They must be trying a little rebranding… they’re not very good at it. They’re sending around flyers with adorable drawings of men in white sheets and a hood, recruiting for new members.
Sounds…enticing. And the picture so inviting. And when you read closer, you discover it’s the same old KKK white bigotry under a new name, the Traditionalist American Knights.
If you’ve ever wanted to have a conversation with a real-live good ol’ redneck bigot, go ahead and call that number. I’m afraid all you’ll get is a machine with a recording about fighting for the white race…unfortunately, all in a Southern accent that isn’t going to help the stereotyping in the slightest.
Maybe if all of you give them a call, some time or another they’ll actually pick up the phone, and then you can have a little chat with them about how ugly their hatred is.
I see they make the standard mistake of fetishizing the constitution and somehow thinking that it’s compatible with school prayer.
It may not be re-branding but yet another splinter or franchise group.
A local printshop in my small town once refused to print a poster I was having done for the Atheist Alliance. The owner kindly explained to me that she was a Christian and had also once refused to do business with the KKK — so surely I would understand. I said yes, I understood: she was a bigot. And I resented the comparison of atheists to racists.
So when I see the KKK using the same ‘talking points’ the shop owner would probably also use — ‘Our Christian Nation’ and prayer in public school — I feel a special sense of irony.
Umm, yes Mr, er, Ku, I do have a problem in my neighborhood. Christians keep trying to get their religion into my kids’ school in violation of separation of church and state and religious freedom guaranteed by the Constitution. Can your watch group help?
Bad art design. That looks nothing like Zimmerman
The Southern Poverty Law Center indicates that the “[True Invisible Empire] Traditionalist Knights…” are one or more splinter group(s?) currently active in Missouri, South Dakota, and Tennessee.
Apparently, the “Invisible Empire” is “A Ku Klux Klan [group’s] overall geographical jurisdiction, which it compares to the United States although none exist in every state.”
(I have no idea how to track which group is running that 1-888 number.)
[TRIGGER WARNING: racism, racial slurs, hostlity to sexual agency.]
Friends moved to Nottingham, Pennsylvania a few years ago, and received something similar in their mailbox – except their local KKK also stood for doing whatever was necessary to prevent “their” (white) women from having sex with black men, thereby becoming “niggerized.”
More recently, another friend’s mother called her father extremely upset that she was dating someone of mixed race, because, and I quote, “No white man will ever want her!” (FWIW this is North Jersey, half an hour’s drive from Manhattan.) She wanted him to DO SOMETHING!!!11!! She never said what, exactly. Turns out she needn’t have worried, though: they broke up — because he was a Jehovah’s Witness and wanted her to convert before he would commit to her. (She’s an ex-Catholic barreling toward atheism at impressive speed.) Of course, she’s marrying a different mixed race d00d next month, so mom needn’t have worried about her permanently tainted vagina.
Wait, what century is this again? And why do white people have such epic doucheweasels claiming to represent them? YO! EPIC DOUCHEWEASELS! YOU ARE NOT HELPING. PLEASE GO AWAY.
They used to be “The Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan”. Did Christianity finally vote them out? Or are they just dropping the offensive part of their name?
redjuggler@7, There are zillions of KKK groups. They keep splintering, ceasing to exist, re-forming (sometimes, I think, using the name of a previously ceased-to-exist group), yadda yadda. Just like religious sects.
The list at the Southern Poverty Law Center does not list any “Christian…” group. I have no idea if there ever was a group, in modern or historical times, with that name.
According to Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge:
I was about to ask if they’d made up with the RCC, but I see that’s still covered by 2.
Jefferson for all his faults would just lurrrve worship of his perfect document, wouldn’t he?
Oh, it includes a bit more than that…
Article: Wikipedia – Positive Christianity
Yeah, if there was trouble in my neighborhood, I’m certain the KKK is the first organization I would think to call.
Of course, dudes running around in whites sheets are going to look awfully suspicious, and likely to be the ones causing any trouble.
No, no I don’t think that would aid me in the pursuit of sleep at all. Quite the opposite, I’m afraid.
Translation: We think the Inquisition was a fine thing! You better be xian or else!
blf:
No surprise there.
About point 3, the constitution as written without those pesky 13th and 14th amendments
Gee, who says any student can’t, at almost anytime in school, follow the words of Jebus (Matt. 6:6-6:8), and pray silently from the closets of their souls? That should be Xian prayer. What isn’t allowed is forcing everybody to pray.
…or the first for that matter. I bet they’ll somehow draw the line squiggly enough to simultaneously go before the first amendment and after the second. Maybe slicing right through thr middle lf the first so the part where they’re free to spew whatever hate they want as “speech” is original but that whole no-establishing-religion part right before it in the same sentence isn’t.
Remove the “white race” bit and you could be reading some universal talking points and values of the Republican party. =/
This is hilarious! ‘Traditionalist American Knight’? It’d be one thing if they were the ‘Unorthodox American Knights’, but ‘traditionalist’? TRADITIONALLY, to become a knight, you need a bloody monarch to knight you. Where’d they find the monarch? Burger King? And doesn’t bending their knees and swearing an oath of loyalty to a king kinda go against the US constitution?
The KKK on Neighborhood Watch? Should have been expected. A Florida jury finds that it’s OK to protect a neighborhood by hunting and killing black people. The Klan is back in its element.
If “Positive Christianity” meets “Negative Christianity” will they annihilate one another leaving NO Christianity?
#21.
Only if they’re equally armed.
#20: they would create a quantum explosion of energetic neutral Christian particles.
And make it harder to convince people that we need to fight against this shit in blue states as well. We in the Northeast are amazingly adept at convincing ourselves (and everyone around us) that this kind of shit can’t happen here.
For shits and giggles, I took a look at SPLC’s “hate map” for New York. There are 15 distinct racist skinhead/white nationalist/neonazi/KKK groups in the state†. This is in a state full of “liberal elites”, mind.
†Out of 38 active hate groups. I did not include the anti-Muslim, antisemitic, radical traditional Catholics, anti-gay or the “general hate” groups*.
*Or black separatists (for obvious reasons).
Yuriel:
I’m pretty sure that “white race” is implied in everything those racist assholes say.
Um, aren’t principles 3 and 5 mutually exclusive?*
I guess if you are up all night Watching the Neighborhood [sic]**, maybe the old brains might be working better….
* a concerned non-citizen
** a concerned spelling nazi – why can’t you Americans spell “neighbourhood” correctly? This is the sort of moral weakness that leads to the development of the KKK in the first place. For shame!
I thought that the KKK believed God wrote the American constitution and delivered it on silver platters. Perhaps I was incorrect.
@dccarbene – absolute moral decay – ask one of them to spell honour.
@24 Alexandra (née Audley): Well, sure, in a lot of cases, but they usually don’t say it out loud. :)
To be honest, I have concerns about “alien influence” myself. The way aliens sneak into America under cover of darkness, seemingly not knowing much of anything about our culture or language.
And all they do is take, take, take. Abducting people to probe them, or dissect them, or impregnate them.
They are very rude too. They never introduce themselves, but then there’s that not speaking English issue.
And even though they’re obviously more technologically advanced race than we are, they never share.
bastionofsass:
Don’t forget crop circles. It’s just damn rude to smash our corn down like that.
On another appendage, I’d like to see the UN removed from US borders.
But where would we put it?
Who’d want it?
With the Repugs, it’s implied.
I’m totally opposed to removing the UN from the edge of the US. The Ited States of America! Do not like.
If there’s somethin’ black
in your neighbourhood
who you gonna call?
…men who dress up like ghosts?
Nah, needs more work I think.
I think the UN should be mobile.
Like the A-Team: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_A-Team
or Tim Horton’s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Hortons#Tim_Hortons_and_the_Canadian_military
The UN should make their own artificial island in the middle of the Atlantic, call it Atlantis, and make it so that only UN officials are allowed there. But only after I have heavily invested in tinfoil.
They believe in the Constitution “as it was originally written?” You mean, without the Bill of Rights?
Do they really mean to let go of the Second Amendment, or is this just their ignorance of American history and law showing?
This sort of paint-coat-deep patriotism is all too common, especially among those in the right-wing who claim to be deep thinkers.
Worse, just try to get any of them to volunteer to help in any seriously patriotic exercise.
chigau @ 34,
Well it sounds like Tim Hortons has a strategy in mind when it comes to invading the US. First military base they took over was Fort Knox (from your pffft link).
Once we finish taking over your country, we’re gonna force you to have universal medical, the metric system, gay marriage and TimBits. What do you say to that, eh?
JohnnieCanuck>
will poutine be involved?
but seriously, fuck the KKK and all their offshoots/variants. Those people make me question my ideas about non-violence.
Not sure I like the derogatory use of redneck any more, or that it’s shorthand for racist simply because the subjects of the term are usually white and “country” folk, or typically conservative. There might have been some overlap between poor farmers, coal-miner unionizers and racist asswipes, but that’s hardly reason to associate them so willy-nilly with one another. Unless there’s some special history of rednecks and racism that I’m missing besides the overlap.
I’d want to believe this is a ‘joke’ with extra stereotyping of southerners thrown in. In which case I’d tend to agree with #39. It would be a crappy and unhelpful joke, and one of the problems with it is that outsiders are unable to make an reliable assessment of how likely it is to be real.
I’m with chigau @34.
Pen@40, These “Neighborhood Watch” flyers do not appear to be a joke:
● Church Hill residents alarmed at KKK flyers, Virginia(?), December 2011.
● Ku Klux Klan distributes flyers in Newnan, Georgia, March 2012.
● Klan flyer appears in northeast Cedar Rapids neighborhood, Iowa, January 2013.
● KKK Starts Neighborhood Watch Group in Missouri, July 2013.
What I do not know is if any of the above groups (or the others which are easily found by Generalissimo Google™) currently exist, previously existed, or have ever been active.
Apparently, a local TV station in Missouri managed to contact someone claiming to be one of racist nutters behind this, KKK tries to recruit for ‘neighborhood watch’ program in Springfield:
The video segment at the above link is rather well done. There’s a great interview with an elderly gentlemen who got one of the fliers saying the racist arseholes are cowards and basically telling them to “fuck off”; And just before Frank Ancona (whose voice is not actually used) is claimed to have said this “Neighborhood Watch” is not racist, there is a screen-grab from the site listed on the fliers which indisputably shows the “white supremacy” gibberish.
Nuts. I just composed a follow-up to myself@43 which, among other things, quoted this “Frank Ancona” cupcake using, as one example, the N-word. Assuming I didn’t make an error in submitting, it hasn’t appeared, so I assume it is caught in moderation (possibly because of the N-word?).
@JohnnieCanuck: having Canadian relatives in large numbers, I have no problems with Canada taking over in most ways. However, I refuse to change my spelling habits at my age. And you can keep the poutine. As far as adjusting to the metric system…eh.
I’ve met, in my southern living days, a few people who claimed to belong to the KKK. It was rather sad, actually, because those people are horribly insecure about their lives. Unless they control everything, they feel very unsettled. (Many of them were my age – 50+, but some were a lot younger). All you really needed to do to set them off on a frothing-at-the-mouth rant was mention equal opportunity. Very sad.
Despite being male, fair-haired and blue-eyed I guess I don’t have to call them – I’m a Dutchman living in Suriname and so fail to qualify for point 2.
Johnnie:
Further proof of Rule 34?
They’re Knights are they? Charged by god with a sacred quest?
Only one answer for that:
You don’t frighten us, racist pig dogs. Go and boil your bottoms, you sons of a silly person. I blow my nose at you, so-called “KKK,” you and all your silly white K-nig-hts.
Forgot the h/t to John Cleese.
“the highest standards for western culture and technology”… note the complete absence of science.
I think even they have understood that The Bell Curve is crap.
Oh snaaaaap.
Whoopsiedaisy.
Full of win.
Hm…
Most significantly, you omitted the well-known fact that God wrote the American Constitution in authentic frontier gibberish – so nobody can read it, and only divine revelation can tell anyone what it says! It can be worshipped, but it can’t be read. :-)
♥
Fixed the link for you. And cringeworthy it is, several times over.
Exactly, it triggers moderation. Use an HTML trick next time.
Thank God (the Aryan White One) that we have a fine patriotic organization to step up and protect my neighborhood. Although I haven’t noticed many wrong-colored faces here, there are entirely too many hoodies and not enough hoods. And we need to go back to the Original Constitution and leave out all those silly amendments except for the second one — we’ll just start numbering our amendments with ‘II’. There is one problem; how will we divvy up all of those 3/5 votes? The fairest way would be to apportion them according to wealth.
Finally, we have an organization with such abundant common sense.
I don’t need to call that number to talk to a dumb redneck Klansman. Back in the early ’80’s (following Reagan’s racist dog whistles during his campaign) there was a jump in Klan activity here in Connecticut and the warehouse I worked at had quite a few new Klansmen. They’re just as stupid & racist even with New England accents.
“Positive Christianity” is literally Nazi Christianity. As in, it was the form of Christianity that the Nazis espoused. Seriously. The Klan is self-Godwinning.
Anyone else thinking that that list of “values” probably bears a striking/exact resemblance to the original draft of the Republican manifesto? You know, before their PR people got hold of it and said “Er, guys? Number 1 may be a problem…”.