Let’s talk about the Ku Klux Klan. Or rather, let’s talk about the Ku Klux Klan(s), because at this point, there are dozens of them, a motley heap of warring splinter groups who these days seem mainly occupied with bickering with one another, accusing each other of being FBI agents (as many probably are), and holding the occasional picnic.
The Southern Poverty Law Center writes that there are an estimated 5,000 to 8,000 Klan members left, and that the movement “has been greatly weakened by internal conflicts, court cases, a seemingly endless series of splits and government infiltration.” This week, one of those splinter groups has been making some news: Montana’s Rocky Mountain Knights, led by a guy named John Abarr, who’s claiming he wants to recruit black, Jewish and gay members, and who met last year with the NAACP, a meeting by all accounts wasn’t particularly productive.
Abarr’s claim that he wants to recruit what he calls “non-traditional” Klan members has predictably grabbed a ton of headlines. But it’s both a. total nonsense and b. nothing new.
Klan groups claim they’re “open to everyone” all the time, because it’s a great way to get publicity. As the SPLC puts it, “While some factions have preserved an openly racist and militant approach, others have tried to enter the mainstream, cloaking their racism as mere ‘civil rights for whites.'”
That’s what British journalist Jon Ronson discovered when he went to visit Thomas Robb in 2002. Robb, who at that time had an enormous compound in Arkansas’ Ozark Mountains, is another Klan leader, a director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which he took over in the 1980s from the far more infamous David Duke. For years, Robb too went around saying he wanted, in Ronson’s words, a “kinder, gentler Klan.” From the KKK chapter in Ronson’s amazing book Them: Adventures with Extremists:
Thom Robb wanted to fit in. He wanted to slide into the mainstream. He wanted his own TV show, he said, with jokes and music, like David Letterman, or Regis and Kelly with him as Regis and his daughter Rachel as Kelly.
That was his number one plan. But first he had to teach his members to stop saying “nigger” when they were in public.
Robb renamed the Knights of the Ku Klax Klan the Knights Party, according to the SPLC, in another unsuccessful bid to appear more mainstream. When that didn’t work, he started partnering with some newer, harder line neo-Nazi groups. So much for a kinder, more inclusive Klan.
As for John Abarr, the guy who’s making all the news for his purported recruitment drive this week, this is just the latest in his endless bids for attention: before the NAACP meeting in 2013, he made an abortive run for Congress in 2011 on a platform of legalizing marijuana and “saving the white race.”
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