Steve and Barr also launched poison squads, as they were known on the inside. This was a disinformation brigade—clucks and gossips, but the best-known clucks and gossips in every community, so that false stories could be plausibly true. The fake news originated at the top and was planted at the bottom. It might be a whispered suggestion over a neighbor’s fence that a Black family was planning to move nearby. Or that a public servant was a Jew. The Klan prided itself on how quickly it could spread a lie: from a kitchen table to the whole state in six hours or less. The poison served a
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