It’s a ham-handed (and in Klan and Klan-adjacent circles, well-worn) attempt at making blood & soil nationalism make sense for the United States in the ways such nationalism was invented and deployed in places like the old Habsburg lands,
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but the vague criteria still don’t really work American nationalism into a white supremacist framework—eg, Barack Obama’s maternal grandfather was born in Kansas and fought in WW2, and Donald Trump paternal grandfather was born in Bavaria and maternal grandfather was born in Ireland
jul 21, 2025, 3:42 pm • 15 0 • view
Yeah I’ve got ancestors from pre-Revolution Pennsylvania who owned people, ancestors who fought and died for the Union, ancestors who illegally immigrated from Ireland, and ancestors who legally immigrated from Slovakia. Real Americans often have complex family histories!
jul 21, 2025, 3:51 pm • 14 0 • view
Trying to shove American citizenship into a tightly defined box based on a pure lineage is about as un-American as you can get!
jul 21, 2025, 3:54 pm • 10 0 • view
It’s weird too because he’s accepting the Ellis Island narrative of destitute peasants and backfilling it to the beginning. Writing out the various and simply political fanatics who came prior to the civil war.
jul 21, 2025, 9:43 pm • 4 0 • view
Right!! Most of our “founding stock” or whatever he wants to call them wouldn’t be welcome in his vision of America.
jul 21, 2025, 10:06 pm • 4 0 • view
At the time when her ancestors immigrated the complaint, in upstate NY at least, was that the radical abolitionists found recruiting to their cause very easy among new arrivals. Imagining immigration of peasants makes our national story charity, instead of inspiring ideologues too.
jul 21, 2025, 10:11 pm • 5 0 • view
This always amuses me because substantial pre Civil War immigration was ideological. My wife’s paternal side for example, rather than destitute peasants, they were politically motivated whose children would enthusiastically join the Union army.
jul 21, 2025, 9:40 pm • 0 0 • view