USA Today Twists Itself Into a Pretzel Trying to Deny Democrat Roots in Civil War & KKK

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“At the core of the effort to discredit the current Democratic Party is the refusal to accept the realignment of the party structure in the mid-20th century,” Hunt said.

In September, NPR host Shereen Marisol Maraji called the claim, “one of the most well-worn clapbacks in modern American politics.”

Comedian Trevor Noah tackled the misleading trope on an episode of "The Daily Show" in March 2016, after two CNN contributors debated the topic.

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“Who started the KKK? That was Democrats. Who was the party of slavery? Who was the part of Jim Crow and segregation? Who opposed the Civil Rights Movement? Who opposed voting rights? It was all the Democrats,” the meme reads.

Other posts making more specific claims about the Democratic Party starting the Civil War or founding the KKK continue to circulate.

This trope was rated false by PolitiFact and the Associated Press in October 2018.

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A faction of the Democratic Party started the Civil War

Opponents of slavery extending further into America founded the Republican Party. They elected President Abraham Lincoln in 1860, in response to escalating tensions around slavery after the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 threatened the balance of slave states to free states.

Southern states, primarily led by Democrats, initiated secession proceedings and launched the Civil War. But historians say the party is not to blame.

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The KKK was founded by Democrats, but not the party

The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 by ex-Confederate soldiers Frank McCord, Richard Reed, John Lester, John Kennedy, J. Calvin Jones and James Crowe in Pulaski, Tennessee. The group was originally a “social club” but quickly became a violent white supremacist group.

Its first grand wizard was Nathan Bedford Forrest, an ex-Confederate general and prominent slave trader.

Experts agree the KKK attracted many ex-Confederate soldiers and Southerners who opposed Reconstruction, most of whom were Democrats. Forrest even spoke at the 1868 Democratic National Convention.

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