In an attempt to to protect the candidate they’ve invested $411,296 into staying bought this election cycle in official campaign contributions alone, CNN (also known as the Clinton News Network) just published one of the most remarkable examples of white supremacist apologist rhetoric outside the ‘dark corners of the Internet’ that Hillary referenced the other day.
Apparently, Donald Trump pointing out that it’s extremely disturbing that supposedly left-leaning Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton regarded a man who rose to the rank of Kleagle (a recruiter of new members) and Grand Cyclops (generally a presider over a local chapter) of the Ku Klux Klan as a close mentor and even attended his funeral, is the stuff of wild hysteria and Alt-right conspiracy. Are CNN claiming the rumours about Byrd aren’t true? Not at all. And that’s the remarkable thing about it. It’s the way they’re framing this figure that’s most unpalatable and hard to swallow.
The section of the article covering West Virginian Senator Robert Byrd reads like something written by a recently released Patty Hearst chronicling the CV of her captors. The authors of this article are revisionist historians par excellence. The excuses fly thick and fast, and I was half expecting them to explain that all the burning crosses were just art installations.
Eugene Scott and Jeremy Diamond make some pretty remarkable leaps of logic. They buy into Byrd’s ‘everyone was in the Klan in West Virginia back then’ defence while they, along with their peers, simultaneously re-evaluate the right of bronze statues and place names to exist under the stringent revisionist history rules of contemporary regressive leftism.
The CNN line is basically that Senator Robert Byrd was involved with the Klan for a while, but then apologised profusely so should somehow be considered less abhorrent than say, an elderly person who mistakenly referred to someone as coloured rather than person of colour or whatever term has superseded it that morning.
It’s quite remarkable really. A free pass to surpass all free passes. The Klan was and is a terror organisation. Byrd was involved in it up to his ears during his twenties and thirties before leaving it in 1943. In all likelihood he was involved in at least a few illegal activities during that time. These people weren’t white power types innocuously venting on P.C.s in a basement somewhere. In those days, white supremacists had to get physical and violent in their intimidation to get their message across. There was no need to fake hate crime hoaxes back then. There was actually real stuff happening. It wasn’t uncommon for the Klan to lynch African Americans or burn down their homes. Quite a bit more genuinely traumatising than seeing Trump 16 chalked on a footpath, or being triggered by a Pepe meme.
To suggest that Senator Robert Byrd, who was the leader of his chapter, did not engage in any violent criminal activity, is as ridiculous as suggesting that the leader of an outlaw motorcycle gang has never engaged in any criminal activity. It isn’t outside the realm of possibility that BLM-friendly Hillary was mentored by a man who was involved directly or by association with lynchings, rape, arson, and other acts of intimidation against the no doubt terrified African American community of West Virginia.
CNN’s big piece of validation is that Byrd left the Klan in 1943. Big deal. That is no proof of remorse or rehabilitation. Thousands of Nazis burned their uniforms as soon as everything went to hell for them. It didn’t mean they changed their ideology like flicking a switch. My father was in Rotary for years, then quit. It didn’t mean that he no longer believed in charity, merely that things like family and work left little time for Rotary, so he left.
Byrd may have quit in 1943, yet wrote a letter to the Grand Wizard in 1946 stating that, “The Klan is needed today as never before, and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia.”
Over twenty years after his resignation in 1964, Senator Robert Byrd did everything in his power to keep ‘those blacks from getting too uppity’ by using his power to impede the immensely important Civil Rights Act of 1964 as much as he possibly could. Clearly Byrd’s resignation and later grovelling apologies were more about self-preservation and his burgeoning political career than any kind of self-reflection and soul searching.
You can take the Democrat out of the KKK, but you can never take the spectre of the Klan out of the Democrats who founded them. But for CNN, it’s all water under the bridge. Imagine if they argued that a 17-year-old who guarded prisoners at Dachau was just a reflection of the culture of the time and should be forgiven and absolved of all criminal and career ramifications because he said he was sorry a couple of times, is a good Democrat, and supports open borders and Islamisation of the West (come to think of it, that’s remarkably close to George Soros’ bio and how the mainstream media regard him).
CNN and others in the mainstream media demand that Trump withdraw from the race every time he says something slightly off-colour. Imagine for a moment the outrage if he had even the most tenuous link to a highly-ranked member of the most infamous race-hate group in the history of the United States, let alone been close to them, attended their funeral, and spoke fondly of them. Even for the Teflon coated Donald, this would be incredibly damaging. The media would mercilessly hound him not only out of the Presidential race, but possibly into hiding for a very long time.
This article from CNN is perhaps the clearest distillation yet of the partisan approach of the media in regard to the 2016 race to the White House. Trump bragged early on that he could shoot somebody in the street without losing a single vote from his base. Clinton could well brag that she could openly align herself with a KKK Grand Cyclops without fear of a negative story from the mainstream press. During her Alt-Right address, Hillary said that ‘you will know someone by who they walk with’. In Clinton’s case, if she wins in November, that should make her the new Grand Wizard!
Photo by Nrbelex