On the day that Jeff Sessions was confirmed as attorney general, Ted Cruz appeared on Fox News to bash Elizabeth Warren after she was silenced while attempting to read a letter written by Coretta Scott King in 1986. The letter, of course, was about King’s perception that Sessions was unfit to serve as a federal judge, due to alleged KKK jokes and suppression of voter rights. And Cruz was not content to fill 24 hours with one instance of awkwardness — congratulating a woman for her MS struggles — he also accused Democrats of founding the Ku Klux Klan. In the above clip, Cruz cuts to the chase while defending Sessions and slamming Warren.
“The Democrats are the party of the Ku Klux Klan. 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. The Klan was founded by a great many Democrats.”
Well. Cruz appears to be echoing a 2013 statement by Virginia State Senator Stephen Martin: “Both the KKK and Planned Parenthood are creations of the Democratic Party.” Polifact did some digging into the KKK part, which was difficult because of the nebulous starting point of the hate group. However, historians credit Confederate veterans with founding it around 1865, and a small quantity of Democrats joined between 1860-70.
However, Polifact spoke with University at Buffalo Professor Carole Emberton, who notes that the Democrats that existed back when the KKK began do not represent the contemporary party:
“The party lines of the 1860s/1870s are not the party lines of today. 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. By then, the Democratic Party had become the party of ‘reform,’ supporting a variety of ‘liberal’ causes, including civil rights, women’s rights, etc. whereas this had been the banner of the Republican Party in the nineteenth century.”
So technically, Cruz isn’t grasping at complete straws. There’s a connection between the KKK and Democrats, but it wasn’t launched by the Democratic party, especially not the incarnation that exists today … in a time when the hate group endorsed Donald Trump. Here’s a longer clip of Cruz’s Fox News interview if you’re looking for a more context, although this is mostly a WTF apperance.