Alabama Newspaper That Published Klan Editorial Also Voiced Anti-Semitic Views

February 21, 2019

The Democrat-Reporter newspaper of Linden, Alabama, made news of its own mid-February when its editor and publisher, Goodloe Sutton, penned an editorial calling for the Ku Klux Klan to “ride again” to target politicians who are considering raising taxes in Alabama.[1]

In a subsequent interview with the Montgomery Advertiser, Sutton clarified that he supported lynching: “We’ll get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them.”[2]

An investigation by ADL’s Center on Extremism reveals that Sutton’s paper has a history of offensive commentary published as unsigned editorials. For instance, a December 2012 editorial described Obamacare as “more and more like a muslim [sic] plot to wreck America.”[3]

The Democrat-Reporter has also targeted Jews, portraying them as greedy and controlling.

In 2016, for example, the newspaper used anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jewish financiers to accuse the “establishment” of agitating against Trump because “the establishment has some Jews in it who don’t want any changes in the laws governing money changing.”  Two years earlier, an editorial claimed that “the Democrats loved war as long as it lined the pockets of the Jews who run America.”  It added: “If the Jews would read their own history, they could predict that God is going to let someone clean them out, again.”[4]

Sutton’s paper has even defended Nazi anti-Semitism.  A 2014 editorial claimed that “to not put Hitler and Eichmann in context is a sin of omission.  Why did they want to rid Germany of Jews?  Go read German history after World War I.” In that op-ed and another, the paper also implied that Hitler merely went too far and should instead have simply deported the Jews, “like England did in 1612.”  England did not expel Jews in 1612 but had done so in 1290.[5]

The Democrat-Reporter also repeats anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jewish media control, claiming in one 2012 editorial that Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong together killed “200 million,” but due to Jews “in key places in the…media, most of what we hear is about how six million Jews were murdered.”[6]

In a September 2018 editorial about high school football, the newspaper appeared to allude to the anti-Semitic myth of Jewish ritual sacrifice, criticizing people “who make football a religion with human sacrifices,” then claiming that “Gentiles trying to act like Jews is ridiculous.”[7]