Posted on 06/28/2019 8:51:47 PM PDT by conservative98
Claim A photograph shared on social media in June 2019 showed former Vice President Joe Biden with the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Rating
Mostly False About this rating What's True The 2008 photograph shows Biden with Robert Byrd, a West Virginia senator who was during the 1940s a member and organizer for the Ku Klux Klan.
What's False Byrd was never "Grand Wizard" of the Ku Klux Klan
(Excerpt) Read more at snopes.com ...
Are you serious....do you really think he would have lasted ten minutes if he had been a republican!!!!
And at least once on national TV!!!!
(However, one must candidly admit that old Gibberish-Jackson didn't look very eager to, or enthused about, returning that snuggle with Biden there.)
That’s the guy. Of course, some partisan media shill will now claim that the dog in the Peanuts comic strip was also a Kleagle, so what’s your problem? :^)
It's a difference with a distinction. The ‘10 guys from 7-11 are powerless. I have no doubt racists in Illinois or Indiana wanted in on the power of the KKK in the Jim Crow South but they never had that power. Two Nazis in Podunk would NOT have the power of a Nazis working under Hitler either.
If I change my name to ‘George Soros’ I don't have his money or influence... Wrap your mind around the reality - not the names.
Senator Robert Byrd (democrat) was a Kleagle, a Klan recruiter, in his 20s and 30s.
Politicians who were active in the Klan at some time
Robert Byrd
Senator Robert Byrd was a Kleagle, a Klan recruiter, in his 20s and 30s.
Robert C. Byrd, was a recruiter for the Klan while in his 20s and 30s, rising to the title of Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops of his local chapter. After leaving the group, Byrd spoke in favor of the Klan during his early political career. Though he claimed to have left the organization in 1943, Byrd, wrote a letter in 1946 to the group’s Imperial Wizard stating “The Klan is needed today as never before, and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia.” Byrd attempted to explain or defend his former membership in the Klan in his 1958 U.S. Senate campaign when he was 41 years old.[1] Byrd, a Democrat, eventually became his party leader in the Senate.
Byrd later said joining the Klan was his “greatest mistake.”[2] However, in a 2001 incident Byrd repeatedly used the phrase “white niggers” on a national television broadcast.[3]
No, I haven’t forgotten what Byrd said. But I also don’t imitate the Left’s “gotcha” games, and I’m not interested in isolating the word out of the context of what he said. I’m not interested in misrepresenting a political opponent for the purpose of scoring cheap social justice warrior points. But if you want to do that, go right ahead.
“Southern Democrats opposed it”
As did the 1964 Republican candidate for President. The leader of the conservative movement in the mid 1960s, Barry Goldwater.
Of course Goldwater was despised by GOP liberals, and some Republicans, like Senator Kuchel of California, openly backed Lyndon Johnson’s election.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/88-1964/s409
“As far as individual KKK members in the North - yes, there were some, but in the South they were also the culturally powerful. “
And this gem of cultural history is what Hollywood believes, which is undoubtedly where you are getting your information.
“I’ve got to shake my head at this one...”
After enjoying the rattle, you can always spend some time reading the history of the Second Klan era and disabuse yourself of the nonsense that you presently believe.
After enjoying the rattle
I lived in the Jim Crow South... I was also active in the civil rights movement in ‘63 and ‘64.
The Second Klan movement was anything but a Republican shared history. A small handful do not make a movement. In fact its founder William J. Simmons and his successor (who really amped up the movement) Hiram Wesley Evans, we’re both heavily entrenched in the Democrat party. Evans pushed hard to support the Wilson presidency, as well as the politics of William Jennings Bryan and Grover Cleveland. They were also large supporters of Sanger’s eugenics movement. The few Republicans who supported the Klan during this time were Republicans in name only, not so different than those we have today.
Early signs of disaffection with the Democrat party did not happen until much later in the 30s when Roosevelt initiated the New Deal, but even then, the Klan began to mold itself into an apolitical entity beholden to no single party. Its most prominent members, however, continued to be Democrats from the south, like Byrd.
You should put down the SPLC literature and deepen your studies...
He was not a run of the mill racist, but a leader of racism. Then he saw the light? BULLSH!T.
The original klan was a resistance movement of demobilized rebel soldiers against military occupation governments during Reconstruction. When Reconstruction ended in 1877 so did the first klan.
The klan probably would have remained only a memory if it weren’t for the world’s first blockbuster feature length film: DW Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, which cast the original klan as heroic.
That movie set records that wouldn’t be broken until 1939. People paid the equivalent of $50 to see it in New York. People wanted to dress up like the movie and entrepreneurs started selling klan gear.
In the wake of all of this and inspired by the movie, a big fan of fraternal societies decided to re-found the Klan. Or at least the klan as seen in the movie. William Simmons had been a member of twelve different fraternal brotherhoods and his Klan was going to be yet another one. He borrowed imagery from the movie, including cross burning, which was a DW Griffith invention.
The second Klan took off, especially in the industrial Midwest. It got involved in political hot button issues of the day, supporting Prohibition and opposing the mass immigration coming from Eastern and Southern Europe. The Second Klan was hostile to Catholics and Jews, two Democrat voting blocs. The Second Klan had a run of about a decade, and then corruption and crimes its leaders were involved in soured the public and it mostly died out. The Third Klan would arise in the 1960s.
Imagine if Star Wars had been the world’s first blockbuster movie back in 1915. The second klan could have been dressed like wookies.
“Early signs of disaffection with the Democrat party did not happen until much later in the 30s when Roosevelt initiated the New Deal,”
Right, because the anti-Catholic Klan were of course big supporters of Al Smith, the Catholic whom Democrats ran for President in 1928. Well at least you believe it.
“In fact its founder William J. Simmons and his successor (who really amped up the movement) Hiram Wesley Evans, we’re both heavily entrenched in the Democrat party.”
William Simmons was an insignificant Methodist preacher with no record of any political connections, which apparently counts for “heavily entrenched” in your mind.
“They were also large supporters of Sanger’s eugenics movement. “
Margaret Sanger was a bigwig in the Tucson Republican Womens Club. A natural ally of Democrat Klan members. Of course in make-believe world anything goes.
“You should put down the SPLC literature and deepen your studies...”
You have to be one of the most clueless posters at FR, not that I needed to see that glittering jewel of ignorance for evidence.
“How to win an argument like a Democrat” by Pelham
Mis-characterizing Republicans as KKK-lovers and ending arguments in childish DU fashion...
Are you sure you’re on the right site?
Thanks for the morning chuckle...
“Are you sure you’re on the right site?”
Yes, because Free Republic is a conservative website and not a playground for Republican party bootlickers.
Bootlickers prefer fake history when what actually happened doesn’t match their party line.
In the real world the Second Klan had members of both parties, and in states like Indiana, California and Colorado the Klan helped elect Republican governments. This isn’t hard to learn about for those who prefer history over make believe, which as we see doesn’t include you.
Governors Friend Richardson of California, Edward Jackson of Indiana, and Clarence Morley of Colorado were all Republicans, and they were all connected with the 1920s Ku Klux Klan
https://history.denverlibrary.org/news/when-kkk-ruled-colorado-not-so-long-ago
https://historymuseumsb.org/the-golden-era-of-indiana/
https://localwiki.org/oakland/Ku_Klux_Klan
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