If you identify who’s in these photos and were in those “social clubs” at the time, their families today prolly still own the farmland, still call themselves “farmers” while exploiting the actual farmworkers or “blue collar” while managing a franchise restaurant or car dealership.

Today, their descendants prolly still complain about immigrants and socialists all while stealing water for private profits and pushing neo-Northwest Territorial Imperative projects (e.g. “Greater Idaho” or “Liberty State“).

These aren’t new problems, and smug progressives in overwhelmingly white areas of the Pacific Northwest need to start looking hard at how it got that way, and why it stays that way.

The Klan recruited members by marketing itself as a means to celebrate and support that which most white Americans did already: go to church, get involved in civic groups and fraternal orders, participate in family life, and vote. The Klan would capitalize on people’s insecurity that these activities were under threat from within and without, and offer itself (for a fee) as a kind of protector of tradition. The ultimate goal of such marketing was to transform people’s everyday habits so they came to think that being American was synonymous with being a Klan member.

Source: University of Washington