I know that – from time to time – folks buy out the rights to brand names of long defunct products: “Sanka” coffee or “Quisp” cereal or “PanAm” and whatnot. As there’s a certain brand familiarity, it can be a short cut to market positions.
Yet I don’t think this is really where this sort of brand equity applies.
I think the right comparison here is Not See Cola.
I was told once upon a time that the Klan was originally a social club founded by former Confederate leaders, although I have no source for this, and it might have just been an attempt to cover for a family member who was supposedly a founder. How a social club became such a loathsome organization was never really explained.
If that story is true, though, I guess in a way it’s the Klan returning to its roots–although a hundred and fifty years ago even the friendliest social club wouldn’t have had such an open membership policy.
I don’t imagine this New Klan will catch on.
Well my first reaction to this story was kind of “but this is completely against the KKK’s mission statement, so how can this be a chapter of the KKK?”
So I googled the Klan to find out about their mission statement.
Turns out, there are three distinct incarnations of the KKK covering three time periods.
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), or just the Klan, is the name of three distinct movements in the United States. They first played a violent role against African Americans in the South during the Reconstruction Era of the 1860s. The second was a very large controversial nationwide organization in the 1920s. The current manifestation consists of numerous small unconnected groups that use the KKK name.
So it looks like now days the KKK can be pretty much whatever the hell you want it to be, because there’s nobody driving that train.
Just wait until the Provisional Militant Wing of Toastmasters engages in a renegade bombing campaign in the US Southwest in the late 2040s, it won’t seem so innocent then.
Here’s a phrase you probably won’t hear again:
Bradley Jenkins, Imperial Wizard of the KKK, said: “That man’s going against everything the bylaws of the constitution of the KKK say. He’s trying to hide behind the KKK to further his political career.”
This story is weird to me on so many levels.
Isn’t a tolerant KKK organization just a book club?
Toastmasters. Eh, they’re all talk.
-blink-
-blink-
My word.
You see, it turns out that the Klan is really about ethics in games journalism.
#notallklansmen
Yes, it’s your Friendly, Liberal, Neighborhood ku klux klan! (Wonderful song from the late '60s)
If memory serves the KKK and similar groups grew largely out of the Know Nothing movement, politically speaking. They just grafted on the features of social clubs/secret societies like the Masons.
If you watch the fictional version of the Klans birth in D.W. Griffith’s 1915 movie “The Birth Of A Nation” it will fill in the blanks for you.
Griffin showed Negro militias taking the guns from whites, stealing elections by frightening whites away from the polls and stuffing the ballot box, leering at white women, and refusing to work because they can get government relief. Mulatto politicians are elected under the guidance of radical white leftist puppetmasters, and whites struggle under the iron heel of reverse racism. Towards the end, white people are being rounded up and hauled away in wagons while some brave whites barricade themselves in a bunker-like log cabin.
What I’m saying is that if you want to understand the Klan, just watch Fox News for a couple hours and they will cover all the familiar Klan themes for you. It hasn’t changed a bit.
KKK. For the discriminating individual.
Mr. Show predicted this:
Australian trouble-making personality John Safran (whose background is jewish) visited the klan and asked if he could join. At the time the answer was no, even though he made the case that he’s whiter than hitler. Classic.
Don’t forget the KKK was pro-temperance, wildly anti-Catholic, and anti-immigrant.
