KKK Has a Great Recruiting Tool: Obama's Presidency

They may refer to themselves as the invisible empire, but at least in Virginia, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) have stepped up recruitment to Richmond-area residents.

In an interview with Richmond television station WTVR, two members of the Virginia Ku Klux Klan boasted recruitment was up, thanks largely to the election of Barack Obama as president.

“Since Obama’s first term our numbers have doubled and now that we’re headed to a second term it’s going to triple, this is going to be the biggest resurgence of the Klan since 1915,” said one of the Klansmen interviewed.

“We’re not trying to target anybody or scare anybody with hate, we’re just using our freedom of speech to drop fliers,” said one of the Klansmen interviewed. “Everyone thinks that we’re a hate group, we’re not a hate group, we don’t hate anyone, and we want to see good things come to our race.”

The number of so-called hate groups and anti-government organizations in the nation is on the rise, according to a report released by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Nearly every day you can read a story that pertains to political racism, whether it's white students at Ole Miss who greeted President Obama's re-election with racial slurs, to empty chairs hung from trees meant to symbolize the "lynching" of the president.

Following President Obama's re-election, there was a spike in hate speech on Twitter, with racist thumb-mashers calling the president everything from a "nigger" to a "monkey," as well as a call for the south to "rise again."

Geography scholars mapped some of the nastiest tweets, and found that Alabama and Mississippi scored worst. Not surprisingly, among the 10 states with the most racist tweets, Obama lost in nine of them.

Fox News has also played a role by allowing their hosts and guests to use coded language in their attacks against President Obama to foment racial hatred on the right.

Brent Bozell, head of the horribly-labeled Media Research Center, likened Obama to "a skinny, ghetto crackhead" on Sean Hannity's show, and Fox's Eric Bolling came under fire for claiming the president was "chugging 40's in Ireland" while tornadoes ravaged Missouri. He also said Obama was was hosting "hoodlum[s] in the hizzouse" when he welcomed Gabon President Ali Bongo Ondimba and rapper Common.