First, create a populist bogeyman and use state power to crush it. Official propaganda and dramatic trials will do the trick. Plus, demons will smirk with satisfaction at the lies you must tell in the process.
Then, when the events are so far removed that no one can remember them — say, 150 or so years later — watch and listen as another of your well-placed and thoroughly demented minions, who ironically has created and persecuted a populist bogeyman of his own, tells the original story in a way that makes it seem as if he is on the side of the persecuted! Oh, how the demons will howl with laughter as they mock us through their demented minion.
At a campaign stop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Monday, the cognitively impaired President Joe Biden emerged from his marathon vacation to deliver a Labor Day speech in support of Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
During the speech, Biden dredged up and personalized a 150-year-old legend.
In a clip of the speech posted to the social media platform X, the president recalled his great-grandfather. Allegedly — one must always qualify Biden’s stories with the word “allegedly” — early 20th-century political opponents accused his great-grandfather of belonging to the Molly Maguires.
Then, Biden spent 30 seconds or so connecting the Molly Maguires to 19th-century Irish immigrants to the Pennsylvania coal mines.
“But a lot of the English owned the coal mines,” the president said. “And what they did was, they’d really beat the hell out of the mostly Catholic population that was in the mines. Not a joke. Not a joke.”
Biden, a pro-abortion tyrant who poses as a Catholic, played up his Irish heritage. Thus, he could sound sympathetic toward the Irish Catholics who toiled in the 19th-century coal mines.
“But there was a group called the Molly Maguires. And the Molly Maguires, if they find out the foreman who was taking advantage of an individual, and they’d literally kill him,” the president said with his usual syntactic incoherence.
Biden then took his story in a morbid direction.
“And they’d bring his body up and put him on the doorstep of his family,” the president said. “Kinda crude. But I gotta admit, they accused my great-grandfather [of] being a Molly Maguire. He wasn’t. But we were so damned disappointed.”
“No, that’s a joke,” he added as the crowd laughed.
Of course, the true story of the Molly Maguires would take pages to tell. A few outlines, therefore, should highlight the diabolical irony in Biden’s story.
First, the Molly Maguires did exist as a secret society in Ireland in the mid-19th century. According to the American Philosophical Society, the Mollies operated “as a semi-legendary vigilante group that had fought Irish landlords for tenants’ rights.” Sometimes the vigilantes resorted to violence.
Thus, when they came to America in large numbers, Irish immigrants brought with them a reputation as ungovernable rebels.
In the 1870s — a violent and formative decade for organized labor — railroad and coal barons greeted the Irish with suspicion. For instance, the president of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company hired a detective to infiltrate Irish workingmen’s organizations.
Then, according to the National Canal Museum in Easton, Pennsylvania, the detective’s report became the basis for the 1877 hanging of ten workingmen accused of murder, arson and kidnapping. The detective, hired by the coal and iron company president, claimed that the men not only committed the crimes but that they belonged to a chapter of the Molly Maguires operating in America.
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s modern state archives, however, cast serious doubt on the detective’s conclusion.
“No one has ever produced a primary source document proving that the Molly Maguires existed as such” in Pennsylvania, per the state’s archives website.
It made no difference, of course, because the coal and iron company president succeeded in crushing organized labor. That was his purpose all along.
Thus, we have a story with remarkable and ironic parallels to the present day.
In short, powerful people feared a populist-style insurgency. So they made a bogeyman of the powerless and used paid agents to infiltrate one of their groups. The powerful accused many, killed some, and sent others to prison on flimsy evidence. In the end, the entire narrative benefited those same powerful people.
Indeed, one can almost hear the demons laughing while Biden, who works for the powerful, posed as sympathetic to the powerless.
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