Thread by @_TimBarker

In 1965, a disgruntled Ku Klux Klan leader gave the FBI the names of most of the Exalted Cyclopses (ECs) in Louisiana. According to the list, the Exalted Cyclops in St. Francisville was one "Ray Drear (ph)" [phonetic].

I shouldn’t have to tell you that the FBI and informants lie constantly. But we know for sure that John Rarick (a notoriously racist congressman with documented KKK ties) had a lifelong political association with Murphy Dreher Jr, brother of Ray Oliver Dreher Sr.

The Dreher brothers (Murphy and Ray) along with Rarick were all leaders in the small St. Francisville Masonic lodge, which had about 100 members). Ray's son later said, "If there was something about West Feliciana that Ray Dreher did not know, it was probably not worth knowing.”

According to a historian of the so-called "Second Klan" in the '20s, the KKK "deliberately sought to recruit Freemasons into their order, and succeeded in doing so." The presence of the Second Klan in St. Francisville is attested. It would be shocking if all traces vanished.

Consider the timeline: Houston Morris told the FBI he organized the St. Francisville KKK unit in October 1963, when he inducted Rarick and “five more men at St Francisville“ into the KKK.

Between 1963 and 1964 - exactly when Morris claims to have inducted Rarick and unnamed others into the KKK - Ray Dreher became top officer ("worshipful master") in the St. Francisville Masons. By 1965, according to Morris, "Ray Drear [ph]" was Exalted Cyclops of the local Klan.

If you're wondering by now how Ray Oliver Dreher Jr (the man we all know as Rod Dreher) pronounces his last name, there's a million YouTube videos waiting.

This wouldn't matter at all except that Rod is extremely racist - so much that other conservatives (even one whose book has "Benedict Option" in the name) had to distance themselves during the Floyd protests. Rod's premise is a false innocence in which racism is long past.

In a rare lucid moment, Rod once reported that researchers have “documented at least 10 lynchings in W. Feliciana Parish." He claimed to "want to know who was killed....We all need to know these things and face down what our ancestors did...These were our fathers, grandfathers."

Even in that post - one of the best of a sad oeuvre - Rod put this all safely before his own time ("if you were a black in the years 1877-1950," he feels your pain). But Rarick took national office a month before Rod was born - Rod is fully contemporary w/ Rarick's Louisiana.

If you think the evidence re: his dad is circumstantial, there can be no debate that Rod's beloved uncle Murph was a lifelong comrade of Rarick, a guy who chilled with the man who murdered Medgar Evers. Someone should ask about it in Rod's next New Yorker profile!

(I found these documents just by searching for "Rarick" and "St. Francisville" in LSU's database of records related to civil rights-era cold cases. Here's the crucial "Drear" file: lsucoldcaseproject.com/wp-content/upl…)