The new Know Nothings tell the same old story

Read an excellent op-ed today in America The Jesuit Review, "The new know-nothings? Anti-Catholic political rhetoric is making a comeback." The writer is Anna Keating. Under a big photo of Secretary of War and Christian Fascist Pete Hegseth, she begins this way:

President Abraham Lincoln once said of the Know-Nothing Party, founded in 1844 and dissolved in 1860: “If the Know-Nothings get control, [the Declaration of Independence] will read all men are created equal, except negroes, foreigners and Catholics.”

As she notes, the Know Nothing Party shriveled up and died in 1860  but its attitudes have not. 

We are seeing a resurgence of anti-Catholic outbursts in the U.S. with the rise of the Trumpists and the outspoken nature of Pope Leo, an Irish-Catholic priest, then cardinal, now pope on the world's billion Catholics. Read Keating's article for the details. She writes about how fundies would stop her when she was growing up in Colorado Springs "and try to 'save' us." There also was this:

In fact, the Klu Klux Klan targeted my Catholic immigrant ancestors in the panhandle of Texas by burning crosses in their yards.

My grandfather, Martin Hett, an immigrant from County Roscommon, told us how the resurgent KKK burned crosses in his Irish-Catholic Denver neighborhood in the 1920s. My mother, Anna Marie Hett Shay, told us how she and her sister, dressed in their St. Francis Catholic School uniforms, had to run away from the South High School kids who chased them calling them "dirty Catholics" and "Catholic rednecks." This latter one was a new one on me. Grandpa explained (in his droll Irish way) that immigrants from Ireland were prone to red necks due to their fair skin and most jobs they could get in America were harvesting crops, digging ditches, and building railroads. Grandpa did not seem to bear any ill will toward these Know Nothing shitheads. But he had already been through hell and considered Colorado public school kids "small potatoes" when compared to his life as coal miner, railroad worker, and big fella who could take care of himself. 

I've written a bit about American Know Nothings. This has pissed off a few Republican friends who insist they are not Know-Nothings who get all sorts of news from FOX and right-wing talk radio. 

Know Nothings and the KKK play a role in my new novel, “Zeppelins Over Denver.”

For a look back at one of my blog posts, see Donald Trump's Know-Nothing attitude would have doomed my Famine Irish ancestorsere.

Note the images that go along with it, cartoons of Irish immigrants as apes and drunkards. Those depictions tell a story that is as old as America.

P.S.: One of my first published stories was “REV,” about a fundamentalist Christian army marching across Arabia to whip an army of fundamentalist Muslims. I will see if I can dig it up.