On a recent episode of his web talk show Big Drive, Nick Cannon made a claim that has been ricocheting across X/Twitter for more than 21 hours. Speaking with model and political commentator Amber Rose, Cannon said: "People don't know that the Democrats are the party of the KKK. People don't know that the Republicans are the party that freed the slaves."

He added that he doesn't belong to either party, citing W.E.B. Du Bois: "There's no such thing as two parties. It's just one evil party with two different names."

Cannon has been trending on X for the better part of a day. The clip has been amplified by conservative media as validation and condemned by progressive commentators as dangerous revisionism. Both reactions miss the actual history.

Here is what the documented record shows.

What Cannon Said That Is Historically True

The Ku Klux Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1865–1866 by six veterans of the Confederate Army. Its first and only "Grand Wizard" was former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Democrat. The original Klan targeted Black Americans, Republicans, and Reconstruction-era federal officials. It was explicitly anti-Republican: the Republican Party had won the Civil War, passed the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, and was overseeing Reconstruction in the South. The KKK was, in the clearest sense, a terrorist arm of resistance to Republican rule in the South.

Cannon is also correct that the Republican Party was founded on opposition to slavery. Established in 1854 by anti-slavery activists in Ripon, Wisconsin, the party elected Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Lincoln's Republican administration fought the Civil War and passed the 13th Amendment (1865), which abolished slavery. Republicans also passed the 14th Amendment (1868) granting citizenship to formerly enslaved people, and the 15th Amendment (1870) extending voting rights to Black men.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was Southern Democrats — not Republicans — who enacted Jim Crow laws, enforced segregation, and dominated KKK membership during the Klan's revival in the 1910s–1920s. At its 1924 convention, the Democratic Party was so infiltrated by Klan members that it became known as "Klanbake" — delegates rejected a platform plank condemning the KKK by a narrow vote.

On the historical facts through roughly 1950, Cannon's framing has legitimate basis.

Where the Claim Breaks Down

The problem is that Cannon's framing ignores what happened next — and it's the most important part of the story.

The Democratic Party underwent a fundamental transformation in the middle of the 20th century. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal (1933–1939) began attracting Black voters to the Democratic coalition in northern cities, even as Southern segregationists remained Democrats. The transformation accelerated dramatically in 1948 when President Harry Truman, a Democrat, desegregated the U.S. military by executive order — causing a bloc of Southern Democrats (the "Dixiecrats," led by Strom Thurmond) to bolt from the party.

Then came the decisive break: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both championed by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson. Johnson is reported to have said, after signing the 1964 act, "We have lost the South for a generation." He was right.

The 1964 presidential election produced one of the most dramatic partisan realignments in American history. Republican Barry Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act, carried five Deep South states that had been reliably Democratic for nearly a century. Richard Nixon's 1968 and 1972 campaigns explicitly pursued what strategist Kevin Phillips called the "Southern Strategy" — appealing to white Southern voters disaffected by the Democratic Party's embrace of civil rights.

By the 1980s, the South had flipped. Ronald Reagan opened his 1980 general election campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi — the site where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964 — with a speech about "states' rights." Former Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond formally switched to the Republican Party in 1964. Most Southern KKK members and White Citizens' Council members who were politically active in subsequent decades voted Republican.

Academic historians across the political spectrum broadly agree on this timeline. The Ku Klux Klan of the 1860s-1920s was associated with Democrats. The political descendants of that movement — white Southern opponents of civil rights — became Republicans over the course of the 1960s-1980s. The parties did not swap identities overnight, but the directional shift is not seriously disputed among historians.

The Data on Modern KKK Membership

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, documents that the modern KKK — fragmented and diminished, with an estimated 3,000–6,000 members nationally — is overwhelmingly associated with far-right politics and has endorsed Republican candidates in recent elections, not Democrats. David Duke, the most prominent KKK figure of the modern era, ran for office in Louisiana as a Republican. He endorsed Donald Trump in 2016.

This does not mean the Republican Party is the KKK or endorses it. The Republican Party formally rejected Duke's endorsement, and Trump eventually disavowed him. But it does mean that describing today's Democratic Party as "the party of the KKK" is not historically coherent — it is a statement about party labels that existed 100 years ago, not the parties or their coalitions as they exist today.

The Du Bois Point — Which Is the Interesting Part

Cannon's invocation of W.E.B. Du Bois may be the most substantive part of what he said — and it received the least attention.

Du Bois was a consistent critic of Black loyalty to either party. In the 1920s, he argued that the Republican Party had stopped delivering for Black Americans even as it traded on its Civil War legacy. He ran for Senate as a third-party candidate in 1950. His broader critique — that Black voters gave unconditional loyalty to parties that extracted their votes without delivering results — is a serious political argument with a long intellectual history in Black political thought.

That argument is distinct from claiming one party is "the party of the KKK." And conflating them, as Cannon did, muddies both points.

Why This Keeps Coming Up

The "Democrats are the real racists" argument has been a recurring feature of American political discourse for decades. It is popular on the right because it functions as a rhetorical reversal — turning the historical association of the Democratic Party with racial justice against Democrats, while deflecting from Republican racial politics post-1964. It is resisted on the left because it erases the actual policy history of the last 60 years.

What Cannon did on Big Drive was state a partial historical fact (the pre-1950 Democratic Party's relationship to white supremacist organizations) as if it fully described the present. It doesn't. It describes a party that, by the measures that most political scientists use, no longer exists in the same form.

History is not just about which name was on a party's banner 150 years ago. It is about which voters, which policies, and which coalitions occupied that banner — and what happened when they moved.

The Bottom Line

Nick Cannon has been trending for over 21 hours. The reason is that a celebrity said something provocative about race and party politics. The history behind it is real, complicated, and worth understanding in full — which is not how viral clips work.

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