I would add that it is interesting watching the endorsement of David Duke as a barometer. My understanding is that he has endorsed Kamala Harris because she is his kind of anti-Semite.
On that note, I will add that I visited the Indiana State Museum a few weeks ago. First: did you know that the word comes from “Land of the Indians”? There were many tribes there. We signed treaties limiting white settlement, then broke them as soon as we had the numbers to resist the Indian war which followed. That is what I recall, in any event.
Secondly, though: the second iteration of the KKK was largely founded not as a particularly anti-black party, but an anti-immigrant party. They opposed Jews, Italians, and I think even Catholics, which is to say Irish, Polish and others.
In this regard, what needs to be said is the obvious, which is that Trump does not oppose legal immigration. Neither do I. I think nearly everyone who has studied the issue has concluded that economically, immigrants are a HUGE bonus for America. They come here bringing fire, passion, ideas, and a fierce work ethic. Many, many important companies were founded by immigrants.
But legal immigrants are people we invite. They ask to come here, and we say yes. Trump has not really affected this process, other than to, for the time being, ban people from countries where a sizable part of the population has experience dealing terrorism, and which hates us. Not cool bringing those people here.
People we do not invite, who sneak–and sneak is the word–in here without asking permission, without seemingly CARING about permission: those are the people who we all should be concerned with. They break our laws the moment they come here. A very great many of them wind up on welfare and in jail. The numbers are night and day legal versus illegal immigrants. By and large LEGAL immigrants use less welfare and commit considerably less crimes than people BORN here. Illegal immigrants, of course, invert this. I read something approaching 50% of the people in our Federal jails are people here illegally, who subsequently committed other crimes requiring incarceration.
That our national conversation is disrupted in damaging ways daily by most of our media is really beyond dispute. What they take from this, why they do it, why they find it acceptable, I continue to wonder.