Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R) will not go to a local Republican Party fundraiser after the party distributed flyers advertising a Ku Klux Klan discussion at the event, Business Insider reported on Wednesday.
In the flyers, the Garvin County Republicans promoted a chat about “some things that you may not know” about the KKK. One of the event’s organizers said that the discussion would be focused on how some Democrats can be tied to the Klan and said that the event was not “connected” to the KKK, according to Business Insider.
The flyer advertised that Fallin would speak at the “GOP Bean Feed” event, but a spokesman for the governor, Alex Weintz, told Business Insider that Fallin declined to attend the fundraiser.
“They had invited her to go, we had said we would look to put it on her schedule. She is not going,” Weintz said.
Weintz would not say whether the KKK discussion prompted Fallin to skip the event.
“All I can tell you is she is not going and certainly that flyer was not something that is run by our office,” Weintz told Business Insider. “The governor was never going to speak about any of those topics. Her plan was always to speak about her re-election campaign and her goals for the state.”
Allie Burgin, the Garvin County GOP chairman, told Business Insider that the flyer was “taken out of context.”
“It kind of caused a firestorm because KKK was mentioned in there and it had people thinking that was a recruiting tool or something we were signing on to,” he said. “The information is just a website where you can find how the KKK was instituted and it was actually started by southern Democrats.”
Burgin called the KKK a “racist organization.”
“Throughout history they’ve been known to be murderers,” he said.
Business Insider has a picture of the flyer here.
