The MAGA movement’s KKK revisionism is revealing

Ku Klux Klan denialism is in vogue for the MAGA movement these days.

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As the GOP uses Jim Crow-like racial profiling and voter suppression tactics such as gerrymandering, some Republicans are engaged in a campaign of obfuscation and misinformation to downplay allegations of racism.

And it increasingly seems that some of President Donald Trump’s supporters want to use falsehoods about the KKK to advance their goals.

Last week’s fact-free diatribe from Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., about the KKK supposedly being a leftist organization is a prime example. As I recently wrote, Republicans have used the Justice Department’s dubious indictment of the anti-racist Southern Poverty Law Center to falsely portray racist extremism, which the SPLC tracks and investigates, as either nonexistent or a liberal contrivance. This tactic mirrors rhetoric deployed by conservatives who sought to deny the threat of the KKK during its rise, or even its mere existence.

The aforementioned falsehoods about the SPLC were the subject of an exchange Hageman had with conservative podcaster Winston Marshall in which she made the demonstrably false claim that the KKK, Nazis and the Aryan Nation are “far-left organizations” and “always have been.”

Hageman told Marshall:

The Aryan Nation, the Nazis and the KKK are not far-right organizations. Those are far-left organizations, and they always have been. The KKK was created and started by the Democrats in the United States to prevent Blacks from being able to participate in the political arena, if you will. So I’m going to say they’ve never been associated with the right; they’ve always been associated with the left.

This is the kind of derangement that would make a reputable historian weep.