h2>
<p>In 1950, Congress formed a special committee <a href="https://catalog.archives.gov/id/10449541">in response</a> to a series of news articles suggesting that organized crime was corrupting many local government officials. It was referred to as the Kefauver Committee after its chairman, Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. The committee launched an investigation, traveling to 14 major cities in the process.</p>
<p>The committee’s hearings rank among the <a href="https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/kefauver.htm">most widely viewed congressional investigations</a> in history. It is estimated that <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-senator-and-the-gangsters-69770823/">90% of televisions</a> in America were tuned in to the hearings.</p>
<p>In part, what made the investigation such good TV was the <a href="https://www.senate.gov/about/resources/pdf/kefauver-committee-full-citations.pdf">cast of characters</a> subpoenaed to testify. Mobsters, their girlfriends, former elected officials and their lawyers paraded into the hearings, all captured on live television.</p>
<p>Not all witnesses complied with the subpoenas. In fact, the Senate approved <a href="https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal51-889-29670-1406711">45 contempt of Congress citations</a> in 1951 alone. <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/lasvegas-kefauver/">Litigation over witness noncompliance continued</a> in most cases even after the committee issued its over 11,000-page final report. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/466591/original/file-20220601-48778-yx23wp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A crowded room where a handful of men are sitting at a raised desk, while one woman talks in the audience" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/466591/original/file-20220601-48778-yx23wp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/466591/original/file-20220601-48778-yx23wp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/466591/original/file-20220601-48778-yx23wp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/466591/original/file-20220601-48778-yx23wp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/466591/original/file-20220601-48778-yx23wp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=584&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/466591/original/file-20220601-48778-yx23wp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=584&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/466591/original/file-20220601-48778-yx23wp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=584&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Virginia Hill Hauser, onetime girlfriend of mobster Bugsy Siegel, talks as members of the Kefauver Senate Crime Investigating Committee listen to her testimony during interstate crime probe hearings at a federal courthouse in New York City on March 15, 1951.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/VirginiaHillHauser/86b0ef78e34f4517aa4b75dc64b0bb6e/photo?Query=Kefauver%20committee&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=65&currentItemNo=15">AP Photo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Watergate</h2>
<p>In 1973, after seven men from President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, <a href="https://www.levin-center.org/the-watergate-hearings/">the Senate voted 77-0</a> to establish a committee to investigate the break-in.</p>
<p>Throughout the investigation, President Nixon <a href="https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/watergate.htm">refused to cooperate</a> with the committee’s requests for information and directed his aides to do the same. He claimed <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/anniversary-of-united-states-v-nixon">executive privilege</a> gave him the right to refuse to hand over White House records, including audiotapes, and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/02/07/presidential-records-act-trump-nixon/">planned</a> for many of them to be destroyed. </p>
<p>The battle between the president and Congress went to court and, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/10/03/inside-supreme-court-ruling-that-made-nixon-turn-over-his-watergate-tapes/">hours before</a> the House was scheduled to start debating whether to impeach him, the Supreme Court <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/418/683/">ruled</a> against Nixon.</p>
<p>The tapes showed Nixon had, despite his denials, taken part in the cover-up. Nixon lost the support of prominent Republicans in Congress, and he resigned shortly thereafter to <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/nixon-resigns">avoid impeachment</a>. </p>
<h2>Intelligence community and the Church Committee</h2>
<p>In addition to revealing presidential misconduct, the Watergate Committee investigation found evidence that the U.S. intelligence community was conducting <a href="https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/church-committee.htm">potentially unconstitutional</a> domestic operations, including spying on U.S. citizens. </p>
<p>Then, in 1974, The New York Times published an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/22/archives/huge-cia-operation-reported-in-u-s-against-antiwar-forces-other.html">extensive investigation</a> by reporter Seymour M. Hersh suggesting that the CIA maintained at least 10,000 intelligence files on U.S. citizens.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/466606/original/file-20220601-48874-a0wqb1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two men sitting at a table, one holding up an oddly shaped gun." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/466606/original/file-20220601-48874-a0wqb1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/466606/original/file-20220601-48874-a0wqb1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/466606/original/file-20220601-48874-a0wqb1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/466606/original/file-20220601-48874-a0wqb1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/466606/original/file-20220601-48874-a0wqb1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/466606/original/file-20220601-48874-a0wqb1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/466606/original/file-20220601-48874-a0wqb1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chairman Frank Church, D-Idaho, of the Senate Intelligence Committee, displays a poison dart gun Sept. 17, 1975, as Co-Chairman John G. Tower, R-Texas, looks at the weapon during the panel’s probe of the Central Intelligence Agency.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/CHURCHTOWER/b870744467e5da11af9f0014c2589dfb/photo?Query=Church%20Committee%20hearing&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:asc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=82&currentItemNo=9">AP Photo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In response, Congress established a special committee to investigate. The committee’s <a href="https://www.levin-center.org/frank-church-and-the-church-committee/">16-month inquiry</a> exposed the attempted assassinations of foreign political leaders, experiments conducted on U.S. citizens, and covert operations to recruit journalists to monitor private citizens’ communications and to spread propaganda over the media. </p>
<p>The committee found that <a href="https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/church-committee.htm">every presidential administration</a> from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon had abused its authority. </p>
<p>“Intelligence agencies have undermined the constitutional rights of citizens,” <a href="https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/resources/intelligence-related-commissions">the final report concluded</a>, “primarily because checks and balances designed by the framers of the Constitution to assure accountability have not been applied.”</p>
<h2>Mainstream oversight</h2>
<p>A few common themes run throughout these five noteworthy congressional investigations. </p>
<p>First, as the legacy of the Church Committee suggests, public hearings help provide a layer of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/27/in-the-1970s-congress-investigated-intelligence-abuses-time-to-do-it-again/">transparency</a> to government.</p>
<p>Congress and the media can be <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691171852/investigating-the-president">allies</a> in investigation. Investigative reporting like in the work that revealed the <a href="https://www.newspapers.com/clip/33493758/wall-street-journal-reports-on-sinclair/">Teapot Dome scandal</a> and <a href="https://www.npr.org/2014/06/13/321316118/40-years-on-woodward-and-bernstein-recall-reporting-on-watergate">Watergate</a> can lay the groundwork for congressional probes. And media coverage of proceedings like the <a href="https://www.senate.gov/about/resources/pdf/kefauver-committee-full-citations.pdf">Kefauver Committee’s investigation</a> not only raises public awareness but also puts pressure on federal, state and local government officials to act.</p>
<p>But party can get in the way. In one example, partisan infighting and the Democrats’ rejection of the KKK proceedings hindered Congress’ effectiveness and <a href="https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-jan-6-panel-must-avoid-fate-of-congress-klan-report/">provided a narrative</a> that helped justify Jim Crow laws and other racist policies.</p>
<p>Similarly, party loyalty led many Republicans to remain <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/it-took-a-long-time-for-republicans-to-abandon-nixon/">vocal in support of Nixon</a> until the full scope of the president’s actions were revealed through the Watergate investigation.</p>
<p>These moments in history also illustrate the importance of examining elected officials’ political support networks. </p>
<p>When President Harding assumed office, he placed <a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/07/the-greatest-hearings-in-american-history-215237/">loyal allies</a> in government positions. While these allies helped reinforce Harding’s pledge to reorganize government and “<a href="https://millercenter.org/issues-policy/us-domestic-policy/making-teapot-dome-scandal-relevant-again">return to normalcy</a>,” they also perpetuated corruption. </p>
<p>Likewise, the Watergate investigation prompted <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/02/why-did-nixons-team-order-watergate-break-in-in-the-first-place">criminal charges</a> against 69 people, including two Cabinet officials. Additionally, dozens of major corporations pleaded guilty to illegally financing Nixon’s reelection campaign.</p>
<p>While the upcoming hearings of the House Jan. 6 investigative committee will be dealing with unprecedented events in American history, the very investigation of these events has strong precedent. Congress has long exercised its power to investigate some of the greatest problems facing the nation. In that way, the upcoming hearings fit squarely into the mainstream of American government oversight.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/181548/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The views expressed in this article are solely the views of the author and not the Carl Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy.</span></em></p>
The public hearings of the House Jan. 6 investigative committee will deal with unprecedented events in American history, but the very investigation of these events has strong precedent.
Jennifer Selin, Co-director, Washington Office, Carl Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy, Wayne State University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/153712
2021-03-04T13:13:08Z
2021-03-04T13:13:08Z
What the policing response to the KKK in the 1960s can teach about dismantling white supremacist groups today
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/387271/original/file-20210302-13-1a1b3pu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3693%2C2476&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Archival image from 1967 shows protesters demonstrating while Ku Klux Klan members walk in a parade to support the Vietnam War.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/young-girl-holding-hands-with-robed-ku-klux-klansmen-walks-news-photo/514694140?adppopup=true">Bettmann Archive/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>During his confirmation hearing in February, Attorney General nominee <a href="https://apnews.com/article/merrick-garland-confirmation-hearing-b5f03bc4ab13c8e42bb9994e7b2765d6">Merrick Garland pledged</a> that his first order of business would be to “supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on January 6.” </p>
<p>On that day, thousands of Trump supporters – including <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/insurrection-at-the-capitol/2021/01/19/958240531/members-of-right-wing-militias-extremist-groups-are-latest-charged-in-capitol-si">members of white nationalist and militia groups</a> – gathered to support and defend a series of fabricated and conspiracy-laden claims around the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/16/technology/trump-has-amplified-voting-falsehoods-in-over-300-tweets-since-election-night.html">purportedly “rigged” 2020 election</a>. </p>
<p>As a social scientist who <a href="https://sites.wustl.edu/cunningham/">researches how white supremacist groups are policed</a>, I understand both the need to vigorously address threats of violence from racist and anti-democratic elements and the <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/justice-department-opens-the-door-to-seeking-new-domestic-terror-powers-after-capitol-riot">calls from some Justice Department officials</a> to expand police powers to do so.</p>
<p>But if history is a guide, providing police with new tools to address current white nationalist threats could result in further repression of activists of color.</p>
<p>The campaign to police the civil rights-era Ku Klux Klan, for example, offers clear lessons in this respect. While that effort prevented white supremacists from capitalizing on their momentum in the mid-1960s, it also spurred unforeseen consequences.</p>
<h2>KKK in 1965</h2>
<p><a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/klansville-usa-9780199391165?q=Klansville%2C%20U.S.A.&lang=en&cc=us">Nearly every night in 1965</a>, ascendant KKK leader Bob Jones appeared on a makeshift stage in fields across rural North Carolina channeling the revolutionary fervor of his newfound followers.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/387267/original/file-20210302-15-1jakhqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C12%2C4009%2C2807&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two Ku Klux Klan leaders in uniform stand close together" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/387267/original/file-20210302-15-1jakhqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C12%2C4009%2C2807&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/387267/original/file-20210302-15-1jakhqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387267/original/file-20210302-15-1jakhqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387267/original/file-20210302-15-1jakhqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387267/original/file-20210302-15-1jakhqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387267/original/file-20210302-15-1jakhqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387267/original/file-20210302-15-1jakhqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bob Jones, right, a leader of the Klu Klux Klan in North Carolina, stands with Calvin Craig of Georgia during a KKK rally in Atlanta in 1967.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/klu-klux-klan-dragons-calvin-craig-of-georgia-and-bob-jones-news-photo/515099944?adppopup=true">Bettmann Archive/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As the head of the nation’s largest statewide Klan since World War II, Jones was growing accustomed to crowds numbering in the hundreds – and sometimes the thousands – at rallies throughout his home state. </p>
<p>The previous fall, President Lyndon Johnson had defeated <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/daily/may98/goldwater30.htm">archconservative Barry Goldwater</a>. Jones’ KKK had <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Klansville_U_S_A/fBQhe8jcXZEC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=klansville+usa+cunningham+%22goldwater%22&pg=PA139&printsec=frontcover">strongly backed the loser</a>, who had aligned himself with Southern segregationists. Now Jones drove a shiny new Cadillac <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Klansville_U_S_A/fBQhe8jcXZEC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=cadillac">purchased from KKK dues</a>. His bumper sticker read: “I’m not ashamed, I voted for Goldwater.” </p>
<p>Though Jones did not contest the election’s legitimacy, Goldwater’s defeat caused the KKK leader’s crowds to <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spv016">swell in size and intensity</a>. Supporters seemed newly energized in their aggrieved alienation from national politics. When LBJ <a href="https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/march-26-1965-statement-arrests-violo-liuzzo-murder">spoke out</a> against an increasingly deadly spate of Klan violence, Jones drew more than 6,000 to a <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Klansville_U_S_A/gIpSAwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=6,000%20in%20dunn">rally celebrating known KKK perpetrators</a>.</p>
<p>Jones clearly recognized that opposition from the White House energized his base. “If Lyndon Johnson makes three more speeches,” he <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/klansville-usa-9780199391165?q=Klansville%2C%20U.S.A.&lang=en&cc=us">proclaimed</a>, “we could quit renting fields and start buying farms.”</p>
<h2>Police crackdown</h2>
<p>In March 1965, a bipartisan group of congressional lawmakers urged the House Committee on Un-American Activities to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1965/12/05/archives/huac-meets-the-kkk-huac-meets-the-kkk.html">investigate the Klan</a>. Formal hearings were <a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875813001357">announced that June</a>.</p>
<p>The resulting scrutiny led police to challenge KKK rally permit requests and aggressively investigate cross burnings and other intimidation tactics they had <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/klansville-usa-9780199391165?q=Klansville%2C%20U.S.A.&lang=en&cc=us">previously dismissed</a> as not hurting anyone.</p>
<p>At the same time, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program received more latitude to use informants and other counterintelligence techniques. As the bureau’s own memos specified, agents worked to “<a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520246652/theres-something-happening-here">expose, disrupt and otherwise neutralize</a>” domestic subversives like the KKK.</p>
<p>Such measures also created a safer space for concerned citizens to publicly oppose organized vigilantism. By 1969, in North Carolina and throughout the South, the KKK had all but <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-6-20-04-re-evaluation-what-the-g-men-knew.html">ceased to operate as a mass membership organization</a>.</p>
<p>But, crucially, such short-run success came with significant costs.</p>
<h2>Unforeseen consequences</h2>
<p>Aggressive moves to dismantle the Klan’s ability to organize pushed its militant core underground. There, it metastasized into <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/klansville-usa-9780199391165?q=Klansville%2C%20U.S.A.&lang=en&cc=us">lone-wolf or cell-based violence</a>. As one former Klan member described it, racist resistance evolved into a “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Klansville_U_S_A/fBQhe8jcXZEC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=raymond+cranford+game+of+ones+cunningham&pg=PA224&printsec=frontcover">game of ones</a>.” Left unchecked by any coordinated organization, white supremacists posed a threat that <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674286078">became even more volatile</a>.</p>
<p>The crackdown also failed to rid areas of political and racial divisions that the KKK had stoked. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122414555885">Research I’ve conducted</a> with sociologists <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=yWSee08AAAAJ&hl=en">Rory McVeigh</a> and <a href="https://environment.yale.edu/profile/farrell">Justin Farrell</a> shows that, even after accounting for a wide range of competing explanations, areas where the KKK was active in the 1960s continued to display – even 50 years later – significantly higher levels of violent crime and political polarization.</p>
<p>Finally, and perhaps most importantly, police ultimately deployed their expanded powers not primarily against the KKK, but against activists in communities of color that have always <a href="https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/07/27/disparities/">borne the brunt</a> of state control. </p>
<p>For example, FBI agents’ newly gained authority to infiltrate and disrupt the KKK quickly extended – with <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/how-the-fbi-conspired-to-destroy-the-black-panther-party">deadlier consequences</a> – to members of the civil rights and Black nationalist movements.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/387274/original/file-20210302-17-1lmlsw8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton raises his arm" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/387274/original/file-20210302-17-1lmlsw8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/387274/original/file-20210302-17-1lmlsw8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387274/original/file-20210302-17-1lmlsw8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387274/original/file-20210302-17-1lmlsw8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387274/original/file-20210302-17-1lmlsw8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387274/original/file-20210302-17-1lmlsw8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387274/original/file-20210302-17-1lmlsw8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton raises his arm at a rally in Chicago in October 1969 – just two months before police raided his home and shot him to death.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/american-political-social-activist-and-black-panther-party-news-photo/72150265?adppopup=true">David Fenton/Archive Photos via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Such efforts sought to <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520246652/theres-something-happening-here">destroy grassroots activist organizations</a> and <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520246652/theres-something-happening-here">disrupt personal relationships</a> between their members. And as the current film “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9784798/">Judas and the Black Messiah</a>” powerfully depicts, they also led to campaigns to <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520246652/theres-something-happening-here">eliminate charismatic and effective movement leaders</a>, including Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton and <a href="https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/12/7204453/martin-luther-king-fbi-letter">Martin Luther King Jr.</a></p>
<h2>Relevance today</h2>
<p>Today, <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/justice-department-opens-the-door-to-seeking-new-domestic-terror-powers-after-capitol-riot">some Justice Department officials</a> are pushing to label Trump-supporting insurrectionists as domestic terrorists. Such aims would bolster criminal legal strategies they hope will stem the tide of political violence. </p>
<p>At the same time, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2021/blm-protest-capitol-riot-police-comparison/">media reports</a> have <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/08/us/dc-police-arrests-blm-capitol-insurrection-invs/index.html">highlighted the differences</a> in treatment between the seemingly permissive stance adopted toward the violent insurrectionists on Jan. 6 and the far more pronounced police crackdown against largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests throughout the summer of 2020. </p>
<p>As President Joe Biden <a href="https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1347298213422747649">tweeted on Jan. 7</a>, “No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesters yesterday that they wouldn’t have been treated very differently than the mob that stormed the Capitol.”</p>
<p>Of course, there is a strong case for pressing police to <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/2018_10_DomesticTerrorism_V2%20%281%29.pdf">use existing tools</a> to arrest and prosecute those who engaged in violence and other crimes at the Capitol, as well as to heed officials’ calls to confront and defeat an <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/news/2021/02/16/end-trump-era-white-nationalists-increasingly-embrace-political-violence">emboldened white nationalist movement</a>.</p>
<p>But doing so can risk expanding police powers in ways that history demonstrates may be turned on those who have been seeking justice all along.</p>
<p>[<em>Insight, in your inbox each day.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=insight">You can get it with The Conversation’s email newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/153712/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Cunningham has received funding from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the National Science Foundation. </span></em></p>
If history is a guide, expanding police powers to address current white nationalist threats could result in future repression of activists of color.
David Cunningham, Professor and Chair of Sociology, Washington University in St Louis
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/153376
2021-01-25T13:30:41Z
2021-01-25T13:30:41Z
Strange costumes of Capitol rioters echo the early days of the Ku Klux Klan - before the white sheets
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380221/original/file-20210122-13-1bfdan7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=6%2C20%2C4537%2C2984&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Fringe groups have long understood that capturing the public's attention is the best way to spread their views.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/piece-of-graffiti-art-depicting-the-washington-capitol-news-photo/1295805725?adppopup=true">Karwai Tang/WireImage via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>After the riots at the Capitol, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/capitol-rioter-horned-hat-gloats-feds-work-identify-suspects-n1253392">images</a> of Jacob Chansley, who’s been dubbed the “QAnon Shaman,” were <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/07/us/insurrection-capitol-extremist-groups-invs/index.html">splashed across news</a> outlets.</p>
<p>Chansley’s outlandish costume – consisting of American flag-themed face paint, a hat made of bison horns and coyote skins, a shirtless, tattooed torso and brown pants – was met with fascination and ridicule. </p>
<p>Given the outrageous nature of his garb, it might be easy to dismiss Chansley and the others wearing costumes or uniforms at the Capitol as silly or unhinged outliers. </p>
<p>However, after spending the last decade <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=vvv4XfkAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">studying the rhetoric</a> of organized racist groups in the United States, I know how outfits that look harmless and eccentric can actually have an insidious effect. In fact, costumes and uniforms have played a central role in the appeal of extremist groups throughout the history of the country.</p>
<h2>The triumph of the spectacle</h2>
<p>For many extremist groups, a primary goal is to <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2012.01415.x">spread their group’s ideology</a> to the mainstream public. In order to accomplish this, groups need to gain as much widespread recognition as they can. </p>
<p>Costumes and uniforms are a form of spectacle that attract attention.</p>
<p>While most people recognize the infamous hood and white robes of the 1920s Klan, early Klan costumes were homemade, individualized and much more bizarre. </p>
<p>In the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Fiery_Cross.html?id=6O_XYBMhNYAC">imagination was encouraged</a>” in the creation of costumes by members, who competed to create the most “outrageous outfit.” </p>
<p>Historian Elaine Parsons notes that early Klan costumes <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Ku_Klux/Gl60CAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=the+birth+of+the+klan+during+reconstruction&printsec=frontcover">were composed of</a> animal skins, horns, conical hats and gowns featuring a range of colors and patterns. Modeled after garb from carnivals and Mardi Gras traditions, the spectacle and performance of early Klan costumes helped to spur the <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/3659969">swift growth of the group</a>, which an 1884 history of the Klan described as “<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31819">a wave of excitement, spreading by contagions</a>.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="An 1871 engraving depicts a group of Klansmen surrounding a man on his knees with a rope around his neck." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380219/original/file-20210122-19-19dy2i3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380219/original/file-20210122-19-19dy2i3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380219/original/file-20210122-19-19dy2i3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380219/original/file-20210122-19-19dy2i3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380219/original/file-20210122-19-19dy2i3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=637&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380219/original/file-20210122-19-19dy2i3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=637&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380219/original/file-20210122-19-19dy2i3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=637&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Early Ku Klux Klan outfits had a carnival-like quality to them.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/political-cartoon-in-which-ku-klux-klansmen-threaten-to-news-photo/640486525?adppopup=true">Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And it is no coincidence that the revival of the Klan in the 1920s <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/08/383279630/100-years-later-whats-the-legacy-of-birth-of-a-nation">was in part popularized</a> by the costumed Klansmen portrayed in the blockbuster film “Birth of a Nation.” </p>
<p>Like the early Ku Klux Klan, the <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/10/27/what-you-need-know-about-qanon">viral spread of the QAnon conspiracy theory</a> has been driven through spectacle. Chansley admitted as much. He has commented that his costume <a href="https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2021/01/06/arizona-qanon-supporter-jake-angeli-joins-storming-u-s-capitol/6568513002/">gets people’s attention</a>, which then gives him the opportunity to spread the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-qanon.html">tenets of the conspiracy theory</a>: that the world’s governments and banks are run by secret rings of Satan-worshiping pedophiles that manage child sex-trafficking organizations. </p>
<p>Other members of the movement are keenly aware of how their clothing can work to influence others. </p>
<p>Doug Jensen, the man seen in <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/10/politics/doug-jensen-capitol-hill-police-officer/index.html">a viral video</a> at the head of a mob chasing a police officer through the Capitol building, <a href="https://cbs2iowa.com/news/local/iowa-man-charged-in-capitol-riot-says-he-chased-officer-so-qanon-would-get-the-credit">said in an interview</a> that he purposefully positioned himself leading the charge wearing a “Q” shirt so that “Q” could “get the credit.” </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Jensen in a black hat and black t-shirt leads a mob of riotors." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380224/original/file-20210122-13-1drg3py.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380224/original/file-20210122-13-1drg3py.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380224/original/file-20210122-13-1drg3py.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380224/original/file-20210122-13-1drg3py.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380224/original/file-20210122-13-1drg3py.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380224/original/file-20210122-13-1drg3py.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380224/original/file-20210122-13-1drg3py.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Douglas Jensen confronts police in the U.S. Capitol wearing a ‘Q’ shirt.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/PicturesoftheWeekPhotoGallery-NorthAmerica/5213ab83f87f407ca74c1c84500ad43b/photo?Query=capitol%20AND%20breach&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=1239&currentItemNo=95">Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Costumes and community</h2>
<p>Costumes and uniforms in extremist movements serve a second purpose: fostering community among members. </p>
<p>While Klan costumes became more homogeneous in the early 20th century, the white hood and robes did more than conceal the wearer’s identity. They also created a sense of “<a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631493690">magnetism and prestige</a>” through group secrecy. One ritual of membership involved other members lifting their masks after new recruits joined.</p>
<p>In the era of the internet, costumes and uniforms help groups construct community in a different way. </p>
<p>Most organized extremist groups in the United States primarily communicate in anonymous online spaces, and members are often separated geographically. </p>
<p>For these reasons, costumes, uniforms and symbols on clothing can act as physical indicators of group unity. This can work to <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2021/01/decoding-hate-symbols-seen-at-capitol-insurrection/">bring divergent groups together</a> – such as via a MAGA hat – or to denote a belief in a specific ideology, like patches with the QAnon motto “WWG1WGA,” an abbreviation for “Where We Go One, We Go All.”</p>
<p>To be sure, there are ways in which costumes and uniforms do more than simply operate as identifiers. </p>
<p>Hitler’s Nazi party believed that mass gatherings gave attendees a “<a href="https://search.proquest.com/docview/1291660995?fromopenview=true&pq-origsite=gscholar">sense of being protectively surrounded by a movement</a>,” with the uniformed guard creating “a tendency to place the center of authority in the Nazi party.” In other words, because people often associate uniforms with legitimacy or power, the use of uniforms can help extremist groups persuade people that they should be trusted. </p>
<h2>A higher cause</h2>
<p>With its costumes, the Reconstruction-era Klan liked to perpetuate the legend that its members were <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Fiery_Cross/6O_XYBMhNYAC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=the+fiery+cross&printsec=frontcover">the ghosts of Confederate soldiers</a>. However, the Klan of the 1920s drew heavily upon religion in framing its mission as a holy cause. </p>
<p>One of the most violent Mississippi chapters of the Ku Klux Klan believed their members were chosen by God to conduct a <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvs32rk6">holy war</a> against the civil rights movement. Psychologist Wyn Craig Wade has noted how the “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Fiery_Cross.html?id=6O_XYBMhNYAC">act of donning the costume was often recounted as ‘a holy experience’</a>” by members of the Ku Klux Klan.</p>
<p>It should be no surprise, then, that today’s racist and extremist groups have also used this tactic. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22d6tRXxVeg">In describing the meaning of his costume</a>, Chansley notes QAnon is engaged in a “war of a spiritual nature” and that his costume represents his status as a “light occultic force of the side of God” necessary to defeat an unseen, omnipotent force of evil. Some contemporary neo-Nazi and racist groups incorporate <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/world/europe/vikings-sweden-paganism-neonazis.html">Norse symbolism and mythology</a>, while others, following the Klan, use Christianity to frame their racist ideology as righteous or divine.</p>
<p>Although costumes cannot tell us the entire story of a group or movement, they can provide a window into understanding how the groups and movements form and how their ideologies are spread. </p>
<p>While they never need to be entertained, neither should they be ignored.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/153376/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kenneth Ladenburg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
For many extremist groups, a primary goal is to spread their ideology. Costumes and uniforms – even ridiculous ones – are a form of spectacle that can garner attention and interest.
Kenneth Ladenburg, Instructor of English, Arizona State University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/153676
2021-01-22T15:58:32Z
2021-01-22T15:58:32Z
Capitol mob wasn’t just angry men – there were angry women as well
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380067/original/file-20210121-15-17vtax2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=50%2C16%2C5523%2C3715&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">There were women among the crowd that marched to the Capitol and stormed the building.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/trump-supporters-near-the-u-s-capitol-on-january-06-2021-in-news-photo/1230476985?adppopup=true">Shay Horse/NurPhoto via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2021/capitol-insurrection-visual-timeline/">terror inflicted on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6</a> laid bare <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-boogaloo-and-who-are-the-rioters-who-stormed-the-capitol-5-essential-reads-153337">America’s problem with violent extremism</a>. </p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/how-law-enforcement-is-using-technology-to-track-down-people-who-attacked-the-us-capitol-building-153282">The FBI and other law enforcement agencies have begun to piece together</a> the events of that day, while attempting to thwart any impending attacks. <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/storytelling/capitol-riot-mob-arrests/">Scores of people have been arrested and charged</a> over the attack – the vast majority being men. </p>
<p>In the wake of these events, there were stories attributing the violence and destruction to “<a href="https://www.thelily.com/what-happened-at-the-capitol-was-pure-white-male-privilege/">white male rage</a>” “<a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/01/capitol-riot-male-rage.html">violent male rage</a>” and “<a href="https://www.inquirer.com/news/capitol-breach-white-rioters-protesters-georgia-election-20210111.html">angry white men</a>.” </p>
<p>But what about the women?</p>
<p>To distill the violent insurrection into a tale of angry male rage is to overlook the threat that women in the mob posed to congressional officials, law enforcement and U.S. democracy that day. </p>
<h2>Long history of women’s involvement</h2>
<p>Several women have been identified as alleged participants in the events of Jan. 6. Among those women are a <a href="https://www.cleveland19.com/2021/01/11/still-no-charges-against-former-cmsd-employee-linked-capitol-riots/">former school occupational therapist</a>, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-protest-officials-insight/off-duty-cops-other-officials-face-reckoning-after-rallying-for-trump-in-d-c-idUSKBN29I315">an employee of a county sheriff’s office</a>, a <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/jenna-ryan-texas-realtor-capitol-riots-sign-vandalised-1560515">real estate broker</a> and a <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/13/we-mock-the-rioters-as-ignorant-at-our-peril-459072">former mayoral candidate</a>. </p>
<p>At least <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/us/politics/oath-keepers-capitol-riot.html">one woman</a> is being investigated for her role in organizing the attack with fellow members of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia movement. And <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/07/ashli-babbitt-dead-capitol-riot/">Ashli Babbit, a female veteran</a>, was shot dead by police while attempting to breach the Senate floor.</p>
<p>The women who took part in the siege of the Capitol are part of a long history of women’s participation in extremist violence, both in the United States and abroad. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380060/original/file-20210121-23-1ci8szt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A headshot of Jessica Watkins." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380060/original/file-20210121-23-1ci8szt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380060/original/file-20210121-23-1ci8szt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380060/original/file-20210121-23-1ci8szt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380060/original/file-20210121-23-1ci8szt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380060/original/file-20210121-23-1ci8szt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380060/original/file-20210121-23-1ci8szt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380060/original/file-20210121-23-1ci8szt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jessica Watkins, seen here in a photo from the Montgomery County jail, is facing federal charges that she participated in the assault on the U.S. Capitol.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/CapitolBreachArrests/b6464e489c5c4245a59807864fb2fd4a/photo?Query=Capitol%20AND%20Breach&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=1239&currentItemNo=21">Montgomery County Jail via AP</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Women have buoyed American far-right organizations and causes for centuries. In <a href="https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/seyward-darby/sisters-in-hate/9780316487771/">her recent book</a> on women at the forefront of contemporary white nationalism, author <a href="https://seywarddarby.com/">Seyward Darby</a> writes that women are not “incidental to white nationalism, they are a sustaining feature.” </p>
<p>Since the late 1800s, women have supported and enabled the terrorist white supremacist organization the Ku Klux Klan, while hundreds of thousands joined its female affiliate, Women of the Ku Klux Klan, and its predecessors. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178170?pq-origsite=summon&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">Women helped establish</a> the Klan’s culture, bolstered its recruitment efforts and manufactured its propaganda. Despite its hyper-masculine ideology, which identifies white men as the primary arbiters of political power, women have also held leadership positions <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00380237.2016.1135029">within the modern-day Klan</a>. </p>
<p>More recently, women have joined the far-right Proud Boys movement, which has <a href="https://www.wiisglobal.org/not-convinced-a-gender-perspective-matters-to-todays-political-activism-meet-the-proud-boys-and-their-girls/">openly recruited female foot soldiers</a>. In December, a growing rift between male and female Proud Boys was reported. After experiencing intense sexist backlash from men in the organization, women led by <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/proud-boys-are-at-war-with-their-proud-girls-female-extremist-wing?ref=home">MMA fighter Tara LaRosa</a> began their own group, the Proud Girls USA. </p>
<p>To leave one extremist organization in order to form another suggests a deep commitment to the far-right cause.</p>
<h2>Discounting is dangerous</h2>
<p>A 2005 study <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10576100601101067?casa_token=5Up9CxiwQpAAAAAA%3ATmDm-CtsOasDz__iRni78NJf3UFY-tylaKfYChMRuwCqsdr1uVeH__sOjOGQ4qtA3EvR0qWuIYCE">noted a disconnect between the rise in women</a> within American right-wing terrorist organizations and the attention it received from law enforcement. </p>
<p>Despite a marked increase in women’s engagement in acts of terror against the state and racial minorities, security officials <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10576100601101067">have largely failed to publicize</a>, search and interrogate women operatives in these organizations, even after they become known to law enforcement. </p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10576100601101067">There is also evidence</a> that American far-right women have drawn inspiration and tactical knowledge from women engaged in extremist violence abroad. </p>
<p>Evidence from the global war on terror points to the potential dangers of ignoring the growth of violent extremism among women. In Iraq, for example, female terrorists carried out large numbers of deadly suicide attacks against American assets during the U.S. occupation. </p>
<p>The rest of the world has since been forced to grapple with the reality of violent women after female terrorists staged lethal attacks in Nigeria, Somalia, Tunisia, the Philippines, Indonesia and France. </p>
<p>Recent terror attacks in American cities such as <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/12/02/one-year-after-san-bernardino-police-offer-a-possible-motive-as-questions-still-linger/">San Bernardino</a>, California, and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/06/24/las-vegas-cop-killers-packed-ammo-and-wore-adult-diapers-as-they-prepared-for-their-revolution/">Las Vegas</a> that featured women among the perpetrators confirm violent women have already inflicted damage on U.S. soil.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380069/original/file-20210121-13-1lwibg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Ku Klux Klan security guards escorting two women members." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380069/original/file-20210121-13-1lwibg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380069/original/file-20210121-13-1lwibg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380069/original/file-20210121-13-1lwibg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380069/original/file-20210121-13-1lwibg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380069/original/file-20210121-13-1lwibg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380069/original/file-20210121-13-1lwibg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380069/original/file-20210121-13-1lwibg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ku Klux Klan security guards escort two female members after a Klan meeting in Castro Valley, California, in 1979.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/KuKluxKlan1979Women/a1d3e8cff91c4ccdaa56b3f0d2e2f257/photo?Query=women%20Ku%20Klux%20Klan&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=17&currentItemNo=7">AP Photo/PS</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Gender bias can be deadly</h2>
<p>In fact, <a href="http://www.jakanathomas.com/research.html">my research</a> suggests that attacks by female terrorists are often more destructive than those executed by their male counterparts.</p>
<p>In an analysis of over 2,500 global suicide attacks, I show disparities in the severity of male and female attacks are greatest where gender stereotypes suggest that women are neither violent nor political. Such tropes can blind security officials and civilians to the threat posed by women terrorists, causing them to overlook the potential for female complicity. </p>
<p>Female terrorists, including in <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/isis-female-suicide-bombers-battle-mosul-631846">Iraq,</a> <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3395973.stm">Israel</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/world/africa/nigeria-vexed-by-boko-harams-use-of-women-as-suicide-bombers.html">Nigeria</a>, have been able to deflect suspicion because they were women. My research shows that gender bias can become deadly when it stops effective counterterrorism policies, such as surveillance, searches and interrogations, from being implemented. </p>
<p>Additionally, since ordinary citizens played an unusual role in exposing the identities of the Capitol attackers, gender biases among civilians are also relevant. Failure to accept women’s complicity in the Capitol siege and the broader movement may prevent the identification of female offenders and impedes efforts to punish and deter future attacks.</p>
<p>American women have been key pillars of support for violent right-wing extremists for centuries. They have been right-wing extremists themselves – racist skinheads, neo-Nazis and Klanswomen. Women are also Oath Keepers, <a href="https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/2020/05/26/what-to-know-about-kentucky-three-percenters-group/5258749002/">Three Percenters</a> and Proud Boys. They were capitol rioters.</p>
<p>To construct an accurate account of the Capitol attack, it’s necessary to ask “Where are the women?” And the answer is, “Right there.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/153676/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jakana Thomas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
To distill the violent insurrection at the US Capitol into a tale of angry male rage is to overlook the threat that women in the mob posed.
Jakana Thomas, Associate Professor, Michigan State University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/153145
2021-01-14T13:21:44Z
2021-01-14T13:21:44Z
Capitol siege raises questions over extent of white supremacist infiltration of US police
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378592/original/file-20210113-23-xvfvrk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C8%2C5982%2C3979&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A U.S. Capitol police officer stands at a street corner near the Capitol.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/capitol-police-officer-stands-at-a-street-corner-near-the-u-news-photo/1230481038?adppopup=true">Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The apparent <a href="https://theappeal.org/the-cops-at-the-capitol/">participation of off-duty officers in the rally</a> that morphed into a siege on the U.S. Capitol building Jan. 6 has revived fears about <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2021/01/12/what-the-capitol-insurgency-reveals-about-white-supremacy-and-law-enforcement/">white supremacists within police departments</a>.</p>
<p>These concerns are not new. White supremacy, the belief that white people are superior to other races, has <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidden-plain-sight-racism-white-supremacy-and-far-right-militancy-law">long tainted elements within law enforcement</a>. As <a href="https://docs.house.gov/meetings/GO/GO02/20200929/111003/HHRG-116-GO02-Wstate-JohnsonV-20200929.pdf">I testified before Congress just months before this assault</a>, there is a <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-racist-roots-of-american-policing-from-slave-patrols-to-traffic-stops-112816">long history of racism in U.S. policing</a> – and this legacy may have contributed to the violence in the Capitol in Washington, D.C.</p>
<p>Reports of <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-police-investigation/off-duty-police-firefighters-under-investigation-in-connection-with-us-capitol-riot-idUSKBN29F0KH">officers involved</a> in an attack in which the <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2021/01/decoding-hate-symbols-seen-at-capitol-insurrection/">symbols and language of white supremacy</a> were clearly on display are concerning. </p>
<p>But so too, I believe, is a policing culture that may have contributed to the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-security-insight/u-s-lawmakers-say-police-downplayed-threat-of-violence-before-capitol-siege-idUSKBN29D0N9">downplaying of the risk</a> of attack before it began and the <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2021/01/07/613802462/how-the-storming-of-the-capitol-was-and-wasnt-about-police">apparent sympathetic response to attackers</a> displayed by some police officers – they too hint at a wider problem.</p>
<p>As someone who has researched and <a href="https://law.lclark.edu/live/files/28080-lcb231article2johnsonpdf">written about the chilling problem of white supremacists in law enforcement</a>, I believe the failure to confront the problem has had deadly consequences.</p>
<h2>Blue, but white first?</h2>
<p>Racism and white supremacy are problems in society, not just the police. Just after the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, 9% of Americans responding to an <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/28-approve-trumps-response-charlottesville-poll/story?id=49334079">ABC News/Washington News poll</a> said that it was acceptable to hold neo-Nazi views. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, a <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-poll/majority-of-americans-want-trump-removed-immediately-after-u-s-capitol-violence-reuters-ipsos-poll-idUSKBN29D2VG">Reuters poll</a> after the insurrection at the Capitol found that 12% of Americans supported the actions of those who took part in the attack.</p>
<p>But the percentage of police officers who hold views in support of white identity extremism may be at least as high or higher – white people are overrepresented on police forces cross the country. And surveys have found that police officers – especially white ones – diverge from the wider public on issues of race. A <a href="https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/01/11/police-views-public-views/">2017 Pew poll</a> found that 92% of white officers believe that the U.S. had made the reforms necessary for equal rights for Black Americans. This compared with just 29% of Black officers and 48% of the general public, including 57% of white Americans. This leads some to wonder whether police are more sympathetic to the rhetoric of Trump and others.</p>
<p>With their enormous power, department-issued weapons and access to sensitive information, police departments must be rid of officers with racist views for America’s security. But for the same reasons, police departments have become attractive recruiting grounds for white supremacist groups.</p>
<p><a href="https://oversight.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight.house.gov/files/White_Supremacist_Infiltration_of_Law_Enforcement.pdf">The FBI warned of the problem</a> in 2006, noting: “Having personnel within law enforcement agencies has historically been and
will continue to be a desired asset for white supremacist groups.”</p>
<p>Because of the secretive nature of such groups, it is hard to say how many officers are involved. But since 2009 police officers in Florida, Alabama and Louisiana have been <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidden-plain-sight-racism-white-supremacy-and-far-right-militancy-law">identified as members of white supremacist groups</a>. Meanwhile, more than 100
police departments in 49 different states have <a href="https://law.lclark.edu/live/files/28080-lcb231article2johnsonpdf">had to deal with scandals</a> involving racist emails, texts or online comments sent or made by department staff. Just this week a high-ranking officer in the New York Police Department was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/nyregion/nypd-james-kobel-racist.html">found to be behind a string of racist posts</a> online.</p>
<h2>Misplaced sympathies</h2>
<p>When it comes to the events of Jan. 6, there appear to be three main areas of concern about the action – or inaction – of police. First, there appears little doubt that Capitol Police <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-uncomfortable-questions-facing-capitol-police-over-the-security-breach-by-maga-mob-152857">did not prepare in a way to protect the Capitol</a> for the threat lawmakers and the vice president faced. The U.S. Capitol Police Department is one of the best-funded police forces in the country; <a href="https://www.rollcall.com/2020/06/15/capitol-police-a-department-shrouded-in-secrecy/">with a budget of more than $500 million</a> and approximately 2,000 police officers, it is larger than the police force of the city of San Diego, yet the Capitol Police’s mission is to guard a few buildings and the members of Congress.</p>
<p>The rally and <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/capitol-rioters-planned-for-weeks-in-plain-sight-the-police-werent-ready">plan to attack the Capitol were discussed on public social media platforms</a> such as Twitter, Parler, Reddit, Instagram and Facebook for law enforcement who cared to be prepared. Enrique Tarrio, a member of the far-right Proud Boys, was arrested a few days before the attack for the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/proud-boys-enrique-tarrio-arrest/2021/01/04/8642a76a-4edf-11eb-b96e-0e54447b23a1_story.html">destruction of a Black Lives Matter flag belonging to a Black church in Washington, D.C</a>. Tarrio had traveled to the District of Columbia for the Jan. 6 rally and was <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article248458030.html">allegedly in possession of high-capacity magazines</a>. This should have been an indication that the protesters planned violence.</p>
<p>Both the <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/fbi-nypd-told-capitol-police-about-possibility-violence-riot-senior-n1253646">NYPD and FBI warned the Capitol police</a> of the threats they were seeing online, with <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/capitol-riot-fbi-intelligence/2021/01/12/30d12748-546b-11eb-a817-e5e7f8a406d6_story.html">an FBI office in Virginia telling Capitol police that extremists were planning violence and “war” just one day before the attack</a>. </p>
<p>Yet there were no phalanxes of heavily armed police officers <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2021-01-12/the-us-capitol-riots-and-the-double-standard-of-protest-policing">as had been the case in protests in the capital against racism</a>, in which many more Black Americans were involved.</p>
<p>As such, many are legitimately asking: Was the threat posed by the rioters on Jan. 6 underestimated by police because of their race?</p>
<p>There are also questions to be asked over whether <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/capitol-riot-fbi-intelligence/2021/01/12/30d12748-546b-11eb-a817-e5e7f8a406d6_story.html">Capitol police officers were more sympathetic to Trump supporters</a> during the attack itself. One officer tasked with protecting the Capitol <a href="https://www.king5.com/article/news/nation-world/capitol-police-officers-suspended-riot/507-0c454f7e-fed5-44f3-9b84-2a6d74239645">put on</a> a red Make America Great Again cap during the attack, <a href="https://www.king5.com/article/news/nation-world/capitol-police-officers-suspended-riot/507-0c454f7e-fed5-44f3-9b84-2a6d74239645">according to the Tim Ryan</a>, the Democratic chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees funding for Capitol police. Another Capitol police officer was seen being friendly and <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/11/politics/capitol-police-officers-suspended-tim-ryan/index.html">taking photographs with rioters</a>. Two Capitol police officers have been suspended and <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/01/12/2-capitol-police-suspended-10-under-investigation-after-capitol-riot/6639735002/">at least 10 others are under investigation</a> for their behavior in the uprising.</p>
<h2>Off duty, in crowd</h2>
<p>Finally, there is concern that off-duty officers holding extreme views traveled from across the country to be part of the day’s events. Reports from Capitol police officers describe cops <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emmanuelfelton/black-capitol-police-racism-mob">flashing their badges while attempting to enter the Capitol</a>.</p>
<p>At least 28 sworn law enforcement officers attended the Jan. 6 rally, according to a <a href="https://theappeal.org/the-cops-at-the-capitol/">tally kept by the publication</a> The Appeal. They represent police departments from at least 12 different states. This number could grow.</p>
<p>Obviously there is a difference between merely attending the rally and taking part in the siege.</p>
<p>But domestic terrorism from far-right groups is a significant threat to America’s safety and security. And the actions of police on Jan. 6 – both as individuals and as a force – raise concerns. For all Americans to be truly safe, it is important to weed out far-right extremism, especially in the institution sworn to protect us all.</p>
<p>[_<a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/politics-weekly-74/?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=politics-important">The Conversation’s most important election and politics headlines, in our Politics Weekly newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/153145/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Vida Johnson is a registered Democrat. </span></em></p>
The FBI has long warned that white supremacist groups are seeking to infiltrate police, which makes the events of Jan. 6 all the more concerning.
Vida Johnson, Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/146170
2020-09-20T11:56:41Z
2020-09-20T11:56:41Z
Canadian viewers of HBO’s ‘Watchmen’ should know the KKK helped bring down a provincial government in 1929
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/357976/original/file-20200914-22-1sde2tu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=3%2C5%2C1192%2C652&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In 'Watchmen,' Angela Abar (Regina King) finds KKK garb in the closet of Judd Crawford (Don Johnson), her late friend who was Tulsa’s police chief.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(HBO)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The HBO show <em>Watchmen</em>, which <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/arts/television/emmy-awards.html">won 11 awards</a> at the <a href="https://www.emmys.com/awards/nominees-winners">72nd Emmy Awards held Sept. 20</a>, has used <a href="https://www.wired.com/2019/12/geeks-guide-watchmen/">science fiction and the superhero genre</a> to probe white supremacy, police corruption, trauma and institutional racism across time. The show, <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/23/17383826/damon-lindelof-watchmen-remix-original-characters-remake">a “re-mix” based on the original <em>Watchmen</em> comic series</a> engages the subject of policing and the Ku Klux Klan.</p>
<p>Beyond <em>Watchmen</em>, the Klan may be most familiar to some contemporary Canadians
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/movies/spike-lee-blackkklansman.html">through its high-profile American and Hollywood portrayals</a>.</p>
<p>But as I trace in my book <em><a href="https://www.ubcpress.ca/keeping-canada-british">Keeping Canada British: The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Saskatchewan</a></em>, the Klan also existed in Canada, first appearing here in 1921. And nowhere else in Canada did the Klan achieve the influence it <a href="https://www.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.9_09493/1?r=0&s=1">attained in Saskatchewan — where it helped bring down a government</a>.</p>
<h2>Origins in ex-Confederate soldiers</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/flood-klan/">In 1866</a>, immediately after the American Civil War, a group of ex-Confederate soldiers in Pulaski, Tenn., formed an organization called the Ku Klux Klan, after the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/acref/9780195301731.013.33752">Greek word “kuklos,” which means circle</a>.</p>
<p>The Klan propped up white racial supremacy by means of violence and intimidation, including beatings, torture, sexual assault and murder. The Klan faded out in the 1870s, but was <a href="https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/strangers-in-the-land/9780813531236">revived in 1915 when a small group of men gathered at Stone Mountain outside Atlanta</a>, where <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/04/08/the-preacher-who-used-christianity-to-revive-the-ku-klux-klan">before an altar beneath a fiery cross</a> they swore allegiance to the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. </p>
<p>By the fall of 1921 there were 100,000 members in the United States. The peak membership is <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/flood-klan/">estimated at three million to six million (or higher) in the 1920s</a>, but the precise number is not known <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9780807846278/citizen-klansmen/">because the records at Atlanta headquarters were destroyed</a>.</p>
<h2>First appearance in Canada</h2>
<p>The Klan’s first <a href="https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/ku-klux-klan">appearance in Canada was in 1921</a>, when branches were formed in Montréal and West Vancouver. </p>
<p>Cross burnings were sighted in various locations, for example, in Fredericton, N.B., at the Mount Saint Vincent convent in Nova Scotia, and at the St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic church in Melville Cove, near Halifax. The Klan reported as many as <a href="https://doi.org/10.3138/jcs.30.3.156">7,000 enrolled just in the Toronto chapter, although as political scientist Allan Bartley notes this claim may be exaggerated</a>. </p>
<p>He finds the Klan “initially exercised its strongest appeal in southwestern Ontario,” where Black people were “targets of rising racism.” But “the Klan also exploited traditional Protestant animosities against Catholics and French Canadians. There were diatribes against Blacks, Jews and foreigners, and avowals of respect and loyalty to British traditions and institutions.” </p>
<p>In Ontario and elsewhere in Canada, the Klan advanced its capacity to exploit local prejudices against those who didn’t fit neatly into moulds of British Protestant Canadian nationalism. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Hooded figures stand in front of a cross" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/357992/original/file-20200914-14-1q7d6at.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/357992/original/file-20200914-14-1q7d6at.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357992/original/file-20200914-14-1q7d6at.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357992/original/file-20200914-14-1q7d6at.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357992/original/file-20200914-14-1q7d6at.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357992/original/file-20200914-14-1q7d6at.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/357992/original/file-20200914-14-1q7d6at.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A gathering of the Ku Klux Klan in Kingston, Ont., July 31, 1927.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(John Boyd/Library and Archives Canada, PA-087848)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Klan organizers Lewis Scott and Pat Emmons, both from South Bend, Ind., arrived in Saskatchewan in late 1926. They preached white supremacy, and to that extent the message was the same as it was in the United States. But the message was tailored to local conditions. </p>
<p>The 1931 census showed that for the first time since Saskatchewan was established as a province, people of non-British origin formed the majority of the settler population. There was a <a href="https://www.mqup.ca/blacks-in-canada--second-edition--the-products-9780773516328.php">small Black population in Saskatchewan</a>, and a growing number of <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/ukrainian-canadians-a-study-in-assimilation/oclc/4510680">immigrants from central and Eastern Europe</a>.</p>
<h2>Preserving ‘traditional’ social order</h2>
<p>For many British Protestants, who fashioned themselves as <a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Patterns_of_Prejudice.html?id=yqUVAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y">rightful “nativists,” it seemed that “foreigners” were taking over the country</a>. Combined with this was a desire to preserve their traditional gender and moral order. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.saskarchives.com/Suffrage">Votes for women</a> and more women in the paid work force, women smoking or bobbing their hair <a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=PEkiAAAAMAAJ&dq=editions:ISBN0773047417">suggested that gender roles were changing</a>.
The Klan did not want this, partly because they thought that controlling women’s sexuality was essential to keeping the white race pure.</p>
<h2>Saw themselves as ‘moral arbiters’</h2>
<p>The 1920s was also the <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/sale-of-liquor-debate-in-saskatchewan-goes-back-100-years-1.3288058">era of prohibition of alcohol</a>, a regime that was difficult to enforce. There was also a general anxiety about prostitution, opium and gambling all of which were disproportionately blamed on the non-British population. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/358676/original/file-20200917-18-j8crvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The frontpage of a newspaper" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/358676/original/file-20200917-18-j8crvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/358676/original/file-20200917-18-j8crvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358676/original/file-20200917-18-j8crvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358676/original/file-20200917-18-j8crvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358676/original/file-20200917-18-j8crvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358676/original/file-20200917-18-j8crvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358676/original/file-20200917-18-j8crvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ku Klux Klan publication, Western Freedman - masthead and headline, v. 1, no. 10, April 5, 1928. Publication directed by J.J. Maloney.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan/R-A6902)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As scholar William Calderwood noted in his 1973 article, “<a href="https://www.saskarchives.com/sites/default/files/sh_feature_articles_tableofcontents_fin_2017_12_12.pdf">Religious Reactions to the Ku Klux Klan in Saskatchewan</a>,” Protestant clergymen were prominent in the ranks of the Klan. (Calderwood also wrote an 1968 master of arts thesis, <em>The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in Saskatchewan</em> while at the University of Saskatchewan, Regina Campus). </p>
<p>They saw the Klan as a bulwark against the moral collapse of society. Canadians had fought in the First World War in large part for the British Empire, and its fresh psychological wounds <a href="https://utorontopress.com/ca/shades-of-right-1">influenced the rise of right and fascist politics</a>. </p>
<h2>25,000 members in Saskatchewan</h2>
<p>The Klan declared that Canada must not allow what had been won in the trenches of Belgium and France to be lost on the plains of Saskatchewan. For all these reasons, the Klan took off like wildfire, signing up an <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/ku-klux-klan-saskatchewan-history-1.4251309">estimated 25,000 members in the province</a>.</p>
<p>One notable event was a huge rally and cross burning outside Moose Jaw on June 7, 1927. An estimated 8,000 people attended the rally. Newspaper reports of the time estimated more than 1,000 automobiles at the scene. On Empire Day, May 24, 1928, crosses burned in communities across the province. </p>
<p>In September 1927, Klan organizers Emmons and Scott fled the province, taking with them money they had collected for membership fees and from the sale of Klan regalia. Emmons was brought back and put on trial for embezzlement, but acquitted because he had acted in accordance with Klan rules. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A man in a business suit and tie." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/358682/original/file-20200917-14-rn9ik9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/358682/original/file-20200917-14-rn9ik9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358682/original/file-20200917-14-rn9ik9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358682/original/file-20200917-14-rn9ik9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358682/original/file-20200917-14-rn9ik9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358682/original/file-20200917-14-rn9ik9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358682/original/file-20200917-14-rn9ik9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gardiner lost the election of 1929 partly because of backlash to his anti-Klan crusade.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Alexandra Studio/Library and Archives Canada/PA-052491)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At this point the Saskatchewan Klan might have collapsed, but instead it restructured itself as a locally run organization. All ties with the American Klan were severed. Robes and hoods, part of Klansmen’s or <a href="https://search.saskarchives.com/klanswomen-uniforms">Klanswomen’s garb</a>, were no longer worn in public. </p>
<p>The new locally run Klan explicitly emphasized that it rejected violence and its main purpose was to keep Canada British and follow constitutional methods to achieve that goal. But cross burnings, verbal attacks on the non-British and explicitly racist pronouncements were, if not physically violent, hateful and deeply intimidating. </p>
<p><a href="https://utorontopress.com/ca/jimmy-gardiner-2">Liberal Premier Jimmy Gardiner</a>, continued to attack the Klan, saying that it was an alien American import and that it had left a trail of bloodshed everywhere it went in the U.S. However, he was unable to cite specific instances of bodily violence perpetrated by the Klan in Saskatchewan. Gardiner <a href="https://utorontopress.com/ca/prairie-liberalism-1">lost the election of 1929, the first defeat for the Liberals since 1905, partly because of the backlash against his anti-Klan crusade</a>.</p>
<h2>Pervasive racism</h2>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/358884/original/file-20200918-22-y1memq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/358884/original/file-20200918-22-y1memq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/358884/original/file-20200918-22-y1memq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=738&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358884/original/file-20200918-22-y1memq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=738&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358884/original/file-20200918-22-y1memq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=738&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358884/original/file-20200918-22-y1memq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358884/original/file-20200918-22-y1memq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358884/original/file-20200918-22-y1memq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Christian flag (Protestant), From ‘Women of the Ku Klux Klan, a Catalogue of Official Robes and Banners,’ ca. 1928.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan/R-A12825-1)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Gardiner’s own archives are significant textual sources for documenting the Klan in Saskatchewan. Both Gardiner’s collection of newspaper clippings and his correspondence provide insight into this strange and complex history.</p>
<p>Gardiner, who began his career as a teacher and was a Protestant, stood against the Klan’s hateful expression of an idealized exclusive white British Protestant social order. </p>
<p>At the same time, his archives, as well as many other <a href="https://www.osgoodesociety.ca/book/colour-coded-a-legal-history-of-racism-in-canada-1900-1950/">sources, show how there was an atmosphere of accepted racist discourse and legally established stuctural racism</a>. Such laws pertained to and impacted both colonial settler relations with Indigenous peoples and non-British racialized groups.</p>
<p>Gardiner had to walk a line of being anti-Klan: He couldn’t denounce the clan in frankly anti-racist terms, because there was so much racism in the general population including among his own supporters. He mainly denounced them because they had originated in the U.S. and for their blatant hucksterism.</p>
<p>Lest Canadians believe that the Klan was only an American phenomenon, it’s important to critically examine our own histories and legacies — <a href="https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/the-kkk-has-a-history-in-canada-and-it-can-return">including the many waves of white supremacist activity</a> — and levels and nuances of structural racism.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/146170/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James M. Pitsula does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The KKK appeared in Canada in 1921. Nowhere else in Canada did the Klan achieve the influence it attained in Saskatchewan, where it helped bring down a government.
James M. Pitsula, Professor emeritus, Department of History, University of Regina
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/121468
2019-08-06T12:56:13Z
2019-08-06T12:56:13Z
From across the globe to El Paso, changes in the language of the far-right explain its current violence
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286974/original/file-20190805-36381-752a8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Law enforcement officers walking to the scene of a shooting at a shopping mall in El Paso, Texas, on Saturday, Aug. 3, 2019. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Texas-Mall-Shooting/5987fafc0f114e34b2aa9553b955b983/165/0">AP/Rudy Gutierrez</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The recent <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/05/us/el-paso-shooting-monday/index.html">shooting attack</a> in which a young white man is accused of killing 22 people in a Walmart in El Paso fits a new trend among perpetrators of far-right violence: They want the world to know why they did it. </p>
<p>So they provide <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/us/patrick-crusius-el-paso-shooter-manifesto.html">a comprehensive ideological manifesto</a> that aims to explain the reasoning behind their actions as well as to encourage others to follow in their steps.</p>
<p>In the past, only <a href="https://info.publicintelligence.net/CTC-ViolentFarRight.pdf">leaders of far-right groups did this</a>. Now, it’s common among <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-drives-lone-offenders-62745">lone-wolf perpetrators</a>, such as the alleged perpetrator in El Paso. </p>
<p>In the past decade, the language of white supremacists has transformed in important ways. It crossed national borders, broadened its focus and has been influenced by current mainstream political discourse. </p>
<p>I study <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xBQYKHwAAAAJ&hl=en">political violence and extremism</a>. In my recent research, I have identified these changes and believe that they can provide important insights into the current landscape of the American and European violent far-right. </p>
<p>The changes also allow us to understand how the violent far-right mobilizes support, shapes political perceptions and eventually advances their objectives. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286978/original/file-20190805-36395-y4q1ae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286978/original/file-20190805-36395-y4q1ae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286978/original/file-20190805-36395-y4q1ae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286978/original/file-20190805-36395-y4q1ae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286978/original/file-20190805-36395-y4q1ae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286978/original/file-20190805-36395-y4q1ae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286978/original/file-20190805-36395-y4q1ae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286978/original/file-20190805-36395-y4q1ae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A vigil to commemorate the 50 victims of a March 15 shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which the accused shooter issued a 74-page manifesto prior to the massacre.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/New-Zealand-Mosque-Shooting-Free-Speech/0965b04afbdf442daabd9c5d24581e0a/2/0">AP/Vincent Yu</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>New identity crosses borders</h2>
<p>Since the early stages of the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/white-supremacy">American white supremacy movement in the mid-19th century</a>, the movement has always emphasized <a href="http://insct.syr.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Blessing_Roberts_Berlin_Report-mwedit070618.pdf">the superiority of Western culture and the need for segregation</a> between racial groups in order to maintain the purity and dominance of the white race. </p>
<p>For example, in the 1980s, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Blood_in_the_Face.html?id=2MlmswEACAAJ&source=kp_book_description">a Ku Klux Klan affiliate published a map</a> allocating specific parts of the U.S. to specific ethnic communities. The map makers imagined Jews limited to the New York area, while Hispanics were to live in Florida. </p>
<p>But recently, a growing number of far-right activists have preferred to focus on cultural and social differences between communities, rather than on attributes such as race and ethnic origin. </p>
<p>They justify their violence as a way to preserve certain cultural-religious practices, rather than relying on their old justification – maintaining the genetic purity of the white race. In these activists’ view, the battle has moved from genes to culture. </p>
<p>For example, a member of the National Socialist Movement, an American neo-Nazi organization, wrote in a 2018 online post that white American is an identity like African American or Jewish American. In a statement that probably wouldn’t have been made by previous generations of neo-Nazis, the member wrote that all whites should come together, using their knowledge and weapons, to stop non-Europeans from pushing their secular agenda via government and media power. </p>
<h2>Countering liberal left’s cultural influence</h2>
<p>Another traditional theme of the far-right discourse – preserving the patriarchal order from attacks from the left – has grown in prominence. </p>
<p>Anders Breivik, who <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2013/09/26/world/europe/norway-terror-attacks/index.html">killed 77 people and injured more than 300</a> in July 2011 in Europe’s most lethal act of white supremacism, issued a manifesto shortly before his rampage. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jul/27/breivik-anti-feminism">In it, he stated</a> that the politically correct terminology which is becoming more prevalent in the West intends to “deny the intrinsic worth of native Christian European heterosexual males” who were reduced to an “emasculate[d] … touchy-feely subspecies.” </p>
<p>Such sentiments are becoming more prevalent in the white supremacist forums, and reflect another component of what they perceived as an ongoing cultural war to preserve the white Christian way of life. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286975/original/file-20190805-36367-dl0nng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286975/original/file-20190805-36367-dl0nng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286975/original/file-20190805-36367-dl0nng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=774&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286975/original/file-20190805-36367-dl0nng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=774&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286975/original/file-20190805-36367-dl0nng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=774&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286975/original/file-20190805-36367-dl0nng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286975/original/file-20190805-36367-dl0nng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286975/original/file-20190805-36367-dl0nng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Belgian Flemish right-wing party member Tanguy Veys holds a copy of a manifesto sent to him and written by Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 76 people in twin attacks in Norway in 2011.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Belgium-Norway-Massacre/b65388d5ead04f36978b48545a27591f/36/0">AP/Virginia Mayo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>New transnational culture</h2>
<p>The declining emphasis by the far-right on nationalism has led to the adoption of a transnational identity based on race, culture and religion.</p>
<p>Simply put, they feel closer to whites in other countries than non-whites who live in their neighborhood. </p>
<p>This explains why we have seen a <a href="https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-03-20/white-nationalism-born-usa-now-global-terror-threat">global spread of violent white nationalism in recent years</a> as the far-right finds kinship with like-minded nationalists in other countries. </p>
<p>Racial identity was always a prime component in the identity of far-right activists, but it was usually framed by local politics. In the past, racist British skinheads focused mainly on what they perceived as the interests of the British white working class. Today the rhetoric of most skinheads focuses on international geopolitics, although local issues haven’t been abandoned. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/05/21/725390449/accused-shooter-in-new-zealand-mosque-attacks-charged-with-terrorism">attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which an Australian white supremacist killed 51</a> Muslim worshippers in a mosque on March 15, 2019, reflects that far-right activists seem to increasingly embrace a regional, if not global, perspective in the way they define their constituencies and the threats they are facing. </p>
<p>The Christchurch attacker’s manifesto was clearly <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/3/15/18267163/new-zealand-shooting-christchurch-white-nationalism-racism-language">inspired by far-right rhetoric from European and American groups</a>, such as notions of <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/03/what-the-christchurch-attackers-manifesto-tells-us.html">“white genocide</a>.” He specifically mentions Norway’s Breivik as a role model. </p>
<h2>Legitimizing far-right ideology in the US</h2>
<p>In the U.S., what’s different about the current rhetoric of the far-right is that they are now using terminology that can also be found in some mainstream political parties and movements, aiding their efforts to gain popular legitimacy. </p>
<p>For example, the United Northern and Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan released a new set of organizational goals a couple of years ago. Beyond their longstanding, bedrock belief – <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/2015648259/">the protection of the white race</a> – they also declare support for restricting immigration and free trade and ending or limiting foreign aid. They want government to provide protection to small businesses, agricultural workers and gun owners.</p>
<p>This broad ideological shift also spilled over to some far-right skinhead organizations. <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/politics/legal-and-political-magazines/volksfront">Volksfront</a>, for example, declares in its online mission statement that beyond white nationalism, the organization will fight for economic issues, states’ rights, crime repression and labor rights. </p>
<p>U.S. President Donald Trump’s language about the need to restore order to the streets of America, as expressed <a href="https://www.npr.org/2017/01/20/510629447/watch-live-president-trumps-inauguration-ceremony">in his inaugural address</a>, is also evident in the language of American white supremacists. In a poster produced by the skinhead group <a href="https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounders/keystone-state-skinheadskeystone-united">Keystone United</a>, they call for harsher punishments for drug dealers. </p>
<p>The demand for stricter punishment of criminals is echoed in many racist group platforms. These include support of death penalty expansion, an important point of discussion mainly in skinhead message boards, and levying harsher punishments for sexual offenses. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/30/shrinking-gap-between-number-of-blacks-and-whites-in-prison/">Since minorities are overrepresented</a> among American incarcerated population, far-right activists see these criminal justice policies as a more “legitimate” way to “punish” members of minority groups. </p>
<h2>Two future trends</h2>
<p>These changes in the discourse of the far-right suggest two important trends. </p>
<p>The first is the <a href="https://theconversation.com/white-nationalism-born-in-the-usa-is-now-a-global-terror-threat-113825">growth in the international nature of far-right violence</a>, posing a challenge to law enforcement across borders. </p>
<p>Second, the growing overlap between the language of the far-right and the rhetoric of elected officials illustrates how the current polarization in the political system, and delegitimization of minorities by political leaders, can provide legitimacy for radical practices and violence and broader acceptance of ideas, concepts and statements that in the past were the domain of the far-right. </p>
<p>I fear these dynamics are likely to encourage additional far-right activists to express their views via violence. The emerging evidence that the <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/el-paso-shooting-patrick-crusius-manifesto-texas-white-nationalist-1452579">El Paso shooter was inspired by popular theories in the far-right rhetorical universe</a>, such as that of the “great replacement,” is a clear warning sign. </p>
<p>[ <em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/121468/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Arie Perliger does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Major changes in the language of white supremacists have happened in the last decade that provide a window into how the groups mobilize support, shape political perceptions and advance their cause.
Arie Perliger, Director of Security Studies and Professor, UMass Lowell
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/112320
2019-03-01T11:38:12Z
2019-03-01T11:38:12Z
The KKK is in rapid decline – but its symbols remain worryingly potent
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261436/original/file-20190228-106368-1spbhaq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/july-8-2017-charlottesville-virginia-usa-1075392755">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It sometimes seems that the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is never far from the spotlight. This is odd, since its actual numbers are officially in sharp decline according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) – one of the most effective, respected and thoroughly informed of anti-Klan groups.</p>
<p>The SPLC’s spring 2019 report, <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/intelligence_report_166.pdf">The Year in Hate and Violence</a>
argues that in the US, “White Supremacy flourishes amid fears of immigration and [the] nation’s shifting demographics”. Yet it offers one glimmer of hope, in the rapidly falling membership of the nation’s various KKK groupings. </p>
<p>The report, headlined “Rage Against Change”, states that the number of Klan groups has dropped significantly since 2016, when there were 130. There are now 51. The SPLC concludes: “It may be that the KKK, having somehow endured since 1866, is finally on its last legs.”</p>
<p>It goes on to claim that this decline is because “the KKK has not been able to appeal to younger racists, with its antiquated traditions [and] odd dress … Younger extremists prefer Fred Perry polo shirts and khakis to Klan robes”. </p>
<p>However, as an observer of the Klan, I would argue that it is those very traditions, those icons, which make the order hit the headlines so often. The Klan hood is still one of the most widely recognisable symbols of hate. Yes, it is old fashioned, and certainly, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyCPEkPIwC4">it is impractical</a>. But surely that’s the point.</p>
<p>That curious – absurd – pointed shape, with the sinister eye holes, immediately conjures up visions of lynchings, the fire-bombing of African-American churches and other acts of terrorism. It is a far more recognisable symbol than other logos used by the alt-right and other white supremacists, with the obvious exception of the swastika. </p>
<p>And in spite of the Klans’ declining numbers, it remains a powerful symbol. A quick trawl through some recent <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alyssa-milano-the-red-maga-hat-is-the-new-white-hood/">news stories</a> seems to bear this out. </p>
<p>In fact, the symbolism of the Klan is currently so powerful that it is difficult to think of a situation where using its instantly recognisable iconography would not bring near universal condemnation. The Governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, discovered this recently when pictures emerged of the 1984 yearbook for the Eastern Virginia Medical School which he attended. One photo, on a page headed by his name, showed a <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/01/politics/northam-blackface-photo/index.html">figure in full Klan costume</a> standing next to another in “blackface”. Northam, a Democrat, issued an apology, although later denied that he had been in the image. Still, he faced calls for his resignation.</p>
<p>It is obvious that the Klan’s symbols and its very name remain shorthand for white supremacy, bigotry and hate. This became apparent to the British actress, Joanna Lumley, who made an extremely ill-advised – and not very funny – joke at the 2019 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Awards. <a href="https://metro.co.uk/2019/02/10/bafta-viewers-cringe-joanna-lumleys-awkward-ku-klux-klan-joke-8517533/">She quipped</a> that she was surprised by the success of Spike Lee’s film BlacKkKlansman at the “Klan film festival”. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fQNZhs0QKq0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Within minutes of her remark, the postings on social media almost unanimously condemned the 72-year-old actress and her script writers <a href="https://www.indy100.com/article/joanna-lumley-baftas-2019-host-jokes-kkk-blackkklansman-8773476">for insensitivity</a>. </p>
<p>Given this general toxicity, linking an opponent with the Klan is also an effective political tool, as no doubt Ralph Northam’s enemies realised. A strand of the opposition to Donald Trump has drawn on this tactic, with <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-47209526">a recent example</a> coming from the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. </p>
<h2>Symbol of hate</h2>
<p>Yet there are those who actually relish the notoriety of being associated with the KKK – or at least they seem to. In February, Goodloe Sutton, the editor of a newspaper in Linden, Alabama, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/feb/19/alabama-kkk-editorial-goodloe-sutton-resign-doug-jones">wrote</a>: “It is time for the Ku Klux Klan to night ride again”. </p>
<p>He appeared to see the Klan as the only body able to make sure that taxes did not continue to rise in Alabama. Despite the outrage, Sutton stood by his demands and when asked about the Klans’ violent past <a href="https://eu.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/2019/02/18/alabama-newspaper-ku-klux-klan-to-night-ride-again-linden-democrat-reporter-goodloe-sutton/2910436002/">simply replied</a>: “A violent organisation? Well, they didn’t kill but a few people.” </p>
<p>Sutton was soon removed from the Hall of Fame of the University of Southern Mississippi and condemned by the police. He has since been <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/02/25/697694443/alabama-publisher-who-called-for-kkk-to-ride-again-is-replaced-by-black-woman">replaced as editor</a> by a black woman.</p>
<p>Yet the predominantly black population of Linden seemed more or less resigned to the ongoing racism. One local businessman sadly admitted that the <a href="https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/2019/02/18/alabama-newspaper-ku-klux-klan-to-night-ride-again-linden-democrat-reporter-goodloe-sutton/2910436002/">community was “numb”</a>. He said that citizens seemed to have adopted the attitude that “if you’re black and live here, people think you don’t have a problem with racism. Otherwise, they say you should just move”.</p>
<p>But however disturbing Sutton’s plea may appear, it also serves to show how impotent today’s Klan members actually are. When asked about the Klan in Linden, the 79-year-old editor admitted it had died out in the 1960s. His article was pleading for it to be re-formed, which thankfully, as the declining numbers in the SPLC’s report show, is very unlikely. </p>
<p>Perhaps that is not the point, though. Perhaps it is the symbolism of the Klans and its very name which is the real threat, offering, as it does, a recognisable point of unanimity for the racist extremists of America.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/112320/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kristofer Allerfeldt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
KKK membership is falling rapidly across the US, according to a respected report. Ideas of hate, though, remain.
Kristofer Allerfeldt, Senior Lecturer in History, University of Exeter
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/102311
2018-08-30T11:23:05Z
2018-08-30T11:23:05Z
BlacKkKlansman: what Spike Lee’s new film misses out
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233932/original/file-20180828-86123-1dkvm13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">© 2018 FOCUS FEATURES LLC.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The much-hyped new film release <a href="https://theconversation.com/blackkklansman-a-deadly-serious-comedy-101432">BlacKkKlansman</a> has once again brought the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to public notice. Never one to shy away from a racially sensitive issue, director Spike Lee’s most recent film, set in 1979, follows Colorado Springs Police Department’s (CSPD) first black officer Ron Stallworth as he supervises an undercover operation infiltrating the Klan. </p>
<p>Sticking relatively closely to the real Stallworth’s 2006 memoir of these events, the film lays open the institutionalised bigotry of the era. Appointed as a nod to the prevailing trends of integration, the heroic Stallworth fights racism within the all white Colorado Springs Police Department. </p>
<p>The film has the look of a true 1970s <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/10-great-blaxploitation-movies">blaxploitation movie</a>, in which black ethnic stereotypes take centre stage. But there is more to it than that. Alongside the questionable clothes, afros and chrome-covered gas guzzlers, this is a film about a race war. “Black Power” was taking on white supremacy and Lee personalises the struggle.</p>
<p>On the one side, is David Duke – the glad-handing, ambitious, preppy “Imperial Wizard” reviving a moribund KKK. Ranged against him is the charismatic and articulate Stokely Carmichael: a frontline civil rights activist, Student Non-Violent Coordination Committee founder and Black Panther leader. Both are demagogues, both want revolution, and both are willing to use violence. Stallworth investigates the two and Spike Lee shows both those investigations. </p>
<p>But what is interesting about the true story is what Lee doesn’t have the time, or perhaps the inclination, to show.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233933/original/file-20180828-86135-mnx492.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233933/original/file-20180828-86135-mnx492.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233933/original/file-20180828-86135-mnx492.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233933/original/file-20180828-86135-mnx492.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233933/original/file-20180828-86135-mnx492.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233933/original/file-20180828-86135-mnx492.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233933/original/file-20180828-86135-mnx492.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lee doesn’t shy away from difficult images.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© 2018 FOCUS FEATURES LLC.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Investigating the Klan</h2>
<p>In many ways, the CSPD’s investigation of the Klan was a surprising move. In 1979, undercover operations in general had a bad name, and those investigating the Klan were seen as particularly dubious by both the public and the police. </p>
<p>This stemmed back to the deep cover <a href="https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro">Cointel Program</a> in which J Edgar Hoover’s FBI used undercover agents to investigate what was termed “white hate”. This effort, which began in 1964, ceased in 1971 having suffered from persistent accusations of Bureau agents themselves being involved in a range illegal activities. These included high profile racist crimes like the notorious 1963 <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/1960s/birmingham-church-bombing">16th Street Baptist Church bombing</a> and the 1965 murder of the Civil Rights activist <a href="https://www.roosevelt.nl/murder-viola-liuzzo-turning-point-ku-klux-klan-history">Viola Liuzzo</a>. In addition, undercover work in general became difficult to sanction at a federal, state or municipal level following the scandal of the 1972 Watergate break-in which tainted all clandestine investigations in the 1970s.</p>
<p>Even given a successful investigation, it is worth asking what could then be done with the information gained. America has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/06/19/supreme-court-unanimously-reaffirms-there-is-no-hate-speech-exception-to-the-first-amendment/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.de9c9f65204e">no “hate law” today</a>, let alone in the 1970s. This essentially means membership of the Klan was not, and is not, illegal – as such. Then, as now, extremist groups were adept at sheltering under America’s First Amendment protections of free speech. They also seemed to have influential members at all levels of the establishment. As Stallworth shows in his memoir, they were powerful in law enforcement. BlacKkKlansman features Stallworth’s run in with at least one deeply racist cop.</p>
<p>But it is true that Duke resigned his imperial position in 1980. So, did Stallworth’s work destroy Duke’s Klan? In Stallworth’s own account, he is proud to have gathered some useful intel on the racists of the region and prevented a series of cross burnings (the bombing in Lee’s film and the comic exposure of racism in the CSPD are fictional). But while the operation probably didn’t help Duke’s leadership, the Wizard’s growing ambitions for national political office and getting photographed selling the lists of Klan members were probably the more important elements behind his departure.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233934/original/file-20180828-86132-1ro6m4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233934/original/file-20180828-86132-1ro6m4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233934/original/file-20180828-86132-1ro6m4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233934/original/file-20180828-86132-1ro6m4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233934/original/file-20180828-86132-1ro6m4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233934/original/file-20180828-86132-1ro6m4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233934/original/file-20180828-86132-1ro6m4j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Colorado College Black Student Union.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© 2018 FOCUS FEATURES LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Black Klansmen</h2>
<p>Speaking of membership, Lee’s film pivots around an understanding of the Klan as being so dumb, so responsive to Stallworth’s dog-whistle racist phrases, that it allows him – a black man – to become a member. </p>
<p>In fact, this is not the first time the Klan were duped in this way. Apparently, the powerful 1920s Klan was tricked into a giving membership to an African American, because in its drive for massive membership it allowed unverified mail order subscriptions. Nor is Lee the first to see the issue’s comic potential. The black comedian David Chappelle has already made fun of the idea. His character, a blind black man, Clayton Bigsby, is unaware of his ethnicity and rants white supremacist propaganda to a baffled Klan audience. <a href="http://www.comedycentral.co.uk/chappelles-show/videos/frontline-clayton-bigsby-pt-1-uncensored">This video</a> has over three million hits.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JBC-9k3y1ew?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>And in some cases, black Klan membership was not accidental. David Duke himself attempted to create a more inclusive Klan in the 1970s by playing down the hate speech – at least in public – doing away with robes, except for ceremony, and allowing Catholics and women to have full membership. </p>
<p>John Abarr of Montana has taken this idea of inclusion even further. In 2014, Abarr’s Klan-based Rocky Mountain Knights abandoned the principle of white supremacy <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2014/11/17/montana-klansman%E2%80%99s-idea-%E2%80%98inclusive%E2%80%99-kkk-elicits-derision">altogether</a>. Abarr even met with the foremost black civil rights group, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which he called a “really good organisation”, adding: “I don’t feel we need to be separate.” Consequently, the Knights have no bar on membership based on race, religion or sexual orientation. His stated aim is simply to cut the power of the federal state, and anyone who shares that view is welcome to join his order.</p>
<p>Most of the far right condemned Abarr’s suggestions and Lee makes sure to highlight their ongoing commitment to exclusion and violence. The final scenes of the film use original footage showing horrific scenes of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/10/unite-the-right-rally-alt-right-demise">Unite the Right rally</a> in August 2017. This is not the first time Lee has married shocking documentary footage with his cinematic work. His 1992 biopic Malcolm X opens with bystander video of the LAPD officers’ 1991 beating of the black taxi driver Rodney King. What is more, while promoting Blackkklansman, the director has been outspoken – missing few <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8gKi-r6Dak">opportunities</a> to associate the Trump administration with the racist right. </p>
<p>But perhaps all this dialogue between film and reality is missing the point. I would argue that Lee’s use of mockery is a more effective tool than blunt polemic when used against the Klan and its allies. Humour not only takes the sting out of the hate message: in doing so, it should also depress <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map/by-state">Klan recruitment</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/102311/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kristofer Allerfeldt works for the University of Exeter and receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.</span></em></p>
What is interesting about the true story is what Lee doesn’t have the time, or perhaps the inclination, to show.
Kristofer Allerfeldt, Senior Lecturer in History, University of Exeter
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/67899
2016-11-17T21:37:02Z
2016-11-17T21:37:02Z
The real reason Trump won: White fright
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146283/original/image-20161116-13547-57j23l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">What drew white voters to Donald Trump?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/ Evan Vucci</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Many presidents have assumed the reins of a divided nation, but we’ve never seen anything like the reaction to Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential election. </p>
<p>It didn’t happen to Richard Nixon while the country was bitterly split over race and war. </p>
<p>Half of the country believed Al Gore was cheated out of his shot at the White House in 2000, but the run-up to George W. Bush’s presence in the Oval Office offered nothing like what we are seeing now. </p>
<p>President Barack Obama, by turns believed a socialist and African national, among other things, was feared by some on the right, but didn’t face what the current president-elect now faces: a country whose division is exceeded only by <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/obama-legacy-poll_us_569fde11e4b0fca5ba765452">Civil War-era America</a>.</p>
<p>If Trump is so divisive, why did he win? </p>
<h2>The conventional account</h2>
<p>If we are to believe the emerging consensus, Trump won with the support of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/upshot/why-trump-won-working-class-whites.html?_r=0">working-class white voters</a>, people anxious about their economic prospects in a globalizing economy. The <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/12/a-massive-new-study-debunks-a-widespread-theory-for-donald-trumps-success/">theory goes</a> that the automation that has replaced workers, and the pull of capitalism that pushed manufacturing jobs overseas, squeezed the white working class. As a result, <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/06/28/donald-trump-globalization-trade-pennsylvania-ohio/86431376/">the white working class supported Trump</a> and his promises to blunt globalization and curb free trade, moves that will preserve working-class jobs. </p>
<p>Hogwash. </p>
<p>Reasonable people may disagree on the definition of “working class,” but let’s agree that it resides in the <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/21/news/economy/upper-middle-class/">US$30,000 to $50,000 range</a>. Even if we add in those classified as poor – that is, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls/national/president">households earning less than $30,000</a> – this group constitutes only about 36 percent of the electorate. Substantial, but not enough to hand Trump the election. </p>
<p>Especially not since <a href="http://www.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls/national/president">Hillary Clinton actually beat</a> Trump among poor and working-class voters: 52 percent to 41 percent.</p>
<p>So, where did Trump beat Clinton if income is the criterion by which we’re judging the election? Even if not by much, exit polling indicates he bested her among those earning at least $50,000 – that is, the middle and upper class. </p>
<p>But for the fact that much has been made of the white working class riding to Trump’s rescue, it’s not entirely shocking that the GOP standard bearer won the middle- and upper-class white vote: It’s been this way for some time, for <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-may-become-the-first-republican-in-60-years-to-lose-white-college-graduates/">several decades</a>, in fact. </p>
<p>Instead, what’s most arresting is that middle- and upper-class whites voted for this particular candidate. College-educated whites <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674745698?ie=UTF8&tag=thewaspos09-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=0674745698">tend to be more tolerant</a> than those without a college diploma. In a nutshell, a college education is generally tied to a commitment to <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo3683564.html">democratic values</a>. But Trump’s brazen misogyny, racism and navitism run afoul of these values. </p>
<p>By the way, <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/138754/blame-trumps-victory-college-educated-whites-not-working-class">I’m not the only one</a> to conclude that Trump’s victory had at least as much to do with support from voters who remain unencumbered by economic anxiety as those riven by it.</p>
<h2>The real reason he won</h2>
<p>If social economic status – especially education – is a gateway to a more tolerant, democratic society, why did middle- and upper-class voters back someone who represents the antithesis of such values? </p>
<p>It’s actually pretty simple, in my opinion. My reading of history suggests that the boundaries of American identity intersect with whiteness, patriarchy, xenophobia and homophobia. This means that anyone, any group that falls outside of such a definition of American identity, is considered beyond the political community; they’re aliens. </p>
<p>Rapid social change, which poses a threat to this truncated version of American identity, activates anxiety and anger on the part of those who lay claim to this identity. The America with which they’ve become familiar is changing too fast. Hence, the slogan for the Trump campaign: “Make America great again.” This suggests that America, in its present state, is defective in some way and needs to return some previous version of itself. </p>
<p>Let’s consider what could be “wrong” with America circa 2016. </p>
<p>Rapidly changing demographics means that America will transition to a “<a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2014/12/12/new-projections-point-to-a-majority-minority-nation-in-2044/">majority-minority</a>” country no later than 2044. Women are now more visible in public life than ever. Three serve on the Supreme Court. One even ran for president – twice. Same-sex marriage is now <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf">the law of the land</a>. Last, but not least, we’ve had a black president for almost eight years. </p>
<p>With this in mind, many Trump supporters believe themselves to be losing “their” country, something that leads them to prefer a social milieu more consistent with days gone by – one in which primarily white, middle- and upper-class, heterosexual, native-born men reigned supreme. </p>
<p>It isn’t the first time America has witnessed something like this. Rapid social change spurred the growth of the <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9954.html">Ku Klux Klan</a> in the 1920s and the <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9954.html">John Birch Society</a> in the 1960s. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146284/original/image-20161116-13512-afphsm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146284/original/image-20161116-13512-afphsm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146284/original/image-20161116-13512-afphsm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146284/original/image-20161116-13512-afphsm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146284/original/image-20161116-13512-afphsm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146284/original/image-20161116-13512-afphsm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146284/original/image-20161116-13512-afphsm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ku Klux Klan members supporting Barry Goldwater’s campaign for the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention, San Francisco, California in 1964.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goldwater1964SanFranciscoKKK.jpg">United States Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Like Trump’s supporters, economic anxiety had next to nothing to do with why people supported the KKK or the John Birch Society. These people were relatively well off. Instead, it was the perception of existential threat that pushed people to join each. The <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9954.html">KKK felt threatened</a> by the “New Negro” and religious minorities; for the JBS, it was about the <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9954.html">civil rights movement joining forces with the Soviet Union</a>.</p>
<p>But we needn’t look back as far as the 20th century to identify the most recent example the reactionary sentiment that fueled Trump’s stunning victory. </p>
<p>As <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9954.html">I have written elsewhere</a>, the Tea Party movement formed in reaction to the election of the first black president. He represented social change in which 20 percent of white voters couldn’t believe. </p>
<p>When one considers the extent to which these groups overlap, these similarities come as no great surprise. My analysis of <a href="http://kcts9.org/programs/vote-2016/washington-state-views-political-figures-race-immigration-and-voting-rights">existing polling data</a> suggests 83 percent of those who identify with the Tea Party also supported Trump’s candidacy during the campaign. In other words, Tea Party supporters are now Trump supporters.</p>
<p>More importantly, if the policy preferences of Trump supporters are even remotely similar to those who supported the Tea Party, progressives have reason to be concerned. Tea Party types are far less inclined to support progressive policies than establishment conservatives. </p>
<p>Still, a silver lining may exist. Trump’s victory, in light of all of his antics during the campaign, makes it all but impossible to deny the continuing currency of racism, sexism, xenophobia and homophobia in the United States. It’s on display for all to see. </p>
<p>This could be a good thing: It forces us to reckon with who we really are. Is America really about the democratic, progressive values professed in the founding documents? Or, are we really the small-minded, bigoted place Trump’s election represents? </p>
<p>If we hope to maintain a claim to exceptionalism, we must find our way back to the values on which this country was founded, ones that include equality and freedom. </p>
<p>If Trump and his supporters really wish to “Make America great again,” perhaps they should go all the way back to these founding principles. Only this time, they should leave behind the racism, sexism and nativism.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67899/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christopher Sebastian Parker does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Exit polling shows that Hillary Clinton actually won the poor and working class vote. If “Make America Great Again” wasn’t fueled by an angry underclass, what powered it?
Christopher Sebastian Parker, Professor of Political Science, University of Washington
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/67765
2016-11-07T11:01:40Z
2016-11-07T11:01:40Z
In Trump, extremism found its champion – and maybe its demise
<p>Political correctness was one of Donald Trump’s earliest targets in his presidential campaign. From the onset, his massive crowds cheered whenever he would defiantly declare, “<a href="http://theweek.com/articles/641981/donald-trump-losing-war-political-correctness">I’m so tired of this politically correct crap.</a>” He often went on “straight talk” discourses spouting his beliefs about “real” America, Mexican immigrants, Muslim terrorists, inner-city crime and even the old war on Christmas. </p>
<p>On the campaign trail, Trump has often assured audiences, “<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/15/politics/donald-trump-election-2016-racism/">I am the least racist person that you have ever met</a>.” But to feed his need for uncensored talking points, Trump has drawn politically incorrect rhetoric from a bottomless online well of conspiracy theories and unfiltered intolerance. His “dog whistle” comments – their true meaning audible only to those already attuned to them – have given the radical right an amount of publicity, and legitimacy, never achieved in prior elections. </p>
<p>Yet what all this says (or doesn’t) about Trump himself is not as important as what it shows us of modern American bigotry. The more Trump’s words have been examined and associated with racist and xenophobic ideas, the more the public has come to identify similarly objectionable beliefs, comments and actions in society all around them. Trump has given extremists a high-profile stage, but in the process exposed them to the disinfecting sunlight.</p>
<h2>Extremism on the edges</h2>
<p>As a researcher of online extremism, <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2012.01415.x">my investigations</a> have focused on two general tiers of digital hate culture. The first is the well-traveled network of extremist websites that work hard to avoid appearing racist at first glance. Sites like <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/03/11/blog-wars-daily-stormer-and-its-racist-frenemies">Daily Stormer</a>, <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/american-renaissance">American Renaissance</a> and <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/kevin-macdonald">Occidental Observer</a> have been skillfully designed to seem like faux-political blogs, social networks and news sites. And yet they contain fervently prejudiced discussions on issues like black violence, Jewish media, the prospect of deportation forces and the 2016 GOP candidate. Underlying this discourse is the recurring refrain that the white race is under siege.</p>
<p>The second layer of online extremism is that which has infiltrated, and in some cases, been quietly sewn into, some of the internet’s most popular blogs and news hubs. The right-wing Breitbart News website has a discussion tag bringing together visitors wishing to read about and comment on “<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/tag/black-crime/">Black Crime</a>” in America. On Alex Jones’ InfoWars, followers are fed a regular diet of conspiracies about <a href="http://www.infowars.com/us-soldiers-smuggling-illegal-aliens-across-the-border/">“illegal aliens”</a> among us. And on The Drudge Report, readers can regularly find <a href="http://www.christianpost.com/news/drudge-report-news-white-students-not-majority-in-us-schools-124863/">headlines</a> collected from across the web about the shrinking white majority and the related rise in minority populations.</p>
<h2>Digital demagoguery in the mainstream</h2>
<p>It is clear that this next possible president draws from this world. One of Trump’s earliest – and most sustained – involvements with the digital fringe was the birther movement, <a href="http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/birther-movement">attacking President Obama’s legitimacy</a> to be president. It began with questions about the first black president’s nationality and faith <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/birther-movement-founder-trump-clinton-228304">spreading like ivy along the margins of cyberspace</a> in 2008. Then it graduated onto <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/9490/obama-could-debunk-some-rumors-releasing-his-birth-certificate-jim-geraghty?target=author&tid=814">increasingly mainstream blogs</a> and into campaign politics. Trump sustained it in <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/09/16/donald_trump_s_birther_tweets_in_order.html">countless tweets</a> and media appearances over many years.</p>
<p>As his campaign ramped up, Trump built on these connections. In November 2015, some of his supporters attacked a black protester at a rally in Alabama. The next day, Trump tweeted a <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/23/donald-trump/trump-tweet-blacks-white-homicide-victims/">racially charged meme</a> highlighting the number of “Whites killed by Blacks.” </p>
<p>The statistics he cited were patently false, and the source <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/claudiakoerner/donald-trump-tweeted-questionable-statistics-about-race-and?utm_term=.mbO5LRYO#.yc8O0PoQ">nonexistent</a>. But the fact that he had tweeted it meant the underlying idea became national news.</p>
<p>In January 2016, Trump drew fire for giving a megaphone to the web’s fanatical underbelly, by <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/22/politics/donald-trump-retweet-white-genocide/">retweeting</a> the sentiments of a white supremacist Twitter user. <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/07/donald-trumps-love-affair-white-supremacists">Deeper analysis</a> found Trump often retweeting posts from people who used a “white genocide” hashtag. </p>
<p>By August 2016, Trump was rebooting his campaign for a third time, choosing as his campaign manager Stephen Bannon, the head of Breitbart News. That brought mainstream attention to the site, and some of <a href="https://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/08/17/breitbart-news-worst-headlines/212467">its recent headlines</a>, such as “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy,” “Bill Kristol: Republic Spoiler, Renegade Jew,” and “Hoist it High and Proud: The Confederate Flag Proclaims a Glorious Heritage.” </p>
<p>Through his connections to these digital demagogues, Trump has empowered narratives that would otherwise have no place in electoral politics. </p>
<h2>Exposing the alt-right</h2>
<p>But by bringing <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-white-nationalists_us_581a103be4b0a76e174c51bb">unprecedented attention to extremist views</a> in 2016, Trump also forced America to see these threats in the light of day. That could be their undoing. Exposed, these guises of bigotry have been recognized, decoded and even classified – as the “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/06/opinion/donald-trumps-alt-right-brain.html">alt-right</a>” – by the press and public. </p>
<p>When last we saw the racist fringe in mainstream media, neo-Nazis and KKK members were regulars on “The Jerry Springer Show,” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsfqHWrz3wY">mocked rather than feared</a> by audiences. Today’s vast online interconnected network of hate, with its Trump-aided inroads into mainstream culture, may yet suffer the same fate.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rsfqHWrz3wY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A KKK leader on ‘The Jerry Springer Show.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Birtherism, for example, is no longer being debated on the right as a legitimate movement. By 2016’s first presidential debate, it was being cast as a clear pretense for racism, with <a href="http://mediamatters.org/video/2016/09/26/presidential-debate-moderator-lester-holt-presses-trump-his-racist-birther-campaign-against-obama/213337">questions from the moderator</a> shifting to Trump’s role in perpetuating the charade. </p>
<p>Similarly, Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric was widely compared to David Duke’s brand of white nationalism after <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/08/05/488802494/former-kkk-leader-david-duke-says-of-course-trump-voters-are-his-voters">the former KKK leader publicly endorsed him</a>. </p>
<p>More recently, civil rights groups quickly identified Trump’s talk of election rigging in the cities of Chicago and Philadelphia as coded racism for “<a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2016/10/17/civil-rights-groups-say-trump-voter-fraud-rhetoric-coded-racism/kS91WbsHWduQYRVUVUeLyJ/story.html">voter fraud</a>” among the black community. And an <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/poll-nearly-70-percent-have-concerns-about-trump-s-controversial-n651876">NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll</a> recently concluded nearly 70 percent of Americans “say they have concerns about Donald Trump’s comments and language on women, immigrants and Muslims.”</p>
<p>In Trump’s journey to abolish political correctness, he has led his supporters to an awkward impasse. No doubt, his backers continue to admire in Trump someone who has the courage to “<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/halim-shebaya/trump-tells-it-like-it-is_b_9836974.html">tell it like it is</a>.” But now they often find themselves saying, “He doesn’t really mean that.” These two sentiments cannot logically coexist.</p>
<p>As for Trump himself, whether he truly believes in the extremist positions he has intimated and associated himself with over the past 16 months we may never know. But John Oliver may have phrased it best when he said, “<a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/29/john-oliver-destroys-donald-trump-you-are-either-a-racist-or-you-are-pretending-to-be.html">You are either racist or you are pretending to be, and at some point, there is no difference</a>.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67765/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adam G. Klein does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Trump has given extremists a high-profile stage, but in the process exposed them to the disinfecting sunlight.
Adam G. Klein, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, Pace University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/64041
2016-08-25T09:52:23Z
2016-08-25T09:52:23Z
David Duke, Donald Trump and the dog whistle
<p>David Duke, the blow-dried wizard of Louisiana politics, is back. This time he is running to represent Louisiana in the U.S. Senate.</p>
<p>When asked by journalist <a href="http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/628">Tyler Bridges</a> if he appealed to the same voters as Donald Trump, <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/how-david-dukes-very-live-ghost-haunts-donald-trump-213720">Duke replied</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“He’s getting the same kinds of votes that I have gotten in Louisiana. He’s getting the same kinds of votes that [Pat] Buchanan got. He’s getting the same votes as George Wallace.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As scholars of southern politics, political campaigns and public opinion, we thought Duke’s time had come and gone. His reemergence during the deeply divisive Donald Trump presidential campaign gives testament to William Faulkner’s observation in “Requiem for a Nun” that “the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.”</p>
<p>The seeds for Duke’s reemergence as a candidate – ironically enough, we contend – were sown by the election of the nation’s first African-American president. Rather than bridging racial divides, those divides have <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo10443910.html">deepened</a> over the course of Barack Obama’s administration. Issues not traditionally associated with race, such as health care, have <a href="http://mst.michaeltesler.com/uploads/ajps11full.pdf">become racialized</a>. Old-fashioned and outspoken racism has replaced the softer, coded and unspoken <a href="http://mst.michaeltesler.com/uploads/jop_rr_full.pdf">symbolic racism</a> that has defined the past several decades.</p>
<p>What Duke represented and still represents – the lingering stain of racial resentment – remains an unfortunate but resilient strand of American political thought. In the America of 2016, racists can put down their dog whistles and just yell for their dogs.</p>
<p>Or, they can run for the U.S. Senate.</p>
<h2>From racist to representative</h2>
<p>Duke spent his college days at Louisiana State University from 1968 to 1974, preaching white supremacy while recruiting for the Ku Klux Klan. He was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/03/01/trump-said-he-needed-to-research-people-like-david-duke-we-did-it-for-him/">dismissed</a> by <a href="http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1991-02-10/features/9101070810_1_david-duke-love-seat-oysters/2">journalists</a> as one of those asteroids following its own orbit in the lunatic fringe. Throughout the 1970s and ‘80’s he was active in white supremacist circles, creating his own civil rights group, the National Association for the Advancement of White People, and running as a perennial Democratic <a href="http://www.uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=1987">candidate</a> for offices ranging from the state legislature to the presidency. Then in 1989, running as a Republican, he won a special election to the Louisiana House of Representatives, where he served from 1989 to 1992.</p>
<p>Success fueled Duke’s ambition and provided the springboard for two serious bids for statewide office. Foreshadowing the Trump campaign, the GOP establishment disavowed Duke. Nonetheless, he won 43 percent of the vote in his 1990 Senate race against incumbent U.S. Senator Bennett Johnston. Then, he won 39 percent in an encore performance in the gubernatorial election against the ethically challenged Edwin Edwards in 1991. </p>
<p>In both contests, Duke won the bulk of the white vote while running against experienced and well-known officeholders. Edwards won thanks to high turnout, especially among African-Americans motivated by the <a href="https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1914&dat=19911115&id=CoEpAAAAIBAJ&sjid=iWUFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4285,2996286">call</a> to “vote for the crook, it’s important.” Perhaps ironically, both the crook Edwin Edwards and the Klansman David Duke would later spend time in a U.S. penitentiary: Edwards for <a href="http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2011/01/former_gov_edwin_edwards_out_o.html">bribery and extortion</a> and <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2003/mar/13/nation/na-duke13">Duke for</a> “bilking his supporters and cheating on his taxes.” </p>
<p>In 1996, his novelty having worn off, Duke <a href="http://www.sos.la.gov/ElectionsAndVoting/GetElectionInformation/FindResultsAndStatistics/Pages/default.aspx">won</a> only 11 percent of the vote in his second run for the Senate. In 1999, he took 19 percent in a special U.S. House of Representatives contest.</p>
<h2>Duke and Trump: Overlapping voters?</h2>
<p>Duke’s relative success spawned a <a href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=6284272&fileId=S002238160007585X">small</a> <a href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=6150372&fileId=S0022381600045199">cottage</a> <a href="http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/628">industry</a> of academic <a href="http://www.vanderbilt.edu/university-press/book/9780826512666">research</a> as scholars grappled with what the electoral viability of a Klansman meant to democratic governance. </p>
<p>The research uncovered that long before Trump entered the nation’s consciousness as a reality show host, Duke honed a message that resonated with white working-class voters struggling economically, angry at an economic and political system that had grown callous to their needs, resentful of establishment career politicians, and ready to scapegoat emerging minorities. When asked in early August if Trump voters were also his voters, <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/08/05/488802494/former-kkk-leader-david-duke-says-of-course-trump-voters-are-his-voters">Duke observed</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Well, of course they are! Because I represent the ideas of preserving this country and the heritage of this country, and I think Trump represents that as well.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Duke’s claim has merit. Looking at votes cast for Trump in the 2016 GOP primary by county, what Louisiana calls “parishes,” shows that Louisianans voted similarly to how they voted for Duke in the gubernatorial primary in 1991. In 40 of Louisiana’s 64 parishes, Trump’s actual support in the 2016 presidential primary is within five percentage points of an estimate from a statistical model based only on Duke’s percentage of the vote in 1991. This is not just partisanship at work, as Louisiana uses a closed presidential primary system, which prevents strategic Democratic voting.</p>
<p>Why is this the case?</p>
<p>Both Duke and Trump received larger shares of the vote in parishes where the population is mostly white, rural and less educated. They both did relatively poorly in more urban parishes like New Orleans, East Baton Rouge and Caddo with large African-American populations and more college-educated residents. </p>
<p>Using statistical models based on these data, we found that relative to David Duke’s vote, Trump’s vote is more closely associated with education, meaning he pulls more strongly from less educated voters. Duke’s vote is more closely associated with race. But, if there are differences in their bases of support, the similarities are even more striking, especially given that a quarter of a century has passed since Duke’s 1991 campaign.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/135357/original/image-20160824-30246-ywv6ij.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/135357/original/image-20160824-30246-ywv6ij.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/135357/original/image-20160824-30246-ywv6ij.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135357/original/image-20160824-30246-ywv6ij.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135357/original/image-20160824-30246-ywv6ij.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135357/original/image-20160824-30246-ywv6ij.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135357/original/image-20160824-30246-ywv6ij.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135357/original/image-20160824-30246-ywv6ij.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Donald Trump and David Duke support explained by education and race.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">fad</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Given the similarities in their support, it is not surprising that Duke <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/david-duke-trump-219777">endorsed</a> Trump. Trump, as has been his pattern, reacted in multiple ways – feigning ignorance of Duke and his past before shying away. Regardless, they share the same base of racially resentful voters. </p>
<p>As political scientist Phil Klinkner <a href="http://www.vox.com/2016/6/2/11833548/donald-trump-support-race-religion-economy">recently concluded</a>, racial resentment, even more than economic anxiety, was driving voters to Donald Trump. David Duke was smart enough to read the tea leaves. If Trump was winning nationally, Duke’s message might once again find resonance locally in Louisiana. </p>
<p>While this explains Duke’s decision to run, we have our doubts about his ability to run competitively or win statewide in 2016. Duke’s days as the messenger of racial resentment are hopefully long gone. Twenty-five years have passed since we thought of him and his message as an echo. The Trump campaign serves as a reminder that Duke’s message still finds resonance with voters, and voice from ambitious, unscrupulous politicians. Donald Trump is only the latest and most visible example tapping into this undercurrent of American political thought.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/64041/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The former KKK grand wizard from Louisiana is hopeful Trump supporters will turn out for his bid for U.S. Senate. Political scientists who have studied his career consider his chances.
Kirby Goidel, Professor of Communication, Texas A&M University
Charles S. Bullock III, Professor of Political Science, University of Georgia
Keith Gaddie, Professor of Political Science, University of Oklahoma
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/52030
2015-12-08T18:34:04Z
2015-12-08T18:34:04Z
How the Ku Klux Klan seized cinema to become a force in America
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/104874/original/image-20151208-32402-1k89woo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Klansmen in Birth of a Nation</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Birth-of-a-nation-klan-and-black-man.jpg#/media/File:Birth-of-a-nation-klan-and-black-man.jpg">Wikimedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>An advertisement appeared in the Atlanta Journal for “The World’s Greatest, Secret, Social, Patriotic, Fraternal Beneficiary Order” on December 9, 1915. Next to this advert for the newly reformed Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was a poster for the film <a href="http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150206-the-most-racist-movie-ever-made">The Birth of a Nation</a>, which celebrated and memorialised the original Klan and was just beginning its record-breaking run in the city. Three days earlier at the premiere, members of the Klan had reportedly paraded outside the theatre. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/104872/original/image-20151208-32398-pwliqi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/104872/original/image-20151208-32398-pwliqi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/104872/original/image-20151208-32398-pwliqi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104872/original/image-20151208-32398-pwliqi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104872/original/image-20151208-32398-pwliqi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104872/original/image-20151208-32398-pwliqi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104872/original/image-20151208-32398-pwliqi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104872/original/image-20151208-32398-pwliqi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Birth of a Nation poster.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation#/media/File:Birth_of_a_Nation_theatrical_poster.jpg">Wikimedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A century on and the dark days when the Klan recruited millions of members across America to its divisive and racist creed may seem like history, but the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment around the world and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/08/donald-trump-muslims-us-republican-rivals-condemn">recent proclamations from the likes of Donald Trump</a> – who has said he wants to ban all Muslims from entering the US – are a sobering reminder of how the media can be used to spread division in society.</p>
<p>The Klan knew how powerful an institution the fast-growing movie industry was going to be and, while historians <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/dw-griffiths-the-birth-of-a-nation-9780195336795?cc=gb&lang=en&">have recognised</a> the link between <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/dw-griffith-9321016">DW Griffith’s</a> hugely controversial film and the reformed Klan, what is <a href="http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/catalog/807732">less well known</a> is the broader way in which the Klan used film over the next decade to recruit members, generate publicity, shape public behaviour and define its role within American society. </p>
<p>At its height in the 1920s, the Klan had an estimated 5m members and oversaw a massive publicity operation. It was publishing dozens of weekly newspapers. It was producing films and radio shows, owned theatres and staged large-scale community plays. It had its own bands and baseball teams, a university, a successful women’s group and a strong presence in local protestant churches. </p>
<p>Klan groups set up film companies and produced their own feature films during the 1920s, such as <a href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=2872032&jid=AMS&volumeId=42&issueId=03&aid=2872024">The Toll of Justice (1923)</a> and <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ZLfkCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA133&lpg=PA133&dq=The+Traitor+Within+1924+KKK&source=bl&ots=Qyd_bkr4_z&sig=b7siHFRpaBCslSmX0_wtbeQUqzc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwis69iey8zJAhWCSA8KHX4lAagQ6AEIHzAA#v=onepage&q=The%20Traitor%20Within%201924%20KKK&f=false">The Traitor Within (1924)</a>. As part of the Klan’s efforts to position itself at the heart of local communities, these films would play in churches, schools, Klaverns (Klan buildings) and at outdoor events. Posters advertised Klan values as much as the film itself, with slogans such as “Do away with the underworld” and “Protect clean womanhood”, while often identifying the Klansman as “100% American”. Indeed advertisements for The Toll of Justice presented “The picture that every red-blooded American should see”. </p>
<p>These Klan productions would also play in cinemas owned or run by Klansmen. For example The American theatre in Noblesville, Indiana once advised patrons that they could come to the film “before or after the K.K.K. parade tonight” and used the three Ks to describe its premises as “Kool, Kozy, and Klean”. </p>
<h2>A war against “immorality”</h2>
<p>The Klan’s own films were often intended to “counteract” what the Klan saw as “immoral” mainstream productions. These criticisms helped the Klan to project its own religious and social values to a wider public, often aligning itself with more established groups. It launched a strong campaign against <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0014358/">The Pilgrim (1923)</a>, in which Charlie Chaplin plays a convict who pretends to be a protestant minister. This helped to get the film banned or cut in a number of states. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ila4DXWcDQU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The Klan objected to the actress Pola Negri’s “low ideals of womanhood” in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0013867/">Bella Donna (1923)</a>. The following year it took on Paramount Pictures’ “sex plays”, objecting to titles such as <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0015116/">Manhandled</a>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0014871/">The Enemy Sex</a>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0014767/">Changing Husbands</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0173993/">The Female</a> – which promised to show Betty Compson “more nearly nude than she has yet appeared on screen”. </p>
<p>Yet its main criticisms of these Paramount films were reserved for the producers and the film industry. This is all too evident in the relevant Klan pamphlet, which was titled: “Jew Movies urging sex vice: Rome and Judah at work to Pollute Young America”. A few years later, in 1933, the Klan publication Kourier ran an article on Jewish film producers which concluded that: “Hollywood certainly needs a Hitler!”</p>
<h2>In decline</h2>
<p>Yet by the 1930s the Klan was increasingly marginalised, which is partly reflected in Hollywood films of the era. The late 1930s saw a cycle of “social problem” films directly exposing Klan activities. In 1937 the Klan filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros, objecting to the appearance of the “Klan insignia” in the Humphrey Bogart film, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0027367/">Black Legion</a>. The Klan demanded $500 for every time the picture had been shown and $100,000 in damages. It lost the case, but gained a few valuable column inches. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/104899/original/image-20151208-32391-1koey95.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/104899/original/image-20151208-32391-1koey95.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/104899/original/image-20151208-32391-1koey95.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104899/original/image-20151208-32391-1koey95.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104899/original/image-20151208-32391-1koey95.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104899/original/image-20151208-32391-1koey95.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104899/original/image-20151208-32391-1koey95.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104899/original/image-20151208-32391-1koey95.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bogart meets a Klan-like group in Black Legion.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://channelawesome.com/forums/xfa-blog-entry/the-incspotlight-the-black-legion-1937.694/">Channel Awesome</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Two years later, producer David O Selznick cut all mention of the Klan when he adapted Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Gone with the Wind, for <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0031381/">the big screen</a>. Mitchell had presented the original Klan as honourable and necessary. The Klan press condemned this edit by complaining that “Jews will even stoop to … distortion of history to carry out their propaganda”. The Klan still sought to align itself to the film, though. It contacted MGM, offering to parade outside the Atlanta premiere, just as it had done 24 years earlier with The Birth of a Nation. The offer was dismissed out of hand. </p>
<p>While the Klan would never again exercise such influence through film and the media, the example serves as a reminder of how a small group reformed in Atlanta 100 years ago used the entertainment industry to become one of the most influential and recognisable social and political forces in the country. </p>
<p>It would be foolish to dismiss this as the stuff of history – the Klan’s fearmongering around the themes of immigration and “The Traitor Within”, begin to look depressingly familiar when you look at the proclamations of the likes of Trump and the media organisations only too happy to give him a platform – <a href="http://www.foxnews.com">Fox News</a> being the most obvious example. We always need to keep a close eye on what the media tells us is “normal” and how it projects national identity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/52030/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tom's research has received funding from the AHRC</span></em></p>
100 years ago, America’s infamous racist group staged a near-takeover of the nation’s film and media industries. Here’s how they did it.
Tom Rice, Lecturer in Film Studies, University of St Andrews
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.