Anti-Catholic conspiracy claims about takeover plots recur verbatim against American Muslims today

Evidence

The rise of the Klan, the APA, and the Know Nothing Party resulted in the publication of approximately sixty national anti-Catholic weekly papers in the period leading up to World War I. The periodicals circulated the conspiracy that the Roman Catholic Church was trying to take over America. For example, the Klan accused the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternity and charity, of creating a secret militia to seize the United States government and exterminate Protestantism. Islamophobes today make similar unsubstantiated claims that the Muslim Brotherhood, Muslim Student Associations, and Muslim civic leaders are plotting to take over America from within (see chapter 6). — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 310

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the essay ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ in the sense of recurring moral/political panics, though the more specific link is: this is the exact template of a moral panic, complementing the panic theme.
• XREF: Connects to moral panic theory (Cohen) and to the pattern of successive groups being cast as internal enemies — Irish Catholics here, Muslims now. — connects to: Conspiracy theories inherit the mythic good-versus-evil frame of American religious zealotry. — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 55; Modern anti-Catholic conspiracy targets organizational secrecy, not theology — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 625; U.S. lawmakers framed devout Muslim practice as treasonous grounds for military exclusion — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 285 (+1 more)