KKK: We’re Not a Hate Group!

January 13, 2013 by Ed Brayton

The KKK in Virginia is using Obama’s presidency to recruit new members and they say it’s working brilliantly, more than doubling their membership to the largest the group has been in a century. Oh, and they’re not a hate group and how could you possibly think they are?

“Since Obama’s first term our numbers have doubled and now that we’re headed to a second term it’s going to triple, this is going to be the biggest resurgence of the Klan since 1915,” said one of the Klansmen interviewed.
The Klansman have been handing out flyers in a Mechanicsville neighborhood, and neighbors who received them have contacted CBS 6.
“We’re not trying to target anybody or scare anybody with hate, we’re just using our freedom of speech to drop fliers,” said one of the Klansmen interviewed. “Everyone thinks that we’re a hate group, we’re not a hate group, we don’t hate anyone, and we want to see good things come to our race.”

Oh, of course. I can’t imagine how anyone could think you were a hate group.

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http://timgueguen.blogspot.com timgueguen
I wonder if any of them voted for Obama in 2012. After all if he’s such a good recruiting tool you’d think they’d want another four years of him in the White House.
marcus
This is, of course, an unfortunate consequence of electing an African-American to the presidency. It is also totally predictable. IIRC the Sierra Club added more members during the Shrub presidency than any time before or since. I imagine the NRA is pulling in bonus membership numbers as well.
http://www.youtube.com/user/RiffingReligion Wes
The fliers read, “WAKE UP WHITE AMERICA!!” and explain that “the majority of HATE CRIMES in America are committed by BLACKS against WHITES!!!”
And the MAJORITY of people who use ALL CAPS and lots of EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! are generally full of SHIT!!!
busterggi
Lynchi9ng for love?
left0ver1under
Not intending to go off topic, but…
Do you remember (or did you hear) what the Kook Klux Klowns said a few years ago?
http://markc1.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451bb2969e201347fc23d47970c-800wi
They disavowed the Phelps family and their Westboro bapist church. You KNOW you’re on the fringe when even the KKK thinks you’re crazy.
shouldbeworking
Not a hate group, they just love some people and ignore the rest.
david
“we’re not a hate group, … we want to see good things come to our race.”
But they don’t necessarily want to see good things come to other people’s races. In fact, they obsess about which race gets “good things” and they obsess about the importance of race as it affects them.
I’m not sure that makes them a hate group, but it sure does make them bigots. The reason they can’t see it is that the eye holes in their white-sheet hoodies aren’t big enough to see through clearly, when they look in the mirror.
Reginald Selkirk
But remember, opposition to the Obamas is because they’re liberals, not because they’re black.
Crudely Wrott
How could I think that they are a hate group? Well, for starters, photos and newsreels, newspaper stories and books, personal testimonies and the like from most of the last century? Just for starters, that is.
Have they wallowed out enough wiggle room now? Do they think that few alive recall or cannot access the record? Are they really that stupid?*
*yes; or stubborn, take your pick.
ethanol
Just a little nitpick – I don’t think the KKK are the largest they have been in a century, or anywhere close. In the 1920s they claimed 4-5 million members. “The largest resurgence” seems instead to refer to a relative growth in membership, which could technically apply to going from two members to six.
http://www.facebook.com/den.wilson d.c.wilson
Not a hate group, they just love some people and ignore the rest.
Well, if by ignore you burning crosses in their lawns and lynching them for looking twice at a white woman.
Sastra
A few years ago I read reporter Jon Ronson’s book Them: Adventures with Extremists. He hung out for a while with the elderly Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan. In the book the author recounts how the old man was having problems with his brilliant idea of mainstreaming and rehabilitating the image of the KKK as simply pro-white, and “not at all about hating black folks.” It seems most of the newer and younger members of the KKK were skinheads who didn’t WANT to be mainstreamed or rehabilitated. They were all about the hate.
A publicity photo of the grandfatherly Grand Wizard kissing a black baby didn’t go over too well.
escuerd
left0ver1under,
Heh, well the WBC is glad to be on the fringe. In their minds, if the rest of the world doesn’t hate them for their religious beliefs, that just signifies that they’re doing something wrong. If you brought this point up to them, they’d probably just get that big creepy wide-eyed look they all seem to have and gleefully quote John 15:19 (or some similar passage):
“If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you.”
The WBC is probably more on the fringe than the KKK in that it’s smaller, but they LOVE that fact. If they weren’t a despised fringe group, I think they might be worried that they weren’t truly among the elect.
It’s also not too surprising that the KKK and the WBC don’t like each other. Sure, they’re both Christian groups, rabidly anti-gay, and generally hateful people, but they differ in at least a couple of other ways:
KKK – Nationalistic, loves USA (nominally at least)
WBC – explicitly anti-American
KKK – Race-obsessed, “white power”, etc.
WBC – opposed to racism (so nice of them, I know.)
The Westboro Baptist Church also regards the KKK as crazy. I guess it is still kind of funny to watch groups of angry lunatics rush to disavow one another, though.
lancifer
A young and impressionable guy I know was recently released from prison for beating up his abusive stepfather. While on work release he met another felon that tried to recruit him into a white supremacist prison gang called the Saxon Nights.
The Saxon Nights member told my young friend “We are not racist. We are ethno-preservationists.”
I was impressed that a group composed of uneducated prison bullies could come up with such a sophisticated sounding euphemism for racist. Perhaps they stole the term from some Nation of Islam tract floating around the prison system.
http://therealisticmccoy.com/ dsmccoy
Yeah, all that lynching was sooo 20th century. The new Klan doesn’t hate black people. They just want them all to disappear, but not, you know, in a hateful way or anything, at least not when there’s a microphone around.
Draken
I’d say the term “hate group” was more or less invented to denote the KKK. All the rest are imitations.
http://howlandbolton.com richardelguru
“ethno-preservationists” Wow! That is a great term, though I bet they left a ‘k’ out of their name.
btw this reminds me of the sad fact that, as an Englishman living in the US, I’m ethnodeficient.
http://polrant@blogspot.com democommie
Are the VA members of the Kristianist Konservative Klownposse as despised as the Illinois Nazis?
MikeMa
I lived for a while near Rising Sun, MD where there was a very outspoken (read moronic) fellow who tried to organize a chapter of the KKK. As far as I knew there were a few hangers on and a few older folks who might have remembered when it was okay to punish blacks for, well, whatever they wanted. This clown would get a chance to make the local papers once in a while but ended up in jail for allegedly throwing a punch at a driver for being a ‘different’ color than his passenger. His disappearance marked the quick end of all KKK activities in the area.
http://motherwell.livejournal.com/ Raging Bee
“…we’re not a hate group, we don’t hate anyone, and we want to see good things come to our race.”
…and they only get hateful when good things come to other races.
Bill Openthalt
Knights in White Satin?
http://freethoughtblogs.com/wwjtd JT Eberhard
They probably love the negro, hate the skin.

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KKK: We’re Not a Hate Group!