Kensington, Pennsylvania. May 6, 1844—In retaliation for the demonstrations against him in the Irish district of Kensington, Lewis Levin organizes a protest of three thousand followers who kill dozens of Irish and burn dozens of houses, in addition to the Catholic churches of St. Michael and Saint Augustine. None of these crimes will be tried and Levin will be elected Representative for Pennsylvania, a position he will take office on March 4, 1845, from where he will continue his fight against immigrants (unwanted immigrants), responsible for the decline of America.

Christmas, the Roman festival in honor of the goddess of the Sun, resisted for a thousand years by Christians of all kinds, had landed in the new promised land and has now become the symbol of Christianity. Protestants in the United States get used to the idea, but they still refuse to accept this horrible custom of getting drunk and giving things away in honor of Jesus. This year, for Valentine’s Day, the custom of buying and selling on religious occasions has also reached unruly proportions.

For decades, the biggest controversy in the United States was not the issue of slavery but of the invasion of non-Protestant European immigrants and a rather strange and suspicious target. Immigrants and children of English and German immigrants do not want Irish. They are Catholics and represent an impure variation of the white race. In Europe, England has stripped the poorest Irish of their lands and the political protection of their church, which has caused one million to die from hunger and another million to emigrate to America via the shortest route across the Atlantic. In America they are not and will not be welcome for at least a century. Some are killed working on railroad tracks to prevent the spread of cholera and other contagious diseases. Others cannot enter restaurants that, with signs on their doors and windows, clarify: “Dogs and Irish are not accepted.” Not infrequently they are warned not to appear for job calls. In different jobs that require brute force and wage slaves, they are eliminated. The Irish who conspire for the independence of Ireland will be considered terrorists, as the Indians were before, as the German workers will be at the end of the 19th century and the Italians a few generations later. During the 20th century, when fear, hatred and racial paranoia are transferred again to the blacks and mixed-race people of the Southern Border, the Irish will assimilate into the dominant ethnic group, becoming white and even have a president who, for other reasons, he will be killed with a shot to the head.

The lawyer Lewis Charles Levin, who in a few months will become the first Jewish congressman in the history of his country, in the summer of 1843 had founded the American Republican Party (later known as the American Nativist Party and, above all, recognized as the Know Nothing Party by its own members). Like the future nativist parties that will be refounded again and again until the 21st century, the Know Nothing Party is openly xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and against taverns and alcohol. Levin, the teetotal son of immigrants who in 1833 had married Ann Christian Hays, a relative of President James Polk, would have a long political career and would die in an asylum for the mentally ill. His contributions that will long outlive him include ending civilized coexistence between Catholics and Protestants in Pennsylvania, identifying a certain group of European immigrants as natives of the American continent, and demonstrating that xenophobic rhetoric is a powerful political weapon to unite a society divided by the fanaticism of its colors and its social classes.

Jorge Majfud, May 2024