This week CNN published information from what it says is a secret recording to frame Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Scott Perry as — what else? — a racist conspiracy theorist. On Wednesday, the network published quotes from what it says was an audio recording of a closed-door meeting on antisemitism wherein Perry notes the Ku Klux Klan was “the military wing of the Democratic Party.”
“The KKK in modern times, a lot of young people think somehow it’s a right-wing organization when it is the military wing of the Democratic Party. Decidedly, unabashedly, racist and antisemitic,” Perry said.
“The KKK is not affiliated in any way with the modern Democratic Party,” CNN added in its “news” article. Perhaps CNN was so eager to absolve the Democrat Party of any relationship to the KKK, which was founded by Democrats, that the network refused to even consider the legitimacy of Perry’s comments.
The hit, based on a supposedly off-the-record meeting between staff and lawmakers, generated hostile coverage against the Republican lawmaker from the New Republic, the Daily Beast, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
If the racist agitators from the 2017 Charlottesville protests had set up antisemitic encampments on college campuses across the country after months of preparations paid for by dark money groups on the far right, the corporate press would be publishing an avalanche of screeds indicting the Republican Party as an infiltrated vehicle of the KKK. While the media will often point to former Klan leader David Duke’s support for Donald Trump as evidence of supposed GOP racism, Richard Spencer, who organized the Charlottesville race riots, endorsed President Joe Biden in 2020.
The Democratic Party includes an increasing number of supporters of antisemitism, which the Klan also promoted more than 150 years ago. The antisemitic protests that broke out after the Oct. 7 Israeli massacre by Palestinian terrorists have featured swastika symbols, which the KKK also embraced. The pro-Palestinian demonstrators are acting like the KKK while using some of the same symbols to terrorize Jewish students and shut down college campuses.
In 2020, USA Today (an official Facebook fact-checker), sought to absolve the Democratic Party of its long history with the KKK in an article titled, “Fact check: Democratic Party did not found the KKK, did not start the Civil War.”
“The KKK was founded by Democrats, but not the party,” USA Today concluded. “We rate the claim that the Democratic Party started the Civil War to preserve slavery and founded the KKK as FALSE because it is not supported by our research.”
Jarrett Stepman, author of “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past,” found the fact-check amusing.
“They came up with all these various caveats – ‘Well, you know, it wasn’t all Democrats; it was only most Democrats in the South,’” Stepman told The Federalist. “I’m thinking, if this was literally any other institution, if this was the name of a street, or if this was a statue, it would have been immediately canceled. It might have even been ripe for being torn down by a mob.”
The House Oversight hearing about Washington D.C.’s response to the current antisemitic demonstrations was canceled Wednesday morning after police cleared a protester encampment at George Washington University. More than 30 people were arrested, according to the Associated Press. More than 2,800 demonstrators have been arrested on college campuses nationwide.
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