Tea Party Senate Candidate Chris McDaniel’s Has a Ku Klux Klan Connection — And is Close To Other Racist Groups As Well

Screen capture from YouTube video.

Mississippi’s Republican Senate race has already featured a weird nursing-home break-in and post-primary courthouse lock-in, so why not donations from a lawyer for an imperial wizard? After break-ins, gaffes and scandals, the Mississippi Senate race now includes a flashback to the state’s troubled racial politics.

By Ben Jacobs
Tea Partier Chris McDaniel has taken $800 in donations from Carl Ford, a former lawyer for Sam Bowers, the imperial wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan who died in prison after being convicted of the murder of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer. Ford also is active in the League of the South, a neo-Confederate organization that has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and was active in the Klan in Laurel, Mississippi, in the early 1960s.

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In an interview with The Daily Beast, Ford, who still practices in Laurel, McDaniel’s hometown, said he was supporting the Tea Party challenger facing six-term Republican incumbent Thad Cochran in a June 24 runoff because of McDaniel’s opposition to what Ford called “immigration reform, so-called.” In contrast, Ford said Cochran was siding with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and supporting “knocking the wall down on the borders and advocating bringing more illegals in.” The septuagenarian lawyer also condemned Michael Bloomberg’s donations to Mississippi Conservative PAC, a super PAC backing Cochran, because of the former New York mayor’s support for gun control. “Don’t think we want a nanny state,” Ford added. “I’m too old and too fat to drink too much sody pop and still don’t want nobody telling me how much to drink.”

It’s not the first time McDaniel, whose campaign declined to comment on the record to The Daily Beast, has been linked to figures with neo-Confederate ties. The Mississippi state senator has spoken to gatherings of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in the past and made racially charged comments on a talk radio show that he hosted from 2004 to 2007.

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