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Dear East Coast Knights of the True Invisible Empire,

Your recruitment fliers recently arrived at certain Wilkes-Barre households, and we felt it important to reply in plain terms: We’re not interested. Not now. Not later. Not ever.

Hatemongering, no matter how practitioners like you try to gussy up the garbage for modern audiences, reeks of fear, desperation and a whiff of the worst of the pre-Civil War South. You say, for instance, you want to “fight white racism, illegal immigration and terrorism.”

White racism?

Sorry, Knights, but taking pride in your heritage doesn’t require denigrating others, nor characterizing an entire race as less advanced – or more dangerous – than yours.

The Wyoming Valley already has seen more than its share of this simple-minded and flawed thinking; it was on full display during the early part of the anthracite mining era. The English families mocked the Irish arrivals who clashed with the Italians who picked on the Poles and so on. Each new wave of immigrants was labeled the less desirable one: its people supposedly lazier, more morally loose, more drunken, more dirty, more threatening.

Hogwash all.

Yet, for far too long in Northeastern Pennsylvania, the hostility served to separate and to scar. The late Lou Lenart, a pilot known as the hero of Tel Aviv, always recalled both his youth as a non-English-speaking newcomer to Wilkes-Barre and the daily beatings he endured from other boys. For what? For being Jewish.

That’s our area’s despicable past for which we cannot make amends; we won’t stand today for any revival.

We get it, Knights; you sense it’s your time once again to pop up and shine, like a firework, or, more aptly, a pimple. The Confederate flag controversy in South Carolina earlier this year stoked long-dormant emotions. Elsewhere, racially charged incidents made national headlines. And, The Donald tromps over the campaign trail this summer, stirring up xenophobia. (Walls won’t work, by the way. Didn’t work in China, won’t in Chihuahua.)

Ultimately, though, the KKK and its 21st-century offshoots are on the losing side of history. Americans – in all shades of black, white, brown and red – have shared too many foxholes, football huddles, workplaces, neighborhoods and houses of worship to reject each other now. We thought you’d realize this by now, Knights. Don’t the names Rosa and Martin ring a bell? Denzel and Oprah? Obama?

Good grief, it’s been nearly 45 years since Archie Bunker made his “All in the Family” television debut, and you’re still griping about how the neighborhood is changing.

We are sorry, Knights, that you’ve acquired such a narrow world view and sorry that, rather than devoting time and energy to solving America’s social ills, of which there are so many, you create new divisions and troubles. Even if you pledge to remain “not malicious,” your rhetoric roils those whose minds are easily twisted, some of whom might be violent.

For those and many other reasons, we disdain and reject your ideas.

Sincerely,

The Opinion Board