CNN contributor and habitual Trump-apologist Jeffrey Lord equated the progressive group MoveOn.org to the Ku Klux Klan, baselessly blaming the organization for recent violence at Trump campaign rallies.

Conservative pundits have attempted to scapegoat MoveOn.org following a spate of violent clashes at Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump's campaign rallies with thespurious claim that the progressive organization is responsible for violence at a canceled rally in Chicago. Despite the fact that numerous media figures have called out Trump for “encouraging, even condoning violence,” Lord blamed the violence on “the American left.” As Ilya Sheyman, executive director of MoveOn.org Political Action explained, the group had supported local activists by “printing signs and recruiting MoveOn members to attend the student-led protest,” but the protest “was a direct result of the violence that has occurred at Trump rallies and that has been repeatedly encouraged by Trump himself.”

In a March 15 American Spectator article, Lord wrote that MoveOn.org is “the new Ku Klux Klan,” arguing that “MoveOn has now become the latest successor to this mantle of racism plus violence.” According to Lord, “the only difference” between the days of the KKK and MoveOn.org's organization of protesters rally is “This time around they don't use hoods and burning crosses to rally the terrorists, they use social media instead”: 

Meet MoveOn.org. The new Ku Klux Klan. The newest leftist incarnation of that old leftist formula that combines racism with violence to push the progressive agenda.

The American Left has a horrendous history of flat out racism and bigotry, liberally salted with violence. From the 19th and early 20th century Klan, on to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Weather Underground of the 1960s and early 1970s, on to today's Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, the Violent Left has trucked in racism or violence or both. The common thread being the goal of shutting down opponents when not terrorizing them into silence.

The MoveOn.org-organized events in Chicago at the now-canceled Trump rally, not to mention the attempt by a Bernie Sanders supporter to rush the stage at a Trump rally and forcibly deny The Donald his First Amendment right to free speech, if not physically assault him, has only underscored the point that MoveOn has now become the latest successor to this mantle of racism plus violence.

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So here we are yet again. The Left appealing to people by race -- urging them to forcibly shut down fellow Americans who were peacefully exercising their First Amendment right to assemble and hear the candidate of their choice.

The only difference between this and the days when the progressives were hiding under those white hoods and burning crosses while trying to terrorize newly freed slaves and their white allies? This time around they don't use hoods and burning crosses to rally the terrorists, they use social media instead.