Donald Trump’s life-endangering ‘Flu Klux Klan’

This 22 April 2020 video from the USA says about itself:

Republican: MY Money Is More Important Than YOUR Life

Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick is as stupid as they come. Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur discuss on The Young Turks.

“Claiming that he was “vindicated” by businesses being shut down by states’ stay-at-home orders, Patrick said on Monday night during a Fox News interview that the new plan to reopen Texas businesses was “long overdue.”

The Texas leader then doubled down on his grim argument for allowing people to be put at risk of death from COVID-19 to help the economy recover from the damage brought on by the outbreak – a proposal that was immediately met with a flood of criticism.”

Read more here.

This video from the USA says about itself:

Crass Stupidity of the Flu Klux Klan – Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Covid 19

Healthcare workers in the USA are counter demonstrating against dying for Wall Street, as advocated by these Donald Trump–Koch brothers–DeVos billionaire family astroturf military gun-toting ‘Flu Klux Klan‘ mobs.

They are called Flu Klux Klan as United States President Donald Trump dismissed the COVID-19 pandemic killing ten thousands of people as just a little ‘flu’.

Their fake ‘arguments’ surely are similar to the Ku Klux Klan.

The grammar of American reaction is eerily resilient. pic.twitter.com/NKvHinWY0Y

— Richard Seymour (@leninology) April 18, 2020

By Sean Yoes in the USA:

Birth of the `Flu Klux Klan’

Race and Politics

April 23, 2020

Whoever it was who tagged the disheveled hordes of wild-eyed, mostly White legions of [not] social distancing protesters the “Flu Klux Klan”, I want to hand you a $1,200 stimulus check (with Trump’s name blotted out) on behalf of Black people all over America.

I didn’t have time to do a precise etymological social media search for the author of the Flu Klux Klan moniker, but I saw it on a Facebook post, which captured a still of an Instagram post, which cited an unknown social media post. So, there you have it; the origin of the FKK is pretty dubious like those simple-minded “protesters” themselves.

However, I do know the name of Stephen Moore, the deranged Trump economic adviser who likened these flailing, sometimes gun-toting hoodlums to our beloved Rosa Parks.

“This is a great time, gentlemen and ladies, for civil disobedience. We need to be the Rosa Parks here and protest against these government injustices,” Moore said during an interview on a YouTube show called, “Freedom on Tap,” on April 14. I can’t use the words I want to use here to describe the level of disrespect and unmitigated White arrogance displayed by Moore in comparing these fools to one of the great icons of the modern civil rights movement. I’ll just say Stephen Moore needs to keep Mother Parks’ name out of his lying mouth.

If hypocrisy was a cult, its members would all be wearing MAGA hats.

For the past week or so, members of the FKK have been throwing tantrums in states mostly where Democratic governors reside (Michigan, Virginia, Colorado, Pennsylvania), “protesting” the social distancing, stay at home orders implemented by the majority of the states in the country. Some of the FKK members come brandishing weapons. Most wear Trump MAGA paraphernalia, wielding nonsensical signs usually with misspelled words. Let’s cut to the chase. Since Trump implemented his national emergency order, with social distancing mandates, he cut off one of the greatest sources of his ghoulish power, infamous MAGA rallies. So, it’s plain to my eye that these right-wing outbursts aimed mostly at Democratic governors (many of which Trump has openly feuded with during the pandemic emergency) are doubling as MAGA rallies. Get it? MAGA rally, equals FKK rally.

And of course Trump has been egging them on with tweets reading, “LIBERATE VIRGINIA!” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” “LIBERATE PENNSYLVANIA!” The liberate Virginia tweet came with a mandate to defend the 2nd Amendment. Technically, the members of the FKK are violating the social distancing guidelines implemented by Trump and he in turn encourages them to and maybe take up arms in the process.

Can I get treason for a thousand Alexander Hamilton?

To attempt to capture the full lunacy of Trump’s daily performances (because he still fancies himself a reality TV star who marvels at his own ratings) over the last several weeks during the so-called coronavirus press briefings, is a fool’s errand. Because only a fool could truly know the mind, or discern the mercurial rantings of the man sitting in the White House.

However, on April 22, here is the substance of Trump’s morning tweets (over the course of approximately one hour) in the midst of the coronavirus global pandemic that has to date killed more than 45,000 Americans and cost the country trillions of dollars:

(7:03 a.m.)

“Happy Birthday to the great Cindy Adams of the [Rupert Murdoch owned] New York Post. Cindy is 90, but looks 39 to me. She is going strong!”

(7:53 a.m.)

“States are safely coming back. Our Country is starting to OPEN FOR BUSINESS again. Special care is, and always will be, given to our beloved seniors (except me!). Their lives will be better than ever…WE LOVE YOU ALL!”

(8:08 a.m.)

“I have instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea.”

Members of the Flu Klux Klan, is this your king? That’s a rhetorical question; of course, he is.

Welcome to White rage 2020, the corona chronicles.

Sean Yoes is the AFRO’s Baltimore editor and the author of Baltimore After Freddie Gray: Real Stories From One of America’s Great Imperiled Cities.

USA, killer Ku Klux Klan policeman exposed

This 12 August 2012 video from the USA says about itself:

KKK Cop Exposed

A Michigan cop who killed a black man in 2009, is being investigated for ties to the KKK. Cenk Uygur, Booke Thomas, and Francis Maxwell, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down.

“A Michigan cop has been placed on administrative leave so city officials can investigate why he decorated his home with Confederate flags and a framed membership application for the Ku Klux Klan.

The cop was last in the news a decade ago for shooting and killing a black man, for which he was cleared of any wrongdoing.

Muskegon City Manager Frank Peterson was alerted to Officer Charles Anderson’s disturbing memorabilia after an African-American man toured the white officer’s home, which is for sale, according to the statewide news site MLive. Rob Mathis wrote on Facebook that the five-bedroom home was littered with Confederate memorabilia. The KKK application was hanging in one of the bedrooms.”

Read more here.

NEW POLITICAL LOW IN TEXAS? The Republican-dominated state Senate in Texas has passed a bill to eliminate a requirement that public schools teach that the Ku Klux Klan and its white supremacist campaign of terror are “morally wrong.” Eliminated requirements also include the writings of Martin Luther King Jr., United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez and suffragist Susan B. Anthony. Critics say the state is promoting an “anti-civics” education. [HuffPost]

KKK attacked African American singer Nat King Cole

This 22 February 2019 from the USA says about itself:

The Vicious KKK Attack Against Nat King Cole

In 1956, Nat King Cole, one of the biggest musical stars in the world, was attacked on stage by the KKK. It was the reality of being a black man in America, where even fame and fortune couldn’t protect you.

MAN CHARGED WITH KILLING BLACK TEEN OVER MUSIC A white Arizona man newly released from prison has been charged with first-degree murder in the grisly killing of a black teenager whose rap music he claimed was menacing. [HuffPost]

Ex-KKK Imperial Wizard supports Brazilian Bolsonaro

This music video from the USa is called The KKK Took My Baby Away – The Ramones.

By Steve Sweeney in Britain:

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Former KKK leader says Brazil’s Bolsonaro ‘sounds like one of us’

FORMER Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader David Duke has endorsed far-right Brazilian presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, saying the former army captain “sounds like one of us.”

Support from the prominent US racist, who also supported Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign, is the latest warning sign of the nature of Mr Bolsonaro’s candidacy.

Many have raised fears of a fascist dictatorship under his rule, with Mr Bolsonaro consistently praising the military junta that ruled over Brazil between 1964 and 1985.

He has faced mass opposition on the streets, with millions demonstrating as part of the non-partisan #NotHim movement organised by Women United Against Bolsonaro.

Attacks on opposition supporters and journalists have increased dramatically since September 30, including the stabbing to death of a prominent Workers Party (PT) activist and a woman who had a swastika carved into her stomach.

Mr Duke said: “He is total European descendant, he looks like any white man in the US, in Portugal, Spain or Germany and France and he is talking about the demographic disaster that exists in Brazil and the enormous crime that exists there in the black neighbourhoods of Rio de Janeiro.”

He was referring to comments made by Mr Bolsonaro in Rio de Janeiro last year about quilombolas — descendants of [runaway] African slaves — when he claimed: “They don’t do anything. I don’t think they’re even good for procreation any more.”

Mr Bolsonaro … was charged earlier this year with inciting hatred and discrimination against black people, indigenous communities, women and gay people.

Brazil is set to go to the polls on October 28 for the second round of voting in a tense presidential contest, which is pitching two opposing visions for the future of the country.

Mr Bolsonaro became the front-runner after popular former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was blocked from running by an election court.

Lula’s supporters branded the move a form of “lawfare” and a continuation of the coup which saw Workers Party (PT) president Dilma Rouseff impeached.

His replacement Fernando Haddad came second in the first round with 29 per cent of the vote compared with 46 per cent polled by Mr Bolsonaro.

Left parties and progressives have united in their call for a vote for Mr Haddad next week to stop Mr Bolsonaro from taking the presidency.

FAR-RIGHT FORMER ARMY OFFICER WINS BRAZIL ELECTIONS Far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro has won Brazil’s presidential election, defeating São Paulo Mayor Fernando Haddad in a runoff. Bolsonaro is a controversial figure who has praised authoritarians and the military dictatorship that controlled Brazil for more than two decades. [HuffPost]

A ‘populist’ revolt of elites against the people. Branding Bolsonaro ‘a populist’ betrays a fundamental inability to describe the political reality of the world we live in, writes DONAGH DAVIS.

WTF!!!The NRA’s latest racist attack, funded by gun companies — and you?

The National Rifle Association in the USA not just supporting Donald Trump, but whitewashing the Ku Klux Klan as well.

SHAREHOLDERS DEMAND GUNMAKER ACT RESPONSIBLY Shareholders of Smith & Wesson, the largest U.S. firearms manufacturer, voted in favor of the gunmaker publishing a report documenting violent events associated with its products and examining the reputational and financial risks it could face from shootings. [HuffPost]

EDUCATION DEPARTMENT SUED OVER GUNS FOR SCHOOLS A coalition of advocacy and teacher groups will sue the Department Of Education for information on whether the NRA had a hand in the government’s decision to allow schools to use federal funds to buy guns. [HuffPost]

BlacKkKlansman, film review

This May 2018 video from the USA says about itself:

BLACKkKLANSMAN – Official Trailer [HD] – In Theaters August 10

A Spike Lee joint. From producer Jordan Peele. Based on some fo’ real, fo’ real sh*t.

From visionary filmmaker Spike Lee comes the incredible true story of an American hero. It’s the early 1970s, and Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) is the first African-American detective to serve in the Colorado Springs Police Department. Determined to make a name for himself, Stallworth bravely sets out on a dangerous mission: infiltrate and expose the Ku Klux Klan. The young detective soon recruits a more seasoned colleague, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), into the undercover investigation of a lifetime. Together, they team up to take down the extremist hate group as the organization aims to sanitize its violent rhetoric to appeal to the mainstream. Produced by the team behind the Academy-Award® winning Get Out.

On 10 September 2018, I went to see that film. Though it is mainly about the 1970s, it makes points about the time after the 1970s, now. And about the time before the 1970s: the United States civil war, 1861-1865.

The opening scene of BlacKkKlansman shows a clip from the well-known 1939 film Gone With the Wind: Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) walks among the dead and dying soldiers of the southern pro-slavery army in Atlanta in 1864. Their Confederate flag flutters in the breeze. Dixie, the unofficial national anthem of the breakaway south, plays. The upbeat tune contrasts with the bloodshed, visible in the images, which the rebellion to keep slavery has brought.

Gone With the Wind whitewashes the pro-slavery secessionists. It is based on the 1936 Margaret Mitchell novel of the same name which praised the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). One of Spike Lee’s main themes in his film is criticizing the racist tradition in Hollywood movies.

The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865 by officers of the defeated Confederate army. Driven underground, it resurfaced after 1915. Then, the blockbuster Hollywood film The Birth of a Nation glorified the Klan. It depicted them as gallant white knights, defending the honour of white southern womanhood against rapist and otherwise criminal freed African American slaves during the post-1865 Reconstruction period. The KKK still today uses this racist film on the Civil War and its aftermath as a recruiting tool; as BlacKkKlansman also shows.

Spike Lee recalled how he was educated as a filmmaker:

They taught us all of the cinematic innovations DW Griffith had come up with, but they left out everything that had to do with the social impact of the film [The Birth of a Nation]”, Lee recently told Ebony magazine. “That this film re-energized the Klan. The Klan was dormant, it was dead, and it brought about a rebirth. Therefore, because of the rebirth of the Klan, it led to black people being lynched, strung up, castrated and murdered, but that was never discussed.

Finally, the Civil War comes back in the last scene in Spike Lee’s movie. It shows the 2017 violent extreme right demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia. White supremacists, including the Ku Klux Klan, then wanted to obstruct the local council’s decision to remove a statue of General Robert E. Lee, the commander of the 1861-1865 pro-slavery secessionists. The neonazis injured many anti-fascists, killing Heather Heyer. BlacKkKlansman shows President Trump whitewashing the Charlotteville nazi violence. And ex-Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke, a major role in Lee’s movie, praising Trump because of that. The last image of the film shows the flowers commemorating Ms Heyer.

This ending differs from the original final scene, now the penultimate scene. Police officer Stallworth has successfully stopped a Klan bomb assassination of black civil rights activists. However, then there is a knock on his door. As he looks outside his house, he sees KKK members having a cross burning ceremony. A sign he has solved one problem, but that basically there is still the same problem. As the nazi murder in Charlottesville marked even more clearly.

The inspiration for Spike Lee was the 2014 memoir Black Klansman by Ron Stallworth, the first black police officer ever in Colorado Springs. For the film, Lee changed several things. Like adding a small k in the title between the capital K’s of BlacK and Klansman. And adding a romantic interest by Stallworth in the president of the local black students organisation, Ms Patrice Dumas. And making Stallworth’s colleague in infiltrating the Klan Jewish.

As Stallworth joins the Colorado Springs police, the commissioner warns him that his fellow policemen will call him nigger and worse, and that he should not get angry about that.

He soon meets a colleague calling African Americans ‘toads’, a killer of an innocent black boy and a sexual abuser of African American women. Other policemen tell Stallworth they don’t like that behaviour; however, ‘in the police, we are one family’, not reporting on each other.

Stallworth would like to do undercover police work, instead of boring archive work. The commissioner offers him an undercover job: spying on local black students. They have invited Kwame Toure (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) for a lecture. The commissioner says that Toure used to be in the Black Panther party. And he agrees with (racist) FBI boss Hoover that the Black Panthers are supposedly the most dangerous group in the USA.

In his lecture, Kwame Toure tells that as a young boy, he was a fan of Tarzan films. As on screen white man Tarzan beat up black Africans, young Toure used to scream: ‘Kill these savages!’ However, later Toure became aware that he was really shouting ‘Kill me!’ That black is beautiful, not ‘savage’. So, another criticism by Spike Lee of racism in Hollywood films.

The Toure speech opposes the Vietnam war. Vietnamese have never done anything against African Americans. The lecturer shouts: Hell no, we won’t go! And the whole hall explodes in approval.

In the film, Stallworth concludes that Kwame Toure is at least partially right. He concludes he should spy on the Ku Klux Klan rather than on African American radicals.

Later in the film, veteran actor and singer Harry Belafonte has a role. He plays an old man lecturing to the black student organisation. He recalls how, as a teenager in Texas in 1916, he witnessed the cruel lynching of a fellow innocent black teenager, falsely accused of raping a white woman. That horrible lynching was just after the film The Birth of a Nation had come out.

David Walsh wrote a critical, far too critical review of BlacKkKlansman; that important, impressive, though not infallible film. Though he did praise the final Charlottesville scene. Walsh has two valid points:

[Actor Topher] Grace is all too foolish and insubstantial as [David] Duke, a sinister and persistent figure, with deep connections to the major political parties, the international far-right and elements within the US military and the state.

Spike Lee’s film does not have enough attention for … one of the more significant of Stallworth’s discoveries—that several active members of the US military, including NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command] personnel, individuals with their fingers on the nuclear button, are members of the Klan chapter. We see Stallworth having a brief meeting with an FBI agent about the matter, and that’s that.

NORAD headquarters is near Colorado Springs, as is the US Air Force Academy. The city was becoming a center for the religious and fascistic right in the period BlacKkKlansman treats. The filmmakers do not trouble themselves about that.

African American leftist filmmaker Boots Riley writes that Spike Lee inspired him to go to film school. This film disappointed him so much that he wrote sharp criticism of it. According to Riley, the movie role Stallworth is much more heroic than the real life police officer Stallworth was; and the often so racist police is depicted too much like a force against racism.

Another critical review, especially on the way the film depicts Kwame Toure’s views, is here.

ALABAMA PUBLISHER STRIPPED OF HONOR OVER KKK EDITORIAL An Alabama newspaper publisher who wrote an editorial calling “for the Ku Klux Klan to night ride again” was stripped of an honor given by his college. The University of Southern Mississippi said it removed Goodloe Sutton’s name from its journalism hall of fame due to the “dangerous nature” of the Democrat-Reporter publisher’s comments. [HuffPost]

ALABAMA PUBLISHER DOUBLES DOWN ON KKK Alabama newspaper publisher Goodloe Sutton does not regret the editorial he wrote calling for the “Ku Klux Klan to night ride again.” He doubled down in a local interview, saying, “The KKK are the nicest.” [HuffPost]

St Louis, USA police and Ku Klux Klan

This video from the USA says about itself:

St. Louis Police Department Is Built On KKK Roots

16 October 2017

TYT Politics Reporter Jordan Chariton spoke with Tory Russel, the chief of staff to St. Louis Alderman John Collins-Muhammad, about the troubling ties that the St. Louis PD has to the “Veiled Prophet Ball,” an event that has been linked to the Ku Klux Klan.

This video from the USA says about itself:

St. Louis Protests: What a Police Cover Up Looks Like

16 October 2017

TYT Politics Reporter Jordan Chariton spoke with Brother Anthony Shahid, a St. Louis resident who has pushed for transparency from police in the killing of 24-year-old African American Anthony Lamar Smith at the gun of white officer Jason Stockley.

Ku Klux Klan leader shot dead by wife: here.

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Ku Klux Klan mocked by United States artists

This video, by the satiric Indecline artists from the USA says about itself:

Ku Klux Klowns

7 September 2017

If attacked by a mob of clowns, go for the juggler.

From the Washington Post in the USA:

Activists hang KKK ‘clown’ effigies from tree in a Virginia park

By Justin Wm. Moyer

September 7 at 4:31 PM

The art collective that unveiled naked statues of Donald Trump in major U.S. cities last year left Ku Klux Klan effigies hanging in a park in Richmond early Wednesday.

The faux Klansmen, left by the INDECLINE collective in Joseph Bryan Park overnight, were hanging from a tree dressed in multicolored wigs and clown shoes. A sign on one of the effigies read: “If attacked by a mob of clowns, go for the juggler.”

A spokeswoman for Richmond police said authorities were investigating the display, which was removed. The park was closed and cordoned off with crime scene tape, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

A video published online Wednesday by INDECLINE includes footage of the clowns being assembled and mounted at dusk by people wearing masks. The video includes dialogue from a decades-old episode of the “Superman” radio show that ridiculed the KKK, interspersed with a Klan anthem featuring the lyrics: “Stand up and be counted/show that world that you’re a man … join the Ku Klux Klan.”

A statement from the group said Richmond was chosen for the display, called “Ku Klux Klowns,” because it was the capital of the Confederacy. The project is a response to the “White Nationalist uprising in the United States”, the statement said, and the park was chosen because it was the location of a slave rebellion in 1800.

INDECLINE was founded in 2001, according to its website. The group was thrust into the spotlight after it left Trump statues in New York, San Francisco and other cities before the 2016 presidential election. It has also covered stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame with names of African Americans killed by police.

West Virginia policeman supports Ku Klux Klan: here.

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Street honouring Ku Klux Klan founder no more in Florida, USA

This 18 August 2017 comedy video from the USA says about itself:

Confederate Monuments Are Bad; General Forrest’s Is Really Bad

James looks at the controversy surrounding the fate of Confederate soldier monuments across the country and can’t let go of a rather scary statue of General Nathan Bedford Forrest in Tennessee.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV:

Founder of the KKK loses street name in Florida

Today, 08:29

The founder of the Ku Klux Klan will disappear from the street scene of Hollywood, Florida. Also two other generals who fought for the Confederate States will lose their street names, the city council has decided.

Nathan Bedford Forrest fought during the US Civil War for the preservation of slavery.

Before that war he was a slave trader.

He was a particularly ruthless general, who killed black Union army soldiers from the north after they had surrendered.

After the war, he was involved in the founding of the Ku Klux Klan, which intended to oppress liberated slaves. Forrest was the first leader of the organization, the Grand Wizard.

Beside Forrest, streets in Hollywood were named after the generals Robert E. Lee and John Bell Hood. …

“It’s like living in the Hitler Street”, said a local politician. …

It is not clear yet what the new names of the streets will be, next week there will be a decision. …

During the local authority meeting, a Hollywood resident suggested that Lee Street did not need to change its name: the name might now refer to writer Harper Lee, author of the [anti-racist] book To kill a mockingbird.

By the way, Forrest will continue in other places: there is no discussion about Bedford Forrest Drive in the Texan Missouri City.

There is some discussion about it.

An Iowa high school says it disciplined a group of students after a photo surfaced showing five people wearing Ku Klux Klan hoods, waving a Confederate flag and holding what appear to be guns in front of a burning cross: here.

A senior official at the VA removed a portrait of a Confederate general and famed Ku Klux Klan grand wizard after a reporter questioned him about the painting.

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Ku Klux Klan, a British view

This 1920s advertisement from Illinois in the USA shows various businesses were Ku Klux Klan sponsors then; including Ford Motor corporation of the anti-Semitic big businessman Henry Ford.

The ‘Everybody Welcome’ in the ad probably excludes African Americans, Jews, socialists, Roman Catholics, LGBTQ people, feminists, etc. etc.

By Peter Frost in Britain:

A dark corner of US politics

Friday 25th August 2017

PETER FROST explores the origins of one of the nastiest, most racist organisations in world history – the Ku Klux Klan

HOWEVER much President Donald Trump ducks and dives and carefully edits his latest soundbite, it is clear that he is one of a very few US citizens who doesn’t think the tiny Ku Klux Klan is a racist organisation fit only to be condemned to the dustbin of history by all reasonable people.

Perhaps that isn’t too surprising. There is overwhelming evidence that Trump’s father Fred was arrested at a Klan rally in New York in the 1920s and there’s good reason to suppose that his grandfather was also close to the obnoxious organisation.

The Klan has a long history. The dust and smoke of the civil war had hardly cleared in 1865 when a small group of white southerners on the defeated side met to form what would become one of the nastiest, most racist organisations in world history — the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

That first Klan flourished in the southern states in the late 1860s, but had almost died out by the early 1870s. It sought to overthrow the Republican state governments in the south during the Reconstruction Era, especially by using violence against African-American leaders and to bring back slavery.

Members made their own, often grotesque, colourful costumes, robes and masks designed to be terrifying and to hide their true identities.

The white sheets and conical hoods would come later. They were actually copied from D W Griffith’s 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation. The curious titles like “grand wizard” and such, also first saw light of day in that film script.

It triggered a second Klan flush in 1915 which flourished nationwide in the early and mid-1920s, particularly in urban areas of the midwest and west.

Rooted in local Protestant communities it opposed Catholics and Jews as well as black people at a time of high immigration from mostly Catholic nations of southern and eastern Europe. It also virulently opposed socialist and communist politics and the organised labour movement.

This second organisation adopted a standard white costume and used code words, which were similar to those used by the first Klan, while adding cross burnings and mass parades to intimidate others.

The third and current manifestation of the KKK emerged after WWII. It focused on opposition to the civil rights movement often using violence and murder to suppress activists.

Today, it is back in the headlines with its greatest fan in President Trump.

Last year, Klan membership nationwide was between 3,000 and 6,000 but, because of its long and colourful history, it punches well above its weight when it comes to media coverage.

Best estimates suggest only a very few hundred of the thousand or so racists who appeared at the Charlottesville white supremacist rally were actually Klan members, but clever public relations from the likes of the Klan’s former grand wizard David Duke managed to snatch most of the credit for itself.

It is worth remembering that in the past, Duke has offered support and publicity advice to former BNP leader Nick Griffin and various other British racist individuals and groupings.

Shrewd business decisions from early founders ensured that the Klan would always be on a firm financial footing.

In 1921, the second Klan adopted a modern business system of using full-time paid recruiters.

The national headquarters made its profit through a monopoly of costume sales, while the organisers were paid through initiation fees. Many national and local leaders became rich running their local Klan group rather like a franchised hamburger shop.

This second KKK preached “100 per cent Americanism” and demanded the purification of politics, calling for strict morality. Its official rhetoric focused on the threat of the Catholic Church.

It also demonstrated the right-wing attitudes that marked out their other politics. In major southern cities such as Birmingham, Alabama, Klan members kept control of access to the better-paying industrial jobs and opposed the labour unions.

During the ’30s and ’40s, Klan leaders urged members to disrupt the Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO), which advocated industrial unions and accepted African-American members.

Using dynamite and skills from their jobs in mining and steel in the late 1940s some Klan members in Birmingham used bombings to destroy houses in order to intimidate upwardly mobile blacks from moving into middle-class neighbourhoods.

Internal divisions, criminal behaviour by leaders and external opposition brought about a collapse in Klan membership, which had dropped to about 30,000 by 1930. It finally faded away in the ’40s.

In the ’50s and ’60s the Ku Klux Klan name was used by numerous independent local groups opposing the fast growing civil rights movement.

These Klan groupings often forged alliances with southern police departments as in Birmingham, Alabama, or with governor’s offices as with George Wallace of Alabama.

Several members of KKK groups were convicted of murder in the deaths of civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964 and children in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. There are many other examples of both convictions as well as Klan members literally getting away with murder.

I neither know, nor care, if 20-year-old nazi James Field who used his car to murder Heather Heyer and injure 19 other brave anti-fascist demonstrators was a member of the Klan.

His car-based method of attack has become a typical terrorist murder and is just as wrong when carried out by extreme so-called believers in either the Muslim, the Christian or any other faith.

The group of white supremacists who gathered in Charlotteville wore all sorts of uniforms and badges but shared the same obscene philosophy of race hate wrapped in the flag of extreme patriotism.

What I do care about is that they seemed to do it with the blessing of a man who claims to be the leader of the free world — President Trump.

When I first saw Trump winning his presidential candidature last year, I wrote in this paper that I began to understand how Hitler had made it to the top. Every day Trump sits in the Oval Office that comparison gets more and more terrifying.

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