The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865 by racist whites seeking to fight against radical Republican efforts to reconstruct the South. The KKK targeted both blacks and white Republicans; they even targeted some Southern white Democrats who weren't sufficiently anti-black. The KKK's argument: Blacks, by their mere presence and attempts to participate in the political process, were destroying the dignity of the white South.

The radical Republicans in Congress fought the KKK tooth and nail; in the early 1870s, they passed the Force Acts, designed to destroy the KKK once and for all. Those acts allowed the president to use the federal military to enforce the 15th Amendment. It nearly did the trick. Within a few years, the KKK had been virtually wiped out.

Then came the election of 1876. Not only did Southern Democrats -- often closely allied with the KKK -- win back South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana, they also helped broker an election deal with Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but Hayes won a majority of one vote in the Electoral College through a series of complex machinations. A constitutional crisis ensued. It was solved when Hayes essentially promised to end reconstruction efforts and withdraw federal troops from the South in return for Democratic support for his presidency. Offshoots of the KKK quickly returned, restoring the South to a state of horrific oppression and segregation; it uprooted the progress made since the end of the Civil War. Southern Democrats instituted Jim Crow and revivified both violence and racism on a massive scale.

The moral of this story is simple: Racial violence can only flourish with the approval or apathy of federal, state and local government.

Fast forward 132 years. Racial violence is becoming a norm around the nation. The city of Oakland, for reasons both racial and economic, has announced that it will stop using police to investigate grand theft, burglary, car wrecks, identity theft and vandalism. The Justice Department is suing the state of Arizona for cracking down on illegal immigration -- a blatant attempt by the Obama administration to woo Hispanic voters by making it more difficult for Arizona law enforcement to crack down on Hispanic illegal offenders. The Obama Justice Department has also dropped an investigation into the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation, despite the fact that videotape shows members of the New Black Panther Party wielding clubs outside a voting place.

Attorney General Eric Holder has announced that the Justice Department will investigate the shooting of a black career criminal in Oakland, after the white police officer who committed the shooting was convicted of involuntary manslaughter; Holder has said nothing about the massive looting, largely by minorities, that followed the verdict.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration continues to ramp up the anti-white rhetoric. This is nothing new. Holder famously called us a "nation of cowards" on racial matters last year; Obama himself called his white grandmother a "typical white person" and blasted the Cambridge Police Department for racial profiling; Michelle Obama wrote her Princeton thesis on how white folks were racists; Michelle and Barack went to Rev. Wright's racist church for 20 years. They've all just upped the ante recently. Now Holder says that the Arizona law will promote racial profiling; Obama agrees with him; and Michelle Obama visits the NAACP, where she tells the black audience to "increase our intensity."

What's their motivation? Supposedly, the Obama administration is simply fired up by the presence of the tea partiers, in the same way the KKK was fired up by the presence of voting blacks in the South. Black Democrats in the House have fabricated claims of tea partiers shouting the "n-word," even as they ignore white union members shouting the "n-word" at black tea partier Kenneth Gladney. The NAACP claims that the tea party is "racist," with NAACP President Benjamin Jealous telling members that his goal was to pour "ice on the tea party."

That's just an excuse. The Obama administration is racist. They are using that racism to let black criminals off the hook, justify illegal immigration, hamstring law enforcement across the country, and push redistribution as a solution to supposed continuing discrimination against "people of color." The predictable result of this policy will resemble the results of the 1876 election: federal abdication on racial violence, state abdication on racial violence and local abdication on racial violence. The next race war will come not from racist whites, but from racist blacks and Hispanics who feel empowered to act on their racism by an administration that excuses all minority misbehavior.