Alabama newspaper publisher Goodloe Sutton has no regrets about the outrageous editorial he wrote last week calling for the “Ku Klux Klan to night ride again.”

“The Democrats have been terrible,” he said in an interview with AL.com. “The KKK are the nicest.”

The inflammatory piece, which appeared in the Linden, Alabama, weekly The Democrat-Reporter, said the KKK would be “welcome to raid the gated communities” in Washington, D.C., where “Democrats” and “Democrats in the Republican Party” live. Sutton claimed the elected officials were “plotting to raise taxes in Alabama.”

After widespread backlash, Sutton was kicked out of the University of Southern Mississippi’s Mass Communications and Journalism Hall of Fame. He was also censured by the Alabama Press Association, which voted to suspend the weekly’s membership in the organization. Politicians in the state, including U.S. Sen. Doug Jones (D), also called on the publisher, whose family has owned the weekly newspaper since 1917, to resign.