Oh I know a few members probably were, but being fair minded liberals, we have to concede that some of the membership were merely pyromaniacs & some just liked to dress up & wear hoods. Being fair minded liberals, we have to acknowledge that crosses weren't burnt on every black family's front yard & that not every African American was lynched - mostly it was those deemed to pose a threat to something called Southern heritage. In addition, it is certainly well known that the Klan hated Jews & Catholics too. Well perhaps "hate" is too strong for a fair minded liberal, does "distrusted" work better for fair minded liberals?
You see, liberals have to be careful to not paint people with a broad brush, we have to be, you know, fair minded. Otherwise we may lose our status as the greased assholes of political intercourse & no right thinking American will want to play with us.
My personal experience with Southern heritage comes from my father being transferred to Ft Gordon, Ga. in 1966 & the two years of high school I attended at The Academy of Richmond County. Southern heritage had been cruelly smacked by something called "civil rights" & had been ordered by the damn Yankee federal government to racially integrate its public schools. The response at Richmond Academy was to segregate the classes by sex that year. I always assumed that it was because the school administration didn't want black boys in class with white girls, a thought all fair minded liberals would reject, I am now ashamed to have thought that these fine Southern intellectual types could have been racist - that would be painting with a broad brush, a very unliberal thing to do. I can't come up with another reason for this, but I am sure some fair minded liberal here will come up with a good non racist reason.
I also remember that most of the white students at ARC seemed to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination my senior year, but to be fair minded, they also seemed to be pretty happy when Robert Kennedy was gunned down a few months later.
So, of course, when a bunch of folks get to protesting banking bailouts less than three months into an African American presidency, but 7 months after a white president's administration requested & got them, all fair minded liberals are loathe to paint them with the racist broad brush. & the fact that these are the same salt of the Earth types that carried stuffed monkeys & think the current president is a Kenyan born, Muslim? Well, we need to be fair minded, calling them racists would be unfairly painting them with a very unliberal broad brush. & the coincidence that these teabaggers are protesting higher taxes, when the black guy has just lowered them? I need some help from a fair minded liberal on that one. Also need help with how a white president could slice up privacy rights & eliminate habeas corpus & the black president gets called a fascist-socialist-Marxist-Leninist who is looking to enslave white people. Certainly racial bigotry has a very small, infinitesimal role in these protests, nothing to get all broad brushy about, because that's not what liberals do, right?