3,518 words
Edward Ball
Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020
It is 2013 in the deep South of America, and deep in the woods it seems a historical film-set is in production. A dozen or so actors portraying men from America’s famous and notorious Ku Klux Klan are recreating the ceremony of the lighting of the burning cross. “Do you accept the light?” each Klansman is asked as he is handed a lit brand. (more…)
1880 cartoon showing the “Solid South” being forced to carry Ulysses S. Grant and the Reconstruction regime at bayonet point.
1880 cartoon showing the “Solid South” being forced to carry Ulysses S. Grant and the Reconstruction regime at bayonet point.
3,095 words
Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)
Creating & Expanding the Solid South
The end of Reconstruction did not immediately lead to segregation or the disenfranchisement of sub-Saharans in the South or any other part of the country. In 1878, segregation and sub-Saharan disenfranchisement seemed impossible — especially since the South had just barely thrown off a military occupation government. In parts of the South, in fact, sub-Saharans outnumbered whites. South Carolina even had a white minority. (more…)
Sub-Saharan misrule during Reconstruction.
Sub-Saharan misrule during Reconstruction.
3,259 words
Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)
On the evening of April 14, 1865, the actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth leaped onto the stage at Ford’s Theater and shouted “Sic semper tyrannis!”, followed by “The South is avenged!” Booth had just fatally shot President Lincoln. He was acting as part of a larger conspiracy to decapitate the Lincoln administration and was the only conspirator to successfully carry out any part of the overall plan — a plot that had been initiated by Booth, not the Confederate government. (more…)
53 words / 11:33
Jim Goad has produced a short video to accompany his latest essay, “Nothing KKKompares to the KKK,” on the fact that for an organization that no longer exists in any meaningful sense, just about every group that is disliked by somebody ends up being compared to the Ku Klux Klan. (more…)
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. (more…)
2,273 words
M. William Lutholtz
Grand Dragon: D. C. Stephenson and the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana
West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1991
The Second Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1915 by William J. Simmons, began as a small group of no more than 15 friends. Within a decade, it spread throughout the country and grew to include up to five million members. At its height, it was, as one journalist put it at the time, “the most vigorous, active and effective organization in American life.” (more…)
1,935 words
Brian Fairbanks
Wizards: David Duke, America’s Wildest Election, and the Rise of the Far Right
Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2022
Brian Fairbanks is a Louisiana-based journalist who seems to be an ordinary liberal, looking for a Great Society-style social safety net. He has recently published a book about Louisiana’s 1991 gubernatorial election in which David Duke, a white advocate, nearly became Governor. (more…)
7,743 words
If you’ve ever wanted to deliver massive doses of red pills to your friends, David Duke’s My Awakening[1] can be considered an entire bottle of them. The first edition, which is reviewed herein, has aged pretty well. Much has happened since then, of course — and little for the better. However, the basics are still relevant; what held true back then remains so now.
David Duke, in brief (more…)
Georg Gyssling and Leni Riefenstahl
Georg Gyssling and Leni Riefenstahl
4,606 words
All installments in this series available here
Over the last few years, there has been some controversy about the influence of China over Hollywood. The claim is not that China is secretly controlling Hollywood, as the Alex Jones types have been insisting, but that Hollywood has been increasingly tailoring their films to meet the approval of the Chinese government in order to gain access to the massive Chinese market. Most commentators, especially liberal ones, consider this a bad thing. (more…)