The unseemly synergy of the media and racist clowns

Once a year, starting in the late 1970s, a gaggle of journalists gathered on a Davie cow pasture to chronicle the ranting of racist lunkheads.

Of course, we feigned a high-minded rationale for the lowdown endeavor. Reporters and photographers and TV crews braved a field stippled with cow paddies so we could remind South Florida that the Ku Klux Klan was still a menace — an assertion that might have been more convincing had we not outnumbered the guys in white sheets.

But we had an unspoken deal with the klansmen. We endured antisemitic and racist conspiracy theories spouted by a self-anointed grand wizard. In return, they provided the pyrotechnics.

With luck, a kerosene-soaked wooden cross would be ablaze in time for the 11 o’clock newscast. Flames against the night sky and silhouettes of guys in pointy hats created an irresistible tableau for TV news and surefire display photos in the morning newspapers.

Afterward, the Klan would disappear until the next year’s rally. Which made me wonder: Would Broward’s KKK have even existed without the media there to bolster their self-regard?

The Klan seemed to hold its last Davie rally in 1993, though it’s unclear whether that was because the membership had dwindled away or because assignment editors simply lost interest.

This past week, the Florida media was dealing with another racist clique and the same old troubling conundrum.

Over the course of several days, homeowners in Parkland, Coral Spring, Miami, Coral Gables, Boca Raton, Vero Beach, Miami Beach, North Miami Beach, Sarasota, Orlando, Jacksonville, Fort Pierce, Venice, Lake Mary and a few other Florida cities awoke to find crude antisemitic flyers had been tossed onto their lawns, each sealed in plastic baggies weighted with corn kernels to keep them from blowing away.

The flyers featured photos of 10 Disney executives and board members, each stamped with a Star of David and with “Jew” written after their names. The flyers couched the Walt Disney Company’s opposition to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ infamous “Don’t Say Gay” law (which limits references to gender or sexuality in public schools) as a Jewish conspiracy. The flyer accuses the execs of “child grooming,” employing the same buzzword used by DeSantis’ shameless press secretary, Christina Pushaw, who characterized anyone opposed to the governor’s homophobic legislation as a probable pedophile. “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer,” she tweeted in March.

The pedophile slander was a variation of the QAnon Internet conspiracy theory that Democratic Party leaders run a child trafficking ring (with a murder and cannibalism sideline). As a Republican political strategist told the New Yorker last week, the outrageous “grooming” charge diverts attention from the plate-breaking, ketchup-throwing, election-sabotaging antics of Donald Trump. What’s worse than a party led by an unhinged insurrectionist? Perhaps a party full of leftwing child molesters.

Tuesday’s flyers merely added an antisemitic element to the Pushaw slur. Sarah Emmons, Florida regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, worried that when “our leadership normalizes this type of hateful rhetoric, groups like this latch onto it.”

Groups like whom, you might wonder. Like bigoted clowns. The guys behind the crude flyers seem more loathsome opportunists than the kind of gun-toting lunatics who led the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. For the pamphleteers, a recent surge of antisemitic violence across the U.S. presents a fine marketing opportunity. They orchestrate nasty stunts and distribute their outrageous flyers to generate shock and media attention, which gins up traffic to their website, where they solicit donations and sell merchandise.

(As a reporter covering the South back in the 1980s, I came away from several encounters with Klan leaders convinced that they were less true believers than peddlers of KKK books and paraphernalia. Hate was just a key element of their business plans. Pointy hats were a hot item.)

After this bunch ran a similar flyer operation in February, littering lawns in Florida, California, Texas, Minnesota and Colorado (blaming Jews for both the pandemic and the vaccines), the Jewish journal Forward warned, “There’s only one way a small number of people who spend their precious earthly hours filling plastic bags with beans, rice and B.S. can get an enormous amount of attention: media.”

The Forward piece demanded, “News organizations big and small need to grapple with their role in amplifying hate and inadvertently helping hate groups grow.”

I’d add that elected officials and their press officers should stop providing hate groups with new material.

Meanwhile, I’m not naming the unseemly outfit behind the flyers. I’m still embarrassed by the misplaced attention I lent KKK buffoons in a long ago Davie cow pasture.