Yeah--that's bullshit. And you wanna know how I know? Just go to a Michigan-Notre Dame game. People really reveal who they are when football is the backdrop--witness the innumerable cries of "tackle that n-----" you'll hear at many a Texas high school football game. In any event, you go to a Michigan-Notre Dame game, and you'll see that nasty Upper Midwest anti-Catholicism on full display.
Yeah, man--there's plenty of real hatred for flesh-and-blood Catholics in this country.
But let's talk about the 1920s and the KKK, since your raise it . . . .
During the two or three decades on either side of the turn of the Century, this country experienced a real spasm of political violence. Part of it was along the same lines as that seen across Europe at the same time, when numerous political leaders were assassinated by anarchists (e.g., Tsar Alexander II, Empress Elizabeth of Austria) and nationalists (e.g., Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Jean Jaures).
America had that same batch of political assassinations (e.g., Presidents Lincoln and McKinley). And aside from the targeted assassinations, we also had a bunch of bombings (e.g., the Wall Street Bombing). But, this being America, we also had to add on the layer of race-based political violence, ranging from the political terrorism of the KKK to the Tulsa Race Massacre.
Nobody in America remembers that shit. You maybe remember from some paragraph in a high-school history textbook the names "Sacco & Vanzetti." But what did they do? Does anybody remember?
Does anybody remember that McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist? Or that anarchists blew up Wall Street in 1920? Or that the Attorney General's house in Washington was blown up in 1919?
Fuck no--because we Americans are really good at telling stories about ourselves, but very bad at remembering our actual history. Like, we'll tell ourselves that the North won the Civil War. Much like in a hundred years we'll say that we won the war in Iraq because we went in, captured the enemy capital and occupied the country. Just like with the Civil War, we'll just omit the fact that we then encountered an indigenous insurrection against our occupation, that in due course the American people got tired of subsidizing an occupation against that insurgency, that in the course of the occupation we managed to oversee the creation of a terrorist organization that would bedevil us for decades, and that for good measure on the way out, we betrayed our allies and left them to the tender mercies of the people we had been fighting together.
But I digress. Where was I?
Oh, yes--the political violence of the turn of the Century. It was all fueled by (1) gross income and wealth inequality, (2) a corrupt ruling class that disfranchised the majority, and (3) the inability of our purportedly democratic institutions to handle the conflict. Sound familiar?
That era was only brought to an end by the New Deal/Post WWII creation of the modern bureaucratic state, which managed to channel and regularize political discourse and greatly reduced income/wealth inequality. But this is the exact thing SCOTUS and the GOP are trying to tear down.
So what they're going to do is reinstitute the environment that led to the political violence of that earlier era. And I suspect we're going to see a return of that violence. I absolutely think we're going to see assassinations. It's virtually impossible to assassinate the president; it'd actually be quite easy to assassinate a supreme court justice. Or a senator. Or, for that matter, a mayor or district attorney.
Shit sucked in the 1910s. It's about to suck again.