Right. "Continental Europeans? My family is all Ashkenazi Jews -- they're gonna LOVE us!!"

My Polish grandparents weren't exactly welcome in the 1920s either

He is also denying the existence of the Native Americans who were here before that ocean crossing bunch arrived.

Yeah the Irish would like a word with him.

Lololol did they forget how bad the German xenophobia was? Were just gonna pretend that people weren't literally murdering dachshund dogs for being German? The Anglo whites took the opportunity to hate everyone at some point until they needed to bring in more people to bolster their numbers.

The Irish were so popular many of them were effectively slaves when they got off the boat.

oddly these people don’t seem to mind my Irish immigrant parents or me, one of their anchor babies or whatever. weird!

See also Article 8 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the hand-wringing over giving NM statehood that delayed that until 1912.

And Eastern Europeans were another fave

lol, my city literally had the largest mass lynching in US history because someone claimed an Italian (read Sicillian) shot our police chief so a mob broke into the jail and killed 19 Italians

lol.

Don’t forget the Irish. Not too kind to them either.

And refers only to Scotch-Irish (i.e., Protestant).

And he’s a Catholic who grew up in Missouri 😳

when my dad saw first Rocky in the cinema their were a group of Italian immigrants watching who were cheering Rocky on the whole fight. Imagine a young person today looking at Sylvester Stallone today and thinking to themselves that there is anything but an American.

I just got back from cinema seeing Superman for first time so this shit on my mind for some reason

pretty confident this guy's definition of "continental europe" excludes its southern peninsulas

More than the Irish.

Missouri, 1840, where only “white” people were doing any labor.

lol when is someone gonna tell these idiots what the US did to German immigrants like my great grandpa during/after WWI? www.archives.gov/research/imm...

As a kid in New York in the 1970s I heard people still saying ugly terms like "wop" or "dago".

Oh, let's not forget how the Irish were welcomed to America with open arms…

I bet they love people from Spain!

it really is interesting that they recognize it isn't politically possible to claim the US as a specifically anglo-saxon country and thus have to retroactively include groups of european immigrants — seen, at the time, as interlopers — as "white" people entitled to the same claim on national origins

I feel like this is an excerpt from the book History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter.

Slave Power has always wanted us European-descendos to not notice that we are actually diverse as shit and that at no point in history were we “one race.”

inclusion of the Irish is interesting as they weren’t much of a presence in the 18th century, in the 19th century the Know Nothing party tried to force them out of the country & in the early 20th no one would hire them & their immigration is linked to the revival of the klan-too many catholics

See my comments elsewhere re: "Scots-Irish," which is a deliberate choice of terminology here.

"Scotch-Irish" are actually Ulster Scots - people whose ancestors settled northern Ireland who then moved onwards to the US

a fact known by few and the use of the word Irish immediately links to the Irish Catholic who were really unwelcome not the Ulster Protestants, the Scots themselves were more focused on eastern Canada, the potato famine created the first true wave of Irish Catholics

Pouring one out for all the conservative Latinos who think of themselves as "white" and voted for this guy... (Also "I told you so")

My mother’s family was Hungarian. Like the Irish and the Italians, they weren’t considered “white enough.”

They simply prefer that the US be whites only. It's simple. And we can see that's what they want. They should just own it without all the attempts to justify it.

He had to include the Irish, too. They weren't welcome at first, either.

Not quite: he seems to quite intentionally use "Scots-Irish," to distinguish these people from the masses of poor Irish Catholic immigrants displaced by the Famine.

Yes, I realized that later.

Good morning. You may be familiar with this work, part of the history of whiteness that you’re discussing, but if not, you may find it of interest. It challenges the idea that some European immigrants weren’t considered white. global.oup.com/academic/pro... www.jstor.org/stable/10.10...

if they were making a claim about historical origins the logic would push towards the inclusion of blacks, natives and other peoples on the north american continent. but schmitt is fundamentally making a racial claim.

My mom his hispanic, NM chicano. A mix of native and Spanish conquistadors I lived in the NE for 20+ yrs. One of my fav /s convos was when ppl would ask my background (bc I look indeterminable mix). Me: chicano Them: but from where? M: this country wasn't empty when Columbus landed T: ? M: *sigh*

"tamed" a continent

this is all gross, but the born on the water phrase stood out to me. trying to co-opt/ steal that from 1619 is especially nasty work…

This. Lots of groups that broadly have longer historical ties to the continent than descendants of white Europeans, specifically the immigrants they're attempting to abduct today.

I mean, it's always that mythologization. Their entire gender/sex argument is that as well. What's a woman; it's what they believed a woman to be at the founding; you know, XX chromosomes (discovered in 1891) or its people who can make egg cells (1827). They're imagining a pre-lapsarian past.

Can't decide what's bigger; the hubris or the ignorance or the cowardice.

the naked ambition

Power at any cost

there is a way in which this is even an explicit repudiation of the constitution itself, created not to pass some european idea of "nationhood" down to posterity, but to pass *republican self-government* down to posterity.

They are deeply invested in bringing about a new, post-constitutional order

I was driving today and Lennon’s song Imagine came on… I burst into tears because I used to be able to imagine, now not so much

The homeland-descendants bit is calling out another phrasing nazis really like.

Also: many Americans in the Early Republic did not think of themselves as extensions of their European heritage or whatever. Anglophobia was extremely common in politics and culture.

There was a time in the 19th century when people wanted Cuba to be a state. Granted it was for slavery reasons, but the point stands.

really excellent breakdown of all the vile intricacies of this brand of white nationalism and how it completely ignores history, place, and the principles underpinning the founding of the country itself in exchanges for a mythologized fantasy land for white folks and no one else

These NatCons all act like Americans are some poor Magyars suffering under the Habsburg yoke and not the citizens of the most powerful and dynamic country in human history

He's an ignorant racist.

The author is an aware racist.

and the idea that the suspicious continentals came later isn’t even true. the constitution was translated into dutch and german before it was even ratified. i’m pretty sure the first batch of settlers recruited to new amsterdam by the dutch west indies company included jews (shorto wrote about it)

(just double checked. what i can readily track down is not the first boat but a bunch that arrived in 1654 and immediately founded a synagogue that is still around to this day. anyhow i guess the usa is a nation of scotch eggs or something.)

I want to see them try ... their attempt this far reaching and quick as it has been, is imploding all around them.

You can read e.g. the Irish declaration of independence - says they're are establishing the Irish Republic in the name of the "Irish nation", representing the "ancient Irish people" Israel's of course explicitly says it's a Jewish state. TJ could have written something like that ... but he didn't.

It's a repudiation of American Exceptionalism, because it makes us no different from any other nation - just a bunch of people who were the most recent ones to live in that place.

Only stupider, because it’s not even the most recent people. Or the earliest people. It’s strictly racial.

I notice that he specifically avoids mentioning any nation that is historically Catholic. No Irish, Italian, or French there. I see no other reason to include the Scotch-Irish but not the Irish themselves.

And he is Catholic.

And, more specifically, a conservative Catholic who probably doesn't think a lot of many other Catholics (among them: James Martin, Pope Francis, and myself, which is almost certainly the only time the three of us will be in the same sentence).

Spot on. Knew a trad Catholic convert who I mentioned more liberal Catholics to. His response was “oh, you mean Protestants”.

Not sure what they'd think of me since I'm a Catholic convert from being Unitarian. Probably not much...

Liberal catholics are far more liberal than Protestants. Also, far more faithful to the scripture than the Opus Dei types. There's a strain of American Catholic that has essentially rejected the main line of the Roman Catholic church as a whole.

Evergreen tweet

Meanwhile, evangelical Protestants still call the Catholic Church rhe Whore of Babylon. Idiots, the lot of them.

He's converted to Catholicism. He's not ethnically from a Catholic group. The last thing he wants to do is elevate the Irish.

By design, it would interfere with his racist agenda and alienate a key voting block.

Racism lS the point.

Power is the point and racism is the tactic.

We were NEVER exceptional that's what has FINALLY been exposed.

Well, the most recent would be now, and that's not what they want. They want to pick a point in time and say "that's when the land belonged to us, the true owners, and people who came after don't belong." And I guess the people who were here before then were just waiting to turn it over to them.

It's a good bet that in 1848 or so most of my mom's Scots-Irish ancestors who arrived in the 1750s thought my dad's newly arrived German ancestors were filthy furriners, not true Americans.

Pretty much. And they'll take Johnny-Come-Latelys like Musk because he's white, and similarly any European countries - ideally NORTHERN, as long as they're North of the Med. Any color you want, as long as it's white.

Yeah, the list of the lies of omission in that little speech were pretty striking, doesn't talk about all the exploitation and murder that was committed to 'claim the land that they were destined for'. I mean, if it was Destined for Them, why wasn't it Empty? Right, that's how they talk about it.

I think it’s funny that they include continental Europeans but still exclude the Irish

There was some horrifically racist statement going around a few years back, with the kicker that it was a Congressman from a hundred plus years ago talking about Finns.

The Reconstruction Amendments are just as much part of the Constitution as the 1787 draft, and this doesn’t even pretend to not repudiate those.

That's the logical and historically accurate view. But just wait until the Calvinball Court gets done with it.

Those are the Second Founding, in many ways

Racism is so lame. Our nation is awesome BECAUSE of its inclusive aspirations and achievements IN SPITE of its exclusive racism and hatred.

👏 If the Founders wanted to create Europe 2.0 why would they create a new country here instead of just moving to Europe? Europe isn't America. America isn't Europe. If Musk, Vance, Miller want Europe, pack your bags and move there. They won't be missed!

Other than Russia and Hungary, I doubt Europe wants them.

Do you have a sense for how someone like Yoram Hazony can show up on places like the Ezra Klein show and claim this isn’t a racist project? I found his explanations incomprehensible, but speeches like this make his case seem less a project of willful ignorance and more of straight lying on the topic

Every word of Project 2025-written by a white mans party-is aimed at gathering up or containing those they deem unacceptable or able to give R’s trouble over their lies and overreach by the Squatter Trump most they hate are stars in the intellect dept-hard to fool them that actually read & research

I would like to see this dude give this speech to a room full of Missouria and Osage.

I’d like to know his heritage. From the name, thinking he’s “old line” German(I don’t know the St. Louis lingo), akin to the Busch family, as an example. Missouri/Mississippi river minor royalty. Nowhere near the “conquering” of the wild.

They're the product of a melting pot and they want to lie about and then hide the recipe.

Years ago, you might have been able to quiet me down that there was a natural ebb and flow to this, the achievement of natural rights, but I'm older and wiser now. It's just race. And it's cuz it's easier to sell. Like drugs, demand side problem. A sucker and a racist born every minute.

Blacks for Trump must be feeling a bit awkward right now. Tim Scott and Byron Mcdonalds practicing their biggest grins and head nods.

Extremely fucked up that he calls the nation "a gift" and "our birthright" just after acknowledging Native armed resistance

Damn Jamelle, it was all white boys din't cha know? What a crock of shit. This counrty wouldn't be a country if it weren't for the indiginous, slaves, indentured and every fucking body else that was here when the shit was going down and threw in looking for something better than what was. Thanks!

It’s Daniel Boone & Davey Crockett & cowboys & Indians. Like the movies I saw when I was a kid in 1960. I grew up, but apparently Eric Schmitt did not.

Racism is the point.

Not to mention they violently stole the land from its original people. This country was founded on crimes against humanity.

He said that was a good thing, proof of superiority.

Hell, even if they were making a claim about sheer wills to survive and make something out of unimaginable circumstances he’d have to warrant such inclusions, but again clearly not the story they’re telling. Sign of the times indeed.

Even the French! Lol, French trappers and traders and the, ahem, "daughters of the king" who were sent to America.

They don't even know what actually happened at Valley Forge except for some ancient myth cooked up by racist "Nordic American" groups

Roughly 10% of the continental!/army camped at valley forge were black (both free and enslaved).

Yup, Indigenous people kept them supplied during the winter, too, and even fought for the US oneida-nsn.gov/wp-content/u...

Note he says ‘Scotch Irish’. The famine Irish, who made up the majority of Irish immigrants (and were Catholic, not Presbyterian) don’t make the cut.

Scotch is a drink. The Scotts-Irish are a a distinct ethnicity.

Scotts is a weed killer company. Feed yer lawn, laddie! Feed it! ‘Scotch Irish’ is the term. Quite a few of them were Harbisons. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch-...

I shouldt have done 2 ts. But the book i read on it makes the distinction, even though scotch is the more popular term. Im a McDowell on my mother's side. about as Scots/Scotch-Irish as they come.

Oh, *eventually*...cf. Ignatiev "How The Irish Became White" (1995)

I literally thought Scotch-Irish just meant people from Scotland and Ireland until your post just now. Thanks for prompting me to look it up!

They were originally Scottish settlers in Ulster, the same people who (when they didn’t emigrate, became Unionists/loyalists. They mostly came in the 18th century, because of rent gouging by landlords. There were maybe 100,000 of them, first to PA, and then to the Carolinas.

They were settled in ulster in an attempt to drive the Irish out of the cities and towns. This was part of the forced settlement and ethnic cleansing of Ireland in the 1600s.

I’m something of a genealogy nerd and this is one of my niche bits of knowledge: due to trading routes and the like, there is no distinct Scottish genealogy, only Scotch-Irish (because f the British) but there is a distinct Irish lineage. So he doubly erases the Irish.

I dunno. My family are lowland Scots who arrived in the Carolinas probably during the Scottish Marian Civil War in the 17th century

This goes back way further than the 17th century. Think pre-Roman. Think pre-land bridge collapse.

Then you're talking about early Celtic Pictish ppls ? Celtic migration of Gaels from Ireland and British Celtic tribes was around 1 st century BCE I believe.

Probably well before that.

It's whatever they need to think they're covering up their overt inadequacies. My people are sad & beyond pathetic. I loathe my culture. I travel overseas yearly just to get a break from them. How POC have tolerated my people for this long is mind blowing. Must be something righteous in Melanin. ✌️🖤

DimSchmitt.

oh lordy yes

Classic Finley Peter Dunne column on this from Chicago, 1898

I wonder how he explains how basically every town in the southwest is a Spanish name. By his rationale, its ok if the colonizers from Spain named them, but not the Mexicans.

wonder how those anglo saxon pioneers felt about a roman catholic like Schmitt

Also note the pointed use of "Scots-Irish," i.e., the "right kind" of Irish immigrant.

Mexican Independence Day is coming up, big deal in Chicago. So the threats are ramping up. Polish Independence Casimir Pulaski Day, big deal in Chicago as well, is in March. Not on Stephen Miller's radar.

Funny that he didn't specify any Catholic groups, though. He mentions "Scotch-Irish" (Brits who colonized northern Ireland beforehand) but not regular Irish. Mentions continental Europeans, but that may not include Italians.

"Scots Irish" are central to the self mythologizing of the KKK

Bill the Butcher would like a word.

A Clip from the movie the Titanic and it's finale is more up their speed, as a teaching moment. How did we get here? let's keep it rhetorical.

I'm a direct descendant of settlers of the far west. It's interesting to me how much effort was made to make themselves anglo-saxon when there were Irish, German etc people in that family tree--and these were basically rural peasants on the run from bill collectors.

The reason the original WASPs kept expanding the definition of "white" to include previously oppressed ethnic migrant groups is to make the numbers work as they became increasingly a minority. The very idea of whiteness is a lie.

Great books on this are Whiteness of A Different Color by Matthew Frye Jacobson and Canarsie by Jonathan Rieder (probably more recent ones exist!). Shout out to Al Young at UMich for his urban ethnography course that blew our minds.

Perhaps not obviously, these recs are for fellow readers who want to go deeper, I know Jamelle knows.

300,000 Norwegians immigrated to the U.S. between 1900 and 1930. I wonder which category Schmitt would put them in.

Ben Franklin called Swedes "swarthy" and wanted my German forefathers to gtfo of the colonies. The founders were on some racism that's way beyond today's racists comprehension. If they had guts, they'd say "americans only come from south yorkshire, everyone else: out!"

someone should ask Schmitt if "Continental Europeans" includes Jews, and Slavic peoples while we're at it

I don't think it does. I'm not even sure that it includes southern Europeans? Like this is some next level racism

Someone else said that 'continental Europeans' was added in by the transcriber so the original might be worse?!?!

the full transcript is more ambiguous, referring to "sons and daughters of the West" and "Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe's shores"

Note too how he uses the archaic term “scotch-Irish” because the Irish by themselves were not welcomed!!

Yeah, I can’t tell if he is deliberately leaving out Irish Catholics (i.e. he’s basically an 1850s-style bigot) or if he thinks “Scotch-Irish” means the Scots and the Irish (i.e. he’s an idiot). Open to considering both.

Scots-Irish were Scottish Protestants who were sent by England to colonize Catholic Ireland in the early seventeenth century.

I mean sure, but the fact that those are the two categories of people from the British isles he limits it to is indicative of 1) racism 2) ahistoricity 3) idiocy.

I don’t know about Schmitt himself but if Hochman wrote it, it’s 100% the first one.

I think it’s a kluge because the original racists would have stopped at “English and Scotch-Irish” but he expands a little to accommodate “continental europeans” but still messes up because he still fails to include the Irish. Anyway, it’s racist garbage so of course they didn’t think it through.

I suspect it's an intentional usage, nodding to the populations that settled Appalachia, and parts nearby.

Oh absolutely. It’s a dumbass’s view of selective pieces of American history, extra spicy with racism for good measure.

I think it’s because it was in Vance’s book

I’m happy to be able to say I haven’t read Vance’s book.

It’s much easier to do if your entire understanding of history starts at like 1750.

"Whiteness" - exactly as elastic and reconfigured as it needs to be to cling to some semblance of demographic dominance.

Kinda gives up the game, doesn't it!

Running the blade along the whetstone, Bill the Butcher cocks an eyebrow.

Heck, Benjamin Franklin threw a fit in the 1700s about the Pennsylvania Dutch being too German and not assimilating!

Indeed! www.dialoginternational.com/dialog_inter...

Which makes it massively ironic that those of us who are descendants of those Pennsylvania Germans are now seen as quaint pie baking Real Americans, precisely because our ancestors refused to fully assimilate and passed down their traditions.

And my Jewish relatives from Germany who were denied visas and died in Buchenwald as a result. Damn, American conservatives loved them to death.

and the Irish too!

after Luigi I thought they were legit going to bring back obscure anti-Italian slurs

Are they trying to make space for Jewish Ukrainians from 1890s or not? Asking for a friend.

And the Irish all the time!

Irish need not apply.

Oh yes. And Trump's family only got here in 1885 (after refusing to serve in Germany's required military service). No "hundreds of years."

Irish- a historically loved people. 🙄

I couldn't believe it that there were lynchings of Italians in the early 20th century.

If you read carefully, he seems to have written Irish Catholics back out of whiteness. Not like the worst thing that’s happening right now but sure seems like a warning sign!

My grandmother was being called "Dirty little Hun" as late as the 1920's

This wasn't that long ago

Legacy selective memory at its finest.

And those Irish…so welcomed 😆

And who is he kidding about the Irish

Mentions Scots-Irish but not the Irish

Mighty WASPish of him.

As if WASPs would accept those cattle thieving barbarians

He doesn’t say Irish, he says “Scotch-Irish.” That term usually refers to the orange Ulster unionists, descendants of the Scottish presbyterians who were planted in Northern Ireland in the C17th, as part of a colonial project. It does not refer to Irish Catholics.

The Scotch-Irish (aka Ulster Scots) aren’t ethnically Irish, they’re mostly Presbyterian and originally came from the Scottish border regions but lived for a few generations in the British colony of Ireland Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, Andrew Johnson, etc. were descended from “Scotch Irish”

Makes sense now

This white supremacist jackass should keep the word "Irish" out of his mouth.

also the irish, which at the time need not apply?!

Don’t forget how much “Americans” loved the Irish immigrants too 🫠

As an Irish-American, I am shocked, I say, shocked that the warm welcome we received in the United States in the 1840s has been so egregiously overlooked

I guess they feel like they’ve properly integrated themselves into the master race category since then

Even "Scotch-Irish" is doing a lot of work.

I heard my Irish ancestors were treated... in ways.

They know the people who this is for have no concept of or interest in history - just identity.

Only English people were “white” way back when. They only expanded the definition of who was white when they needed more numbers. I don’t use the term white for myself because doing so is endorsement of this sick and completely subjective attempt to distinguish “white” from the “other.”

One of the most laughable things about their ideology is the question of admittance. Exactly who qualifies and how? Is DNA testing involved to substantiate if you’re “American enough?” There’s certainly no written testing. Or am I overthinking this and any type of white is in?

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