Counter-Currents
Including Audio Version by Jim Goad!
Nothing KKKompares to the KKK
Jim Goad
1,478 words / 11:25
Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”
The “just-world fallacy” is the childishly simplistic moral fantasy that the world is like a stupid Hollywood movie: an unerringly fair place where the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and everyone gets exactly what they deserve in the end.
It’s widely understood that the winners write history, but what’s less often grasped — or even discussed — is that one of victory’s prime spoils is the right to dictate who’s good and who’s bad.
The Ku Klux Klan — you may have heard of them — was founded on Christmas Eve in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee by a half-dozen former Confederate officers eight months after the Confederacy surrendered to Union troops at Appomattox, Virginia.
Ever since then, the KKK has had a really rough time in the court of public opinion. It’s like they just can’t catch a break.
In the current moral framework, it’s a VERY VERY VERY BAD thing to be compared to the KKK. Whenever anyone likens an individual or a group to the Klan, it’s rarely taken as a compliment. Even more rarely, if ever, is it given as a compliment.
Just like the Nazis — who, I feel the need to remind you, lost their war in 1945 — are still depicted as an ever-present threat several generations after being outgunned in a conflict that was solved through brute force and deception, just as all conflicts ultimately are, the Klan, despite not existing in any meaningful sense, is still seen as the two-dimensional embodiment of pure EEEEEE-vil. There are simply no shades of grey when it comes to the KKK. To demonstrate this, I will now become the first person in world history to use “nuance” and “KKK” in the same sentence.
Since there’s much less risk in comparing someone or something to the KKK than there is in being compared to them, one is never at a loss when searching for Klan comparisons.
Just as you’re forbidden to ever suggest that Jews may behave like Nazis, it’s also gauche to imply that non-whites can ever act like the Klan. It gets even more confusing when non-whites compare other non-whites to the Klan.
Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has a name that assures you his ancestors were not on the Mayflower. It seems as if he’s being buttered up like a little brown cinnamon roll to shield Republicans from predictable, and tiresomely damaging, accusations of “racism.” He recently caught some flak for an August 27 tweet where he likened two black public figures to the KKK:
“The remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” — Ibram Kendi
“We don’t want any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice.” — Ayanna Pressley
It’s racist. It’d make the Grand Wizard of the KKK proud. It’s driving reactionary attacks. It needs to end.
It’s quaint that Ramaswamy seems to believe there still is a “Grand Wizard of the KKK,” much less a Kleagle, Kludd, Klabee, or in fact any organized network of Klaverns.
After facing the predictable backlash for KKKomparing Persons of KKKolor to the KKK, Ramaswamy doubled down and spat out the shallow fiction that race is nothing more than “skin color” while giving a stale and silent shout-out to Martin Luther King:
I think it is the same spirit to say that I can look at you and based on just your skin color that I know something about the content of your character — that I know something about the content of the viewpoints you’re allowed to express. . . . For Ayanna Presley to tell me that, that because of my skin color, I can express my views — that is wrong.
Similar to the idea that race is only as skin-deep as “color” is the delusion that a many-colored society could ever be truly “colorblind.” Bill Maher — the Jewish talk-show host whose official height is listed as 5’8,” (1.52 meters) but, since I’ve met him in person, that must only be when he’s wearing high heels – finds himself temporarily unemployed due to the Hollywood writer’s strike. Maher, who is trying to brand himself as a “liberal” rather than “woke,” recently appeared on Joe Rogan’s show to compare the woke crowd to the KKK:
[Wokes] believe race is first and foremost the thing you should always see everywhere, which I find interesting because that used to be the position of the Ku Klux Klan. . . . You can be woke, with all the nonsense that that now implies, but don’t say that somehow it’s an extension of liberalism. Because it’s most often actually an undoing of liberalism. . . . You can have your points of view and your positions on these things, but don’t try and piggyback on what I always believed, as liberals do for example, in a colorblind society. . . . That the goal is to not see race at all, anywhere for any reason.
You can buy Jim Goad’s Whiteness: The Original Sin here.
Those are strange words coming from someone who, a quarter-century ago, called me a “scary-looking redneck,” as if that wasn’t a race-specific slur.
Ever since Bob Dylan burst onto the music scene in the early 1960s despite his limited singing and guitar-playing skills, music critics have been searching for the “new Dylan.” Similarly, ever since the KKK burst onto the political scene in late 1865, people have been trying to find the “new Klan.”
The first example I was able to find came from all the way back in 1868, when, according to Stanley Horn’s book Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, the editor of an Alabama newspaper said of the Union League, which actively recruited black members, that “[t]he League is nothing more than a nigger Ku Klux Klan.”
Despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth you may hear about “AmeriKKKa” and how it’s always been a highly Klan-sympathetic nation, the truth is that the American mainstream press and political establishment have always opposed it.
In 1870, a federal grand jury designated the Klan as a “terrorist organization.” The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, passed by the federal government less than five years after the KKK’s founding, allowed the president to suspend habeas corpus and round up Klansmen as enemies of the state. Ninety-five years later, the House Un-American Activities Committee launched an investigation into the Klan’s remaining vestiges.
During Reconstruction, even the Southern press was almost uniformly Klan-negative.
In 1928, during Klan 2.0, Grover Hall, Sr. of the Montgomery Advertiser won a Pulitzer for his 1926 series of articles savaging the Klan.
In 1953, during the KKK’s third and final iteration, a pair of North Carolina publishers won a Pulitzer for “their successful campaign against the Ku Klux Klan, waged on their own doorstep at the risk of economic loss and personal danger, culminating in the conviction of over one hundred Klansmen and an end to terrorism in their communities.”
No similar across-the-board condemnations have appeared in the American press, or by the federal government, against modern-day violence-prone political groups such as antifa or Black Lives Matter.
Lest you condemn me for making another baselessly paranoid KKKomparison, I’m merely passing along analogies that others have already made.
In 2020, then-President Donald Trump promised to get antifa formally classified as a terrorist organization, but, just like that border wall he vowed to force Mexico to finance, it appears to be another one of his many broken promises.
Three years earlier, Trump’s obese female spokes-Negresses “Diamond and Silk” likened antifa to Islamic State (ISIS), the KKK, and neo-Nazis. Earlier this year, “Diamond” died of heart disease at age 51, becoming one of over 100,000 blacks who perish yearly from cardiac disorders. From 1882 to 1968, a total of 3,446 blacks (and 1,297 whites) were lynched, proving that every year, gorging at the trough like pigs in heat costs about 29 times as many Black Lives as the KKK and its cohorts did over an 86-year span.
Writer Jason Whitlock — who, from the looks of things, is another black heart attack waiting to happen — has repeatedly compared BLM to the KKK.
West Virginia Republican delegate Eric Porterfield, whose double chin alone appears to weigh more than Diamond and Silk combined, is a blind white man who caught static in 2019 for equating “the LGBTQ” to “a modern-day version of the Ku Klux Klan.”
And so it goes: People haven’t hesitated to compare such disparate groups and individuals as Boko Haram, Noel Ignatiev, and — but of course — Europe’s anti-palm oil lobby to the Klan.
Trump gets it all the time. So do the Proud Boys. As does anyone who’s white and doesn’t constantly apologize for it.
I’m someone with a lifelong compulsion to defend the underdog, especially when they’re being savagely misrepresented as the overlord. So just as Chris Crocker begged the world in 2007 to leave poor Britney Spears alone, I feel like screaming to the world to leave the poor KKK alone. Haven’t they suffered enough?
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17 comments
What does the KKK have to do with anything? It’s just another thing that they use to defame white people nowadays. Being pro-white, which is to say being pro-oneself, is the normal and healthy attitude, and it is only by associating pro-white sentiments with an archaic organization like the KKK that they manage to demonize these perfectly justified sentiments. What does the KKK have to do with the untold thousands of blacks killed by other blacks each year? Or the destruction of the black family? Is the KKK responsible for constant anti-white hate crimes? Why is it that we concede any moral high ground whatsoever to these people when these are the same people that supported tens of millions of black embryos and fetuses being destroyed during the Roe era? When people want to return to a better time before the black community had spun out of control, rather than actually try to justify their failing policies they simply wail about ‘racism.’ Once material conditions are bad enough, that will no longer work. It’s already losing effectiveness.
Not that it matters to your main point, there have actually been at least 3 Klans. The 1865 one, which you describe and which appears in Birth of a Nation, was the original, and served as a needed paramilitary org to protect White interests. The most recent, post-60s “Klan” is largely or entirely made up of cops and FBI agents, who use it to entrap low-IQ patsies.
More interesting, to me at least, is the middle Klan, between the wars. Constant Readers will recall my many essays on the late Bro. Stair and his apocalyptic Christian cult. I only recently learned that Stair derived many doctrines from a preacher named William Branham, who basically created the modern evangelical “faith healing” movement, and Branham got his start and was a longtime associate of “Rev.” Roy Davis, who was one of the founders of the Second Klan, longtime “missionary” (using revival meetings as a cover for Klan membership drives), eventually rising to the position of Imperial Wizard. Along the way, he served several prison sentences for various grifts as well for bigamy. He just happened to be in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 (along with Richard Nixon and GHW Bush).
Among the doctrines promoted by Davis, Branham and other evangelicals was the “Serpent’s Seed” doctrine, that Cain was produced when Eve and the Snake had sexual congress, and his descendants are the Negro, a sinful and cursed race. This was used by Davis to promote the Klan and battle racial desegregation.
Many, however, left Branham to take the side of their “black brothers”; later preachers like Bro. Stair in fact focused on black recruits, supposedly because the women were easier seduce. One Rev. James Jones was being groomed as one of Branham’s leading team of evangelists but he broke away when the secret Serpent’s Seed doctrine was revealed to him; he went on to found his People’s Temple, using the name Jim Jones; one of the best examples of liberal do-gooders being worst for the black people than outright racists.
Another Branham connection is Kim Kardashian’s father, a rich guy from Armenia who funded many faith healers in the 40s.
For more:
Preacher Behind the White Hoods: A Critical Examination of William Branham and His Message by John Andrew Collins: https://william-branham.org/site/books/pbtwh
“William Branham and the Imperial Wizard” – Episode 74 William Branham Historical Research Podcast: https://youtu.be/EE2bB5s9JH4?si=K96hkJYMtubZbJIZ
Not that it matters to your main point, there have actually been at least 3 Klans.
Hence this passage:
During Reconstruction, even the Southern press was almost uniformly Klan-negative.
In 1928, during Klan 2.0, Grover Hall, Sr. of the Montgomery Advertiser won a Pulitzer for his 1926 series of articles savaging the Klan.
In 1953, during the KKK’s third and final iteration,
Sorry, Jim, I was so eager to read your latest that I didn’t wait for my eyes to clear from the ophthalmologist’s eye drops (no kidding, I can provide the receipt), and missed that transitional paragraph. This is why I need an editor.
It’s sort of like trying to herd skinheads. Since I’m not aware of any corporate entity representing “the” Klan and the primary MO of the “Invisible Empire” was secrecy, there have probably been “Klansmen” since 1865. But yeah, there were three major “flowerings,” each of them eventually beaten down by the media and government. The second one is also interesting because it was by far the biggest numerically and was apparently centered outside the South, with Indiana and Colorado supposedly being #1 and #2, respectively. One analysis of Klan 2.0 found that was mostly comprised of middle-class businessmen rather than sharecroppers, etc. Klan 2.0 was also the least violent iteration.
Perhaps surprisingly to most, Oregon was known for its large Klan presence, mainly in the 20’s, fizzled out by the 30’s.
For an ancient analogy, the saying “Hannibal ad portas” persisted for centuries, and Romans used to scare their kids with that Carthaginian bogeyman.
Judging from their activities in the mid-twentieth century, the recruiting standards were not stringent enough, but the original 1857 Klan had noble goals. Their creed stated
“First: To protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenceless, from the indignities, wrongs, and outrages of the lawless, the violent, and the brutal; to relieve the injured and oppressed; to succor the suffering and unfortunate, and especially the widows and orphans of Confederate soldiers.
“Second: To protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and all laws passed in conformity thereto; and to protect the States and the people thereof from all invasion from any source whatever.
“Third: To aid and assist in the execution of all constitutional laws, and to protect the people from unlawful seizure, and from trial except by their peers in conformity to the laws of the land.”
—The Story of Reconstruction, Robert Selph Henry,
the original 1857 Klan had noble goals
The Klan was founded after the Civil War, not before—on December 24, 1865 to be precise. Without freed slaves and Union troops occupying the South, there was no need for the Klan.
Check. Make that 1867.
In 1871, General John B. Gordon, suspected of being a Klan leader, but never admitting it, testified before Congress:
“The instinct of self-preservation, prompted that organization, the sense of insecurity and danger, particularly in those neighborhoods where the negro population largely predominated….
“Apprehension took possession of the entire public mind of the State. Men were in many instances afraid to go away from their homes and leave their wives and children, for fear of outrage. Rapes were already being committed in the country. There was this general organization of the black race on the one hand, and the entire disorganization of the white race on the other hand….”
I’ve got nothing against the first Klan. If I had to tip my hat to every African I saw on the sidewalk I wouldn’t be very happy either. Especially if I’m sweltering in Texas, Alabama or some Louisiana swamp where summers can reach way over 100 degrees.
Not only were blacks encouraged to take vengeance against defeated Rebels, the whites who fanned the flames were openly genocidal. Although you’ll never hear it on TV or in classrooms, the KKK was a self-defense organization:
We shall treat the South as a defeated enemy….Hang the leaders—crush the South—arm the Negroes—confiscate the land…. —Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens
If I had the power I would arm…every Negro of the South…and turn them loose on the Rebels of the South and exterminate every man, woman and child south of Mason and Dixon’s line. I would like to see Negro troops, under the command of [U.S. General Benjamin F.] Butler, crowd every Rebel into the Gulf of Mexico and drown them as the Devil did the hogs in the Sea of Galilee. —Parson Brownlow, Tennessee’s Carpetbag Governor
People don’t realize the original Klan was a legitimate resistance organization. Amazingly enough there has been so little mentioned about the Reconstruction Era. It lasted nearly a generation. It was the first modern neocon nation-building project or even denazification. Carpetbaggers, scalawags, freed blacks and vengeful Union soldiers hunting whites terrorized this defeated region. They weren’t even allowed to vote or hold office anymore. The South was way blacker than it is today if you can even imagine that. It was closer to a Brazilian plantation, while the North was its own ironic ethno-state. So that required a strong hand to protect the rights of whites. I even had an anti-white Jamaican professor admit Southerners were rightfully fearful. The Yankees realized they couldn’t keep this going forever, just like the Allies couldn’t keep the occupation/division/persecution of Germany forever without ruining basic function.
It’s so bad that we have a similar system today. The same Radical Republicans dynamic. The same Cuckservative scalawags and neocon turncoats. It’s all on display with the GOP primaries. Men who were on the Trump transition team bided their time all these years later to bring the GOP back to neoconservatism. How can you possibly defeat this? You have to get creative. There are so few non Deep State civil servants that you have to incorporate some of them to have any basic governance. That’s why somebody like this materialistic Indian is better than the alternative. At least he is willing to play second fiddle to Trump while not bowing to these neocons. Every last one of these clowns that shows any promise always ends up being corrupted because they were compromised the entire time.
Ramaswamay’s KKK tweet reminds me of RFK Jr.’s own goals on Covid with regard to the Jews.
5’8″ is 1.72 m, which isn’t very short at all.
Either you are with us or against us. There will be no middle ground.
Well.
All I know is that the Klan doesn’t exist, has never existed, and will not exist in the future.
And if it did exist or does exist now or in the future, I’m sure it does so for a good reason.
Just saying.
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