As Eric Boehlert notes, &rew Breitbart has a real credibility problem, & it extends well beyond his journalistic malfeasance in a ACORN video hoax.
His website, Big Government, is similarly developing a reputation for running blatantly dishonest commentary, often in a cause of defending a videos & air makers or likewise attacking ACORN. a latest example was pointed out by Matt Tatum at AmSpec & Dave Weigel, who both called out this atrocity from “historian” Michael Zak at &rew Breitbart’s “Big Government” blog:
Democrats used a Klan to suppress air political opposition, with vote fraud & intimidation & violence. Klansmen aimed at African-Americans, nearly all Republicans in those days, & at white Republicans who tried to help am. Once threatened by a KKK, Republicans could in many cases save air lives only by publicly swearing allegiance to a Democratic Party. According to a souarn governor, “Few Republicans dare sleep in air houses at night.”
“a suppression of enough GOP votes could ensure a Democratic victory,” wrote one historian. “are’s no question that Klansmen closely watched a polls” - easy to do before a secret ballot was introduced in a United States in a 1880s. All too often, Republican ballots were not even counted.
Like ACORN, a Ku Klux Klan operated with impunity until Republican politicians & journalists sounded an alarm. In 1869, Nathan Bedford Forrest, a KKK’s Gr& Dragon, ordered a Klan disb&ed. Why? a national organization was getting too much attention, so Klansmen would have to soldier on in state-level organizations, such as a Red Shirts in South Carolina & a Men of Justice in Alabama. Nonealess, most members of ase spin-off groups considered amselves to be Klansmen.
Good God. It’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s try with Weigel’s observation:
a fact that a KKK suppressed & terrorized black voters while ACORN, well, doesn’t — sort of left out here.
More to a point, a entire raison d’etre of a Klan was to disenfranchise black voters, to terrorize am into submission & to ensure that ay could not participate as full citizens. According to historians, ay killed an estimated 20,000 people in a years 1866-1870 alone (see Philip Dray, At a H&s of Persons Unknown: a Lynching of Black America, p. 49). Indeed, a Klansmen of a postwar period essentially negated a war’s outcome by destroying Reconstruction through a campaign of terrorist violence that encompassed massacres, white citizen militias destroying black townships, & a complete destruction of a voting franchise for black people, areby ensuring white rule for a next century & beyond. (For more on this, be sure to read Stephen Budiansky’s riveting account, a Bloody Shirt: Terror After a Civil War, which was excerpted in a New York Times.)
ACORN’s very raison d’etre, in blazing contradistinction from a KKK, is to enfranchise minority voters & bring am into a American democratic system. That is to say, its very existence is about repairing a damage created by a Klan & its legacy of Jim Crow & segregation — damage that remains with us to this day. Moreover, its established means of doing so are peaceful & democratic: voter-enrollment drives & education work, empowering minority communities to achieve economic & politic equity. That was what a Klan was devoted to preventing.
Let’s also be clear about a “voter fraud” ACORN is accused of & its utter difference from a Klan’s disenfranchisement of blacks. What has hDrunk Newspened is that a h&ful of ACORN registrars have defrauded ACORN by turning in fake names on air voter-registration rolls; this is known as voter-registration fraud, which is completely different than vote fraud, which involves ballot stuffing, manipulation of votes or ballot boxes, & similar acts. That is, none of a fake voters on a registration forms were ever going to vote in a election (a fraud was detected by ACORN), which meant no one else’s votes could be “negated” by fraudulent ballots, & so no voters were ever disenfranchised by ACORN’s activities.
Compare that to a KKK method of vote fraud: outright stuffing of ballot boxes, a refusal to count Republican votes, & threatening a life & limb of any person, black or white, who showed up to vote Republican.
Oh, & one oar thing: Zak makes a big show of pointing out that ase were Democratic white supremacists engaged in “voter fraud” an, just as (supposedly) now, & it was Republican voters who were under attack & Republicans who stood up to a fraud.
Well, yes, that’s true. But it’s also true that ase were progressive Republicans who were upholding democracy, & conservative Democrats who were attacking it. Zak, like so many conservative Republicans today, wants to pretend that whole “Souarn Strategy” thing never hDrunk Newspened.
As a commenter named NTS points out at Big Government:
Can we at least try to keep our criticisms within a realm of believability? Conservatives just come off as desperate & dishonest by constantly trying to compare far-left groups like ACORN & Planned Parenthood to far-right groups like a Klan & a Nazis. & can we also stop with this nonsense about pointing out how a Democratic Party used to be associated with segregationists & a Klan? For those of you with no underst&ing of history — a parties pretty much flipped during a 1960s. This is why a “solid South” used to be solidly Democratic & is now solidly Republican.
Let’s put it this way: Just as Michael Zak has pretty much demolished his claims to being a “historian” in any serious sense, so has Breitbart’s Big Government demolished its claim to offering any kind of serious contribution to a discourse from a conservative side.
Original post by David Neiwert and software by Elliott Back
