The Ku Klux Klan and the Death of the White American City

A Deep Dive into the Klan and White Urban Demographic Decline

Actually not the KKK

You don’t see a lot of people on the political right praising the KKK anymore. Not even the radical wing care at all about this famous fraternal organization. This is probably because the modern Klan is kind of pathetic. It’s mostly old boomer hillbillies in the deep South that do nothing but carry posters around town sometimes. The way the Klan is taught about in school makes you think that they are currently active domestic terrorists who are slithering around the Southern countryside setting fire to random Black People’s houses. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of my Black classmates were instilled within them a childhood fear of the KKK that simply isn’t reflected in modern-day. The Klan no longer exists in the way it did during the 1920s. There are small groups across the country that call themselves the Klan, but they are disunited. In this post I want to focus mainly on the Second Klan, which arose during the early 20th century, but to do that we have to talk a little bit about the First Klan.

White fraternal organizations were nothing new in the American South by the time of the civil war. Much of the Southern gentry had been members of the Knights of the Golden Circle, which aimed to colonize much of Latin America and Dixiefy it. Freemasonry was also obviously a very integral part of American elite culture since its founding. The Klan arose out of these traditions, with a significant influence of Scottish and Scots-Irish folklore and Jacobite romanticism as well. Much of the South has Scottish and Scotch-Irish ancestry. The “burning cross” is a Highland tradition. This is what Thomas Dixon, author The Clansman, says about it:

“In olden times when the Chieftain of our people summoned the clan on an errand of life and death, the Fiery Cross, extinguished in sacrificial blood, was sent by swift courier from village to village. This call was never made in vain, nor will it be to-night in the new world. Here, on this spot made holy ground by the blood of those we hold dearer than life, I raise the ancient symbol of an unconquered race of men”

In a hilarious turn of events, the etymology for “Ku Klux” is actually probably related to the etymology for “Kike”, both originating from the Greek κύκλος. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard, was of Scotch-Irish origin. Some of the titles are descended from Celtic folklore (wizards, dragons, giants, goblins et cetera). The KKK styled its hierarchy on other secret societies as well as academic fraternities of the time. Frats don’t seem to go through all of this effort nowadays, do they? Probably due to the decline in standards at colleges…

The Klan during reconstruction was something of a remnant of the Confederate Army that had “gone guerilla”. It was secretive and under-the-table. It wasn’t holding public demonstrations, it was riding at night. Its goal was to overthrow the Republican regime that ruled the post-war South. The South belonged to the White man, the White Southerner especially, and both the Negro and the Union soldier were violent invaders. There are many Libtards who are infuriated by this mentality among White Southerners, but support it wholesale among Arabs and other brown races of the world. Yeah, the South did own slaves not long prior… But so did the damn Arabs! It was the White British and French who abolished slavery in the Muslim world. Albeit, it no longer contributed as much to the economy as it did during the middle ages, back when the Arabs would have large workforces of Zanj.

Map of Abolition

Also, the extent of lynchings in the American South is extremely exaggerated in American media. The number of total lynchings in postbellum American history is likely below 10,000, as between 1882 and 1968 only 4,467 cases were recorded. Were the KKK so brilliant at lynching people during reconstruction that they were able to exceed this number in under 20 years under pursuit of Union generals? I doubt it. Furthermore, only 73% of lynchings in this time period were done towards Black men. 24% were done towards White men.

Considering modern violent crime rates among Black men, and the distribution of these lynchings (mostly in the Deep South, which at the time much Blacker than it is today) I don’t think this is evidence of heavy racial discrimination. A lot of these recorded lynchings are not over “ogling at a White woman”, but more mundane things like cattle theft or robbery.

The KKK probably also had a pretty good reason to hate the Black Union Soldiers, if we are to go by statistics from World War II and the 1950s. Black Soldiers were extremely disproportionately overrepresented among executions of American Soldiers for criminal behavior. Among the British and French too, soldiers from the Colonies tended to have a reputation for rapacious behavior against the locals. Albeit, most of these weren’t Blacks and probably aren’t comparable to American Negroes even if they were. I’m not saying Birth of a Nation isn’t biased. Obviously a lot of relatively benign Blacks and White Unionists were victimized in the frenzy of the Klan. But, I highly doubt that the stories of rapacious and violent Black occupiers are not reflected to some extent in reality.

The Klan likely would have been terrifying at this time. They were scarier, for sure, riding around armed on horseback, with these elaborate ghost costumes and torches in the dead of night. Some sources say they intentionally tried to mimick ghosts or undead corpses of the confederate soldiers, taking their revenge on the occupiers. However, much of the later idiosyncrasies of the Klan did not yet exist at this point. The Klan was, in its first iteration, purely a White Supremacist and Southern Revanchist organization. Nordicism had not become a part of it yet, and Protestantism had not become a crucial part of it even though its members were undoubtedly almost entirely Protestant. There are recorded instances of Catholics and even a handful of Sephardic Jews in the First Klan. There simply weren’t enough Catholics or Jews in the South for anyone to care about them. Nativism was mostly a Northern movement prior to the Civil War for a reason. The ones that were in the South had been there since Colonial times. A lot of people bring up the lynching of Italians in New Orleans decades after the decline of the Klan as an example of anti-Italian discrimination, but it is a bad example. Again, lynchings against Whites were not unheard of regadless of ancestry, and furthermore those lynched were believed to be members of an organized crime conspiracy. They weren’t just killed out of anti-Italian hatred. Most people in the United States didn’t even support what had happened.

But back to the main topic. The Second Klan was, in many ways, completely different in its mission statement. It was heavily characterized by anti-papism and pro-prohibition politics. It was also Nordicist, limiting its focus among Whites to Anglo-Germanics. Not exactly the same as the soft Celticism of the earlier Klan. I believe this change is partially related to the change in geography of the Second Klan. It was no longer a Southern Revanchist organization, much of its membership was in the midwest. Many of these members probably had fathers and grandfathers who fought for the union.

Although the Klan is remembered as “mainly Anti-Black, with a side of anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism”, I’m not so sure this was the case. There’s no quantitative deep dives into this, as far as I know, and I don’t even know how such a deep dive would be constructed. In places where Blacks made up only a small minority of the population, the Klan was presumably more known as an anti-Catholic organization. And this is where the problems with the Klan begin.

In the years following the end of World War I, a series of violent race riots broke out in American cities. In the immediate aftermath of WWI, these were known collectively as the “Red Summer” of 1919. These were mostly carried out as a reaction to the increasing urban migration of Blacks, and they were mostly carried out by White Ethnics and especially the Irish, the people whose neighborhoods were being moved into. The delicately articulated and maintained ethnic fiefdoms of Northern cities were now being overrun by Black People.

It was at this time, that the Ku Klux Klan exploded in popularity, in regions which were being most heavily impacted by the Great Migration.

Now, I don’t want to take away all credit from the Nordicists. They did a good job drastically reducing immigration, but the groundwork for that was mostly laid before the Second Klan even existed during the progressive era. There were members of the Second Klan who are very keyed, without a doubt, such as Lothrop Stoddard. Many have told me that Stoddard’s books still hold up today. Cool cover art too.

The problem with the Klan was more its religious sectarianism. At a crucial moment in American history, where White cities began being inundated with nonwhites (particularly Black people) and the main forces against this change were ethnics, the Klan decided to pursue religious nationalism and divert energy away from the Negro question and towards attacking “Papists”. The Klan was also wildly corrupt and politically ineffective, serving more as a multi-level marketing scheme than a political movement. In some Areas, Klan membership was more related to squabbles between White Ethnics rather than opposition to them. In Massachusetts, for example, the Klan was comprised of recent Scandinavian and German immigrants feuding with slightly more recent Irish immigrants¹. The Klan also espoused garbage like “Christian Identity” which supposed that Anglo-Saxons were actually a tribe of Israel. Hawk tuah. That is the sound of me spitting on the ground in disapproval to this retardation. The “Klan Moment” then promptly fell on its face and collapsed after a prominent leading figure of the Indiana Klan, D. C. Stephenson, kidnapped, raped, and abused schoolteacher Madge Oberholtzer. She ended up dying from the infections she got from Stephenson biting her so many times during his rapes.

Stephenson was a true real life Rapeson.

In the wake of this PR disaster and the total collapse of the Indiana Klan, Roosevelt was able to sweep the Ethnic vote under a decade later and form the solid New Deal Coalition, and formulate pre-proto-wokism. Roosevelt is probably worth his own post, but I’d be preaching to the choir if I did that. The KKK had a lot of potential. At its zenith, it had 4 million members. It was one of the largest organizations in the united states, in general. At least according to the Klan itself, almost a third of White men in Indiana were Klan members. And yet, it was all entirely worthless. It accomplished very little, and probably did more harm than good to its own goals. It was already hated by many other racists for its anti-Catholicism, and then it destroyed any good faith it had with American Protestants with the Stephenson incident. The Klan became mostly viewed as a joke at best and as downright villainous at worst.

And then, over the years, people forgot why the Klan was hated. They became convinced that Americans simply rejected the racism of the Klan, that Americans all developed bleeding hearts for the poor Black people who it disliked. In reality, it had nothing to do with that. But it didn’t matter. The Klan became known in American media as the “anti-Black organization” and so people felt like being anti-Klan must mean being pro-Black. A very similar thing, I believe, happened on the subject of World War II. See the relevant article, I consider it one of my best.

Anglos and Americans at the time were overwhelmingly racist, and did not have much of a hate boner for their wartime enemies. People did not care that the Germans were acting “undemocratically”. If they were angry about anything, it was the attack on their overseas cousins in the UK and Australia by the Germans and Japanese. In the aftermath, however, media around WWII portrayed it as if Americans were fighting against discrimination and authoritarianism and such and such. In both the case of the Klan and that of Nazi Germany, lies were used to push White Ethnics closer to nonwhites. The line would be something like: “The racist Klan hated both Catholics and Blacks, so Blacks and Catholics have a common struggle”. This is still less insidious than the popular notion that Nazi Germany believed only people with blond hair and blue eyes were Aryan. You would be surprised how much media promotes this, and how much normies still believe it.

Imagine how different things would be, if the energy of the Second Klan was used productively. I understand that there are legitimate gripes against ethnics, but like I pointed out earlier the Klan wasn’t entirely an “Anti-Ethnic” organization so much as it was an alliance of Protestants against Catholic Ethnics. And no, that isn’t just “good ethnics vs bad ethnics”. Finns and Swedes were heavily associated with Socialism in the Midwest, and both were extremely Lutheran. We saw what populist racialist movements did in Europe and other parts of the world at this same time. It is quite possible that there would have been a much stronger resistance to the brownification of American cities. I believe that this brownification is one of many causes of “woke”. This partially falls under the umbrella of the “Zagrebbi Theory of Woke”, and it partially doesn’t.

The origin of woke: a George Mason view

According to this view, wokeness is caused by virtue signaling. In a society which values equality, one can demonstrate his adherence to social principles by treating someone distant from you (by really any metric — genetic, cultural, geographical, financial) as well as you would someone close to you. However, you don’t have to signal your good treatment to those close to you, because it’s just sort of assumed that you’re going to be biased towards them. Buying your son a $20,000 car is mundane. Donating $20,000 to Africa is heroic. It results in this famous heatmap of moral allocation among Conservatives and Liberals:

America’s cities became racially diverse earlier than America writ large. Today, most major American cities as mostly nonwhite. New York City went from 90% White to 30% White over the course of 70 years. Chicago, as shown above, had a similar story. There are people alive today who remember a Chicago that was over 90% Non-Hispanic White. Today it is 32% Non-Hispanic White. South Side is one of the most infamously dangerous parts of the United States and is also extremely Black. I can go on forever. LA, San Francisco, Saint Louis, Philadelphia, the list goes on. However, you can’t just run a multimillion dollar business from the suburbs. In fact, you can’t run anything from the suburbs due to zoning laws. White people with upwards social mobility are heavily incentivized to either move to a big city, or commute to one, forcing them into diversity zones. Because of this, the elite is being selected for people who have more tolerance for this sort of stuff. Someone who is less racist is more likely to be happy working, studying, and potentially living in these big cities. Where this ties into Zagrebbi’s “Signaling Theory” is that it gives people an actual litmus test to signal over. In the diverse environment, it is expedient to signal race-blindness, because you have to interact regularly with people of other races. It is impossible to ignore the existence of racial disparities, let alone the mere presence of other races within your society. You now have a perfect oppurtunity to signal how open and equality-dedicated you are by engaging with racial minorities and eating their spicy food and not moving to the other side of the road when you’re walking towards them on the sidewalk or whatever. This is not to say that the opposite can’t happen. There are many people who are woke because they are not exposed enough to diversity. Namely, New Englanders. But these people are woke out of ignorance, while the “High Human Capital” has eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge and still chooses to be woke. Yah-woke wants human beings to be knowingly woke instead of ignorantly woke, like Adam and Steve were in the gender-neutral bathroom of Eden.

The White Flight from the cities also makes diversity a non-urgent issue. Americans do not have to witness the demographic revolution going on. In the suburbs, it’s out of sight and out of mind. The truth is, the average White conservative and maybe even the average White independent above 30 does care and doesn’t like it. You have to liquor them up a bit to get them to be honest about it, but the older gentlemen likely remember it firsthand. You send them to Paris, they’ll be horrified too. “Paris is no longer French”, they’ll say. Trump said it himself, the kingpin of right-wing American politics. But they have other things to be concerned about. They have to worry about taxes, about healthcare, about social security, about infrastructure… They worry about crime and bad schools that these demographic changes cause, but they are able to run away from it. They’ll just send the kids to the “good” (white) schools in the ‘burbs. For Europeans, this isn’t the case. They still live in their cities, and they don’t always have suburbs to flee to. They have their city or town, and then they have countryside. Most of them are more forthright in being against ethnic replacement in their own countries, in my experience. This is also part of the reason why the right is surging among European youth, while Anglo-American youth was getting more left-wing over the 2010s. Things appear to have went surprisingly well for the American Right among young voters in 2024 though.

A lot of Trump’s voters are responding to their communities becoming dilapidated and filled with unfamiliar faces over the past decades. This is why he did well in the rust belt in 2016. This is why the Haitian debacle invigorated so many people this past election. It used to just be big cities, now it is random towns in Ohio getting flooded with Haitians at the drop of a hat. Because it really sucks, you know that? It really sucks when the neighborhood you grew up in is now a no-go zone. It really sucks when the subway is filled with screaming crackheads and the road is filled with squeegee guys. It sucks having to worry about getting mugged, carjacked, home invasions, especially when you aren’t allowed to conceal carry. And do you know what really sucks? Going to a minority-majority school. I mean, unless it’s one of those schools in NYC that’s like 80% Indian and Chinese. Even that kind of sucks but in a much more subtle way. And that’s why White people go to the suburbs to start families. Because growing up like that is bad and a lot of the super-racists I know became that way from having to grow up in this environment. I recall a long time ago hearing about a study on how bad the mental state of White students in these schools was compared to in white-majority schools, but I think I’ll never find that study again. If any of you recall it, tell me. I’ll add it.

The city is the center of culture generation within a civilization, The great cathedrals and monuments are built in cities, not in the wilderness (albeit there are a few exceptions). but in modern America the city is an occupied zone by Kultur-Terrors. By giving to them the city we have given them cultural hegemony. I’ve noticed in media that urban “cool” White or white-coded characters are now becoming black-coded or are being replaced with Black people. Perhaps this partially explains the “redhead to black” pipeline. Irish used to be associated with the urban environment, they get turned Black because Irish no longer represent the urban environment. And how do you demonstrate that someone is Irish? Give them red hair. But there are other reasons.

To wrap this post up, I guess I’ll get back to the Klan. You’re never gonna see something like it again, partially because it’s too easy to get your life ruined by participating in stuff like that nowadays. The 1920s were a magical time where groups of political radicals got dressed up in these uniforms that seem ridiculous today and would just go marching around and sometimes fighting other teams. It’s kind of like the Evil Teams in Pokemon. The Klan was probably part of the same “colorshirt radicalism” phenomenon that generated the Sturmabteilung (Brownshirts), the Italian and British Blackshirts, the Irish Blueshirts, the Romanian Iron Guard (Greenshirts), the list goes on. Another reason you probably don’t see this today is because that sort of “team identity” craving is filled by professional sports. A post may be necessary to discuss this very cool, avant-garde mode of politics in the future. Today it would be ridiculed by the irony culture because people are winebarred beta cucks these days. SAD!

1. Emily Parker (Fall 2009). "'Night-Shirt Knights' in the City: The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Worcester, Massachusetts", New England Journal of History, Vol. 66 Issue 1, pp. 62–78.