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Tattoos Will Get You Deported, But Swastikas Will Get You a Podcast
Latino men are targeted and arrested for tattoos, while white gangs commit 80% of extremist murders.
The Birth of a Nation (1915) has two claims to fame: it revolutionized cinema and resurrected the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). With one camera, two lenses, and 3000 actors, D.W. Griffith built a Hollywood epic and a white supremacist fever dream in the same reel.
Critics still praise it as a masterpiece. But let’s be clear: it’s a three-hour KKK recruitment ad dressed in sentimental violin strings and Civil War cosplay.
That’s not hyperbole. The Birth of a Nation didn’t just glamorize the Klan — it gave them a second life. And one scene in particular planted a racial panic so deep, we’re still pulling the roots out today.
The scene opens with a white woman, delicate as a bedsheet and twice as pale, fleeing from a Black man whose only real crime is being in the film at all. The music swells. Her calico dress flutters. Her chest heaves like a parlor curtain in a storm. She climbs a cliff — symbolism, subtlety be damned — and hurls herself to her death to avoid the unspeakable: being touched by someone not white.
