(Deroy Murdock, Headline USA) Federal lawmakers should adopt a simple resolution: “It is the sense of Congress that the Ku Klux Klan and Antifa are domestic-terror groups.”
As part of his $500 billion Platinum Plan for black empowerment, President Donald J. Trump proposed to prosecute the Klan and Antifa as terrorists—an approach that somehow escaped Obama–Biden, despite their two terms.
Attorneys general Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch—the first black Americans to control the Justice Department—failed likewise, notwithstanding their combined, eight-year command.
This legislation would show early support for the more robust battle against these brutal thugs that Trump envisions for a second term—whenever that might occur.
Republicans likely would endorse this measure unanimously. The Grand Old Party has fought the KKK since Reconstruction, when Democrats launched the deadly hate group as their party’s militant, pro-segregation muscle.
The Republican War on the Klan continued into 1991, when Grand Wizard David Duke won Louisiana’s GOP gubernatorial primary. Disgusted Republicans endorsed his dazzlingly corrupt Democrat opponent, Gov. Edwin Edwards and deployed this slogan: “Vote for the Crook: It’s important.”
Republicans understand that Antifa also is an evil terror outfit that shatters domestic tranquility.
“Antifa and other anarchists are hijacking peaceful protests and engaging in political violence that is not only criminal, but antithetical to the First Amendment,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
Representative Mike Johnson, R-La., remarked, “It’s time for Congressional Democrats to finally join the majority of Americans in condemning the destruction and civil unrest that leftwing groups like Antifa are directing.”
Meanwhile, Democrats have spent decades stuffing the KKK down the memory hole. They want Americans to forget that the Klan was Southern Democrats’ henchmen from 1865 into the Civil Rights era.
As a young man, the late Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., enlisted 150 fresh Klansmen into the chapter he launched in his hometown of Crab Orchard, West Virginia.
Byrd led fellow southern Democrat racists J. William Fulbright of Arkansas and Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee in a 60-day filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Despite his decades of robust bigotry, Senate Democrats made Byrd majority leader as recently as 1989.
When the former KKK recruiter expired in office in 2010 at age 92, top Democrats eulogized him, not least Obama and Biden.
As part of his 3,085-word tribute to the dead racist, the then-vice president said, “He was a friend, and he was a mentor, and he was a guide.”
Democrats must weigh this long history and this relatively recent association when deciding how to vote on the Klan clause of this proposed resolution.
The anti-Antifa language would be even tougher for Democrats to swallow: They refuse to accept that this far-Left, violent-extremist group even exists—never-mind the vandalism, arson, assaults and other mayhem that its blackshirts perpetrate.
Biden insisted in the Sept. 29 presidential debate: “Antifa is an idea, not an organization.”
Was conservative journalist Andy Ngo beaten so badly by an idea in July 2019 that he was hospitalized overnight in Portland, Oregon, with a cerebral hemorrhage?
Did an idea flog Trump supporters in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 14 and hurl industrial-grade fireworks at them as they dined outdoors at P.J. Clarke’s Restaurant?
Nope.
Members of an organization called Antifa did these things and much more, never mind this bizarre claim by House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-NY: “That’s a myth that’s being spread only in Washington, D.C.”
Democrats are reluctant to condemn Antifa, lest they alienate their far-Left base.
All the more reason to vote soon. Let every senator be counted on this question, not least Kamala Harris, D-Calif.
Georgia Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue should support this measure and then challenge their respective runoff opponents, Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, to tell voters what they would do.
Next, the Senate should transmit this legislation across the Capitol and watch House Democrats squirm.
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor, a contributing editor with National Review Online, and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research.
