Ted Cruz riles leftists after likening Ku Klux Klan to racist Democrats
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz shot back at Democrats opposing Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions’ nomination for U.S. Attorney General citing the history of southern Democrats and Ku Klux Klan.
Cruz’s comments during a Fox News riled critics:“When the left doesn’t have any other arguments, they go and just accuse everyone of being a racist. It’s an ugly, ugly part of the modern Democratic Party,” he said on “America’s Newsroom.”
“You look at the most racist, you look at the Dixiecrats, they were Democrats who imposed segregation, imposed Jim Crow laws, who founded the Klan,” Cruz said. “The Klan was founded by a great many Democrats.”
photo/ donkeyhotey
“The Klan was founded by a great many Democrats, and yet now the Democrats just accuse anyone they disagree with of being a racist,” Cruz said. “That was a false smear of Senator Sessions, and I think he’s going to make an extraordinary attorney general. After eight years, we deserve an attorney general who’ll be faithful to the law and faithful to the Constitution.”
.@tedcruz nails it with a theme right out of #HillarysAmericahttps://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/08/ted-cruz-the-democrats-are-the-party-of-the-ku-klux-klan/?client=safari … — @DineshDSouza
“The party lines of the 1860s/1870s are not the party lines of today,” Carole Emberton, an associate professor of history at the University at Buffalo, told PolitiFact. “Although the names stayed the same, the platforms of the two parties reversed each other in the mid-20th century, due in large part to white Dixiecrats’ flight out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
“Senator Cruz is a very well educated man, and as such, he is well aware of the fact that the Democrats, Dixiecrats of old are not necessarily the Democrats of present,” Cornell Brooks told USA TODAY in a phone interview. “So to say that the Democrat Party is the party of the Ku Klux Klan past and present is just quite simply inaccurate.”
Sessions was confirmed by the Senate and will join the Trump administration as Attorney General.
Racist poster from 1866 – Library of Congress
