If you’ve spent much time online, you’ve probably seen a Republican claim that the KKK were Democrats. It’s a clever oversimplification that furthers the Republican party’s most popular defense: “I know you are but what am I?” — aka, the Peewee Herman Defense.
This deception works because it is technically true: At the time of the KKK’s founding (1865), and up until around 1968, KKK members were Democrats — over 100 years. Then, Richard Nixon and his advisors decided that to beat the Democrats, they would make a sharp right turn into white supremacy and authoritarianism. First, they devised the Southern Strategy. The plan was to dog-whistle white supremacy, without saying anything overt. That is still the policy of the Republican party today, though Donald Trump tends to say the quiet part out loud. By 1980, there were no KKK members who were Democrats — they had all switched to the Republican party.
One easy way to defuse this insincere argument is to simply ask, “And what party do the KKK belong to now?”
The other thing the Nixon adminstration did was to start the War on Drugs in 1970 — which was intended as a war against Black people and the left.
“You want to know what this was really all about?” Ehrlichman asked, referring to the war on drugs.
Top Nixon adviser reveals the racist reason he started the ‘war on drugs’ decades ago by Alex Lockie, Business Insider
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.”
“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did,” he concluded, according to Baum.
It’s not that Black people and leftists were using more drugs. Rather, the government could use selective enforcement to turn the law into a weapon. Selective enforcement is when you create a law that applies to everyone, but then you almost exclusively enforce it against a group of people you don’t like. Conservatives are big fans of selective enforcement, and that is why they are terrified that selective enforcement might be used against them — for example, with the creation of new gun laws. It’s the inverse of the Peewee Herman Defense — accusing their opponents of what they themselves are doing, or have explicitly expressed that they plan to do.