In Wild CNN Argument, Trump Surrogate Claims KKK Killed People "to Further the Progressive Agenda"
[There was a video here]
On CNN tonight, in the course of Super Tuesday analysis, activist and former White House advisor Van Jones took Donald Trump surrogate Jeffrey Lord to task over the Republican frontrunner’s white supremacist sophistry.
Lord brings up Trump’s comments on the KKK only to obfuscate and equivocate, arguing that the KKK were actually a leftist organization (which is not true) and the terrorist arm of the Democratic party (which is sort of true, although ignoring the radical demographic shifts in the party over the course of the past century is either ignorant or dishonest).
This isn’t the first time Lord, a former aide to Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan who was an early advocate for the Trump candidacy, has made this ahistorical argument. In a 2010 essay for the American Spectator, he denied that Bobby Hall had been lynched. In 2013, he wrote:
At its very core, the Left is about tyranny. Intimidation. The mailed fist.
One can spend endless hours recalling the bloody tyrannies of the French Revolution, or Communism or the Nazis (aka the National Socialists) or, in America, the violence visited by leftist groups from the Ku Klux Klan to this or that labor union to all those 60s radicals who raced around the country in a murderous rage with bombs and bullets.
On Tuesday, Lord accused Jones of dividing people by race. Jones responded that it was the Klan that divided and killed people by race. “And they did it to further the progressive agenda,” Lord said, a smirk just beginning to creep into the corners of his mouth.
