11. This typical development I have seen with most of my Klan friends. At the age of 14 often they run away from brutal parents, get into petty crime and drugs with black friends and go in and out of prison. Later they get into biker gangs. Again this can be interpreted as an attempt at getting our attention by roaring around on large motorbikes with insignias and tattoos in order to frighten us - the only power the powerless have. But it's a false power we give them with our fear. We must all the time keep in mind that deep down it's our love, they try to get - the love they never received in their childhood. Some of the bikers then discover that if they dress up in Klan costumes and lighten a cross out in the forest it gives them a feeling of power, which catches our attention in far more effective way. When they are incapable of getting our love, they settle for our hatred! After all, that is better than being "poor white trash" and totally forgotten by the world.

12. Suddenly they do not any longer feel forgotten and ghettoized. Now photographers such as myself and television-stations come flying from the whole world in order to display something we call their "hate." By putting the notorious "Ku Klux Klan" etiquette on themselves, these forgotten whites in an instant can get attain a few minutes of fame on the "Jerry Springer Show" or "Ricky Lake Show." More serious American media have (contrary to the Danish) long ago seen through these losers and choose (once again) to ghettoize and ignore them. As the Klan leader Jeff laughingly said to me: "I can arrive in a town in a limousine and dressed in my most expensive suit and make speeches with no one caring to listen. But in the same instant I put on these magic historical robes, I immediately stand surrounded by cameras and counter-demonstrators."

13. But whose hate is it really Ku Klux Klan reveals? When I gave a racism workshop in Ohio Wesleyan University and during my mentioning of poor whites talked about the KKK, the most liberal students refused to believe my claim that there isn't any more hatred in KKK than in themselves. I didn't at the time know the KKK personally, but suddenly remembered that the Klan's headquarters was in the very neighboring state. So I asked the students if they would like to come along and examine it. I chose two of the students who had most energetically fought my statement and with them in my car we went to the Klan's headquarters, where we arrived unannounced. We got a cordial welcome by all the members and friendly answers to even our most hostile questions. During the long drive home the two students sat speechless and silent in the car for hours, after which one suddenly said to me: "I want to thank you for having changed my life. I now realize that it was me who hated and not them ."

14. I decided to move in with this Klan group which by the FBI, the SPLC and Klanwatch is described as "The most dangerous one and hateful in America." I made endless interviews with the members about their views on blacks, Jews, Moslems and homosexuals, but found nothing which separated them from all other whites. They came with typical answers like "My best friend is black" and "Moslems are good God fearing people". Only towards homosexuals did some express evident prejudices, but when I rephrased the questions in order to see what they contained in their deeper hearts: "What would you do if your own child was homosexual?" they typically answered  "Oh, then I'd love it just as much as my other children."  On the other hand I have often found that many republicans in the US will disown their own homosexual child. Also the death penalty does the Klan have a more liberal view on than the majority - probably because so many of them have been in prison for various crimes.

15. I found out that the Klan leader's own stepfather is black. "I love him. He saved my mother from drugs and prostitution", Jeff said. His wife's best friend was black, but "I lost my friend, when she found out of that I was in the Klan. It hurt me deeply to lose my best friend." The Klan leader's "hateful" son, Anthony, who produces the Klan's weekly radio program, actually plays in a rap band along with only blacks "whom I love more than anything".
I frequently tell people about these discoveries, but one woman with a Ph.D. in racism research refused to believe me.
"OK, then drive with me and visit them!" I said. We arrived on a surprise visit a Sunday morning and when the Klan leader saw my car, he came running out of the house and hugged me with the words: "Jacob, how glad I am to see you. But damn it, why didn't you come yesterday? We had a giant party and nobody would have enjoyed it more than you. You would have loved all the blacks and Mexicans, who were there." Already before we had said hello in the Klan headquarters, it thus dawned on this racism researcher that she had misunderstood a lot of things about the Klan's racism!!!

16. Since then I have invited many other friends with me on visits to my Klan friends, among them blacks like Rikke Marrott here. The all concur that they never in private hear the Klan talk in that kind of hateful, blaming language we incessantly among many Danes today - not least among Danish politicians and in the media - who again and again try to find wrongs of "the others." Only two of my Klan friends have I heard use the word "Nigger" about blacks, while I incessantly hear the Danes talk derogatory about "perks" and about piety symbols such as Muslim scarves. The Klan is in no ways angels, but since that kind of spiteful language is simply no longer acceptable in the US today, neither is it natural for the Klan. In that sense they have become "politically correct" precisely as they were in the South in the sixties. 50 years ago the US' politicians tried - like Danish today - to "out-nigger" each other in order to get the votes of white racism. That is to say to run for election by loudly accusing blacks of all sorts of faults and immoral and undemocratic behavior. But when the tone is changing among those in power, it transmits down to even the most powerless such as the Ku Klux Klan.

17. But you are not really KKK without borrowing and reusing the hated symbols of the past. Therefore the Klan leader, who is generally called the most hateful in the US, my friend Jeff here, invented a more politically correct expression which he uses again and again on TV to show that he is a real Klan man: "A nigger is one, who takes from society and gives nothing back. And there are far more "white niggers" than blacks.
That sentence rephrases the policy of republicans saying that there has been too much positive treatment for blacks, but it says a lot about the Klan's own self-hatred and feeling of inferiority. I have had a lot of fun of verifying whether the Klan's racism really is color-blind. When the bodyguard of Illinois' Grand Dragoon, Dennis seen here, told me about the endless beatings he received as a child of his drunk and lazy stepfather, I suddenly burst out : "So your father was a nigger?"
"Yes, the worst one I have known!" he burst out without hesitation.

18. The expression "white power" jarred badly in my ears until I moved in with the Klan and slept under the Klan leader's parrots. All night long they screeched "white power" into my ears because they had always been placed next to the Klan's answering machine. But when I lived there in the Klan leader's damp-sad poverty in the unspeakable mess, characterizing so many poor in the US, I soon heard this cry for help as "poor white trash power" - a cry for help from a group of poor whites, who has never had any share in the white power structure. The Klan leader's political program is by and large like the republicans': "Equal rights for everybody. Preferential treatment for nobody." But if I suggest special treatment for all poor and not only blacks, he changes, with all the inconsistency which characterizes these uneducated Klan people, immediately point of view. As a great admirer of Martin Luther King he wishes to be "for my people what King was for blacks."

19. If there is no real hate in Ku Klux Klan, from where do they get their bad reputation? I tried to bring a 17-year-old Danish high school student along to a Klan meeting to see her reaction. She had previously, when we lived with people in the Klan, concluded that "there is no hate is in those people - at any rate not as much as in my high school pals in Denmark." Therefore she was so shook up when she heard the speakers at a large Klan meeting out in a deserted forest that she burst into crying out of fear witnessing "all that hatred." I laughed within myself for a while, since I knew what goes on at such meetings, but then said: "Why do you cry? You came yourself to the conclusion earlier that there is no hatred in those people. You must learn to listen to pain and that is how pain sounds!"
That it was not hatred, but abysmal self-hatred she had listened to, she experienced the next day, when the Klan members went hunting with their black friends in that same very forest, where they had just been standing bawling in tones, which sounded "hateful".

20. If you ask the blacks why they go hunting with Klan people, they answer what couldn't be more true, "What is the difference between them and all other whites around here?" What the name of the game is we also found out about. I had filmed all those "hateful" speeches with my small tourist video camera. After a hour the tape ran out and I went to the car parked far away to get a new tape, but allowed myself plenty of times since I had heard enough of that kind of speeches. When I came back at long last, my Danish friend said: "Are you aware that the Klan leader and all the others immediately stopped the speeches and just stood around having a good time socializing while you were away?" For why indeed should they stand there whining like pigs about something they deep down do not believe one bit in when the world media was not present? Time and again I have in this way seen through how the Klan solely lives and breathes in order to meet the needs of the surrounding world - that is OUR need - to hate and condemn them! I other words again an attempt to compensate for the love they never got.