Joe Moore > Quotes

“It's practically impossible to look at a penguin and feel angry”
― Joe Moore

“A Trump victory would portend nothing less than the realization of the original doctrine the KKK established upon its founding in 1865, in which the Invisible Empire would become starkly visible, no longer confined to the shadows in which the movement has lurked for over 150 years.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“It’s estimated that somewhere between half and three quarters of all self-identifying Republicans either identify as white nationalists or hold white nationalist beliefs.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“Their actions and the radical views they espoused lured like-minded law-enforcement officials and former and current military members out of the shadows and into the light, no longer fearing reprisal, because they had a champion in the once and potentially future president. Trump was basically calling them to arms in the wake of his defeat in the 2020 election, sixteen months after our return to Florida. That’s why January 6, 2021, wasn’t a failure so much as a dress rehearsal. It also unearthed a disturbing, interconnected trend I had seen glimpses of first in the Wayward chapter of the Ku Klux Klan under William Hawley, and then again, even more pronounced, in the Bronson chapter under Jamie Ward and then Charles Newcomb: the pervasive infiltration of right-wing extremism into law enforcement.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“In regard to his apparent support for white nationalists like Fuentes, Senator Tommy Tuberville said in May 2023, “You call them white nationalists. I call them Americans.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“In 2022, Congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona (via video) and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene both attended a neo-Nazi convention, called the America First Political Action Committee conference, sponsored by avowed Nazi fanboy Nick Fuentes; Gosar also has two alleged white nationalist sympathizers on his staff.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. —ATTRIBUTED TO EDMUND BURKE”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“We need to fear that the 2024 election will signal the end of the checks and balances that have preserved our system through thick and thin since the time of the Founding Fathers. Government agencies, like the Department of Justice and the IRS, becoming thinly disguised tools to do the bidding of the administration means a permanent redefinition of the role of these agencies, just as the KKK has envisioned from the time of its founding.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“Unable to accept defeat, veterans of the Confederacy gathered at a social club in Pulaski, Tennessee, on Christmas Eve 1865 to establish a group that would continue fighting for the values that had spawned the war in the first place, namely pertaining to slavery.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“The key phrase in Solomon’s words that struck me was “with encouragement from elected officials,” namely the president of the United States himself, an occurrence previously thought to be impossible in this day and age. The Klan and others now knew they had a friend in the White House, who similarly wanted to turn the clock back to a neo-antebellum period when women were second-class citizens, Blacks weren’t full citizens at all, and the Bill of Rights applied only to a certain class of people. Americans sometimes forget that the notorious Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised Black voters in the post-Civil War era were named for James R. Crowe, a founding member of the KKK back in 1865.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“And while America has a party system to protect against such minority rule, the damage a third-party candidate, or candidates, could do on Election Day 2024 is as palpable as it is terrifying and incalculable. A relatively small percentage of the voting public in a mere smattering of crucial battleground states could easily tip the Electoral College to Donald Trump with little more than 40 percent of the vote and potentially somewhere in the mid-to high thirties.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“Klan brothers turned against their leaders and sought refuge in militia-style groups like the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and Proud Boys, which had become a rising force in the world of ultra-right-wing fanatics.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“very afraid indeed. Reinstituting politically viable versions of poll taxes, intelligence tests, and Jim Crow laws would truly be all it would take to tip the scales of otherwise free and fair presidential elections for decades to come. And in some ways, this could even be scarier than taking up arms, because when you do that you expose yourself and there is recourse. But in a draconian authoritarian regime,”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“They’re desperate to succeed, another reason why they should inspire fear in all of us. The kind of right-wing ideologues I spent a good portion of my life trying to bring down don’t understand there are people in the world who want to get along with all people.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“The safeguards this country maintains to avoid such a debacle are nothing more than guardrails to be ignored or flattened by those willing to go further than the other side.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“national militia or private police force, and the persecution of non-ideologues who don’t toe the line. All three of these have become prime components of the policy platforms of Trump and others running for president in 2024.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“I learned, for example, that the metadata I had supplied the FBI had unearthed a treasure trove of names, email addresses, and phone numbers of former Klansmen who were now known members of the groups that ultimately converged on the Capitol on January 6.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“Speaking of guns, how is it that over three quarters of Americans favor commonsense gun control, but few laws to that effect are ever passed? How is it that two thirds of the country favors abortion rights, but the fervent momentum for a near all-out ban continues to build?”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“And now it falls upon all of us to keep 2024 from becoming 1861. Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for.” So is America, and I fully intend to keep fighting for the country I love.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“And since the far right would never dare to cede power back to the majority of the country, once in power they will be laser focused on gaming the system to assure they never relinquish it in the fashion of other right-wing autocracies globally.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“Those trend lines aren’t getting any better as we approach the 2024 election. The warning lights I saw leading up to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 have only brightened. I was always far more concerned about a wholesale spread and adoption of the Klan ideology than I was about any individuals. You can arrest individuals and put them behind bars. You can’t do the same with ideas, and the white nationalist movement that threatens the very future of this country has pretty much adopted the original Klan orthodoxy hook, line, and sinker.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“Speaking of guns, how is it that over three quarters of Americans favor commonsense gun control, but few laws to that effect are ever passed? How is it that two thirds of the country favors abortion rights, but the fervent momentum for a near all-out ban continues to build? The answer lies in the fact that virtually all radically conservative movements currently spanning the globe rely on parliamentary systems”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“The radical right cares nothing about process, only outcome. They’re not interested in a civil discussion to work out differences, because they are so consumed by ideology that it has hijacked their civility. They have a clear vision of what they want the country to look like, and democracy itself is the only thing standing in their way.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“Thanks to Donald Trump, the white nationalist movement the Klan has been at the forefront of for generations moved from the shadows into the light, and his followers continued to flock to his dogma and his increasingly bombastic rhetoric from the White House.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“The warning signs are already flashing in the rhetoric of Trump and others who inhabit the former fringe that has gone mainstream, three of which we need to pay special attention to: the dissolution of the Justice Department, the establishment of what amounts to a national militia or private police force, and the persecution of non-ideologues who don’t toe the line.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“confidential human source”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“Jamie Ward told me he had fielded hundreds of calls in the time since we’d first spoken. He stressed that this was a trend the Klan was seeing nationwide. Of course, relatively few of those who contacted the Traditionalist American Knights became card-carrying members. The Klan tends to be cautious and discriminating when it comes to its membership, viewing itself as far too serious a group in terms of tradition and long-term goals to accept people looking to join a social club. As it turned out, other groups more than willing to take those the Klan had rejected were sprouting and flourishing. Groups like the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and others were all well known to the FBI back then, but became household names only in the wake of 2021.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“But in a draconian authoritarian regime, there is no recourse. Remember, it’s not so much who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“One of the first things I learned in my position of Grand Knighthawk was how much overlap had begun to take place between the Klan and various militia-style groups, namely the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, along with several smaller militias (the Proud Boys hadn’t established themselves as a force yet).”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us

“The Klan and other organizations that had adopted their ideology saw it as the death knell for the hegemony of white men in American society. Time was passing them by, and they had to be ready and willing to fight, lest they risk becoming irrelevant, an afterthought in history. The messaging was the most basic imaginable: It’s us versus them, without needing to specify who “them” was.”
― Joe Moore, White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us