The GOP Is Staging Klan Rallies Across The Country To Win The Midterms. Let Me Explain

I’ve written about this before — multiple times, actually — but it’s ironic and interesting that Republican conservatives go out of their way to highlight the history that members of the early iterations of the Ku Klux Klan identified politically as Democrats. I find it equally interesting that in response to Republicans isolating that history from the broader historical context, liberal Democrats always bring up the party switch: the gradual process in which our two major political parties essentially flipped ideologies.

It’s interesting because people on “the left” feel the need to combat Republicans’ favorite strawman by digging into the archives of U.S. history, when they can easily point to the U.S. present to illustrate which party the Klan is far more likely to identify with today.

Much like today’s Republicans harp on Democrats historically favoring slavery while they, in the 21st century, fight tooth and nail for the preservation of the legacy of the Confederacy, they say Democrats represent the KKK — but they’re the ones having coast-to-coast Klan rallies right now, and calling them campaign events.

After all, what was the main messaging model of the Klan, if not to propagandize white people into thinking anyone they deem to be “other” is coming for their heritage, their freedom, their material possessions, their purity, and their way of life?

“In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) took advantage of popular xenophobia to form a white fraternity organized to defend Anglo-Protestant America,” a researcher for the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs wrote nearly a decade ago. “In so doing, they developed a gospel of their own to support a unified political and social movement.”

EBSCO describes the earliest versions of the organization as “a fraternal order for White, male, Anglo-Saxon Protestants opposed to Reconstruction and the rights of newly freed African Americans,” and it describes the next rise of the Klan as one that “presaged the period of the Red Scare (1919–20) and the Immigration Act of 1921, the first such legislation in the United States to establish immigration quotas on the basis of national origin” in a period that “was marked by high levels of prejudice in mainstream US society toward immigrants, Black Americans, Jewish Americans, and other minority groups.”

The Klan fear-mongered to white people, convincing them that the freedom of Black enslaved people would lead to a system of enslavement for white people. It preached and produced media that taught the integration of nonwhites in American society would cause explosions of violent crime and white victimization.

In  “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism” (1926), Hiram Wesley Evans, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan at the time, described the second coming of the KKK as one where “Klansmen wrapped themselves in the flag and the cross and proclaimed themselves the moral guardians of America.”

And here’s another excerpt:

First in the Klansman’s mind is patriotism-America for Americans. He believes religiously that a betrayal of Americanism or the American race is treason to the most sacred trusts, a trust from his fathers and a trust from God. He believes too that Americanism can only be achieved if the pioneer stock is kept pure. There is more than race pride in this. Mongrelization has been proven bad. It is only between closely related stocks of the same race that interbreeding has improved men; the kind of interbreeding that went on in the early days of America between English, Dutch, German, Huguenot, Irish, and Scotch.

So, what does that look like in 2026? What does the fight for a white ethnostate, the use of xenophobia and racism as a galvanizing tool, and the tying of patriotism to white nationalism look like now? What does the new “Red Scare” look like?

Well, I’d say it bears a striking resemblance to the GOP’s last campaign push ahead of the midterm elections.

I’d say it looks kind of like this:

Over the last few months at least, virtually every Republican in a competitive race, and every GOP member who is invested in holding on to their congressional majority, has joined President Donald Trump in bashing “third world” countries like Somalia, claiming an Islamic takeover is underfoot, and calling candidates and elected officials like Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar communists, “jihadists,” scammers, people who hate America, and people who will prove true their “Great Replacement Theory,” an ideology adhered to by white supremacist terrorists and Republican officials alike.

Even before this year, modern-day Klan rhetoric looked like Vice President JD Vance spreading lies about Haitian migrants abducting and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, and Trump then repeating those lies on a nationally televised debate stage. 

It looked like Trump generalizing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” who are “bringing drugs” and “bringing crime” into the U.S., baselessly claiming Mexican migrants were bringing “tremendous infectious disease” to the country, saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America, invoking scientific racism by claiming migrants are predisposed to murder because it’s in their “genes,” and erroneously blaming those same “genetics” for recent mass shootings.

And as far as call-backs to the Klan’s ideology of white victimization, look no further than our VP, who has complained numerous times about white conservatives being called racist, and declared to white audiences: “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being White anymore.”

Now, here he is at a recent Michigan campaign rally, describing the Middle East as “a region of the world made up of countries whose name I couldn’t even pronounce.”

Meanwhile, RFK Jr. is asking, “What’s the point?” regarding Indian people in the U.S.

 “I know a lot of my contemporaries are in bed with Indians — which, if you take that statement literally, might make a lot of you want to vomit — but the point is, they’re everywhere, they’re unethical, and a lot of them don’t smell the freshest,” said our nation’s health secretary.

Besides the fact that RFK is talking about how Indians smell — as if he doesn’t take his grandkids to swim in sewage — he seems to have completely forgotten who the vice president married and had kids with. 

But Vance won’t do or say anything about it. He’s known the hoods were off in the MAGA world for as long as he’s been a willing participant in it.

So, yeah — it simply doesn’t matter which political party name was most common among the founders of the KKK a century to a century and a half ago. Who’s holding Klan rallies now?

The parties might have switched, but white supremacy is the same as it ever was, and when they say “Make America great again,” we know exactly what they mean.

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