State Rep. Shane Baker (R-Somerset) has introduced a pair of bills in the General Assembly that would “ban naturalized citizens and people with dual citizenship from holding local or state office,” recently wrote Sylvia Goodman of Kentucky Public Radio.
Baker might not know it, but he’s reprising the anti-immigrant paranoia of the old American Party, which dominated politics in Kentucky and other states in the mid-19th century. Members were popularly known as “Know-Nothings” because they were supposed to reply. ‘I know nothing,’ when a suspicious stranger asked about the party.
“Largely anti-immigration (from “shithole countries” ) with a significant white nationalist element, the GOP has become our nation’s 21st-century Know Nothing Party, bringing new meaning to the claim ‘I know nothing,’” wrote Glenn C. Altschuler in The Hill online.
Trump, the Yankee George Wallace, has brought new meaning to “White House,” too.
While the president and his party focus their white supremacist-freighted xenophobia on nonwhite immigrants, Trump recently called Somali immigrants, including U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a naturalized citizen, “garbage.” The nativist Know-Nothings, an all-white Protestant party, focused their ire on Irish and German Catholic immigrants, many of whom settled in Louisville and other Kentucky cities.
In 1855, the Know-Nothings won the governorship and piled up majorities in both houses of the General Assembly. But the party ultimately collapsed nationally, its doom in Kentucky hastened on election day 1855 when Know-Nothing mobs rampaged through German and Irish immigrant neighborhoods in Louisville, murdering, beating, burning and looting. The violence went down in history as “Bloody Monday.”
Goodman quoted Baker: “You can see the direction they’re trying to take New York, and the problems that are there are on the front burner there, and we don’t want to face those things in Kentucky. We want to make sure to head things off before they get here.”
The object of Baker’s disaffection was obviously Zohran Mamdani, the new Big Apple mayor. A Muslim, Mamdani was born in Uganda; his parents are of Indian descent. He is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Baker’s House Bill 186 would “require people elected to local offices-county commissioner, mayor, city council, board of education, etc. to be natural-born citizens and may not hold dual citizenship with another nation,” Goodman explained. “House Bill 259, meanwhile, would change the Kentucky Constitution to make the same new requirements for state offices, like governor, attorney general, Supreme Court justice, or state lawmaker.”
Anyway, Baker’s pet bills might be a stretch even with MAGA Republicans enjoying supermajorities in the state House and Senate. We’ll see.
Though Trump and his MAGA loyalists in Washington and statehouses are all in for immigrant-bashing, the first Republican president wasn’t.
“I am not a Know-Nothing,” Abraham Lincoln declared in an Aug. 24, 1855, letter to his friend, Joshua F. Speed of Louisville. “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.”
Going on 171 years later, the Trump-led, across-the-board descent into degeneracy is approaching warp speed.
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