Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Grifters Who Resurrected the KKK

Episode Date: January 24, 2019

In Part Two on the Ku Klux Klan, Robert is joined by Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston to discuss how The KKK became a multi-level marketing scheme. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, I'm Robert Evans, and this is Yet Again Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. Now today, we are on part two of our series on the KKK. Okay, part two, part two. My guest with me as with part one, Katie and Cody. Hello. The stuff news, how much network of? That's the one. That's the one. Here we are.

So, how are you guys doing still? Still got a cold. Still good. I'm still doing well. Still happy. It's two days after you heard our last episode, but it's just minutes after we recorded the last one. But in those minutes, we've grabbed us a Dorito or three. There are so many Doritos in here, and they are interesting. They're delicious, I mean. How do you guys like the Tapatio ones? That's spicier than I expected, because that's spicier than Tapatio is. Yeah, I like it a lot. It's got a real kick, if that's what you're looking for. Tapatio is my go-to sauce. I like it crystals. I grew up with crystals, hot sauce. You know who would not have liked Tapatito Doritos? KKK. I was hoping that was a seamless transition to the KKK.

Well, then we should keep talking about Tapatito. I was hoping for another reason to not like the KKK. So, in part one, we talked about the original clan, which was a terrorist organization that started as a bunch of drunk frat boys pretending to be ghosts, and turned into a murder gang, headed by a former rebel general. Funny how that works. Part two, we're going to talk about the rise of the KKK in the 1920s, which was an order of magnitude larger than it was in the 1860s, and a hell of a lot weirder. This is not going to go where you think it's going to go. This is a weird story. You keep saying that. A hell of a lot weirder, and it's hard to imagine.

Super excited. Because it's already weird. It's already weird. Our grand mag eyes and our, you know, queens. No, there's no queens. There's definitely no queens in the KKK. No. Imperial emperor. There are some King Klegels in this one.

I don't know what a Klegel is. I do. It has to do with. It's a racist eagle. They're racist. The Grand Kegels. The Grand Kegels came later. We're not part of the clan. They did come later.

That was a movement I support. That was very good, Cody. That was very witty. Wowee. We're going to check out for the rest of the episode. You know what? Just dial tone for the rest. If you guys got your dose of comedy.

You guys want to go get a drink? Thanks for stopping by. All right. Here's the episode. In 1919, a pamphlet started circulating amongst the townships and villages of the American countryside. On its front was a drawing of a Klansman on a rearing steed. The title was The Ku Klux Klan. Yesterday, Today, and Forever. The flyer's purpose was to announce the glorious rebirth of the KKK.

It opened up by defending the first clan. The Ku Klux Klan, the Invisible Empire, was the great idea, that's capitalized, of American reconstruction. We say American reconstruction for the reason that all America was affected by reconstruction influences. It actually says influences. I guess that's a spelling error. What were the racists? Is this what the president models his tweets after? I was going to say like the capitalizing words and like getting some words wrong.

The South, most of all, yes, but nevertheless, all, all is capitalized. For the great threat, great threat is capitalized. To the white race that loomed on the horizon of the South would have spread through the entire nation, had not the white robe of the Ku Klux Klan kept unrevealed those courageous and devoted hearts that were consecrated to saving the Anglo-Saxon civilization of our country, protecting the homes and well-being of our people, and shielding the virtue of womenhood. The original Ku Klux were not outlaws, all-caps, or moral degenerates, all-caps, nor did they perpetuate outlawry, which is a great word we don't use enough.

I really like outlawry. This is the Klan and they're terrible, but I really like it. We can reclaim it. They were men of moral and social standing, and their leaders were men of sterling character and unquestioned culture. They reverently bowed to the soul of real law, all-caps, and swore to enforce its principles of justice, protection, and the pursuit of happiness. Their strong arm fought valiantly for the preservation of the integrity of the race against the cruelty of base, unjust, and tyrannical legislations and insufferable conditions.

No joke, I feel like that's formative literature for Trump. He grew up reading this. He's definitely got some better words in there. I think his dad lied. There's rumors that he was in the Klan during that story. See? They've got drafts of these things laying around the Trump household when he was a kid. I love they got the moral degeneracy in there. I was waiting for that.

Although, I gotta promise, this is not going to go where you're thinking. Now, I read a book for this episode 2, the second coming of the KKK by Linda Gordon. I want to advocate reading both of the books for this podcast because they're both good, but Linda Gordon's book is really special. It is almost unbelievably dense. Rarely in my life encountered so much information from so many different sources consolidated into a single book of this size. I'm just kind of in awe of the amount of work she must have put into it and how it's really good.

We're only using fractions of it for this episode, but it is a fantastic book. So, I really recommend giving it a read if you're interested in the history of American radical right-wing extremism. Now, this book claims that the second KKK's rise was directly inspired by the release of a movie, Birth of a Nation, in 1915. Birth of a Nation was a fanciful story about the first KKK and how they saved white women from Ray Papi Freedman. It was the first film ever shown at the White House. Woodrow Wilson fucking loved it, saying, quote, It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.

Maybe America's worst present if you're getting this guy's opinion on it. What with the whole Nazism and that thing that he just said. What with a lot of things. William Joseph Simmons, a doctor from Atlanta, a Spanish American war veteran and minister, was a huge fan of the movie. When he got back from serving garrison duty during the war, he drifted around a number of jobs, showing no aptitude for anything and joined 15 different fraternal orders. Now today frats are just something that a chunk of college kids do,

but back in the day there was very little going on and most men were in a fraternal order of some type. Many were in multiple. It was an extremely popular way to have something to do and feel like part of a community. Communities important. Very important. Simmons was desperate for a community, but none of the groups he joined fit the bill. He was a fan of Birth of a Nation and he'd been inspired by the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish man falsely accused of rape and murder. None of them fit the bill. They weren't quite evil enough.

Inspired by the lynching of. Really a bad term? Boy, that lynching really inspired me. What about it? Simmons started reading about the original clan. He bought a copy of the original KKK pre-script, mixed in a little bit of Masonism, and tried to start up his own fraternal order, essentially cosplaying as the Ku Klux Klan. Simmons' KKK was just as racist as the original, but was also differently bigoted.

It ranted against, quote, the hairy claw of Bolshevism, socialism, syndicalism, IWWism, and other isms. IWW is the international workers of the world, a very influential group of unions. Yeah. He believed that these forces were, quote, seeking in an insidious but very powerful manner to undermine the very fundamentals of the nation. Yeah. First letter of nation's capitalists.

Oh, yeah. We're getting into the good stuff. Yeah, I knew this was going to be right into the vein for you. So when the KKK had last written, socialism had not really been a buzzword in America. Marx and Engels had only published the Communist Manifesto in, like, 1848, and shit traveled slowly back then. Social Democratic parties were starting to become a thing in Europe by the late 1860s, but most of the U.S. was off doing its own thing. The assassination of William McKinley by a Polish-American anarchist in 1901

really helped to pour gas on that whole fire. Simmons started advertising for KKK too, this time it's Claymere. In 1915, he described... Fully reloaded. Yeah, fully reloaded. Or electric boo-glu. You know, you pick your own sequel title. KKK Harder, you know, whatever.

There's options. In his promotional materials, he described it as, quote, a classy order of the highest class capitalized... No... Classy order of the highest class? Man. No rough necks, rowdies, nor yellow streaks, real men whose oaths are inviolate are needed. His oaths are inviolate?

Inviolate. Inviolate. Yeah, they're not gonna break their oaths. Classy, man, of a higher class. Very good class. Very classy. Classiest men. It was not exactly an instant hit.

Only a few dozen people signed up at first. Simmons went out of his way to find a few very old former clansmen to join. He proclaimed himself the Imperial Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and started holding meetings. Now, unlike the original clan, they didn't start off doing anything out in the world. This was just a place where grown men went to engage in weird-ass quasi-magical rituals with other masked men. It was LARPing. LARPing as the KKK. Who were themselves LARPers?

Getting really deep in here. It's getting really... Very mad up. Yeah, circle, circle, circle, circle, circles inside of circles. Exactly. Now, in order to codify some of these rituals and establish standards for his new organization, Simmons published the KKK's holy book in 1915. You guys want to guess what it was called?

The... Clannomicon. The tome of the Martian demon. Clanronomy. Hobgoblin. What is it? The Chloran. The Chloran.

What? Mine was closer. You knew the wire? That's real. That's so bad. It's amazing. You can find the whole Chloran online. It's...

Beyond parody. I know. It is beyond parody. Everything about this episode is beyond parody. I can't tell you how excited I am. He's literally jumping out of his head as he said that. Now, again, you can read it for yourself if you decide that is an experience that will spark joy in your life. It is online.

I'll put the link in the thing. It's all there. Now, the Chloran promises education in character spelled with a K and no H. Honor and duty. Not spelling, though. Definitely not spelling. Never been one of the KKK's strong points. To give you some info on the organization's founding principles,

I would like to read y'all the Ku Klux Creed. The spell with a K? Yeah, of course. Of course, it's spelled with a fucking K. We, the Order of the Knights of the Ku Klux Clan, reverentially acknowledge the majesty and supremacy of the divine being and recognize the goodness and providence of the same. We recognize our relation to the government of the United States of America,

the supremacy of its constitution, the union of states thereunder, and the constitutional laws thereof, and we shall ever be ever devoted to the sublime principles of a pure Americanism and valiant to the defense of its ideals and institutions. We avow the distinction between the races of mankind as same has been decreed by the creator, and we shall ever be true to the faithful maintenance of white supremacy and will strenuously oppose any compromise thereof in any and all things.

Decreed by the creator. Decreed by the creator. Citation needed. One of the things that is pointed out in the fantastic Linda Gordon book, the second coming of the KKK, is that this was not radical at the time. The KKK was speaking very much to the majority of white Americans, and that is very important for everything that comes next. The ideology of this group is not fringe in any way, shape, or form.

They are preaching to the choir. They are not radicalizing people, and that's critical. No one's getting radicalized here. Everyone's a white supremacist? Well, I'm gonna start a white supremacy group! Now, about two-thirds of the Cloran is made up of incredibly dense, utterly preposterous ceremonies. We're going to read a quick and random excerpt from the clan's naturalization ritual, a.k.a. their induction of new members,

so you can have an understanding of the special tenor of this nigh-unreadable tone. Cody, you look so excited! I'm ready! I'm gonna read all the titles! So, starting off, we have the clad speaking. With a K? With a K. Yeah, K-L-A-D-D. Were the aliens from the world of selfishness and fraternal alienation prompted by unselfish motive desire the honor of citizenship

in the invisible empire and the fellowship of clansmen? To which the claxter responds, has your party been selected with care? To which the clad responds, these men are known or vouched for by clansmen, in Clonclave Assemble. The two Ks in Clonclave? The claxter responds,

have they the marks? The clad asks, or says, the distinguishing marks of a clansman are not found in the fiber of his garments or his social or financial standing, but are spiritual, namely a chivalric head, a compassionate heart, a prudent tongue, and a courageous will, all devoted to our country, our clan, our homes, and each other. These are the distinguishing marks of a clansman.

Oh, faithful claxter! And these men claim the marks. The claxter next says, what if one of your parties should prove himself a traitor? To which the clad says, he would be immediately banished and disgraced from the invisible empire However, conscience would tenaciously torment him, remorse would repeatedly revile him,

and direful things would befall him. The claxter asks, do they know all this? The clad says, all this they now know, they have heard and they must heed. Claxter says, faithful clad, you speak the truth. Gonna be a lot of Ks. Gonna be a lot of Ks going on. Bunch of dorks.

Bunch of real dorks. It's not even that racist. Like, there's a little bit about white supremacy in there, where it's mostly just really dense, nonsense rituals. And then you sprinkle in a little bit of dash of racism here and there, like you do with cilantro. Just get him salivating a little bit. Now, the first two-thirds or so of the Claran

are made up of frustrating, stupid rituals, how you open and close meetings, etc. Then at the end of the book, Simmons wrote a lecture. It reads like a particularly bad D&D source book written by a racist. Here's him describing the South prior to the rise of the first clan. Ignorance, lust, and hate all capitalized, seize the reins of the state capitalized, and riot, rapine, and universal ruin reign supreme.

The highest form of cultured society was thrust down, and its noble neck was forced under the iron heel of pernicious passion, who yielded a potent scepter of inquisitorial oppression, and the very blood of the Caucasian race was seriously threatened with everlasting contamination. I would have been a pretty good clan leader back in the day. You really would have. I got that voice down. I know it.

Don't explore that too much. Let's go down that path. Spoiler alert, but we're about to get to an Evans. Oh. Really prominently here. An important thing to realize about the 1920s clan is that while they were racist, they were first and foremost a social order.

Their meetings probably weren't any more racist than the average Masonic meeting at the time. We have minutes from a lot of individual Clavern meetings. Individual groups are called a Clavern. Because they were so cool. Linda Gordon points out that many of them never even brought up racial subjects other than in passing.

The second clan was racist, but not more racist than mainstream society. It didn't stand out. Simmons ran the clan for five years, and as with every other endeavor in his life, he was bad at it. During his reign, the group had only one public outing, a march at a veteran's parade that included 20 black men he paid to put on robes

in order to pad out his numbers. Wow. Whatever you do, do not take this off. Do not take this off. Yes. But there's a point like it's not the racism isn't the focus, because he's clearly like, well, I just want us to look big.

Right. I want my club to be cool. I want everyone to show up to my cool club. That's very cool. So he did make enough money to buy Baptist Lanier University in Atlanta because it was heavily in debt, and he tried to turn it into a whites-only university for racists. 25 people enrolled,

and it went bankrupt. So Simmons was forced to go looking for help. So Simmons don't bankrupt the KKK's in severe debt. He's got to go find help, and he found it when he met two veterans of the fairly new PR industry, Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young-Clark.

They ran a publicity agency that had already helped the Anti-Saloon League on its rise to prominence. Clark's dad had been a confederate colonel and owned the Atlanta Constitution, an influential newspaper. Elizabeth was his wife. She'd grown up poor and married at 15, and if you ignore the whole helping to found

girl, she's a pretty inspiring feminist story. It's hard to ignore that other part. It's really hard to ignore the clan part. Here's the second coming of the KKK. Quote, The team saw a lucrative client in Simmons's new clan group. The minute we said Ku Klux, Tyler recalled, editors from all

over the United States began literally pressing us for publicity. By 1920, she and Clark had convinced Simmons that they could grow his new clan, that it had national potential. To realize that potential, it had to multiply its bigotry. The alleged threat from black people would not reverberate among northerners at a time when so few

African Americans lived outside the southeast, so Simmons hired them, signing a contract that gave Clark and Tyler an astonishing 80% of any revenue they brought in from new recruits. Since Simmons had got nowhere with his new organization, he undoubtedly thought that he had nothing to lose in giving them four-fifths of anything they could bring in. Tyler

and Clark became, in practice, head of the clan for two years. Now, they turned Simmons into a polished speaker. In gendering and exploiting fear, he would warn that generative forces were destroying the American way of life. These were not only black people, but also Jews, Catholics, and immigrants, the big city dwellers who were tempting

Americans with immoral pleasures, sex, alcohol, and music, notably jazz. Interesting choice of music there. Interesting choice of music. We're almost to the big reveal. Very excited. Like the original clan, the second KKK used newspapers to

stoke the buzz around their organization. Simmons would give exclusive interviews where he would come across as super suave and cool, and the clan's membership would grow. Newspapers ran advertisements that included KKK application forms. Press releases ran like rain on front pages of the nation.

By the summer of 1921, the new KKK reported a membership of 850,000. Now, this is almost certainly an exaggeration, but the real number was surely in the hundreds of thousands. Incredible growth over roughly a year of PR blitzes. And this is where it gets fun.

This is a sort of splits. One half is the tale of the various assaults and murders and attempted political coups by clansmen over the next several years. And the other story, the bigger story, is the tale of the clan's true purpose. It was an MLM, a multi-level marketing scheme. It was a pyramid scheme.

The KKK, the second KKK, it was a motherfucking pyramid scheme. This is a twist. I'm so excited. I love it. I was waiting for you to literally read a headline, it's like a dapper KKK. There's a shitload of those.

I bet. Yeah. Now, we're going to talk about how the clan became a pyramid scheme. But first, we're going to talk about some things that are legitimate products and services. The products and services that advertise on this show and or content platform.

I did it by Doritos. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season we'll take you inside an undercover

investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then he was sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. There was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country, the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic

and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put

forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all

bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! We just had a handful of Tapatio Doritos

which are spicing our way through this tale of racism and profiting off of racism. Grifting racist? What? Excuse me. MLMs in the far right? I am appalled.

I'm surprised and I'm going to leave right now because I'm so surprised. I've had a great Harvard paper called Hatred and Prophets Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan. I'm going to quote from that now. The organizational structure of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, designed by the Propagation

Department, was a hybrid that combined features of other fraternal orders with a multi-level marketing firm, with two distinct sets of reporting hierarchies that operated more or less independently. One hierarchy was made up of the Klan's members from the lowliest rank and file of the highest leadership. This hierarchy corresponds to

the social club aspect of the Klan, the arm that intimidated blacks and foreigners and attempted to influence political outcomes. In addition, however, there was a nearly invisible parallel hierarchy of Klan recruiters organized like a modern multi-level marketing firm, which represents the financial arm of the Klan. This highly incentivized

sales force was responsible for recruiting new members to the Klan and almost all of the financial rewards accrued to either the handful of top leaders or the individuals in this auxiliary hierarchy. It was a money-making scheme made up by PR hacks. This is fascinating. Yeah, it's fucking wild, right?

I have so many emotions. Some of them conflict with each other. This is amazing. It's a great scam. It's an objectively great scam. An effective scam. Take note.

Clark and Tyler, the PR agents who made the KKK great again, brought in more than $850,000 in their first 15 months. That is roughly $10 million and modern money in slightly over a year. Now, Simmons got a much smaller cut of this, but he still got rich. They even

gave him a 25 grand bonus, which was $10,000. Good for him. He really put in the work. It was like six years, you know? He designed the paper. Now, this money came from a variety of places, which I will get to in a second, but it's important to know that Simmons, Clark, and Tyler

were all pushed out by like 1922. Simmons was bought out and another new guy named Hiram Evans was made the Imperial Wizard. He'd been hired as a recruiter initially, but once he was the Imperial Wizard, he was able to fire Clark and Tyler, which he did. And then, the second KKK off the ground

weren't around for most of what happens next, but they set all of this into motion and they got rich off of it. The KKK would have died with Simmons indebted and disgraced, but that is distinctly not what happened. These two PR wonderkins had created an incredible profit-making model, one that would act

as a cash spigot for a bunch of greedy racists and con millions of Americans in the process. Taylor's oldest time. Taylor's oldest time. First off, here's how the clan was organized. This is from that Harvard paper. The Grand Wizard, or Emperor, served as the nominal chair of the body, with the Imperial Wizard acting as the chief executive and aided by a 15-member imperial consilium. The Clorago, a tin man inner guard.

The Clexter, the outer guard. The Clonsil, general counsel. The Nighthawk, courier. And the Fora Clocan, auditors. These individuals were responsible for keeping the clan's books, providing in-house legal advice and serving as a clan cabinet. Did you like...

Absolute bananas. Plug racism into a random letter generator and just like... What? Some of those aren't even based off of real words. What's a clan graph? What the... Clalif okay?

What the fuck is a clod? Or the... I'm still stuck on the Clebe. The Clebe! I'm also ashamed to share an initial with this. Kay's been ruined for me. You only got one K though.

You only got one K. If you were the KKK, you'd have like a shitload of Ks. Right. Clady Cole. Clady Cole. Yeah. No, that's... Still one shy. And I don't even want to go down that path anymore.

Back to the story. The clan's worldwide operations were split up into several realms, one for each state, each run by a grand dragon. Why did they call them states? Why did they call them states? I don't know man. At the bottom of the organization were the ghouls,

organized into clavrons which were headed by exalted cyclopses. This is nuts. This is nuts. Why would you say exalted cyclops? Why would you say ghouls? Those are the ghouls. Exalted cyclops? Exalted cyclops has a clavron, yeah.

A clavron. They know. Noems. Why would you just say, you were ghouls. Where are the ghouls? Ghouls make up a clavin. Ghouls make up a clavin. They're the rank and file of the clansmen.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And they're headed by a grand cyclops. This is absolutely more than I ever wanted to know. Exalted cyclops, sorry. These are like, gotta get that right. Two of these things I'm never gonna forget, and I'm not happy about it. No, it's stuck there forever now.

If you think about the KKK as a political or militant organization, outside of the silly names, this structure makes sense. But once you understand the financial dimensions, well it becomes very clearly a pyramid scheme. Quote. Yeah, it was. It was a racist pyramid scheme.

And I'm sorry, the dry cleaning was that for the... For the... For the... For the... For the... For the... For the...

For the... For the... For the... For the... And I'm sorry, the dry cleaning was that for the robes? For the robes, yeah. You gotta keep those white robes clean. You ever worn a white robe, Katie?

I haven't. I can make some assumptions about it, though. The problems that come from wearing a white robe. You drink a coffee once. You drink a coffee once, you bloody up somebody once. It shows everything. It shows everything. Were the swords branded?

Yeah, of course. They were branded swords, Cody! Thank you! This foolish question, I apologize. The goblin hires a King Klegel who hires a bunch of Klegels, the regular grunt sales force of the endeavor. They made $4 off of each membership. The remaining $3.50 was sent up the recruiting structure

with the person in charge of sales in the state, the King Klegel getting $1. The regional sales overseer, a great goblin, got $0.50. The national sales overseer, an imperial Klegel, got $1.25. And the two most powerful men in the clan, the Imperial Wizard and the Grand Wizard,

split $0.75. Klegels were paid for recruiting new members, and once someone joined, none of the ongoing revenues went to the sales force. So, for the big cheeses, the ongoing revenue is where it's at. So the sales force gets a cut of the initial whenever you recruit someone, and then the big cheeses

get anything else that they buy. So the Invisible Empire sold robes, flags, dry cleaning services, candy, every kind of thing imaginable. I'm going to quote again from the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan. A kluxer's nifty knife, every word in that came out with a K, which was described as

a quote, real 100% knife for 100% Americans. Wow. Could be bought for $1.25. A member could buy a brooch for his wife, a Zircon studded fiery cross, a larger cross that a man could wear on the watch chain he displayed across his chest cost $2.90.

For only $5, you could get, allegedly, a 14-carat gold-filled ring with a 10-carat solid gold clan emblem on a fiery red stone. Also for sale were phonograph records and player piano rolls with clan songs, advertisements for this merchandise appeared in newspapers across the country and in flyers at large,

clan vacations. The clan's for-profit life insurance plan claimed $3 million with the policies in 1924, a dubious figure. It claimed to provide burial insurance as well, but the service never actually materialized, because it was a scam. Now, the KKK also offered

a spectacular vacation getaway. I found an ad from some time in the night... And that's not a clicklation? Well, just you wait. I'm gonna hand you the ad, Katie, and you can describe it to the readers. Now, it's from some time in the 20s, Duke University, which is where I found this hosted, didn't know exactly when.

And it talks about, you know what, I'm just gonna hand you this ad, Katie. All right. To all the clans and clansmen of Texas, and then there's like a little image it says, Cool Coast Camp, the healthiest road to the coolest

summer. Are all those words spelled with a K in Cool Coast Camp? Yes, every single one that you could imagine. And the coolest summer, Cool Coast Camp, the healthiest road to the coolest summer. Do you want me to read some of this thing? Yeah, you can do a little bit of that ad copy while I...

Greetings! We, the grand dragons of the realm of Texas, and the great titans of the five provinces in Texas, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, hereby officially endorse the annexed position of clansmen, C.T. Gilliam of San...

This is an announcement. The realm of Texas. The realm of Texas! Really into that. He proposes to give a high class service to the clansmen of Texas at a minimum cost. Yeah, right. It goes on.

It goes on. I want a knife that says 100% knife. You know what you want? And one of my favorite things I've ever heard. That's being part fork. You don't know? You don't know? If it doesn't have that termification... You don't know what it's cut with.

The clan would have hated Swiss armies. They would have hated a Swiss army knife. That's like race mixing for tools. No, thank you. They're a threat to knife civilization. Now, the Cool Coast Camp ad is a really fun document to read. For one thing, it brags repeatedly and

pointedly about how much shade their beaches have. Because everybody's really white. And they can't stand the sun. Guess what it recommends as the most sensible thing to wear? A sheet. A big Mexican sombrero. What?

Is that the... Those are the exact words? A big Mexican sombrero. A big Mexican sombrero. Wow. Oh. There is no shortage of bigotry in the ad, but it is kind of the classic wholesome

mainstream 1920s American bigotry as opposed to what we would expect from the clan today. I'm going to read, for example, a section titled The Family that's sort of advertising this camp to the rest of the family. Wonderful Mothers. This camp, spelled with a K, is deeded to you. So cool.

So restful. No work whatsoever. No drudgery. No worry. The fiery cross guards you at night and an officer of the law with the same Christian sentiment guards carefully all portals. The camp needs beautiful ornaments. No dust to avoid.

Shades natural and shades artificial to keep away the freckles. Cool with a K. In every way. The time of your life in all caps. Put a bug in Daddy's ear and hug him tight. He will let you come. The sentiment reflected through humanity by the rays of the fiery cross makes you as safe at our camp

as at home in Mother's Arms. Mother's Arms is capitalized too. The prize of a concrete Lizzie. No idea what that is. I have no idea. Is it a K? No. The only thing with a C that's spelled with a C. I'm so disappointed.

I don't know what the fuck a concrete Lizzie is. That was the prize given any person who could find a more wonderful spot in America. Is this a sex thing? Yes. It's a fucking thing. They were all fuck guys in the KKK.

Wow. A concrete Lizzie. In this day and age. Oh no. Cool coast. At a low cost. At an affordable cost. At an affordable cost.

It's affordable cost because Texas's coast is kind of shitty. The realm of Texas. Speaking as a Texan. Don't go to Galveston. That wasn't a concern. Good. The KKK recognized that children

represented an incredible potential market so far untapped by the powers of commercial racism. They opened three auxiliary groups for children. The Junior KKK, starting in 1923 was literally just a child's version of the KKK. One new Junior KKK chapter announced its opening

by blowing a horn and lighting a cross and the leather J on fire. Wow. Oh no. No. For young girls, there was the Tri K Club. The club was spelled with a K. Modeled after popular sororities at the time.

Now there was plenty of racism in the Tri K. Historian Christina Du Rocher described the central message of their propaganda as, quote, white girls should remove themselves from contact with all blacks a passive way of preserving white supremacy. But the Tri K Club was first and foremost a social club.

I found an illustrated collection of the KKK's sheet music on Google Books because internet and it included the ritual of the Tri K Club which seems like it was probably patterned off the Chloron. It includes a pledge song of this racism sorority. I'm going to read just the first verse.

We pledged you our friendship true through happiness and tears. The tie that binds our hearts to you will hold throughout the years. Beneath this flag that waves above this cross that lights our way, you'll always find a sister's love in the heart of each Tri K. Oh.

This is good for girls. Make new friends that keep the old. Burning Cross is a little weird. It's a bright cross. They're burning. You don't know why it's lit up. It's just illuminated in flame. It's weird how prescient you saying that is about to be.

Now, Hyrum Evans, who ousted the PR people at the end of 1922 and became the next imperial wizard, still wanted to make money. But he was also someone for whom straight up racism was a huge part of the appeal. Here's the second coming of the KKK. His first career as a dentist might seem modest. One of his rivals

liked to call him a tooth-puller and he took advantage of the impression calling himself the most average man in America so as to normalize the Klan. His short plump stature added to his everyman image. In fact, he was capable of serious violence and Dallas, where he joined the Klan in 1920, he had organized black squads

that kidnapped and tortured at least one black man. Dallas, by the way, used to be known as the most racist city in America around this time, the city of hate. And it was actually a really cool story. The Dallas Morning News crippled the Klan in that city by having reporters find where their meetings were

and take down notes of all of the license plates they saw to figure out which elected members and who was in the Klan. And published that shit. The Dallas Morning News did a lot of damage to the KKK. Docs the fucking fascists. Yeah, did a great job.

So yeah, Dallas Morning News is antifa, I guess. Now, Evans decided that the Klan should be more than an MLM. It should be a political party. He moved the KKK's headquarters to D.C. and established a magazine, Fellowship Forum that was not explicitly tied to the KKK

but existed to further its political aims. The Fellowship Forum built itself a standing for pure Americanism. There were also in a number of the documents I read, the Sentiment America First, which apparently came from the KKK before it became the center of Charles Lindbergh's organization. You found that in a lot of their documents.

Not surprising. They just recently come out that there was talk about a wall at one of the big Klan vacations they held like a guy talking about, we need a silver wall to keep out immigrants. But he was not talking about one at the Mexican border. He was talking about a wall of laws to stop people from like Italy from getting into the country.

They really hated Catholics. Yeah, yeah. So racist but different. Differently racist from them. Fundamental concept. Just like list it, dress it up a little differently and put it over there. Because they need the sombreros.

That's right, they want the sombreros. They want the sombreros to stay in the shade when you go to the cool coast. The cool coast camp. Oh, good God. Soon after taking charge, Evans realized that the leader of the Indiana KKK, David Stevenson, had some potential.

He put him in charge of recruitment for seven states. Here's that book again. I'm a nobody from nowhere really, but I've got the biggest brains he boasted. I'm going to be the biggest man in the United States. But Stevenson was a fraud several times over. He claimed to be the millionaire son of a wealthy businessman and who have earned a decoration for bravery in World War I.

In fact, he was the son of a Texas sharecropper. His education at a parochial school ended with the eighth grade and his stint with the army was as a recruiter in Iowa. He boasted of owning a wholesale coal supply and auto accessory companies, but in fact worked as a salesman for someone else's coal company. He married at least three women, drank heavily,

got into fights, beat his wives, and attempted to rape several other women. But the motherfucker could talk and convince people to join the KKK. So he stayed. Under his leadership, 23% of the native-born white men in southern Indiana joined the KKK. He refused to be called by his name

going by the old man. Stevenson made millions off of his racist downline and was able to buy a mansion and a yacht. We'll come back to him later. He does get his just desserts. So he wasn't comfortable with all the lofty titles. Just call me the old man. Call me the old man.

Racist man. I'll be the biggest man in America. Yeah. For a good long while, in the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was everywhere. At its height, as many as 4 million Americans, roughly 4% of the country were members. It is, to this day,

the largest explicitly racist organization in American history, if you don't count the Confederacy. Yeah. Yeah. 4 million. Now, the Klan did not draw in that many members by focusing on the racism up front. It was always there, a calm backdraft of propaganda and at every outing.

But they knew you'd catch more flies with honey than with water. Enter the Klan Vacations. These were gigantic outdoor events akin to massive state fairs or even carnivals, which they held in order to draw in new members and foster solidarity with Klan's members. Here's how the nation described one such gathering. On July 4, 1923, for instance,

a crowd estimated at between 50,000 and 200,000 attended a Klan picnic in Kokomo, Indiana. The Klan vacation boasted 6 tons of beef, 55,000 buns, 2,500 pies, and 5,000 cases of soda. Children had their own play center, while adults could take their pick of entertainments,

including a boy's singing quartet, a talky film, circus performers, a six-round boxing match, and a daredevil who performed aerial acrobatics on the wing of a circling plane. All right. Yeah. All right. Sounds like a good one. Sounds like a good time.

And that was the idea. We hold this not like we're going to try to get all the racists, but like we'll just hold it through a big party and then we'll get more money. Yeah. 1,000 burgers. They also charged admission and stuff. They made a profit. Right. Which, you know, 1923 dollars is a shitload of money.

Yeah, they cleaned up. And the biggest of these was in 24 had like 200,000 people show up. The largest Klan gathering ever. And like a lot of people didn't know it was necessarily like, oh, this is like for the Klan stuff. It's like, no, I'm going to go to a fun party with white people. Or white people, though.

It wasn't weird then. I mean, people met and fell in love there. I bet they did. Got a lot of Klan babies. A lot of Klan vacation kiddies. Wasn't there a reason to pull like about like the number of people in America who like are okay with white supremacy and neo-nazis and stuff. And it was about 4%.

Something like that. I think that's about right. I'd really like recently, like last year. Wow. Yeah. Just a lot of racists. I mean, in fucking Toronto, 23,000 people voted for Faith Goldie and explicitly voted for the Nazi candidate.

23,000 Canadians. So, and they're Canadians. Things are going well. Things are going great. I just want like a fun barbecue to go to. So. Thousands of buns. Thousands of, speaking of thousands of buns.

Eds! During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson.

And I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys,

we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy, voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good badass way.

He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass,

and you may know me from a little band called Alphabet Boys. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there,

as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. The Soviet Kreklev

is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story

of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, and watch your podcasts. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put

forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match, and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus?

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on Trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! We're talking about clonvocations, the KKK's primary method

of recruiting new clansmen. I hate these words. There's way too many Ks being set up in here. I slightly cringe every time. Cringe with a K? Yeah. Clinge. Absolutely.

Clarenge. Large cross-burnings were also held at clonvocations, but unlike the first and latter types of cross-burnings that we're familiar with today, these were not primarily hateful spectacles. Cross-burning is the most racist thing you can do.

They were pro-Protestant, and everyone knew the clan was anti-Catholic, but the cross-burnings were more like a fireworks show. They would compete to see who could build the biggest cross, some of which were 50 feet tall, some of which were too big to even burn.

Sometimes they would make gigantic crosses and cover them with light bulbs. Look at this cool thing that we're doing. Yeah, like Master Truck Burning Man house. A little bit of that, because they weren't going to black people's houses and putting them on their lawns. That may have happened out in the sticks sometimes,

but the main purpose was to entertain people. That was the goal of the cross things. In this context. At a clonvocation. At a clonvocation. But when you're out in the wild, there's much more insidious. We will be getting to that.

I will be talking about the violence and stuff, but from what I read cross-burnings were not a huge part of the violence at that point. That was more of a showy thing that you did at the big events, and the violence was the violence. The clan did describe themselves as the army of the cross, and I do want to really point out how much anti-Catholic bias was critical to this, too.

Because they were super racist against Catholics, as well as black people and Jews, and I guess you're not racist against socialists, anybody that wasn't like, yeah. That wasn't a very specific kind of like. A card-carrying member of the very legitimate organization. The Ku Klux Klan.

Yeah, the Klansmen also played highly publicized baseball games, often against teams of people that they defined in their propaganda as aliens. The second coming of the KKK notes, quote, the Youngstown clan team challenged the Knights of Columbus, and the clan played Wichita's crack-colored team,

the Monrovians, the clan lost. Finally, in areas of clan strength, it operated sandlot teams that played in recognized leagues, sometimes semi-pro teams. Indiana, a clan stronghold, fielded a dozen such teams. These leagues might play in stadiums,

and the newspaper coverage might list all team members. No secrecy here. In Los Angeles, the clan team played a three-game charity series against a benign Brith team. And in 1927, in Washington, D.C., the clan played against the Hebrew All-Stars. Newspaper coverage typically treated the clan team

like all others, with no particular attention to clan politics. Thus, baseball functioned to normalize the clan so that it could appear as a benign club, akin to the Elks, or again, a labor union. KKK playing the benign Brith at baseball? That's wild. America's pastime.

I would never have guessed that was a thing that happened in history. Now, while all this was going on, there were Claverons who took to the KKK's more traditional activities, silently oppressing minorities. A number of Claverons exercised a vigilante justice. That is an important story,

which I've waited until the end to cover. That's because I think it's important to understand what the second clan was in context. The first clan was awful, and a clear terrorist organization was viewed by most Americans as a terrorist organization, at least outside of the South. But the only real ethos of the second clan

was making money. The racism and bigotry was just there because in 1922 it sold. If the same PR people were around today, they would have made a fraternal order that was super woke in PC because there's more money there now. I'm sure they were racist too, but it wasn't about that. It was about making the money.

And the clan, again, it's important to understand, if you're going to understand the 20s, that everyone knew the clan was racist, but everyone was racist. The woke people were racist. Our grandparents were racist. Everybody was. It was only a grift because of the

money-making structure it wasn't like. It was not considered extreme. Not radicalizing anybody or anything like that. What we're going to talk about, the violent part, was extreme, and that is an important factor, but that was an ancillary thing that happened because of the original KKK's

history and because a lot of racists are violent. The violence was not primarily the goal of the organization. It was a pyramid scheme. In the early 1920s, urban crime rose by 24% in the United States. Clan propaganda heavily emphasized these rising crime rates

and build the clan as, like their predecessors, regulators. Much of this crime was driven by prohibition and prohibition was a cause the KKK firmly supported. Also, women's voting rights. There's a feminist angle to the clan, too. We're not going to get into enough of it here, but there was a women's auxiliary KKK,

very popular. The clan was because one of the two PRP people who founded this was a woman, was one of the first organizations in America to realize, well, women are voting now, so they have political power. They also have more money now. So we should go after them. We should get that fucking money. And they did.

Put more women in the KKK. Feminist icon. The KKK. Representation is important. Super important. Not just men in the clan these days. Some people even called the clan the militant wing of the temperance movement.

Generally, clansmen and individual clappers were willing to use violence against black people, of course, but also any other bugbear of that era's right wing. They carried out a raid that arrested 52 bootleggers in Anaheim, got 125 people arrested in Indianapolis, again, bootleggers. In the Northwest, they spent a lot of time

threatening labor organizers. One Oregon Klegel sent out this warning, if you are the mouthpiece of American labor in this locality warned and do not endorse the above principles, then you should be a fit subject for a vigilance committee. I found another piece of sheet music in the KKK's song book that puts forward

this regulator depiction of the KKK. It's titled, There's a Clansman Watching You. Oh, no. You guys want to sing this for me? Cody, that's all you. Yeah, you're right. You did the other thing. And also, you're the musician. There's a class of people

patriotic in their work always on their guard always watchful misspelled and alert. They all make good citizens They're friends of Uncle Sam They fight for right with all their might

They're called the Ku Klux Klan That's the verse. Keep going, man. You will find them out in the country You will find them in town They're as thick as bees

in clover You can't tell when they're around You may think that you're gone to fool them Have a care what you do

The Ku Klux Klan are always watching They're sure watching you. There's a second verse that I will not do. Wow, wow.

Wow, that was a virtuoso performance. Let's That's how it goes. Those are the notes. That's the melody. So where did they sing this again? They had records. They had records, Katie.

They had a publishing press and a record press. So that's like you're having a dinner party and you're like, let's put on the new Klan record. You guys heard there's a Klan watching you. The shit is fire.

Yeah. Oregon and Oklahoma were particular centers of Klan vigilance committee violence. The second coming of the KKK summarizes, quote, Three Oregon cases known as the Oregon Outrage has captured widespread press attention when night writers terrified their victims

with such lynching threats. J.F. Hale, a piano salesman, white, was accused of illicit sexual affairs and the would-be lyncher's demanded he owed money that a Klan'sman was having trouble collecting. Sam Johnson, described as part Mexican, was accused of stealing chickens and being an idler. Arthur Burr, an African-American boot black

accused of bootlegging, received the worst treatment. Vigilantes abducted him and took him to the very crest of the Cisquio Mountains, where they strung him up and let him down three times. Releasing him, they fired revolvers near his feet, demanding that he leave the era permanently. Yelling, can you run? Inward.

Though charges were brought against three groups of Klan'smen, in each case, juries acquitted the culprits and the grounds that because the victims were morally bad, their vigilante punishment benefited the community. By contrast, Oklahoma, Indiana, Kansas, and southern Illinois, locations that were as much southern as northern, experienced a great deal of actual Klan violence.

Whippings, tar and featherings, and lynchings. In all four places, some degree of racial segregation was in place, and Klan violence helped to keep it in place. In Oklahoma, Klan provoked violence became so widespread, with a reported one flogging for every night of the year that the governor placed parts of the state under martial law.

The culprits got him impeached in 1923. Oklahoma law officers sometimes handed suspects over to Klan whipping parties, or even participated in the beatings. In Kansas, Klan'smen abducted an anti-Klan mayor, tied him to a tree, and laid 30 stripes on his bare back. In Bloody Williamson, as one southern Illinois county became known,

the local Klan and the Anti-Saloon League merged into the Williamson County Law Enforcement League, which soon became run by the Klan. Attacks on the operators of the wide open bars produced lethal battles in 1924 and 25, involving gunmen and the deployment of military forces, and ended by forcing the anti-Klan sheriff out of office.

These armed skirmishes killed 20 people. So, do not want to be ignoring the violence here. Right, this is still happening, but it wasn't the overarching leg. It wasn't the purpose. The Klan was more about money, but also the violence was occurring within the county. Society was fine with this.

This is not a counter-cultural act. Again, they were acquitted, generally, when they were brought to trial, because most white people were fine with what they were doing. Right, they're like vigilante cop figures who are like taking care of business, because the government's not going to do it. So, horribly violent, but not horribly violent

against the wishes of the majority of their white Protestant countrymen. And in fact, we're kind of seen as heroes by a lot of people. Which was true only in the south for the original KKK. North was not confused. Yeah, it's a game of racist Batman. It's a game of racist Batman, exactly.

And America's always loved the vigilante badass. It's the punisher, but racist. In 1925, the KKK even carried out an attack on the home of the young Malcolm X, when he and his parents lived in North Omaha. Here's a quote from Malcolm's autobiography. It actually is how his autobiography starts. When my mother was pregnant with me,

she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan writers galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night, surrounding the house, brandishing their shotguns and rifles. They shouted for my father to come out. My mother went to the front door and opened it, standing where they could see her pregnant condition. She told them that she was alone with her three small children

and that my father was away, preaching in Milwaukee. The Klansmen shouted threats and warnings that heard that we had better get out of town because the good Christian white people were not going to stand for my father's spread and trouble among the good Negroes of Omaha, with the back to Africa, preaching of Marcus Garvey.

My father, the Reverend Earl Little, was a Baptist minister, a dedicated organizer for Marcus Aurelius Garvey's UNIA, United Negro Improvement Association. With the help of such disciples as my father, Garvey from his headquarters in New York City's Harlem, was raising the banner of black race purity and exhorting the Negro masses

to return to their ancestral African homeland, a cause which had made Garvey the most controversial black man on earth. Still shouting threats, the Klansmen finally spurred their horses and galloped around the house, shattering every window with their gun butts. Then they rode off into the night, their torches flaring as suddenly as they had come.

It was terrifying. Yeah, it's horrifying. Now, like all good and bad pyramid schemes, the Klan had to come to an end. It was finally brought down, not by the U.S. government, because, well, most of the U.S. government was fine with it, but by the incompetence, greed, and corruption of its leaders.

It's always that with these kind of far-right ganks. Philip Fox, editor of the Imperial Nighthawk, a major Klan newspaper, was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering another Klansman he considered a rival. Hiram Evans called it a personal affair. Governor Ed Jackson of Indiana, a Klansman, was indicted for bribery.

Officers of the Klan Bank were also indicted for embezzlement and grand larceny. There were countless scandals and arrests, a fight with the FBI that led to 19 people being charged, members caught drinking and bootlegging and paying for back alley abortions. They picked a fight with J. Edgar Hoover. Not a smart guy to pick a fight with in 1924.

Really bad guy to pick a fight with in that period of time. They did not win that fight. The final nail in the KKK's coffin was the conviction of Indiana Grand Dragon Stevenson, who we talked about earlier, for kidnapping, raping, and murdering his secretary. What? Only the classiest high class.

I mean, I was waiting to be like white collar, like a tax thing or something. No, no. Straight up. Terrible thing he did. It's actually even worse than it sounds, because he did not technically murder her. He raped her and assaulted her,

and then she killed herself, but the jury convicted him of murder because they believed he'd ruined her. Which is also why she killed herself. It's even worse than... Right. Just because it's the 20s and it was a garbage time to exist. Yeah, it's messed up.

But Stevenson went to fucking prison. Did he die in prison? I think so, yeah. He was convicted of second-degree murder. By 1927, the KKK had gone from its high of like 4 million members to less than 350,000 active members nationwide. It never quite went extinct entirely.

Men continue wearing clan robes and being racist up until the modern day, but the giant money-making and political enterprise that it once was fell apart. Are there still dues? I mean, maybe in individual chapters, but there's no, you know, not the same as it was.

There's some people that try to be that, but it's pretty shadows of themselves. The legacy of the KKK, outside of its existence as an MLM and the vigilante violence it inspired, is unclear. During its height, the KKK was extremely politically active, but there is substantial debate as to whether or not

it actually influenced politics on a mass scale. A number of clan-backed candidates were elected, and the clan was a massive fundraiser, but that Harvard studies analysis claimed that the actual political achievements of the group were fairly minimal, just because those people were already going to get elected. They weren't elected because they were clansmen. Everybody was fucking racist.

Right. Right. They just happened to be in the clan. However, in the conclusion of the second coming of the KKK, Linda Gordon makes this note. Some scholars and contemporary observers have seen the 1920s northern clan as a failure because it was short-lived and campaigns against Catholics and Jews did not

manage to confine them to second-class citizenship. But transience is common to most social movements. Moreover, the clan declined in part because it had triumphed in several respects. State eugenics laws providing for forcible sterilization of those of defective stock spread to 30 states, and those labeled defective were typically

the poor and people of color. The biggest clan victory was immigration restriction, and Imperial Wizard Evans repeatedly claimed credit for its passage. I mean, it is pretty disappointing that their eventual like downfall or decline was not because people

started to know better or like people stood up like this whole story I'm sitting here thinking like, when is it like, oh, this person like there's this big altercation and people started just public opinion started to change. Nope, it was They were fine with the racism and the vigilante murder. Yeah. It was the abortion thing that really

Yeah. Back at the abortions really turned America against them. Hooray! We got through it. All the stuff, the wall stuff, the immigration stuff, it's always so fascinating to like, what do you think these things align

with like, maybe it It's even like, you recognize that other people who aren't white have invented things you like, like sombreros. I know! Guys, without Mexicans, how are you going to go to the cool coast camp? You won't go to the cool coast camp!

Come on! You're going to have a bad time. You're going to have a bad time at the cool coast camp. You wouldn't have gotten anywhere without playing the Benai Brith in baseball. That is fascinating. That was a twist. And now I know what MLM means.

Old T-level marketing. It's really important in the politics of today. Yeah. I just hadn't heard that abbreviation. Money lives matter. There is a direct line between the strategy behind the KKK and the strategy behind Amway, which is the source

of the fortune of Betsy DeVos. Oh, but we don't have time to talk about her though. We don't have time to talk about her. That segues us into the next episode. We will be doing another thing very soon. Plugs. Plugs, plugs, plugs.

Plug time. Plug time. Check us out on the internet. Twitter. Patreon.com Twitter.com I was getting there! Okay. It seemed like you were just like passing it off. No, no, no. You do it. Finish it. You said on the internet. That's pretty big.

Our YouTube show also. Some more news. Are you doing some? Our podcast, even more news. Yup. That. On the Twitter. Your personal Twitter. It's Katie Stoll. Mine's Dr. Mr. Cody. With the C. We'll get good at this one day.

Give them money. Some more news. Patreon. Dollars. We would love that. You can go to there. You can find me on the internet. I write okay on Twitter. I have a book called A Brief History of Ice. It's not about the plan. It's about me putting a friend in the hospital

with dangerous drugs. It's fun. It's a good time. Everybody enjoyed it. Twitter and Instagram. You can find this show at atbastardspod. Website behindthebastards.com Doritos. I love you. 40%. I love you.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse is like a lot of guns.

But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass

is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I oughta know. Because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast

that tells my crazy story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted

pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.