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Fact Checkers Cover for Democratic Party’s Sordid History With the Ku Klux Klan

During a June 7th Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on white supremacy and domestic terrorism, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz stated that:

  • the Ku Klux Klan “was formed by elected Democrats.”
  • Klan “leadership was almost entirely elected Democrats.”
  • today’s Democrats “try very hard to erase the history” of their party’s involvement with the Klan.
  • today’s Democrats “politicize acts of violence.”

Conversely, “fact checkers” like PolitiFact and the Associated Press have repeatedly argued that the Democratic Party did not found the Klan, played a limited role in it, and that racist southerners fled to the Republican Party after 1964.

In reality, Cruz’s statements are a much closer reflection of the facts.

Origins & Leadership

The AP and PolitiFact correctly state that the Klan was started by a group of Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee as a non-violent, grassroots social club without political motivations.

What the AP and PolitiFact fail to acknowledge is that the Klan’s 1865–66 founding as a social club does not mark the beginning of the Klan as it is known today. Per the 1971 academic book White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction, the “real beginning” of the “Ku Klux conspiracy” occurred at an 1867 meeting in Nashville that consolidated the Klan.

As explained by an 1884 book written by a founding member of the Klan, this meeting bound the “isolated dens together” with “unity of purpose and concert of action” to supposedly reign in rogue Klansmen that had turned violent toward black people just a year after the group’s founding. However, White Terror points out that if Klan leaders really wanted to eliminate violence, they would have disbanded altogether. Instead, they sought “tighter organization” and recruited leaders “of far greater prestige and authority whose influence extended throughout the state”—primarily ex-Confederate generals and Democratic politicians.

An investigation published by the Illinois General Assembly in 1976 explains that after the Klan “transformed into a political organization,” violence became more widespread under Democrat leadership. The men that guided the Klan’s reorganization and subsequent growth included:

However, the Illinois investigation also found that “central control over the actions of the various local Klan groups did not really exist,” and some of the figureheads above began “dropping out” to distance themselves from local terrorism. For example, Nathan Bedford Forest ordered the Klan disbanded in 1869 because he claimed a “few disobedient and bad men” had infiltrated the Klan, disgracing its “good name and honorable reputation.”

On the other hand, some prominent Democrats remained loyal to the Klan’s violent activities. For example, Fredrick Strudwick led a Klan attempt to assassinate a Republican state senator and was later elected as a Democrat to the North Carolina state legislature.

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DOJ: Porn Website Co-Owner Pleads Guilty to Sex Trafficking Conspiracy that Coerced Women

The co-owner of a pornographic website pleaded guilty Tuesday to one count of conspiracy sex trafficking by force, fraud, and coercion in a federal court in California.

Michael Isaac Wolfe, 40, faces a maximum penalty of life in prison and is set to be sentenced on October 10, the Department of Justice (DOJ) stated in a press release.

Wolf moved to the United States in 2011, where he worked with co-defendant and owner of the San Diego based-website, GirlsDoPorn, Michael James Pratt, 39, who is still at large.

According to the DOJ, the defendant’s responsibilities to the website included filming videos, uploading the videos, overseeing the company’s finances, and operating other aspects of the business.

Wolfe admitted to coercing women to appear in these pornographic videos by lying to them that they would never appear on the internet, that they would never be posted in the U.S., and that no one would ever find out about them. He also trained co-defendant and camera operator Theodore Gyi, 44, to tell the women the videos would not be posted online.

The defendant also admitted to being aware of Pratt’s role in operating pornwikileaks.com, a website that exposes the identities appearing in pornographic content.

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Lightfoot Wants Chicago Drivers Under Constant Surveillance, But Look at What a Camera Caught Her SUV Doing

Chicago drivers are increasingly subjected to speed limit and red-light cameras that automatically send out millions in fines every year, and if they don’t pay, they can lose their driver’s license.

Meanwhile, Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s motorcade reportedly has racked up hundreds of dollars in fines that she has refused to pay — without any consequence at all.

According to a review of public records by CWB Chicago, Lightfoot’s police-driven SUVs have been recorded exceeding the speed limit and going through red lights by the city’s traffic camera system several times in the last year — and none of the fines has been paid.

Several other cars registered to her motorcade also have had fines assessed but never paid, the report said.

CWB Chicago even found that one of the vehicles is now eligible for booting and being impounded because the fines are so far in arrears.

Worst of all, two of the speeding incidents occurred while Lightfoot’s SUVs were driving through school zones while exceeding the speed limit.

The report said none of the $658 in fines accumulated by the mayor’s motorcade since May 2021 has been paid.

But this is not just a recent habit. Her motorcade cars have a long history of breaking traffic laws, getting tickets and fines, and never paying them. It has been so bad that the city has gotten in a habit of just forgiving them because they never get paid anyway, the Chicago Tribune reported in 2020.

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The one point that can get people off the global warming obsession train

Climate alarmists play the “hide the magnitude” game.  If they didn’t, they would soon be out of business.  

Politely ask a few of your friends how much of the air they’re breathing is CO2.  I’ve done that, and the typical answer, when I can get one, is twenty percent or more.  (Most people have no idea and would rather not guess.) 

Climate alarmists rarely talk about the actual quantitative composition of our atmosphere.  The impression they give is that (1) a substantial part of the air that surrounds us comprises carbon dioxide; (2) that the proportion of carbon dioxide is increasing rapidly; (3) that the increase is primarily the result of human activity, mostly from burning fossil fuels; and (4) that if CO2 continues to increase, it’s game over for humanity.  Recently, the rhetoric has escalated from “climate crisis” to “climate emergency.”

The actual magnitude tells a very different story.  Carbon dioxide constitutes four one-hundredths of one percent of the air we breathe (or 400 parts per million).  That is an extremely tiny fraction of the atmosphere.

What constitutes the rest of the air around us?  Seventy-eight percent of the air we breathe is nitrogen, 21 percent is oxygen, 0.9 percent is argon, and 0.1 percent is other gases.  The other gases include methane (0.00017 percent); nitrous oxide (0.00003 percent); and water vapor, which varies from 0 to 4 percent.

How can such a small magnitude of CO2 be dooming humanity?  Furthermore, how can climate change alarmists be absolutely, positively certain that if CO2 continues to increase, it will be lights out for life on Earth?

During the Cambrian period 500 million years ago, CO2 constituted over 5,000 parts per million of the Earth’s atmosphere.  Then, 150 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, CO2 was 1,700 parts per million, more than four times what it is now.  Life thrived during those periods.  How can 400 parts per million be a threat to our existence?

Before humans started burning fossil fuels about 200 years ago, CO2 made up 250 parts per million of our atmosphere.  It has been growing at about one part per million per year for the past 150 years.  In other words, a very small magnitude is growing at a very slow rate.  Is there any reason that rate will accelerate when it hasn’t in a century and a half?

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Miami proposes relocating city’s homeless to island near sewage plant

Miami may relocate some of the city’s homeless population out of the streets and into city-sponsored encampments on an island housing a wastewater treatment plant.

Earlier this year, Miami-Dade’s Board of County Commissioners asked city officials to come up with ideas to mitigate its homeless population in the city, according to the Daily Mail.

City Manager Art Noriega called for an encampment to be established on the northern region of the Virginia Key island, one of five locations being discussed, beside a sewage treatment plant and a biking trail. The other four possible locations as options include three parking lots, two of which are located near residential buildings.

The city is considering the proposal that would relocate homeless people, which was recently recorded at 1,525 people, who live on the street in heavily populated tourist areas, like downtown, Overtown, and Little Havana.

The proposal details a plan to establish as many as nine large tents, which can hold up to 22 people, and a parking lot in the northernmost region of the Virginia Key.

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Bipartisan bill aimed at protecting kids online would require Big Tech to spy on them

A US Senate panel is debating two online safety bills that pertain to children, COPPA 2.0, and the Kids Online Safety Act, the latter of which has been described by observers as a scheme that will force online platforms to spy on children.

The original Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) aims to restrict the tracking and targeting of children under 13, while its update would expand to include those under 16.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) was introduced by Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn, who said that it seeks to provide the solution to problems related to teenage mental health.

The way the senators envisaged this can be done is to improve children’s well-being online by requiring that social platforms provide kids and parents with “tools to help prevent the destructive impact of social media.”

The content that social sites would be tasked with preventing includes promotion of suicide, self-harm, substance abuse, eating disorders, etc., and non-compliance would make these companies legally liable.

They would also have to turn data over to researchers, introduce an age verification system, and set parental controls to the highest settings, to enable filtering or blocking.

But critics say that forcing social media companies to censor content and allowing parents to “spy” on children online is the wrong approach that doesn’t address the core problem of why children seek certain information on the web, while at the same time eroding their privacy.

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22 States Sue Over ‘Gender Identity’ Rule Controlling $29 Billion For Poor Kids’ Meals

Twenty-two states are suing President Joe Biden’s administration for threatening to zap school-meal program funding unless the states comply with new rules surrounding gender identity and sexual orientation in schools.

The lawsuit represents the latest volley fired in the ongoing battles between state officials and Biden, who they accuse of usurping their authority through his executive orders.

The states complain that a federal nondiscrimination rule, set to take effect Aug. 15, seeks to impose “obligations that apparently stretch as far as ending sex-separated living facilities and athletics and mandating the use of biologically inaccurate preferred pronouns,” said the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, Tennessee, on July 26.

“The Biden administration’s sweeping rhetoric treats normal practices, such as sex-separated bathrooms and athletics, as ‘discriminatory’ even though DOJ and the Department of Education treated those as legal, nondiscriminatory practices as recently as last year,” the suit says.

A fact sheet about the proposed policy cited examples of discriminatory acts, as interpreted by bureaucrats, under the new rule: “Preventing a transgender high school girl [a biological male] from using the girls’ restroom” and “preventing a transgender high school girl [a biological male] from “try[ing] out for the girls’ cheerleading team,” the lawsuit says.

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Joe Biden: Americans Complaining About Inflation Forgot We Sent Them a Check for $8,000

President Joe Biden on Thursday reminded Americans suffering from inflation and high gas prices that he sent them a check for $8,000 in 2021.

“There’s reason to be down but I started thinking about it … the first year, we were able with the rescue plan, we were able to send them a check for eight grand,” he said. “I mean a check. Beyond that by the way, there was more than that.”

The president spoke about the trillions he spent in the Democrat-passed American Rescue Plan during a conversation he had with his economic advisers on the state of the economy. His mention of the “$8,000 check” was likely a reference to the temporary expansion of the tax credit provided to families in 2021 until it expired this year.

Biden complained that Americans forgot what he did for them in 2021, even as he admitted it was “totally understandable.”

He pointed out that even for Americans making $120,00 a year, $8,000 dollars should have meant a lot to them.

“That’s a lot of money, and so it helped save a lot of people in terms of getting thrown out of their home and rental housing and a whole range of things,” he said.

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Illinois Democrat calls for national Firearms Owner ID card

What was it I was just saying about Illinois politicians targeting legal gun owners while ignoring career criminals? I hadn’t run across Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s latest gun control demands when I wrote my that post, but her remarks are yet another example of the phenomenon of Democrats pretending that cracking down on law-abiding citizens exercising their constitutionally-protected rights is the best way to reduce violent crime.

Duckworth not only wants to slap a new federal ban on so-called assault weapons onto the books; she wants to establish a federal permit that would be required before you could even keep a gun in your home.

“A big portion of what’s happening is assault weapons, which are weapons of war, and the high capacity magazines that are used,” she said. “They just simply don’t belong on the streets of this of this country. And I’m gonna work to suspend, and to abandon them.”

Duckworth said she’s glad to see expanded mental health services, law enforcement information sharing, and school safety funding come from the bipartisan legislation. But she’s hopeful it’s the start of a broader legislative effort.

“I’d like to see a national FOID card. You know, in Illinois, we have a FOID card. It doesn’t stop people from being able to purchase weapons. But I think it’s important that everyone should have a background check,” she said. “You shouldn’t just be able to walk into a gun show and buy a gun without a background check. I think we need to significantly close that loophole.”

Duckworth is ignoring the fact that state courts have repeatedly found that the state’s FOID card requirement violates the constitutional rights of residents; decisions that have been overturned by a state Supreme Court that seems desperate to avoid issuing a ruling on the actual merits of the legal challenges.

Despite the Illinois Supreme Court’s reluctance to address the issues with the state’s FOID card system, the constitutional concerns are clear. The Supreme Court has recognized that we the people have a right to both keep and bear arms for self-defense; a right that can be lost through things like felony convictions or an adjudication of mental defectiveness, but one that each of us possess unless we do something to forfeit it.

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