A tinderbox waiting to explode for at least three decades

A tinderbox waiting to explode for at least three decades

by digby

This story in the Washington Post about the Kansas assassin is just creepy:

When I learned that the man accused of shooting innocent bystanders Sunday at a Jewish community center and Jewish retirement home in Kansas City was a former Klansman named Glenn Miller, I shuddered.

Thirty-three years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Duke University, I read a small item in the Raleigh News & Observer that mentioned Miller, then the grand dragon of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Miller, it turns out, ran a paramilitary training camp in rural North Carolina.

I couldn’t understand how, in late-20th-century America, the KKK could operate in the open less than an hour from our elite, ivory-tower campus. I was an editor of Duke’s daily newspaper, the Chronicle, so I did what any reporter would do: I called Miller and asked for an interview. Always looking for publicity, Miller readily said yes, but he had one condition. “We ain’t no equal-opportunity employer, you know,” he said. “So don’t bring down no blacks and no Jews.”

It get worse. "I smell a Jew....."

I saw Morris Dees last night on Chris Hayes and he explained that this guy lost face among his fellow Nazis and may have been trying to prove his bonafides to his cohorts with this latest shooting. My God ...


.