The head of North Carolina’s Republican Party recently tweeted a pair of memes linking Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to the Ku Klux Klan.
State GOP Chairman Hasan Harnett, who is black, tweeted images of a wild-eyed and a winking Clinton alongside an image of KKK members. The text on the images read “The KKK was created as the militant wing of the Democrat Party in order to fight Republican reconstruction”:
Say NO to the #HillaryClinton and the #Liberal Takeover. #ChristianLivesMatter #KeepGodFirst pic.twitter.com/JAWEcsCmPT
— Hasan Harnett (@HasanHarnett) July 22, 2015
Say NO to the #Democrat Lies #Liberal Agenda. #BlackLivesMatter #KeepGodFirst pic.twitter.com/ueREVWozzS
— Hasan Harnett (@HasanHarnett) July 23, 2015
Harnett declined to comment on the tweets to Raleigh TV station WRAL. The state party’s executive director, Todd Poole, told the news station that as the state party’s first black chairman, Harnett “believes we have to learn from history and move past it.”
The chairman’s tweets also paint a misleading picture of the Democratic Party’s history. It’s true that Democrats have historic ties to the South, from the Confederacy through to the Civil Rights era — a fact that conservative pundits used to try to deflect blame from modern Republicans during the recent debate over the Confederate flag. But while certain Southern Democrats of yore were involved with the hate group, the KKK was never a part of the Democratic Party as an institution.
