GOP becoming a cult of know-nothings

November 28, 2021·

Supporters of former President Trump are seen the North Carolina Republican Party Convention on June 5

The Republican Party is becoming a cult. Its leaders are in thrall to Donald Trump, a defeated former president who refuses to acknowledge defeat. Its ideology is MAGA, Trump's deeply divisive take on what Republicans assume to be unifying American values.

The party is now in the process of carrying out purges of heretics who do not worship Trump or accept all the tenets of MAGA. Conformity is enforced by social media, a relatively new institution with the power to marshal populist energy against critics and opponents.


What's happening on the right in American politics is not exactly new. To understand it, you need to read a book published 50 years ago by Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, "The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970." Right-wing extremism, now embodied in Trump's MAGA movement, dates back to the earliest days of the country.

The title of Lipset and Raab's book was chosen carefully. Right-wing extremism is not about the rational calculation of interests. It's about irrational impulses, which the authors identify as "status frustrations." They write that "the political movements which have successfully appealed to status resentments have been irrational in character. [The movements] focus on attacking a scapegoat, which conveniently symbolizes the threat perceived by their supporters."

The most common scapegoats have been minority ethnic or religious groups. In the 19th century, that meant Catholics, immigrants and even Freemasons. The Anti-Masonic Party, the Know Nothing Party and later the American Protective Association were major political forces. In the 20th century, the U.S. experienced waves of anti-immigrant sentiment. After World War II, anti-communism became the driving force behind McCarthyism in the 1950s and the Goldwater movement in the early 1960s ("Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice").

The roots of the current right-wing extremism lie in the late 1960s and 1970s, when Americans began to be polarized over values (race, ethnicity, sex, military intervention). Conflicts of interest (such as business versus labor) can be negotiated and compromised. Conflicts of values cannot.

You see "the politics of unreason" in today's right-wing extremism. While it remains true, as it has been for decades, that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to vote Republican (that's interests), what's new today is that the better educated you are, the more likely you are to vote Democratic, at least among whites (that's values, and it's been driving white suburban voters with college degrees away from Trump's "know-nothing" brand of Republicanism).

Oddly, religion has become a major force driving the current wave of right-wing extremism. Not religious affiliation (Protestant versus Catholic) but religiosity (regular churchgoers versus non-churchgoers). That's not because of Trump's religious appeal (he has none) but because of the Democratic Party's embrace of secularism and the resulting estrangement of fundamentalist Protestants, observant Catholics and even orthodox Jews.

The Democratic Party today is defined by its commitment to diversity and inclusion. The party celebrates diversity in all its forms - racial, ethnic, religious and sexual. To Democrats, that's the tradition of American pluralism - "E pluribus unum." Republicans celebrate the "unum" more than the "pluribus" - we may come from diverse backgrounds, but we should all share the same "American values."

One reason right-wing extremism is thriving in the Republican Party is that there is no figure in the party willing to lead the opposition to it. Polls of Republican voters show no other GOP figure even close to Trump's level of support for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. The only other Republican who seems interested in running is Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, who recently criticized "Trump cancel culture."

If Trump does run in 2024, as he seems inclined to do, can he win?

It all depends on President Biden's record. Right now, Biden's popularity is not very high. In fact, Biden and Trump are about equally unpopular (Biden's job approval is 52 to 43 percent negative, while Trump's favorability is 54 to 41.5 percent negative). Biden will be 82 years old in 2024. If he doesn't run, the Democrats will very likely nominate Vice President Harris. When a president doesn't run for reelection, his party almost always nominates its most recent vice president, assuming they run (Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Walter Mondale in 1984, George H.W. Bush in 1988, Al Gore in 2000, Joe Biden in 2020). Democrats would be unlikely to deny a black woman the nomination. There is also some talk of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg running if Biden doesn't.

The 2024 election could be a rematch between Trump and Biden. Or a race between Trump and a black woman. Or between Trump and a gay man with a husband and children. Lee Drutman, a political scientist at the New America think tank, recently told The New York Times, "I have a hard time seeing how we have a peaceful 2024 election after everything that's happened now. I don't see the rhetoric turning down. I don't see the conflicts going away. ... It's hard to see how it gets better before it gets worse."

Bill Schneider is an emeritus professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and author of "Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable" (Simon & Schuster).

How the 19th-Century Know Nothing Party Reshaped American Politics

From xenophobia to conspiracy theories, the Know Nothing party launched a nativist movement whose effects are still felt today

Lorraine Boissoneault

January 26, 2017

Anti-immigrant cartoon showing two men labeled "Irish Wiskey" and "Lager Bier," carrying a ballot box. Everett Collection Historical / Alamy Stock Photo

Like Fight Club, there were rules about joining the secret society known as the Order of the Star Spangled Banner (OSSB). An initiation rite called “Seeing Sam.” The memorization of passwords and hand signs. A solemn pledge never to betray the order. A pureblooded pedigree of Protestant Anglo-Saxon stock and the rejection of all Catholics. And above all, members of the secret society weren’t allowed to talk about the secret society. If asked anything by outsiders, they would respond with, “I know nothing.”

So went the rules of this secret fraternity that rose to prominence in 1853 and transformed into the powerful political party known as the Know Nothings. At its height in the 1850s, the Know Nothing party, originally called the American Party, included more than 100 elected congressmen, eight governors, a controlling share of half-a-dozen state legislatures from Massachusetts to California, and thousands of local politicians. Party members supported deportation of foreign beggars and criminals; a 21-year naturalization period for immigrants; mandatory Bible reading in schools; and the elimination of all Catholics from public office. They wanted to restore their vision of what America should look like with temperance, Protestantism, self-reliance, with American nationality and work ethic enshrined as the nation's highest values.

Know Nothings were the American political system’s first major third party. Early in the 19th century, two parties leftover from the birth of the United States were the Federalists (who advocated for a strong central government) and the Democratic-Republicans (formed by Thomas Jefferson). Following the earliest parties came the National Republicans, created to oppose Andrew Jackson. That group eventually transformed into the Whigs as Jackson’s party became known as the Democrats. The Whig party sent presidents William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor and others to the White House during its brief existence. But the party splintered and then disintegrated over the politics of slavery. The Know Nothings filled the power void before the Whigs had even ceased to exist, choosing to ignore slavery and focus all their energy on the immigrant question. They were the first party to leverage economic concerns over immigration as a major part of their platform. Though short-lived, the values and positions of the Know Nothings ultimately contributed to the two-party system we have today.

Paving the way for the Know Nothing movement were two men from New York City. Thomas R. Whitney, the son of a silversmith who opened his own shop, wrote the magnum opus of the Know Nothings, A Defense of the American Policy. William “Bill the Butcher” Poole was a gang leader, prizefighter and butcher in the Bowery (and would later be used as inspiration for the main character in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York). Whitney and Poole were from different social classes, but both had an enormous impact on their chosen party—and their paths crossed at a pivotal moment in the rise of nativism.

In addition to being a successful engraver, Whitney was an avid reader of philosophy, history and classics. He moved from reading to writing poetry and, eventually, political tracts. “What is equality but stagnation?” Whitney wrote in one of them. Preceded in nativist circles by such elites as author James Fenimore Cooper, Alexander Hamilton, Jr. and James Monroe (nephew of the former president), Whitney had a knack for rising quickly to the top of whichever group he belonged to. He became a charter member of the Order of United Americans (the precursor to the OSSB) and used his own printing press to publish many of the group’s pamphlets.

Whitney believed in government action, but not in service of reducing social inequality. Rather, he believed, all people “are entitled to such privileges, social and political, as they are capable of employing and enjoying rationally.” In other words, only those with the proper qualifications deserved full rights. Women’s suffrage was abhorrent and unnatural, Catholics were a threat to the stability of the nation, and German and Irish immigrants undermined the old order established by the Founding Fathers.

From 1820 to 1845, anywhere from 10,000 to 1000,000 immigrants entered the U.S. each year. Then, as a consequence of economic instability in Germany and a potato famine in Ireland, those figures turned from a trickle into a tsunami. Between 1845 and 1854, 2.9 million immigrants poured into the country, and many of them were of Catholic faith. Suddenly, more than half the residents of New York City were born abroad, and Irish immigrants comprised 70 percent of charity recipients.

As cultures clashed, fear exploded and conspiracies abounded. Posters around Boston proclaimed, “All Catholics and all persons who favor the Catholic Church are…vile imposters, liars, villains, and cowardly cutthroats.” Convents were said to hold young women against their will. An “exposé” published by Maria Monk, who claimed to have gone undercover in one such convent, accused priests of raping nuns and then strangling the babies that resulted. It didn’t matter that Monk was discovered as a fraud; her book sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The conspiracies were so virulent that churches were burned, and Know Nothing gangs spread from New York and Boston to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Louisville, Cincinnati, New Orleans, St. Louis and San Francisco.

At the same time as this influx of immigrants reshaped the makeup of the American populace, the old political parties seemed poised to fall apart.

“The Know Nothings came out of what seemed to be a vacuum,” says Christopher Phillips, professor of history at University of Cincinnati. “It’s the failing Whig party and the faltering Democratic party and their inability to articulate, to the satisfaction of the great percentage of their electorate, answers to the problems that were associated with everyday life.”


Citizen Know Nothing. Wikimedia Commons

Phillips says the Know Nothings displayed three patterns common to all other nativist movements. First is the embrace of nationalism—as seen in the writings of the OSSB. Second is religious discrimination: in this case, Protestants against Catholics rather than the more modern day squaring-off of Judeo-Christians against Muslims. Lastly, a working-class identity exerts itself in conjunction with the rhetoric of upper-class political leaders. As historian Elliott J. Gorn writes, “Appeals to ethnic hatreds allowed men whose livelihoods depended on winning elections to sidestep the more complex and politically dangerous divisions of class.”

No person exemplified this veneration of the working class more than Poole. Despite gambling extravagantly and regularly brawling in bars, Poole was a revered party insider, leading a gang that terrorized voters at polling places in such a violent fashion that one victim was later reported to have a bite on his arm and a severe eye injury. Poole was also the Know Nothings’ first martyr.

On February 24, 1855, Poole was drinking at a New York City saloon when he came face to face with John Morrissey, an Irish boxer. The two exchanged insults and both pulled out guns. But before the fight could turn violent, police arrived to break it up. Later that night, though, Poole returned to the hall and grappled with Morrissey's men, including Lewis Baker, a Welsh-born immigrant, who shot Poole in the chest at close range. Although Poole survived for nearly two weeks, he died on March 8. The last words he uttered pierced the hearts of the country’s Know Nothings: “Goodbye boys, I die a true American.”

Approximately 250,000 people flooded lower Manhattan to pay their respects to the great American. Dramas performed across the country changed their narratives to end with actors wrapping themselves in an American flag and quoting Poole’s last words. An anonymous pamphlet titled The Life of William Poole claimed that the shooting wasn’t a simple barroom scuffle, but an assassination organized by the Irish. The facts didn’t matter; that Poole had been carrying a gun the night of the shooting, or that his assailant took shots to the head and abdomen, was irrelevant. Nor did admirers care that Poole had a prior case against him for assault with intent to kill. He was an American hero, “battling for freedom’s cause,” who sacrificed his life to protect people from dangerous Catholic immigrants.

COUNT THE STEREOTYPES

On the day of Poole’s funeral, a procession of 6,000 mourners trailed through the streets of New York. Included in their number were local politicians, volunteer firemen, a 52-piece band, members of the OSSB—and Thomas R. Whitney, about to take his place in the House of Representatives as a member of the Know Nothing Caucus.

Judging by the size of Poole’s funeral and the Know Nothing party’s ability to penetrate all levels of government, it seemed the third party was poised to topple the Whigs and take its place in the two-party system. But instead of continuing to grow, the Know Nothings collapsed under the pressure of having to take a firm position on the issue the slavery. By the late 1850s, the case of Dred Scott (who sued for his freedom and was denied it) and the raids led by abolitionist John Brown proved that slavery was a more explosive and urgent issue than immigration.

America fought the Civil War over slavery, and the devastation of that conflict pushed nativist concerns to the back of the American psyche. But nativism never left, and the legacy of the Know Nothings has been apparent in policies aimed at each new wave of immigrants. In 1912, the House Committee on Immigration debated over whether Italians could be considered “full-blooded Caucasians” and immigrants coming from southern and eastern Europe were considered "biologically and culturally less intelligent."

From the end of the 19th century to the first third of the 20th, Asian immigrants were excluded from naturalization based on their non-white status. “People from a variety of groups and affiliations, ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to the Progressive movement, old-line New England aristocrats and the eugenics movement, were among the strange bedfellows in the campaign to stop immigration that was deemed undesirable by old-stock white Americans,” writes sociologist Charles Hirschman of the early 20th century. “The passage of immigration restrictions in the early 1920s ended virtually all immigration except from northwestern Europe.”

Those debates and regulations continue today, over refugees from the Middle East and immigrants from Latin America.

Phillips’s conclusion is that those bewildered by current political affairs simply haven’t looked far enough back into history. “One can’t possibly make sense of [current events] unless you know something about nativism,” he says. “That requires you to go back in time to the Know Nothings. You have to realize the context is different, but the themes are consistent. The actors are still the same, but with different names.”

Lorraine Boissoneault | | READ MORE

Lorraine Boissoneault is a contributing writer to SmithsonianMag.com covering history and archaeology. She has previously written for The Atlantic, Salon, Nautilus and others. She is also the author of The Last Voyageurs: Retracing La Salle's Journey Across America. Website: http://www.lboissoneault.com/

THE WEIRDEST POLITICAL CONSPIRACY THEORIES IN 19TH CENTURY AMERICA

THE GRUNGE

Though it may seem like a modern plague, conspiracies have been with us for quite a long time. Generations of humans have been worrying about mysterious cabals and shadowy yet powerful figures for ages. In fact, strange conspiracy theories have been bubbling in the human consciousness for millennia, stretching back to ancient Romans fretting over who started the fire that burned much of their capital city in A.D. 64 (via Memory Studies). And, as Lapham's Quarterly notes, Jewish people in medieval Europe could be killed by mobs fueled by false rumors of a well-poisoning conspiracy, all supposedly put in place to eliminate the Gentiles. Around the same time, many also fretted about the specter of a secret yet immensely powerful network commanded by the Knights Templar, while others were constantly on the lookout for an as-yet-unrevealed Antichrist whose appearance had been prophesied in the Bible (per USC News).

When it comes to American history, conspiracies had a serious heyday in the 19th century. It makes sense given the nation was rocked by political parties constantly jockeying for power and increasingly dire tensions over the issue of slavery. Even after the nation had begun its recovery from the Civil War, conspiracies still lingered, pointing to hidden actors in the nation's political system. As so often happens with unfettered speculation over time, things could get pretty strange. These are some of the weirdest conspiracy theories in 19th-century American politics.

19TH CENTURY POLITICAL CONSPIRACIES DIDN'T COME OUT OF NOWHERE

American politics have nearly always been mired in some sort of conspiracy theory. Less than a decade after the American Revolution drew to a close in 1783, political parties were already volleying claims of backroom deals at one another.

The trouble began in the last decade of the 18th century. According to TIME, Massachusetts minister Jedidiah Morse seemed to be the source of the trouble, at least on American soil. In his sermons, Morse began to claim that the "Bavarian Illuminati" had infiltrated American society with the aim to upend both the newly-formed government and Christianity itself. He pointed to the revolution that was at the time tearing France apart, taking particular note of the atheistic Jacobins who were busy closing French churches and promoting a secular way of life. The Illuminati, he claimed, was also ready to promote a lurid way of life that laughed at notions of fidelity, chastity, and social order.

Morse went even further to tie in the future president Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican party. Morse was a devoted Federalist, counting himself among the political opponents of the Democratic-Republicans. Soon enough, others fell in line with Morse's alarmist thinking, including the president of Yale. As the new century dawned, the conspiracy fell out of favor but never fully went away. Even today, some Americans still fear that the mysterious Illuminati are running things toward evil, despite a considerable lack of evidence.

CATHOLICISM BECAME LINKED TO POLITICAL CONSPIRACY

In the early decades of the 19th century, American nativists were fighting for their rights against the invaders. Only these nativists were not American Indians indigenous to North America. Instead, as Smithsonian Magazine reports, they were members of a quasi-secret society who purported to be of "pure" Anglo-Saxon heritage. And the invaders? Well, Catholics, of course.

The society in question would eventually come to be known as the "Know Nothing" party, so called for its members' habit of feigning ignorance of the group when questioned. Though the political party would grow in power, its main fears centered on the notion that immigrants from majority Catholic nations, such as Ireland, were undermining the fabric of American society.

The United States in the 1840s was indeed accepting a wave of Irish Catholic immigrants, as Politico reports. According to this conspiracy theory, these Catholics were not true Americans, instead holding allegiance only to the Pope, who was set on destroying Protestant America. To that end, Catholic representatives were said to be guilty of lurid misdeeds, such as murdering infants and kidnapping young women. Never mind that no evidence of such crimes was ever uncovered. In response to the accusations, the Know Nothings and other nativist political groups helped pass laws that limited alcohol consumption and restricted immigration. This made it all the more difficult for new arrivals to participate in civic life or even find employment in their new home.


THE KNOW NOTHING PARTY THRIVED ON CONSPIRACY

The Know Nothing party first took shape as a secret society, originally called the Order of United Americans, then the Order of the Star Spangled Banner. According to Smithsonian Magazine, the order eventually became an organization of powerful players, established its own political party, and reached its apex of influence in the 1850s. Know Nothings became governors and legislators throughout the nation, briefly becoming a serious force in American politics. They were elected largely because of their conspiratorial view toward immigrants, who they argued were intentionally destroying the American way of life. It wasn't just Irish Catholics who loomed unnaturally large in the political imagination. The Know Nothings positioned German immigrants and women's rights suffragists as equally nefarious groups. People became so riled up by these opportunistic political conspiracies that they burned churches and formed violent gangs.

The Know Nothings rose to prominence by playing on the fear and rage of their fellow Americans. But this was not a strong enough foundation and the group soon crumbled. As time wore on, it became more and more difficult for the party to ignore the issue of slavery, which it had tried to avoid. Furthermore, devotees of the party may have also realized that its vision of a United States peopled only by "pure" white Protestants was ridiculously unattainable.

ANTEBELLUM SLAVEHOLDERS FEARED A BLACK REPUBLICAN CONSPIRACY

In the lead-up to the American Civil War, political conspiracies became widespread and widely believed, according to "Plots, Designs, and Schemes." They also became more and more focused on what was surely the most divisive issue at that point in American history: slavery.

In the South, slave owners became convinced that agents from the North were infiltrating their communities and wreaking havoc to undermine their way of life. During the 1830s, one of the prevailing theories was that abolitionists were actually being directed by the British, who were intent on destroying rebellious American democracy (and economic competition). Others argued that the call was coming from inside the house and that bigwigs in the Republican Party were engaged in a conspiracy to outlaw slavery. They became known as "Black Republicans."

Some kernels of truth inflamed these conspiracies further. As The Guardian reports, Abraham Lincoln (himself a Republican), referred to the "ultimate extinction" of slavery in 1858. Although the party did work to limit the expansion of slavery, pre-Civil War Republicans did little to actually stop the practice or roll back the institution of slavery as it had been entrenched in the South. For some Southern leaders, those details didn't matter. William Harris, who advocated for the secession of Mississippi, wrote that his state "will never submit to the principles and policy of this black Republican administration." Though it wasn't true, the conspiracy clearly had some very real effects.


ABOLITIONISTS HELD THEIR OWN CONSPIRACY THEORIES

While Southern slave owners were becoming alarmed at the idea of outsiders actively working to disassemble their culture and economy, anti-slavery abolitionists had their own suspicions. The "slave power" conspiracy alleged that slave owners had already infiltrated all levels of the government and were working to make their way of life the norm for all (via "Plots, Designs, and Schemes").

Though abolitionists on their own may not have been able to make it all the way to the Emancipation Proclamation, "Plots, Designs, and Schemes" notes that they were given a boost by the "slave power" conspiracies and similar suspicions. Northerners who were previously indifferent to slavery or who even held some seriously racist beliefs began to believe that maybe, just maybe, the Southerners really were worming their way into too much power. Some even alleged that it went all the way to the top, with the president himself either one of them or too weak to resist the "slave power" conspirators.

Though there was no evidence ever uncovered to support this — in fact, that would have been diametrically opposed to the conspiracies popular in the South — the "slave power" suspicions seem to have united many disparate groups in the buildup to the Civil War. Scholars even argue that, strange as it may have sounded to some, this particular conspiracy led to the rise of the Republican Party in the 19th century.

SOME STATES SECEDED BECAUSE OF CONSPIRACY

While some American political conspiracies may have seemed laughable in the first decades of the 19th century, they became harder to ignore as time went on. Tensions over the issue of slavery grew, as did fights over just how states were supposed to handle the issue. Eventually, things reached a breaking point. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union. According to the National Park Service, this and the following secessions were touched off by the 1860 election of Republican Abraham Lincoln. Yet a closer look at secession declarations shows that conspiracies played their role in the breakup, too.

In its declaration of secession, Texas was convinced the North had sent emissaries to wreak havoc in its territory. This didn't just involve undermining the culture of the South or spreading fear and doubt in the minds of Southerners. The purported misdeed also included more obvious crimes, including such nefarious acts as poisoning the water supply of communities and committing arson in towns throughout the state. According to The Atlantic, other states made similar claims, arguing that Lincoln and his allies wanted not only to upend their way of life but to simply kill Southerners. Given Lincoln's recorded intent to reconcile with the South after the Civil War ended — to the point where even his allies thought he was being too soft on the rebels (via History) — this seems all the more unbelievable.

REAL SLAVE REBELLIONS WERE WARPED INTO FEAR-MONGERING CONSPIRACIES

In the 19th century, American slave owners thought the threat of a slave rebellion loomed largely. Could enslaved people have grown so tired of their inhumane treatment that they were planning a large-scale revolt? The idea makes sense. According to Britannica, the Haitian Revolution concluded in 1804 after a rebellion ousted the French and established the first country to be run by former slaves. Was it such a stretch to imagine that a similar thing might happen on U.S. soil?

As The Atlantic points out, slave rebellion did occur in the U.S. So too did conspiracy theories abound of organized slaves on the threshold of revolution, perhaps helped along by the abolitionists. It didn't help that John Brown actually did attempt to encourage an armed uprising amongst slaves in 1859 Virginia. Never mind that his attack fizzled and Brown himself was executed later that year. For some, this was enough evidence to confirm a widespread slave rebellion plot, with a few indulging in fantastical tales of vicious, well-organized people who wanted nothing more than bloody revenge. It was only a short step from that to believe that emancipation would be nothing less than the end of all white people. However, as the rest of United States history after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation has made clear, no such thing ever happened.

NEWSPAPERS TIED LINCOLN ASSASSINS TO A LARGER PLOT

On April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln's outing at Ford's Theater ended in his assassination by actor John Wilkes Booth. According to History, Booth had assembled a small group of conspirators to first kidnap Lincoln. When that plan failed, they decided instead to murder the president.

But was the assassination really the work of only a few people? As Ford's Theatre reports, some thought that the plot was beyond the abilities of some second-rate actor and his friends. Almost immediately after Lincoln's death, newspapers began hinting that the president's demise was the work of a larger, more organized group of Southern rebels.

The roster of potential masterminds behind the supposed plot included Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin. Old religious prejudices came into play, with some arguing that Benjamin (who was Jewish) was influenced by a larger network of anti-Lincoln European bankers. Or was it the Catholics? After all, weren't some of the Booth conspirators devout followers of the Pope? Could Irish-Americans, who had largely opposed the war and rioted against a Union draft, be behind it? Heck, the murder might even have been ordered by Union officials who weren't keen on Lincoln's soft approach to the former Confederacy. However, Ford's Theatre points out that none of these conspiracies were ever proven true. Instead, the consensus remains that the assassination was in fact the work of Booth and a few of his associates.


SOME CONSPIRACISTS LIED TO THE PRESIDENT HIMSELF

When it comes to conspiracies, one of their reliable throughlines is that they're usually bunk. For many, most conspiracy theories are utterly ridiculous, like the idea that we are ruled by lizards or that the Earth is flat. Yet, every once in a while, conspiracy theories turn out to be true, like when the Iran-Contra affair really was a conspiracy to sell weapons and fun a Nicaraguan rebellion, as reported by NewScientist.

In the 19th century, one conspiracy theory fooled even the president. But those involved believed they were doing it for a good reason, given that the president was dying. According to The Washington Post, it all began with an assassination attempt. On July 2, 1881, Charles Guiteau — himself the victim of a conspiratorial thought that had him believing he was a political force and not a mentally ill nobody — shot President James Garfield at a train station. Garfield's doctor attempted to find the bullet lodged in his body by digging around in the wound with unsterilized equipment and hands. The president lingered for weeks before dying of a massive infection on September 19. Before that, his doctors issued cheerful reports to the newspapers, saying that he was "sleeping sweetly" or that "his eyes have regained their old-time sparkle." This was apparently an attempt to bolster the confidence of both the American public and Garfield himself, though eventually even the doctors had to admit their lie when the president finally died.


THE CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT WAS BASED ON CONSPIRATORIAL THINKING

By now, it's probably painfully clear to everyone that, wild as they may be, conspiracy theories can have some very serious consequences in the real world. They've been used as excuses to start wars, gain power, and sell newspapers. Even when a conspiracy isn't quite poised to tear a nation to pieces, it can be used to alienate an entire group of people for no reason other than the fact that they are "different."

In the post-Civil War world of American politics, that concept may have reached its zenith with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which seriously restricted immigrants based on Chinese racial background. According to History, the act didn't come out of nowhere. It followed years of increasing worries that Chinese workers, who entered the country to work in the mining and construction booms of the mid-19th century, were going to bring society and the economy down. Real economic downturns, increasing labor competition, and concerns about "racial purity" led to the passage of the act.

Proponents of the act, such as San Francisco mayor James D. Phelan, alleged that Chinese immigrants weren't just somehow simultaneously barbaric and "cunning", but part of a larger force that would devastate America through disease and erosion of the much-beloved, vaguely-defined American way of life. This anti-Chinese sentiment, tinged with hints of conspiracy, sadly came to light again in the U.S. with the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic .

BY SARAH CROCKER

OCT. 4, 2022 

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THE NEW KNOW NOTHINGS

Republican calls for economic ‘shut down’ while accusing Biden of Marxist agenda

David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement
May 21, 2024

Victoria Spartz (Photo via AFP)

U.S. Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-IN) is calling on Congress to "shut down" the U.S. economy over the southern border, while accusing President Joe Biden of Marxist policies and denouncing his border legislation that Donald Trump ordered killed months ago.

Congresswoman Spartz on Tuesday spoke to Fox News Business host Maria Bartiromo in a rambling interview on the Senate bipartisan border bill that Donald Trump ordered killed. Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is one again trying to pass it.

Rep. Spartz said, "we need to get them back, you know, to really put pressure to control the border. So I just don't see anything else left there because no one wants to shut down the economy, unfortunately. We should really for such a serious issue, but Republicans are not gonna do it. And, and you know, and we're not just going to let Democrats have messagings bill with lots of loopholes. There are way more loopholes in that bill than people even realized."

The economy is a top issue for 2024 presidential election voters.

READ MORE: ‘Not an Accident’: Trump’s ‘Unified Reich’ Video Alarms Historians and Fascism Experts

After calling to shut down the economy, which economists for months have shown is doing extremely well, she then falsely accused President Joe Biden of socialism and enacting "socialist policies by Karl Marx."

"I think we need to have a serious discussion what really Bidenomics is and how it resembles socialist policies by Karl Marx where it's not just, you know, Biden administration had failed policy in a lot of fronts with its supply chain, whether we're dealing with energy, but also they've been subsidizing corporations very close to the government in trying to control financial markets, in order in essence control the means of production and financial markets. That's what socialism really is."

The Biden administration fixed the supply chain crisis created during the Trump administration, improved the supply chain, and continues to massively invest in it.

"And now they are trying to use you know, the government power to pick losers and winners and you know, this, winners are going to be people who can pay, give campaign contribution to Biden's reelection campaign, and losers are going to be all of us. And this is a serious discussion we need to have because this level of spending and subsidy cannot continue, it's destructive and inflation is going to destroy the middle class and people low income."

Donald Trump recently asked top oil and gas executives to donate $1 billion to his campaign in exchange for lower taxes and a rollback of President Biden's climate and environmental protections

Watch the videos above or at this link.

The Origin of American Conspiracy Theories

Americans are fascinated with conspiracy theories, in fact they generate the majority of them. Along with religious revivalism, conspiracy theories are second nature in the body politic of America.

Here is a fascinating thesis that shows that the conspiracy theory meme began in America with its founding during the revolutionary war. And since then conspiracy theory has dominated American politics.

Be it in the religious revivalism of the 1800's, the anti-Masonry movement, or the later Know Nothings, through out the history of American politics conspiracy theories have abounded, and have had major political impact. They are as American as apple pie.

This is a PhD. Thesis and is a full length book available for download as a PDF.

Conspiracy Theory and the Society of the Cincinnati, 1783-1790


At the same time, I became aware of a tradition of radical political dissent in
modern America, an abundance of conspiracy theories that also extended into popular culture. It was the time of Timothy McVeigh and the militia movement, of Waco, Ruby Ridge, Pat Robertson, and the X-Files. Suddenly conspiratorial explanations for current and historical events seemed everywhere. From Richard Hofstadter’s writings I realized that conspiracy theories occurred in episodic waves throughout American history, and from Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood I learned that the founding fathers believed in a secret English plot against American liberty. I decided to investigate, but soon became aware that other scholars were already writing on conspiracy theories in post-World War II America. Clearly, I had to look off the beaten path for a case study in American political “paranoia.”

It was then that I remembered a somewhat obscure document from my studies
on the Connecticut ratification debates. Just before the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, Dr. Benjamin Gale, an eccentric physician from Killingworth, wrote a long letter to Erasmus Wolcott.

In this diatribe, Gale complained about the machinations of the Society of the Cincinnati, a veterans organization of officers of the Continental Army. Gale charged that all the talk about the weakness of the Articles of Confederation was merely a smokescreen for the treasonous ambition of the Cincinnati. According to Gale, this society planned to establish a military dictatorship or monarchy and assume the mantle of hereditary nobility for themselves. Gale was obviously an Antifederalist, one who not only attacked the movement for a new Constitution as unnecessary and dangerous, but who felt it was the result of a deliberate conspiracy against American freedom.

I had found my topic. Apparently, a conspiracy theory existed in the 1780s, the
very period when the political culture and system of the United States was taking
shape, and it accused the leaders of the Continental Army of anti-republican subversion.

Small wonder then that such discourses of radical suspicion surfaced periodically
over the course of American history. If some American revolutionaries felt that even George Washington and Henry Knox could be traitors, we should not be surprised that so many Americans question the report of the Warren commission or distrust the federal government and the United Nations. The Deepest Piece of Cunning is a journey to the origins of conspiracy theories in the United States. It should shed some light on the political controversies of the 1780s as well as the persistence of conspiracy theories in American political culture.

Abstract

In May 1783, the officers of the Continental Army of the United States of America
organized themselves into the Society of the Cincinnati. Soon after, the veterans
organization became the focus of an elaborate conspiracy theory which falsely accused the officers of trying to establish a hereditary nobility and subvert the young republic.

Over the course of the mid-1780s, prominent revolutionary politicans such as John Adams and Elbridge Gerry joined in the outcry. The conspiracy theory became a major political controversy, and even impeded efforts to reform the Articles of Confederation.

However, despite their frantic tone and lack of a factual basis, the accusations were not merely a fringe phenomenon created by political crackpots. Instead, the conspiracy theory was deeply embedded in American political culture. When the political and economic problems of the 1780s threatened to disrupt the republican experiment, many revolutionaries looked for a threat that might explain the crisis. They found that threat in the Cincinnati, whose military background, federal organization, and aristocratic trappings made them suspect.

See:

1666 The Creation Of The World

Once More On the Fourth

Conspiracy Theory or Ruling Class Studies

Bilderberg

Conspiracy Theory

Conspiracy

Ruling Class

Freemasons



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Clinging Onto Hope in Fascist Times: An Interview With Bill Ayers

By Bill Ayers, Richard McDaniel

February 19, 2025

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


Portrait by Robert Shetterly / Americans Who Tell The Truth

Bill Ayers is a retired professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was a co-founder of the Weather Underground.


“Our strength lies in a large political message, a large moral vision, a large mobilization of people, and that’s our only strength,” claims Bill Ayers. A retired professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Ayers is infamous for being a co-founder of the Weather Underground. Founded in 1969, the Weather Underground bombed various public buildings (most prominently the Pentagon and the Capitol) throughout the 1960s and 1970s in an effort to combat American imperialism and racism. Ayers resurfaced in public view during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign due to his loose connection to Barack Obama. Further, Ayers is a prolific author. His latest book, When Freedom Is the Question, Abolition Is the Answer, was published last fall. Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Ayers. Even at the age of 80, Ayers is still every bit as passionate about issues regarding education, colonialism, white supremacy, and war. In this interview, Ayers specifically provides indispensable insight on the nature of grassroots activism and on the necessity of remaining hopeful even under the contemporary threat of fascism.

Richard McDaniel (RM): You’ve called the concept of the “white working class” a “fiction built with white supremacy.” Why?

Bill Ayers (BA): Well, because I think that the idea that you can separate the working class into these neat categories around race is a fiction. I think that we settle too often for labels that might be useful in terms of our conceptions, but are actually fundamentally weak. I think that white supremacy is foundational to this country. As I’ve often thought (in my recent book this is kind of a big theme), all Americans are touched with the idea of freedom. We all think that freedom is the best thing in the world. Well, what anybody means by it is a mystery. So, we have the Black Freedom Movement, which means one thing to me, and then we have the Freedom Caucus (the right-wing group in Congress), or the insufferable Ron DeSantis’ [book] The Courage to Be Free. Or, I just got a new Visa card called “Freedom Unlimited.” That just made me want to jump off a bridge. This is ridiculous! What is freedom? And so, foundational to the American experience is a freedom for the conqueror, [which translates to] murder and mayhem for the conquered.

We are a country built on two original sins. One is the sin of slavery, and the other is a sin of settler-colonialism: conquest, murder, mayhem, annihilation. We have to keep that in our minds as we think about moving forward. So, the working class. What is the working class? Well, the working class are those who have to sell their labor in order to live, and they sell it to capitalists (typically). So, the working class is complex, multi-layered, difficult to understand, difficult to contain in a single slogan. But, people start talking about the “white working class,” especially the Democratic party officials when they start saying: “Well, our problem is we lost the white working class.” To me, that is absolute fiction. It defines something that’s not defined in the actual world. If you go to the UAW, there’s not the “white working class” and the “black working class.” There are white people and black people, and race is a fundamental dividing line in our country. There are people who are seduced by white supremacy into working against their class interests. There’s no question about that, but that doesn’t make an entire hegemonic reality called the “white working class.”

I want to trouble that notion because I find the opportunism of the leaders of the Democratic party to be overwhelming and appalling. In their looking at this last national election, for example, they’re all obsessed with: “What was wrong with our message? What was wrong with our…?” They become both narrow and opportunistic, and they fall into all the traps that make this country a problem, both for people here and in the world. What I would rather people spend time thinking about is: What do we stand for in principle? What do we care about ethically, morally? What are we willing to fight for? If you think about the “why” of building a social movement or a political party instead of always thinking operationally–What do I do? Where do I look? How do I appeal?–[that makes] a much stronger basis. Let me back up again. Another thing that I would say is that we have two major political parties in this country. The Republican party was captured a long time ago, but it’s been captured by a populist, racist, white supremacist ideology–a kind of ring-wing populism. It has now transformed in the last few months–we’ve watched it happen–into a constitutional fascist party. By that, I mean it’s using the levers of power and the levers of the law to remake the country so that it is run by and for oligarchs. It is standing firmly against the needs of the masses of people, the working class included. I think that’s the reality we have to look at. The Republican party is now–its recent history as a right-wing populist party, which has now transformed into a constitutional fascist party.

On the other side, we don’t have a party of opposition. We have a series of blocs that come together as a coalition called the “Democratic party.” It is not a vehicle–it’s not a party in the sense that it has a political line and it has a disciplined structure. It’s not like that at all. The Republican party is much more in that realm. So, that means that the Democratic party is a frail instrument of opposition. In fact, I think that you could argue that the Democratic party, in many ways, laid the foundation for a lot of the worst things we’re seeing as this constitutional fascist party goes to work. The Democratic party laid the groundwork for the genocide in Gaza, laid the groundwork for undoing some of the progressive moves that had been made in both the 1930s and the 1960s and ‘70s. I have no allegiance to or affection for the Democratic party as it exists, and I’ve never been a Democrat. So, I’m not as freaked out as some people. I think what we need to do is build an irresistible mass movement of opposition to this fascist movement, but also to the consensus between the two parties around world domination, around militarization. We will oppose these things by building a mass opposition, not by throwing in with the Democratic party.

One last thing on the party politics. You know, the fact that we have normalized the idea that we all get solicitations from candidates, and that we’ve normalized the idea that, in order to run for office, your main job is raising millions and millions of dollars. That is an atrocity. That has nothing to do with democracy, nothing to do with freedom. Yet, that’s what we’ve normalized. I’m still getting texts from the Democratic leadership saying: “We just need you to kick in $20 and we’ll turn this seat.” It’s an obscene idea that the way you participate, and the way you show that you’ve got popular support, is by how much money you raise. That is really a perversion of any notion of democracy.

RM: In an effort to combat the roughly 6,000 Vietnamese that were murdered every week by American imperialism, the Weather Underground famously destroyed government property. How did the Weather Underground succeed in smuggling bombs into the Capitol and the Pentagon? Was there just a lack of security in these government buildings?

BA: There was a lack of security for sure. First, let me backup a minute. Yes, 6,000 people a week were being killed by our government in Indochina, and that went on for ten years. I was first arrested opposing that war in 1965. I was arrested many, many more times. I did organizing work full-time as an anti-war activist and organizer. But, we couldn’t stop the war. By 1968, it was clear that the war was lost. Yet, the killing went on. So, the questions were: Where do we go from here? How do we oppose this regime when it’s already been defeated politically and ethically, but still continues its murderous path? For the left, and even for the country, there was a crisis because a majority of the country opposed the war. Those of us who had sacrificed and worked hard to end it felt, in 1968, for a minute that we won a victory, and then the war escalated. So, what do you do? One of my brothers joined the Democratic party and tried to build a peace wing. One went to Canada and opened a home for deserters. One went to the communes.

There were many things to do, but I became part of a group out of Students for a Democratic Society. We built an organization away from the eyes of the state, and we felt that we had to find a way to survive in what we thought of as impending American fascism. So, we began to build an underground. When three of our comrades were killed in an accidental bombing explosion, we went underground. We wanted to take the war to the warmakers. We wanted to issue a screaming response, and so we figured out ways to destroy property. It was extreme vandalism, [which] is one way to think about it. It was extreme vandalism with a political message. We weren’t the first or the last people to engage in extreme vandalism, but ours was focused on two things which are still the focus of my politics. One was U.S. imperialism abroad, and one was white supremacy at home. So, we built the capacity to commit illegal, some would say insane (but I don’t think they were insane), actions that destroyed government property or that destroyed a police station.

How did we do it? We figured out ways to breach the security of places like the Pentagon. Now, one could argue that it would be impossible to do today, but that’s not true. But, I’m not that interested in tactics. I’ve never been much of a tactician or much of a person who knows how to do those kinds of things. Rather, I think we should be thinking about: How do we build mass consciousness around the evils of war and racism? I think that’s the most important thing. Figuring out how to evade capture and so on is not that important, actually. In fact, let me transition into [a] slightly different space. I actually think that if you ever start to think that our military versus their military, that we could win, or if you think that our spycraft versus their spycraft gives us an advantage, you’re way off-base. The reality is that, if it’s a clash between their army and our army, we lose every time. If it’s a clash between our imaginations and their imaginations, or our ethical stance and their ethical stance, I think we have a very–not only a good chance of winning, but we will win. That means that we can transform society into a peaceful, just, balanced world if we have large numbers of people involved.

So, I know everybody in the anti-war movement has figured out how to use Signal on their phones. I hate Signal. But, I mean, I have it, [and] I’ve used it. I used it when we were involved in an illegal action shutting down a war munitions plant in Chicago. Everybody wanted to be on Signal, so I was on Signal. There were also a lot of things that I learned in that demonstration. But, once the encampments happened in universities–[after] the encampments were crushed by the fearful, backwards university administrations, to then say: “We’ll meet in small groups on Signal.” [It] makes no sense to me. That’s a time when you should have a big meeting, [and] invite the entire university to an auditorium, because our strength is in numbers. It’s not in Signal. I may have gone off on a tangent, but I think it’s important that militants today (and organizers today) can’t get caught up in the idea, because they’re savvy about technology, that somehow technology is where our strength lies. That’s not where it lies. Our strength lies in a large political message, a large moral vision, a large mobilization of people, and that’s our only strength.

You asked initially about the Weather Underground and a tactical question, which I really don’t have much knowledge of or ability with. But, I wanted to move away from that and say: If you focus on [tactics] in your organizing or in your thinking about how to organize, you will go down a dead end. They have all the strength, and we have all the weaknesses. Our only strength is in talking to people and building bigger and bigger coalitions of people who see that their lives could be materially, spiritually, and ethically better without the capitalist, greedy, acquisitive, militaristic, predatory system that we live in today.

RM: In a 2012 interview, you rightly stated that “you can’t be free if you’re not enlightened.” Why does the United States have such a hard time at granting equal education to all students?

BA: That’s why. You answered the question by asking it! I mean, one of the things we’re witnessing right now that I think is really important to name is that one of the hallmarks of fascism, or any autocratic rule, is to destroy the university. One of my messages as a teacher, and I write about this in everything I write, [is] that free people read freely, that you need no one’s permission to interrogate the world. That has to be the major message that teachers in a free society give to their students: “You have a right to be here. You have a right to read freely. You have the right to investigate the world, and, in fact, your responsibility is to try to understand what’s going on around you.” As Charlie Cobb said in 1963 when he wrote the proposal for Freedom Schools: “The black children of Mississippi have been denied many things: fully funded education, fully trained teachers, [and] decent facilities. But, the fundamental injury is being denied the right to think for themselves about the circumstances of their lives and how they could be otherwise.” That’s the most radical thing a teacher could say: “You have a right to understand the circumstances of your lives and how they could be otherwise.”

So, who’s afraid of that very sensible thing that I just said? People who are afraid of it are the people in 1963 in Mississippi who ran the plantations. They’re afraid of that because an enlightened group of workers will overthrow the plantation. That’s why reading was outlawed during slavery. Frederick Douglass famously tells the story of his master’s wife teaching him to read, and the master finding out about it and exploding, saying: “You can’t teach him to read! That will unfit him to be a slave.” Exactly. Reading, education, [and] knowledge is liberating at its best. That means you can’t have any restrictions on how you interrogate the world. You don’t need your parents permission, you don’t need your teacher’s permission, [and] you certainly don’t need the government’s permission to interrogate the world. So, what are we witnessing right now? Banning books in Florida and Oklahoma, closing libraries in Arizona and Georgia, firing teachers all over the place, [and] fighting the teachers unions because the teachers unions are standing up not just for wages and benefits, but for kids’ right to learn.

We’re seeing this attack on universities, which now has taken on a whole new dimension and is attacking research, attacking graduate schools, attacking the bank accounts of the universities (so the endowments are now under siege), and so on. The big research universities are the product of the 20th century, and I can give you my critique of them. I have an endless critique because I lived in them for a long time. Of course, I’m very critical of the universities as they are, but what we’re witnessing is not the undoing of the universities as they are for a more liberatory, participatory move. We’re witnessing the undoing of them precisely so that people can’t think, can’t learn, can’t know, [which makes people] have blinders on that will limit their capacity to act. That’s the fundamental feature we’re witnessing when I talk about the drift, or now the lurch, toward fascism. The attack on the universities is clear.

One more [thing]. In the spring of last year, we saw the creation of encampments all over the country to deal with a fundamental, major political issue that was rocking the world and rocking the nation. Kids took the initiative to say: “Let’s start a conversation. We’ve got an encampment here.” I went to five of them. They were absolutely utopian communities. People were taking care of each other. There were free libraries. People were reading. People were asking questions. People were learning at an incredible rate, and it’s exactly what you want a university to be. The administrations could’ve said: “These kids have highlighted a major issue of our times. Let’s talk. Let’s have a conversation throughout the university.” Instead, they went to Washington, they cringed in front of the no-nothings, they came back to their campuses, [and] they called the cops on American universities. Then, when the students and teachers were away (when people weren’t paying attention), they changed the rules about when you could speak up, how you could speak up, what you could speak about, and they fired several faculty members, including Katherine Franke, [who was] a tenured law professor at Columbia University. They fired her. How is that possible? Some places that I know of closed departments as a way to fire a tenured professor.

The university presidents could not go before Congress and do what you and I could do easily, which is not just to defend the first amendment (it wasn’t about the first amendment), but to also defend academic freedom, which means the freedom to learn, the freedom to teach, [and] the freedom to think. That’s academic freedom. It goes way beyond the first amendment. [The] first amendment is that the government “shall make no laws.” That’s easy. The right to think, the right to teach, the right to learn–those are fundamental to a free society. That’s what was under attack last spring. That’s what’s under attack in a systemic way as the fascist constitutionalists take power. They’re going to undo the Education Department. Why? Well, because education is their enemy. Reading is their enemy.

The other thing that I would say about the spring and about what’s going on now is [that] there’s been a lot of comparisons to McCarthyism. There’s some truth in that. The universities were pathetic during the McCarthy era as well, as were many businesses and many other places. But, there’s a difference. McCarthyism was about: “What are your associations? Are you in the communist party? Do you associate with communists?” This is about: “What book are you reading? Let me look at your curriculum.” We had university presidents like the president of Columbia naming professors who were teaching the wrong things. That’s just unprecedented, and it’s outrageous. It is the hallmark of fascism.

RM: In your book, Demand the Impossible, you wrote that hope is “an antidote to cynicism and despair” and is the “capacity to notice or invent alternatives” to the existing world. Unfortunately, however, many Americans feel pessimistic and are discouraged to take the steps necessary for change. How do we cultivate a culture of hope in the United States?

BA: Well, we have to, first of all, advocate for it and believe in it. I’ll tell you a couple of things. One is–I think I might’ve written about this somewhere, but I’m often accused of being an optimist, and I’m not an optimist. My mother was an optimist. Karl Marx was an optimist. I used to accuse my mom of being a Marxist because she thought she knew how things were going to turn out. I have no idea how things are going to turn out, and neither do you, the pundits, nor the people who are analyzing why the Democrats lost. Nobody knows how things are going to be tomorrow. That gives me hope because both the pessimists and the optimists are determinists. They know what’s going to happen. The pessimists sit on their couch, smoke a joint, and watch the world go to hell. The optimists wave cheerly from the window into the sunshine. Both are wrong because we don’t know. We don’t know whether we’ll be able to build a movement. We don’t know whether catastrophic capitalist climate collapse is going to do us all in sooner or later. We don’t know.

But, what we do know is, because we don’t know, we could choose to be hopeful. It’s often been said [that] the day before any revolution, the talking heads are certain that it’s impossible, and the day after they can explain why it was inevitable. That’s incidentally why I don’t find the debriefing of the Democratic party’s loss to be that interesting or illuminating because people go on MSNBC and pretty much bullshit. They don’t know. They would be better served if they were out organizing for a vision of a new world that is within reach. I always say to myself: “I’m not an optimist. I’m not a pessimist.” I choose hope precisely because I don’t know what’s coming. Try and fail and try again and fail again, but fail better–that, to me, is the rhythm of a real radical or a real revolutionary. You have to keep trying because you don’t know what’s coming and you know what exists is unacceptable. The mayhem and the murder and the cruelty is unacceptable, and we have to find a way to do our work. For me, as I’ve often said, I get up every morning and think: “Maybe today we’ll overthrow capitalism.” Then, I go to bed every night disappointed (a little bit), but I get up the next morning and say the same thing. Why not? Because you don’t know. Why not get busy with projects of repair, reimagining, and revolution? That’s how I want to live my life.

I had dinner with Eduardo Galeano (the Latin American revolutionary from Uruguay), who wrote the book Open Veins of Latin America. He’s passed away. But, twenty years ago I had dinner with Eduardo, and we were exchanging views on a lot of things. We got to talking about how we both were often accused of being romantics, optimists, utopians. I feel like I’m not guilty of being an optimist. I’m guilty of being a bit romantic, being hopeful, all that. But, Galeano told me the best story. He said that a person he met accused him of being a utopian, and the guy said to him: “What good is utopia?” Galeano’s response was: “Well, it’s true. I take two steps towards utopia, and utopia walks two steps away. I walk ten steps towards utopia, [and] utopia walks ten steps away. It’s good for walking.” I thought that was marvelous. It keeps you going because you have a north star, not a dogmatic fixed image of what we could build. You have an idea that we could move towards more participation, more transparency, more democracy, more mutual aid, more mutual regard. That’s where I want to go: more peace, more justice, more joy. That gives me the ability to keep on walking.

I would say the issues that you raised, and that have been my issues my whole life (war and white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism), are the core issues that we are facing today. So, you think about the Black Panther party. How did the Black Panther party get started sixty years ago? It got started around the killing of black youth by the police in Oakland. That’s still an issue, and that’s only the tip of an iceberg of what white supremacy is. But, I think that I’m deeply involved–in my active work now, besides teaching and writing–in the anti-mass incarceration movement, the peace movement (the anti-genocide movement), the climate catastrophe movement, [and] with working on questions of homelessness. These are all things that matter. From my way of thinking and talking about how we get people hopeful, I would say that if you spend all of your time looking at the sites of power you have no access to (the White House, the Medieval Auction bloc called the Congress, the Pentagon, Wall Street), you’re bound to feel hopeless. The powerful will not make you feel hopeful. But, if instead you spend your time in the sites of power you have absolute access to (the classroom, the house of worship, the street, the community, the workplace, the neighborhood)–you have access to all of that, so why aren’t you spending your time there rather than watching MSNBC or reading The New York Times and feeling like shit all day?

To me, we have to stay hopeful because it’s the logical thing to do, and it’s the only way to live because you don’t know. The other way of saying it that [Antonio] Gramsci put it that a lot of people quote is to be a “pessimist of the head and an optimist of the heart,” or something like that. The idea being that you can be analytical and make sense out of all the stuff that’s going on, but you still have to have a heart that yearns for something better and that can find energy to organize for that something better. That, I think, is where we should all be living.

Kiss My Ass, I’m Irish: Celtic Pride Against

White Supremacy

Nicky Reid

March 17, 2025
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Image by Lukas Eggers.

White supremacy remains a very potent weapon for the powerful in this country and I don’t think that the far left should stand alone in confronting it. Many of my more libertarian readers tend to cringe at such notions and I can’t completely blame them. Sadly, there are a good number of self-proclaimed leftists who use combatting white supremacy as an excuse for building up the state, but this doesn’t change the fact that traditionally white supremacy has been a far more lethal excuse to do the exact same thing, and it still is.

It’s not even that the powerful in this country are necessarily racist, many are but for the most part bigotry is just an easy way to manipulate poor people into forfeiting their agency to authoritarian structures in the name of combatting other poor people.

Donald Trump’s current war at the border is probably the best example of this in progress. The economy is shit and Americans in general are getting fucked left and right in every hole that bleeds. In a sane world, Wall Street welfare queens like Donald Trump and Elon Musk would be the focus of their rage. Instead, these same vile gangsters have hoodwinked half the country into getting behind an insane conspiracy to quadruple the size of the federal police state so they can sic gestapo on itinerate border hoppers who we’re told are destroying this country with a massive crime wave that quite simply does not exist.

After surging during the economic shitstorm of the Pandemic, violent crime rates in this country have largely dropped back to where they were in 2019 and there is zero evidence that increased immigration at the time had anything to do with sparking that temporary bump. Quite the contrary, violent crime appears to have spiked across the Western Hemisphere because of the Pandemic, hitting hardest in the most impoverished nations of Central America and provoking many of their people to flee to safer sections of the map. All available statistics actually suggest that not only are undocumented immigrants less likely to commit violent crime than natives, but they are also more likely to be the victims of it too.

Sadly, none of these inconvenient facts stopped Donald Trump from using the potent imagery of increasingly dark vagrants spilling across the Rio Grande to get elected by wide margins of my fellow libertarians. However, I don’t take this shit so personally simply because my post-left anarchist inclinations have driven me to adopt increasingly libertarian tactics to combat the white power state.

I tend to take this shit a little more personally than your average libertarian honkey, especially around Saint Patrick’s Day, because I am a historically literate nerd of Irish Catholic ancestry, and I am well aware of the fact that my people were the original wetbacks in this country before we assimilated beneath a banner of white supremacy.

You wouldn’t think it by looking at a South Philly Trump rally, but Irish people weren’t even considered white when we first stepped foot on American soil. After centuries of violent colonial rule under the British Empire, my ancestors left their homeland in the mid-19th century to escape a blight that English authorities deliberately manipulated into a genocidal famine. About a million of us died and millions more flooded America’s shores aboard floating coffins, starving and riddled with disease, and when we got here, we faced a lot of the same perils faced by Hondurans and Guatemalans today.

We were subjected to alarmist tabloid headlines and baseless conspiracy theories. We were herded into squalid tenements and targeted by violent mobs. And we were singled out for the simple fact that there was just too damn many of us to assimilate into America’s cultural purgatory of Anglo-Saxon conformity all at once.  In fact, an entire political party was built on this hysteria; the so-called American Party, better known as the Know Nothings, who waged a holy war on Irish Catholics both literally and electorally beneath the banner of “Americans must rule America!”

This proto-MAGA sect swept the country in the mid-1850s, electing over 100 congressmen as well as mayors in major cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. They eventually even took the White House with our 19th president, Millard Filmore, being a former Know Nothing. During this time, these pseudo-populist despots passed egregiously anti-democratic laws that mandated teaching the King James Bible in public schools and barred naturalized citizens from voting unless they had spent at least 21 years in the country.

They also literally murdered people, especially at the ballot box, like they did at the Bloody Monday Riots of 1855 in Louisville, Kentucky, when Catholic homes were burnt to the ground and as many as 100 Irish people were killed in cold blood while thousands more were left with little choice but to flee the city for their lives.

So, what the fuck happened then? How did my people go from being called “white niggers” and digging ditches in the ghettoes alongside our darker counterparts to being a major part of the same system that was once devoted to expelling us from its shores by any means necessary? Well, we did the same thing that the Italians and the Jews did; we got busy being white. We achieved this dubious goal in a number of ways but most of them essentially amounted to us convincing our masters that we could be trusted to do their bidding for them.

We murdered our fellow Catholics during the Mexican-American War when 40% of the United States Army was made up of immigrants. We rose up the ranks of the New England chapters of the Democratic Party by becoming the loudest advocates for chattel slavery north of the Mason-Dixon Line. And we dutifully savaged the next influx of American refugees, leading violent race riots against Chinese railway workers accused of stealing our jobs.

So, now Irish Catholics can stand proud as white people but was it really worth it? What did we as a people really gain from this Faustian bargain beyond a slightly lower rank on the police state’s shitlist? The right to identify with the same globalist Anglo-Saxon monoculture that kept our people in chains for centuries and continues to divide our ancestral homeland?

For this we forfeited a proud culture of Celtic pride built around agrarian peasant resistance to colonial rule. We sacrificed everything that made us Irish just to conform to a crass commercial culture that still fundamentally hates us, that paints us as drunkards and mooks and turns our sacred holidays like Saint Patrick’s Day into an excuse for Protestant frat boys to binge themselves sick on green beer and vomit into plastic leprechaun hats.

This is the other side of whiteness that the left often forgets to acknowledge. The first ethnicities that the master race erased were actually the European peasant cultures that they reduced to a single color. There is no such thing as white culture. This is nothing but a purposely vague conglomeration of secular universalist Protestant hogwash that essentially amounts to little more than kneejerk conformity and an evangelical devotion to institutional power.

That and the constantly evolving demonization of the “other” which is basically just any outgroup that fails to comply with its own erasure and generally makes the world too diverse to govern. That used to be us, and as far as I’m concerned it still should be.

We were all minorities once, a million little tribes scattered to four corners of the wind. This only became a problem when a few powerful people decided that just one city state full of servants wasn’t enough to satiate their power lust and decided to build empires spanning many tribes so they could play God with the poor people in the next village too. From this rapidly expanding cesspool came America and from America came the concept of the white race, invented by the same imperialists who sacked Ireland so they could sack Virginia too.

During the early days of American colonialism there was no black or white. Slaves and servants came in a wide variety of colors and their status could evolve through subordination to the current puritanical traditions favored at the time by the royals back home in London. It wasn’t even totally unheard of to find slaveowners of African descent provided that they said their prayers and paid their taxes.

Then a wealthy landowner by the name of Nathaniel Bacon decided that he was tired of kicking up his fortune to the Virginia colonial elites and formed a militia made up predominantly of European indentured servants and African slaves to overthrow the government. Bacon’s Rebellion quickly got out of hand however and became something of a multicultural populist referendum on life under empire. The uprising was suppressed relatively quickly but not before Bacon’s unruly slave army had succeeded in burning Jamestown to the ground.

The planter class got scared and sought to divide the peasantry against each other. They did this by inventing whiteness as an ethnic concept. And just like that, all Europeans were spared the whip while those Africans deemed Black were reduced to a permanent slave caste.

But not every European embraced assimilation. Some of us wanted to remain ungovernable. And some of us were even insulted at the very notion of becoming complicit in reducing other human beings to property. This included a handful of Irish Catholic conscripts during the Mexican American War who deserted their posts to join the Mexican Army in resisting the Protestant expansion of chattel slavery in Texas. These unruly Micks ended up forming a ferocious artillery unit known appropriately as Saint Patrick’s Battalion and while many were captured and executed as traitors, they didn’t die white servants of American imperialism, they died free, and they died Irish.

I may be but a genderfuck heretic, but this is what I celebrate on Saint Patrick’s Day, a culture of proud peasant renegades who stood with the oppressed not just because it’s the honorable thing to do but because it’s the only way to break free from the shallow culture of our ancestral oppressors. So, if you’re truly as proud of being Irish as I am then you’ll join me in standing with the latest class of wetbacks and spit your ill-gotten whiteness back in the face of the Know Nothings of the GOP.

The only thing great about America is all the weird little tribes who resist it. So, you motherfuckers can keep your white power and kiss my ass, because I’m not white, I’m Irish.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.

St. Patrick’s Day: Seven things you didn't know about the patron saint of Ireland 

Copyright Public Domain - DAMIEN EAGERS / AFP

By Laiba Mubashar

Published on 17/03/2025 - 

There’s more to this holiday than just an excuse to drink pints of Guinness...

For more than 1000 years, St. Patrick’s Day has been celebrated in Ireland every year on 17 March.

Over the years, the religious holiday commemorating the death of Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, has metamorphosed into a day of celebrating Irish culture through parades, music, special foods, dances and a lot of green - the colour commonly associated with the saint.

Many symbols and legends associated with Ireland such as leprechauns and shamrocks come from Saint Patrick. Credited for bringing Christianity to the then-pagan Ireland, Saint Patrick used Celtic symbols such as leprechauns, believed to be meddlesome fairies, to connect the country to Christianity. Legend has it that he chose Shamrocks (three-leaved clovers) as a symbol of the Church and used its three leaves to explain the concept of the Holy Trinity to his followers.

Today, Saint Patrick’s Day is celebrated worldwide in more than 200 countries. It is a national holiday in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador, and the British overseas territory, Montserrat - both of which have inhabitants with Irish descent.

In the US, the Chicago river is dyed green annually on Saint Patrick’s Day using 40 pounds of dye (down from the original 100 to minimize environmental damage) and the river stays green for a few hours - down from the original duration of a week.

St. Patrick’s Day is also celebrated by the likes of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Argentina, especially by the Irish diaspora.

But who was Saint Patrick and why is he so famous?

Here are seven facts about St. Patrick you may not know:

1. Saint Patrick was not Irish

Kilbennan St.Benins Church Window - St.PatrickPublic Domain

St. Patrick was born in Britain - not Ireland - in the late 4th century.

At age 16, he was kidnapped by Irish raiders who sold him as a slave to tend sheep. He escaped, went back to Britain, and took refuge at a monastery. Years later, he became a priest and travelled across Europe, studying Christianity for 16 years.

Eventually, he returned to Ireland to convert the then-pagan country to Christianity.

2. Saint Patrick’s colour was blue - NOT green

Badge of the Order of St Patrick  Public Domain

While today we associate St. Patrick – and everything Irish – with the colour green, the saint was originally depicted wearing blue robes. In fact, that particular shade of blue (known today as azure blue) was originally called “St. Patrick’s blue”.

Green became popular in the 18th century when discontent with English rule grew and the Irish independence movement started using the Shamrock (linked to St. Patrick) as a symbol of unity and resistance. The colour green became a symbol of sympathy with Irish independence.

However, today, azure blue - or rather, St. Patrick’s blue - remains Ireland's official heraldic colour.

3. His real name was not Patrick

St. Patrick’s original name was Maewyn Succat and he was born to Christian parents in Roman Britain.

His father was a deacon and his grandfather, a priest. But St. Patrick (according to his own account) was not religious as a child. He was renamed Patricus after becoming a priest which he then changed to Patrick upon his return to Ireland.

4. Saint Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland

Depictions of St. Patrick driving the snakes out of IrelandPublic Domain

Popular legend has it that St. Patrick stood on a hilltop, Croagh Patrick (now an important site of pilgrimage in Ireland), and banished all the snakes from Ireland using a wooden staff. Over 100,000 people climb the holy mountain every year.

However, scientists say that the island nation was never home to any snakes.

The “banishing of the snakes”, however, could be true on a metaphorical level in the eradication of paganism from Ireland and the triumph of Christianity.

5. Saint Patrick's Day was originally a religious holiday, not a day to party

Today, St. Patrick's Day is frequently used as an excuse to party and to drink pints of GuinnessAP

In 1903, Irish law declared St. Patrick’s Day as a day of religious observance.

Up until the 1970s, pubs were closed on 17 March as per Irish law.

In 1995, the Irish government began a national campaign to use St. Patrick’s Day to drive tourism into the country and display Irish culture to the world.

Today, it is celebrated as a day of drinking, feasting, and parades where many dress up as leprechauns.

6. St Patrick’s Day parades began in America - not Ireland

St. Patrick's Day celebrations in Dublin, IrelandAP

Although Saint Patrick’s Day has been celebrated for over a millennia in Ireland, the famous parades which have now become the heartbeat of the holiday festivities originally began in America in the 18th century by Irish immigrants.

The first definite St Patrick’s Day parade took place in 1737, in Boston, Massachusetts, but the modern-day parades we see today have their roots in a 1762 parade celebration in New York.

For disadvantaged Irish immigrants in America - forced to escape Ireland because of famine and unable to find jobs in America upon their arrival - Saint Patrick's Day became a source of pride and celebration, a way to connect to their Irish roots.

7. Nobody knows exactly where St. Patrick is buried

Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity – known as Down CathedralDown Cathedral

Although several sites identify themselves as St. Patrick’s burial place, no one knows exactly where the saint is buried.

Popularly-accepted locations include Down Cathedral in the town of Downpatrick in Northern Ireland, which is also the burial place for Ireland’s other saints, Brigid and Columba, as well as Saul. However, some state that St. Patrick may be buried in Glastonbury Abbey in England.