Former presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz knows how to ruffle the Left’s feathers. While blasting the Democrats for their claims that Attorney General Jeff Sessions is racist, Cruz pointed out that claims of racism and actual racism have always been the bread and butter of the American left.
Cruz cited the Dixiecrats, the Southern Democrats who vehemently opposed desegregation, as evidence of the Democratic Party’s racist roots. Hilariously, the Huffington Post went on the defensive:
However, historians say the KKK and its founding had nothing to do with what Cruz called the “modern Democratic Party.”
PolitiFact looked into the accusation when it came up in 2013 and called it false.
The KKK was indeed made up largely of Democrats in the South after the Civil War, as most whites in the South were Democrats, but it was not started by the party, historians told the website.
In addition, the modern Democratic and Republican parties are not what they were in the 19th Century.
“The party lines of the 1860s/1870s are not the party lines of today,” Carole Emberton, an associate professor of history at the University at Buffalo, told PolitiFact. “Although the names stayed the same, the platforms of the two parties reversed each other in the mid-20th Century, due in large part to white Dixiecrats’ flight out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
Nope!
Not even close — especially since the GOP voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by a much larger majority than the Democrats did. Roughly 60 percent of Democrats approved it, versus more than 80 percent of Republicans. If the Civil Rights Act was such a catalyst, why would these racists switch to the party much more hostile to them? Start from there and actually do your homework, and Emberton’s claim quickly gets exposed as inaccurate.
The truth is a lot closer to this: “Democrats starting using the ‘party switch’ smear after 1964.”
And while the Huffington Post claims that Politifact had already declared Cruz’s allegations false, Politifact clearly did not do that. Politifact simply found that an accusation that the Democratic Party founded the Klan was indeed untrue.
Well, Cruz did not make that claim.
The Politifact clearly states that the founders of the Klan were, indeed, Democrats — and that claim is precisely what we heard from Cruz!
“You look at the most racist, you look at the Dixiecrats, they were Democrats who imposed segregation, imposed Jim Crow laws, who founded the Klan,” Cruz said. “The Klan was founded by a great many Democrats.”
Now, from Politifact:
J. Michael Martinez, the author of a 2007 book “Carpetbaggers, Calvary and the KKK,” told us many angry Southern whites during the 1860s and 1870s were Democrats and a smaller number of them joined the KKK.
So there is some historic link between Democrats and the KKK. But Martinez said it is misleading to say that the hate group was started by the Democratic Party because it was more of a grassroots creation.
While trying to smack Ted Cruz down, the Huffington Post presented evidence that instead confirmed his claim. And that’s what we call “fake news” — but Huffington Post couldn’t even put together a competent fraud.
However, their article is now up to 6.6k Facebook shares. So go send them this one — let’s see if they post a retraction.
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