Alabama Newspaper Editor Nostalgic For The Good Ol' KKKs

Just a nice old codger with a printing press and a lot of evil ideas.

Just in case you needed more proof the simulation we live in is not being programmed by the most creative folks available, last week a small-town newspaper in Alabama, the Linden Democrat-Reporter, ran an editorial calling for the "Ku Klux Klan to night ride again" and do something about all the rich elitists, Democrats, and "Democrats in the Republican Party" who want to raise taxes in Alabama. And the paper's 80-year-old editor-owner is named "Goodloe Sutton."

Come on, couldn't our metafictional overlords at least deliver us something that isn't straight out of an Aaron Sorkin script? (Dear Crom, what if Sorkin IS writing our simulation? No, can't be him -- too many powerful women who won't defer to the wisdom of charismatic white men. Whew.) You want additional proof that someone's making this all up? Linden, Alabama, is the hometown of civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy, who took up the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Jeez, why not include a highliter with every story, won't you?

The astonishing throwback was published February 14, but blowed up online after editors of Auburn University's student-run paper called attention to it Monday and the Montgomery Advertiser   ran a story about it, complete with additional hole-digging by Sutton, who really seems to enjoy the attention.

The Democrat-Reporter appears to have no online presence at all, so the Advertiser helpfully includes a copy of Sutton's editorial in all its insane racist glory. We're frankly impressed to see that where some old racist idiots might stop with one awful statement, Sutton manages to fill several paragraphs with completely wrong history and then accuses others of appealing to "the ignorant, the uneducated, and the simple-minded people."

That there is some Authentic Southern Rightwing Gibberish. We are impressed by this Good 'loe Boy's fascinating and complete wrongness, and his call for the KKK to "night ride" again is just for starters! There's also his fanciful re-imagining of the origins of the KKK, which you will not find in any history book we know of:

Slaves, just freed after the civil war, were not stupid. At times, they borrowed their former masters' robes and horses and rode through the night to frighten some evil doer. Sometimes they had to kill one or two of them, but so what.

Is this some crazy Lost Cause trope we'd never encountered before? The Klan took its costume (and its violence) from freed slaves? There's enough pure bullshit mythology out there about the Civil War and Reconstruction that almost anything seems possible, but we've never yet seen that one. (Also, in case you were wondering, the notion that the Reconstruction-era KKK wore robes and pointy hats was largely an invention of D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation;   the Klan of the 1920s and later pretty much based its costumes on that fiction. Real history is cool.)

Oh, but look at that next paragraph, too! As any good Republican knows, the Democrats did All The Wars:

This is the same so what used when Democrats got us into World War I and World War II. Then they got us fighting in Korea. Next when the industrial north-east wanted more money, they got us in the Vietnam war, and now into the Middle East war.

And yes, that's a real, if wholly fictional, belief too. Sure, Pearl Harbor happened, but Franklin Roosevelt maneuvered Japan into attacking, don't you see? Him and the "industrial north-east" -- or perhaps that should be the (((industrial north-east))) -- who have plotted all US wars since the War of Northern Aggression. Makes sense you'd want to send the Klan after Them. And don't you go quibbling about how George W. Bush sent US troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, either. Sutton already condemned all those "Democrats in the Republican Party."

Sutton expounded on his editorial in an interview with the Advertiser , too. He explained he doesn't think the KKK is a "racist and violent organization," because they're really a lot like the NAACP, don't you see?

"A violent organization? Well, they didn't kill but a few people," Sutton said. "The Klan wasn't violent until they needed to be."

And just what did he have in mind with his call for the Klan to take up "night riding" again, only now in Washington DC? Duh, he means lynching, silly, and it's OK because any fool knows lynching is necessary sometimes:

"We'll get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them," Sutton said.

When asked if he felt it was appropriate for the publisher of a newspaper to call for the lynching of Americans, Sutton doubled down on his position.

"... It's not calling for the lynchings of Americans. These are socialist-communists we're talking about. Do you know what socialism and communism is?" Sutton said.

See? This would be the same guy who insisted there are too many people who simply "do not understand the constitution." The big dummies.

In conclusion, we would rather live in a much better, believable show, like maybe "Veep," thank you.

[ Montgomery Advertiser / The Nation ]

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