Great research and discussion of the MLM scheme and the Karen comparison. I’ve always thought Karen was a term identifying white racist privilege.
I didn’t connect those dots.
One general pervasive myth is that the KKK were an all encompassing singular party or group, which is not really the case. The Northern Union of Yankee view of the Klan became ‘popular’ because it makes sense to liberal ideas of democracy that people join a group or a cult, there is a charismatic leader, they pledge loyalty and pay fees, etc. But in reality after the war there were many “klans”, and there still are. But this resurgence of the national Klan in the 1920s (born nationally in the 1910s) was very successful spreading the ideology out of the South and across the nation after the first Hollywood blockbuster, Birth of Nation, was released and screened at the White House by the racist president who admired the white south and called the Klan “a veritable Empire of the South.”
But the white supremacists groups that proliferated across the South in 1865 had multiple names and sprung up out of the slave patrol predecessors. There was already a “natural” structure existing on the local level, as passed and signed laws of the South forced white men between the ages of 18 and 60 to rotate on patrols, and fined them if they did not. The legislative laws set them up into “regiments” with captains, and only those with a credible excuse brought before the judge could be reasonably be excused. These groups patrolled outside in the late evenings and nights, when the curfew started for freed negroes, mulattos, and mestizoes, who travel was confined under a different law. The continual modifications came from the 1740 Negro Act evolving until the 1839 South Carolina Negro Act, Section 19 that updated fine recovery “incurred by commanding officers,” for example; or section 2d of the Act of 1823, Section 1, page 23, that required Captains to divide officers who had to stay in the subdivision unless altered, subject to a $700. It also in this section spelled out the Women slave owners also had to serve, unless excused by the magistrate and provided a substitute, hence militarizing the upper class women as well. There were plenty of widows who inherited slaves, from parents or dead husbands, who ran the farmsteads or plantations. They had an obligation to protect the collective property from escaping, by laws, not suggestions or feelings.
The laws were strikingly different from up North, that had no such legal obsession as state constitutions abolished slavery starting in 1777 and ending in 1804 above the Mason-Dixon Line. The concentration of legal effort was more on non-slave property and business/ The laws and Acts of South Carolina literally organized all of white society against color society, giving whites the use of force over freed negroes and slaves on the streets.
After the Civil War, this kind of conditioned lifestyle of whites into organized patrolling militias didn’t stop, and as all whites knew no other lifestyle. Thus they formed local militias, with many different names, like the Red shirts in South Carolina, or the Knights of the White Camelia in Louisiana.
Many, many misconceptions arise from white Union Northerners writing the narrative after the civil war, as the winner gets the spoils, which includes the narrative, overwriting the South’s narrative with their own forced idea of Unity, which never had existed.