Happy New Year to each and every one of you!
Welcome to Season 6 episode 1 of Light ‘Em Up!
We launch 2025 with exciting news! We’re actively being downloaded in 117 countries, globally!
Without fear or favor — we follow the facts wherever they lead us.
We present the facts not the fiction that drive and support our theories forward!
We’ll shine the antiseptic light of the truth as we deliver this in-depth investigation that started some 14 months ago as we began to march heavily into the election season of 2024.
We’ll take an up-close and personal historic look at the United States’ oldest domestic terrorist organization — the Ku Klux Klan — and how some of what you are hearing these days from many MAGA Republicans — even from the recent victor in the presidential election, Donald J. Trump — harkens back to the goals and aspirations of the very same night riders — who burned crosses and terrorized Black people and pretty much anyone or anything that moved after the Civil War that wasn’t like them. White, nativist and Protestant.
Terror, vigilantism and murder were the Klan’s calling card.
We’ll look at the historic foundation of the Klan.
Like it or not, agree or not, the similarities between the 1920s Ku Klux Klan and Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement are stark and marked. Both movements have preached the centrality of being anti-immigrant. Both have been rooted in white supremacy. Both had and have a dark side of associated hate crimes. Both have wrapped themselves in the flag and pretended to be the most patriotic and pro-American.
Originally the Ku Klux Klan was established innocuously enough as a social organization by six ex-Confederate officers in the small Southern town of Pulaski, Tennessee.
In the spring or early summer of 1866, six men gathered one evening in the Pulaski law office of Judge Thomas M. Jones, the father of one of the founders, to create their new “fraternity”.
In 1867 former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest became the first “Grand Wizard" (national leader) of the order.
The transformed Klan was to be organized along military lines in a rigid hierarchy with leaders elected at each level.
A Grand Cyclops was to be the leader of a local den, or chapter.
— Above him was a Grand Giant in charge of all dens in a county, who in turn was answerable to a Grand Titan.
— A Grand Titan reigned over a Congressional District, and in charge of the whole state was a Grand Dragon.
— They created an organization patterned after a previously prominent college fraternity, Kuklos Adelphon.
They adopted the basic ritual of this fraternity with some changes. They took the first part of the name, Kuklos, Greek for circle or band, altered it slightly to Kuklux and added Klan for alliterative appeal.
Thus, the Ku Klux Klan was born.
With our investigation, we submit that to understand MAGA, the Klan must be considered as a formative background influence.
MAGA didn’t spring full-blown from the mind of “stable genius” Donald Trump.
Many Americans love and strive to hide the deep-seated racism which is part of our history, and that is the case with the Klan. In the early 20th century, the Klan was far more influential than is now recognized.
Tune in to hear all of the explosive details.
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