Mark this day....14 November 2020...when the MAGA political party was informally established by 10,000 brainwashed ass clowns. It has happened before in this country. The "Know Nothing Party" (also known as the American party), established in the early 1850's, was primarily anti-immigrant, populist and xenophobic. In other words...if you weren't a descendant of a white European colonist...you were not welcome in this country. Supporters of the Know Nothing movement believed that an alleged "Romanist" conspiracy was being planned to subvert civil and religious liberty in the United States, and sought to politically organize native-born Protestants in what they described as a defense of their traditional religious and political values. Sound familiar? Former president Millard Fillmore was the American party candidate in the 1856 presidential election and won over 21% of the vote. Just replace 1856 with 2024. It is Abraham Lincoln, a Republican senator at the time, who best described the Know Nothings in 1855 as follows:
"I am not a Know-Nothing—that is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equals, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to that I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy"
Leave it to old Abe to sum up the repulsive nature of these sorts of movements. Where are the Republican leaders today on the topic of this potential racist and divisive movement that may turn in to a third party? Although the Know Nothings ceased to be a political movement of any consequence in the late 1850's, they lived on in an organization you may have heard of: the Ku Klux Klan.
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