Trump Judicial Nominee Brett Talley Appears to Have Defended "the First KKK" in Message Board Post
Source: Slate
Brett Talley, the Alabama lawyer Donald Trump has nominated to be a federal district judge, is a 36-year-old ghosthunter who has never tried a case and who failed to disclose to the Senate that he is married to the chief of staff to the White House counsel. He also seems to have written 16,381 posts—more than 3½ per day—on the University of Alabama fan message board TideFans.com. As BuzzFeed has reported, a user who is almost certainly Talley posted for years under the handle BamainBoston. (BuzzFeed managed to identify him because BamainBoston wrote a message headlined “Washington Post Did A Feature On Me,” linking to a 2014 Ben Terris profile of Talley. BuzzFeed reported that a “Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on Talley's behalf.”)
A search of TideFans.com reveals that BamainBoston often opined on controversial issues, including race, abortion, perceived federal overreach, and Southern heritage. In one post from February 2011, he defended the honor of the early Ku Klux Klan.
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Contrary to BamainBoston’s assertion, Forrest did likely serve as the KKK’s first leader, or “Grand Wizard,” though the group’s secretive nature makes this charge difficult to prove definitively. In 1868, he described the Klan as “a protective, political, military organization.” He also asserted that he had “no powder to burn killing negroes,” and intended only “to kill the radicals”—that is, Republicans, especially from the North, who supported Reconstruction. However, by this point, the Klan had become notorious for its relentless brutality against freed blacks. Forrest did not disavow the KKK’s terrorism until several years later, when he finally condemned its tactics and expressed more enlightened views.
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At the time that BamainBoston wrote this post about Forrest and the KKK, Talley was clerking for Judge Joel Dubina of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. Assuming he wrote the post, which seems exceedingly likely, Talley does not seem to have a basic grasp on the history of Reconstruction, which is fundamentally intertwined with the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments’ expansion of equal rights and suffrage.
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Read more: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/11/15/trump_nominee_brett_talley_appears_to_have_defended_the_first_kkk.html
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