“Fox and Friends” host Brian Kilmeade on Wednesday repeated his complaint about how the Democratic Party used to be the party of the KKK but yet the current GOP lacks Black voter support.
Last year, Kilmeade told then-Fox Nation personalities Diamond and Silk during a “Fox and Friends” segment that the Democratic Party “gave birth to the Ku Klux Klan.” Kilmeade also argued that “it was a Republican that — Abraham Lincoln’s party — that up into the 1960s that would fought (and) push back against racism,” before lamenting that “somehow that narrative flipped.”
Kilmeade made similar remarks on Wednesday, as “Fox and Friends” hosts discussed Kanye West’s supposed 2020 presidential run that the rapper abruptly announced in a tweet on Saturday. During an interview in Forbes published Wednesday morning, West said that he’s OK with diverting Black votes away from Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, thus helping Trump, because he feels that assuming the Black vote is Democratic “is a form of racism and white supremacy.”
“That is a form of racism and white supremacy and white control to say that all Black people need to be Democrat and to assume that me running is me splitting the vote,” West told Forbes. “All of that information is being charged up on social media platforms by Democrats.”
West — who told Forbes that he no longer supports President Trump — then claimed that Democrats have threatened him by saying that if he voted for President Trump “my music career would be over” and that these kinds of threats are what “the Democrats are doing, emotionally, to my people.”
Kilmeade took the opportunity to rehash his misguided argument from last year while discussing West’s comments.
“I remember historically it was the Democratic party, the party of the KKK,” Kilmeade said. “The Republican Party — the party of Frederick Douglass and Frederick Douglass as well as Abraham Lincoln. So somehow I guess in the ‘60s things all reversed.”
Although the Democratic Party initially supported slavery and segregation, the party’s platform shifted in the late 1940s when it began embracing civil rights during then-President Harry Truman’s term. After Truman left office, his Republican successor President Dwight Eisenhower expressed resistance to passing the 1957 Civil Rights Act. A change in party ideology ensued when the Republican Party welcomed Southern Democrats who opposed civil rights, prompting a new generation of Southern Republicans aligning themselves with segregation.
Watch Kilmeade’s remarks below:
Brian Kilmeade: "Historically, it was the Democratic Party — the party of the KKK. It was the Republican Party — the party of Frederick Douglass as well as Abraham Lincoln. So somehow, I guess in the '60s, things all reversed." pic.twitter.com/qccdUfr4F9
— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) July 8, 2020
