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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Joe Moore
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December 5 - December 8, 2024
Aware of the inevitable organizational security lapses that Moore describes, the Klan has begun to operate through slightly more sanitized groups that camouflage their violent white nationalism in the rhetoric of MAGA and right-wing extremism favored by Donald Trump and his movement. The “far right” of the Klan has begun to merge into the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and countless other groups whose rhetoric and tactics continue to mutate and metastasize. But Moore treats all these moving organizational pieces as essentially interchangeable parts in the overall
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The Dred Scott decision (1857) affirmed the Constitution as a white man’s political compact under which African Americans had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Working as a confidential human source for the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force, I infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan twice within a ten-year period, between 2007 and 2017, and witnessed the seeds being planted for January 6, as well as what those seeds have sown: the nexus for right-wing extremists uniting toward a common goal, which is nothing less than a second civil war.
It’s estimated that somewhere between half and three quarters of all self-identifying Republicans either identify as white nationalists or hold white nationalist beliefs. That means as much as 30 percent of the United States population wants to see the country burn.
In 2022, Congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona (via video) and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene both attended a neo-Nazi convention, called the America First Political Action Committee conference, sponsored by avowed Nazi fanboy Nick Fuentes; Gosar also has two alleged white nationalist sympathizers on his staff. In regard to his apparent support for white nationalists like Fuentes, Senator Tommy Tuberville said in May 2023, “You call them white nationalists. I call them Americans.”
The stated goal since the group’s establishment in the wake of the Civil War has been to overthrow the government and replace it with one of its own making. At times, right-wing nationalist efforts toward that very goal have been as violent as January 6 or as subtle as the passage of bills in the dead of night.
The radical right cares nothing about process, only outcome. They’re not interested in a civil discussion to work out differences, because they are so consumed by ideology that it has hijacked their civility.
Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.
I watched in horror as more and more members of the law-enforcement community came into the fold. And if it was happening in Florida, it was happening nationwide. Prior to Obama being elected, law enforcement had kept their distance, but now their membership in the Klan was an open secret they no longer saw a reason to hide. Pre-November 2008, such law-enforcement officials had nonetheless been vital to the organization’s efforts in providing intelligence and looking the other way at the most opportune times. Now they had moved from the fringes into the center of the movement, resulting in a
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The seeds of what I witnessed as a member of the Traditionalist American Knights had been sown in the elections in 2010, two years after Barack Obama won his first term as president. No fewer than twenty-three right-wing nationalists or white supremacists ran for office that year, and five of them were victorious, a trend that steepened further in the presidential election year of 2012.
An unprecedented membership drive was afoot nationwide. The population ratios were thought to be no different than they had been during the Klan’s heyday in the 1920s: for every member, it was believed the organization had somewhere between five and ten sympathizers or supporters, like my in-laws. They were considered de facto foot soldiers, who would be there if push ever came to shove, which made them vital components of the Invisible Empire.
The Klan took the “Invisible” part seriously. It had never viewed itself as the engine that would overthrow the United States government. Rather, its foot soldiers, comprised of members of these militias united on a nationwide scale, would handle the heavy lifting, allowing the Klan to emerge from the chaos and anarchy to restore much-needed order by imposing its existing infrastructure on an unsuspecting nation. The organization believed itself to be fully capable of moving in to take over the workings of government in a seamless fashion.
“The KKK is for a strong America. White supremacy is the old Klan. This is the new Klan.”
I swore an oath to protect the Constitution—and the Ku Klux Klan presented as great a threat to it as any enemy I had faced overseas.
“A surge in right-wing populism, stemming from the long-unfolding effects of globalization and the movements of capital and labor that it spawned, brought a man many considered to be a racist, misogynist and xenophobe into the most powerful political office in the world,”
During one of his rallies in February 2016, Trump spotted a Black man being led down an aisle to be ejected, to a chorus of boos. “Punch him in the face!” Trump exclaimed, and the boos were replaced by raucous cheers.
The election of the nation’s first Black president had set the stage for its first demonstratively racist president since Andrew Johnson, who had ushered in the post-Reconstruction movement aimed at returning the South to prominence by basically reconstituting the Confederacy in principle.
The fact that the marchers were wearing khaki instead of white robes was all that separated Charlottesville from the kind of rally the Klan had been famous for in years past.
Think of the white nationalist movement, as defined by the Klan, as a three-legged stool. Membership and ideology are obviously the first two things that are required to build the Invisible Empire, but the third runs hand in hand with those: influence, in the form of the clerk at the DMV, the patrol cop, the town manager, and dozens more such positions. The notion of the Invisible Empire required them to perform the kind of quiet work in support of the Klan and like-minded organizations, which saw a massive surge of energy thanks to the tacit, wink-and-a-nod support of the Trump
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The Klan and others now knew they had a friend in the White House, who similarly wanted to turn the clock back to a neo-antebellum period when women were second-class citizens, Blacks weren’t full citizens at all, and the Bill of Rights applied only to a certain class of people. Americans sometimes forget that the notorious Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised Black voters in the post-Civil War era were named for James R. Crowe, a founding member of the KKK back in 1865.
Though the Klan had been decimated thanks to the arrests and the trial, Trump’s 2016 election was allowing for its reconstitution, at least within the militia-style offshoots it had helped spawn and to which many of its former members had fled.
January 6, 2021, wasn’t a failure so much as a dress rehearsal.
In the recipe for a civil war, cold or hot, the corruption of law enforcement in this manner is a prime ingredient and the first step toward the bifurcation of the country.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, the safeguards of our system bent but didn’t break, while the perpetrators may well have learned how to break them next time. It’s easy to make the case that the next civil war the Klan has been steadfastly working toward for more than a century is already underway, at least in the cold sense, where the weapons being wielded are ideas instead of guns.
the many dictating to the more.
Remember, it’s not so much who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.
“When we consume stories about white power, of violence as single events, as a lone wolf attack,” Kathleen Belew, associate professor of History at Northwestern University and author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, told Rachel Maddow on MSNBC two days after the attack, we are consuming them as if they are existing without connection to each other, without an ideological basis. So this is how we get stories about Jacksonville, as something separate from Christchurch, and Pittsburgh, and Buffalo, and Charleston. Many of these attacks have not only shared
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The point being that today’s social and political environment is ripe for those white nationalist signal flares to burst on the scene like fireworks. Having a leader who is perceived as strong rising up against one in power seen as weak is the ideal formula for the overthrow of any system already revealed as being vulnerable.
Perhaps the most dire forecast for what’s to come lies in recent elections held around the world that might well presage an overwhelming authoritarian, quasi-fascist wave spreading.
A Trump victory would portend nothing less than the realization of the original doctrine the KKK established upon its founding in 1865, in which the Invisible Empire would become starkly visible, no longer confined to the shadows in which the movement has lurked for over 150 years.
