Weekly Roundup: Manifesting Destiny: Birthright citizenship, DHS, and "Native Americans"
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n this episode of Straight White American Jesus, hosts Brad Onishi and Dan Miller dive deep into the ongoing fight over birthright citizenship and the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape American identity. They explore:
The latest court battles over the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship, including recent nationwide injunctions and their significance.
The Trump administration’s use of propaganda, including the Department of Homeland Security’s posting of the iconic “Progress” painting by John Gast, and how it ties into white Christian nationalism.
The historical roots of Manifest Destiny, settler colonialism, and the exclusion of Indigenous and other marginalized groups from the American narrative.
The religious and philosophical ideas that have shaped American policies, including the role of Christian nationalism and the reinterpretation of “Native American” identity by white Christian nationalists.
The intersection of current events, including the Epstein case, immigration policy, and the destruction of emergency food supplies, with broader themes of justice, exclusion, and national identity.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad O'Nishi, author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, founder of Axis Monday Media, here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Lamar College.
Nice to see you, Brad.
Good to see you, Dan.
It was even better to see you and so many of our subscribers at our live recording this week.
That was so fun.
And we had a great time, ended up just so many amazing questions.
And we ended up going longer than we probably anticipated just because we were having so much fun talking about those questions and interacting with people.
The best part is also, as it is with any meeting like that, just the chat conversation.
Yeah.
Most of which is not going to make it into the live recording, but it's a lot of fun if people want to join up next time.
No, it was great.
And I'd just say, if you're a subscriber and you were able to hang, thank you for coming.
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So today, we are going to jump into the ongoing fight about birthright citizenship and the war that the Trump administration is waging on that.
And we're going to link that directly to DHS and its ongoing posting of propaganda that really is representative of what we would take to be white ethno-nationalism, a sense of wanting to instill a dominant white Christian ethos in the country.
That's taken place through commercials that are drawing on biblical verses, through images of the homeland and the heritage of white people.
And now it is happening through a famous depiction called Progress by John Gast from 1872 that DHS just posted a couple days ago.
At the end, we'll get into a little bit of the Epstein stuff and touch on what's happening there.
A lot to cover.
Let's go.
Let's go.
All right, Dan.
We'll do some Epstein stuff today.
Probably not a lot.
I think folks are, if you're listening, you're probably getting a lot of Epstein from a lot of other places.
And one of the things that seems to be positive, I'll say, like in a tempered tone, is that some Trump people are abandoning ship and there is a seemingly weakness here.
And we're going to see huge fights in the coming months over the Epstein files.
We're going to wonder if we're going to get the whole Epstein files.
We're going to wonder what Jelene Maxwell might say if Jelene Maxwell is offered a pardon by Donald Trump in order to say, of course, Donald Trump was nowhere to be found.
He never knew Epstein, et cetera.
We'll get there in a bit.
I'm sure you're getting a lot of that elsewhere.
But one of the things that's happening is because of the Epstein coverage, other things are not being talked about.
And there is an ongoing attempt to occupy the country with ICE agents, but there's also an ongoing court battle about birthright citizenship in the 14th Amendment.
Lo and behold, it all ties in, Dan, whether it's ICE, whether it's immigration, whether it's deportation, whether it is DHS posting a kind of manifest destiny emblem of white Christian nationalism, it all ties together with birthright citizenship and so on.
So take us through that.
And I think that's going to set up so many of the things that are in the ether right now.
Yeah, so everybody's going to remember, right, that Trump issued an executive order basically denying birthright citizenship, saying that children who are born in the United States to parents who are not here legally do not have citizenship, right?
And that that was very much intended, I think, to trigger a battle over the 14th Amendment and so forth.
Lots and lots of court cases ensue.
Among other things, and we've talked about this and folks will know this, and if they don't, they can go back and sort of Google it.
SCODIS essentially ruled that courts can't issue like district courts and appeals courts and so forth, can't just issue national nationwide injunctions anymore.
They did not rule on the issue of birthright citizenship, but the Trump administration had wanted this.
We talked about it.
Big win for the administration because the idea was that now, sure, you might have a district court that rules that birthright citizenship is legal and it is constitutional and so forth.
But the idea was that that ruling will only apply to where that court has direct jurisdiction and so forth.
And so we talked about this.
Why does it matter?
It matters because in the last couple of weeks, there have been two court cases Where courts have issued nationwide injunctions blocking Trump's birthright citizenship order.
And this is since the SCOTIS ruling.
So two courts have now ruled that in rulings that apply nationwide, that this is the case.
So this is really significant because, as we'll get into in just a second, it plays on both of the allowed exceptions that Justice Barrett in particular emphasized in that court case.
So the first case, this is a couple weeks ago, a U.S. District Judge, Joseph LaPlant, who was a Bush appointee.
Obviously, the politics of some of this is important.
He granted class action status to a lawsuit challenging the order and basically saying that the class includes babies anywhere in the U.S., that unborn children or potential children born to parents who are undocumented, that they are a class.
And that was one of the exceptions that the Supreme Court says that you could have a class action.
So basically it said irreparable harm to all kids who could be born into this context.
I also want to I just want to point out as a side thing, an interesting thing to think about with this, is if you're the GOP and you want to contest this, I think it's worth remembering that the GOP has spent a lot of time arguing in recent years that unborn fetuses are persons, that they are people with full legal rights and so forth.
And so it'll be interesting to hear if they decide to try to contest this on those grounds.
Anyway, that's the first case.
The second case was this week.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled two to one and two Clinton appointees ruled one way.
A Trump appointee was the one who voted against them.
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week that four Democratic-led states were entitled to a nationwide injunction of the order.
And so this was a suit that was brought by Democratic-led states and ruled this.
And they said their ruling was based on this.
This is reading from the judge's statement.
It said, states residents may give birth in a non-party state.
An individual subject to the executive order from non-party states will inevitably move to the states.
So in other words, they were saying this applies because if you are coming from a state where birthright citizenship is not recognized, you're going to go to a state where it is recognized.
And vice versa, if you happen to be from a state where it is recognized, and so you're protected by that, but you happen to be out of state in a state where it is not recognized and you give birth, you're at risk with this.
And so that was their argument for why this needed nationwide coverage to be applicable.
And again, this was the other allowance that the Supreme Court made.
They said that states could still receive nationwide injunctions.
So two court cases, a couple weeks apart, one of them on the basis of the class action.
Some would call it a loophole.
I call it an allowance.
Others, another, excuse me, on the basis of this state-led lawsuit in action.
So those two things have happened.
Some takeaways or some thoughts I have, and I'll throw it over to you.
The second thing is that this, it's the set, excuse me, the first thing, looking at my notes.
This is the second time that it has still been blocked nationally since the SCOTUS ruling.
I think that that's significant.
I think it's significant that both of these allowable actions, class action and states, have now been brought into play.
And I think it happened really fast.
That's the second thing.
There was a lot of discussion about this.
There were some analysts who said this is going to blow things up.
There are some who said they're already going to be trying to do this, right?
That plaintiffs are going to be coming to the courts and trying to do this.
I think that some judges and courts, frankly, don't agree with the Supreme Court limiting their ability to put forward nationwide injunctions.
And so I think they're eager to put this to the test.
This happened really fast.
And of course, I support these rulings.
And so I'm happy about that.
I think another thing, and I'm interested in your thoughts on this, that I had not really thought about until I was thinking about the speed of this and so on, is we know the Trump administration likes to make really broad executive orders.
They're orders that apply to everybody.
They are intended.
Basically, Trump views himself as an autocrat, and he thinks he should be able to make proclamations and laws that apply to everybody.
The breadth of those claims is what is going to spur courts to find ways to block them nationwide.
Because by definition, if you're the Trump administration, you're saying this applies to everybody in the U.S., this whole swath of people.
You've essentially identified an entire class.
Like the logic is there to say we can't protect some of these people unless we protect all of these people.
And of course, you have democratic states that are going to lead these.
They'll just take the lead.
You can hear the ACLU now working with the attorney generals of some of these states to say, all right, let's put your name on it and we'll do the legwork and like, let's go forward and do this and so forth.
So I think that the breadth of those actions and the vision of the unified executive that can declare whatever they want is what's actually driving the rapidity of these responses.
So those are some thoughts.
Walk, throw it over to you for thoughts or impressions you had as you followed these developments.
I think this remains if you wanted to envision the core of the Trump 2.0 agenda and what's there, you know, you can look to Project 2025, and I think that's always going to be your North Star.
I think mass deportation is going to remain their like signature, for lack of a better term, their like signature premier program.
Like, what is it we really go back to?
What is our bread and butter?
It's going to be mass deportation, okay?
There's going to be like right now, we're not really talking, Dan, about abortion, are we?
We're not really talking about IVF.
We're not really talking, you know, we're not talking right now, at least yet, about Oberfell or marriage equality.
And we, we may get there, okay?
But we're six months into the first term.
We're reaching a kind of a place where like, this is the presidency.
This is the administration.
The normal is setting in, if any kind of normal can be discussed with this administration.
And I think if you want to look at the ideological core of what they've done so far, we can talk about Doge and all of that and wrecking the government.
But when they go to what it is that's important to them, it is mass deportation and the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship are at the heart of that to me.
And it has widespread implications.
And some of those are just right on the nose, as you've pointed out.
If you're born in this country, are you a citizen?
It's a really big, simple question.
Easy question.
That question Has so many historical and cultural dimensions, and we'll unpack those in a minute when we get to the John Gast progress image that DHS tweeted out this week.
But it has questions about who's an American.
And these questions historically and not in the ancient past, in the recent past, go to people like Native Americans, Indigenous people.
Like there's a lot, there's a history that is like not that old where in the state of Arizona, not all Indigenous people were citizens, even if they were born in this country.
Okay.
I've talked to black activists who've said, if you mess with birthright citizenship, you might be messing with the status of black people in the country and the ways that they may not be considered real Americans and their hair.
So this obviously has implications for folks who are recent immigrants, for folks who have stories that we're thinking a lot about right now when it comes to ICE raids, when it comes to deportations and the southern border and so on and so forth.
But when you think about birthright citizenship, it is such a spider web, Dan.
And to me, that's why they started here because it is like one of those blocks that if you can like move it, you can move so many other things that you want to get out of the way.
And to me, that's what I always come back to when I hear about these injunctions and what's at stake here with the idea of birthright citizenship.
I'll also say that culture is downstream from politics.
Religion is downstream from culture.
We hear all the formulations all the time.
Culture is downstream from politics.
Politics is downstream from culture.
Which one is it?
I don't know.
And it depends on what setting and what time and what historical context and so on.
I think stuff like this, I think an attack on birthright citizenship that's consistent and constant from the likes of Stephen Miller and others in the administration.
You start to hear the normy, like American right dads who are 36 years old driving to work, listening to the talking heads.
You start to hear those guys on Instagram and on X and on Facebook saying, well, you shouldn't anchor babies and people just come here and they give birth and then they're illegals.
And they start in on this trap.
They are being given a tape to play.
And then you press the button with them and they just play the tape that they heard from Charlie Kirk or Ben Shapiro or Stephen Miller or from, you know, whoever it is.
And I think putting this issue front and center is also a way to build, at least an attempt to build support for an ongoing mass deportation program that week by week by week, if you look at the polls, goes down in popularity, that started out as like, this is the place where they're just, they're winning.
They, people love it.
And then it got to like, well, not so much.
And now it's looking like every day the popularity of that goes down.
The attacks on the 14th Amendment, Birth of Red Citizenship, are one point of attack for them to try to gain that popularity and convince people that this is actually really bad for the nation.
It's really hurtful.
So those are some initial thoughts.
I think just to circle like to tie that together, you talk about the spider web nature of this.
As I understand it, the logic, for example, as you say, of black activists and members of the black community that says this could affect us is how far does the domino effect go?
So if your great, great, great, great grandparents were slaves who were brought here against their will and they had children and it turns out that those children weren't citizens and then they had children and so on and so forth, how far back do you trace that domino effect?
I think there's also a way to scare some white people if you wanted to.
You know, I don't know.
Not everybody came through Ellis Island or, you know, one of these iconic places.
Lots of people just came and they were here and they've been established for generations.
And so, you know, if you can't show the paper trail to where you had an ancestor who came here and was naturalized, legitimately, would it matter?
And we know with the Trump administration, of course it would because it's very much about the complexion that you have.
But the point is the spider webs, and that goes back to that point of that makes it easier for the courts to block this nationally because you trace those fissures, you trace those lines, and it's like this affects everybody.
This is all kinds of not completely unforeseen, unknown maybe, but foreseeable consequences that could happen.
So we got to put a stop to this until it's settled and figured out and so forth.
So I think it brings those two points together that ironically, and I'm sure it maddens the Trump administration, that so soon after getting what Trump viewed as, I think, maybe the biggest SCOTUS win that he'd had, they're not getting a patchwork of like, you know, red states where birthright citizenship doesn't apply and blue states where maybe it does.
They're still getting nationwide injunctions that will be almost impossible, I think, to challenge just on that ground because the Supreme Court just ruled on this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And there is irony here, and I think there's something to notice.
And this has been true of Trump's ethos since he started in his first term is there's this instinct towards these broad proclamations.
There's this instinct towards just no details, no nuance, just make a huge declaration, Muslim ban.
First couple of weeks of first term, Muslim ban.
And there's a lack of interest in thinking through, hey, if we slow down, maybe this will lead to a more nuanced policy or executive order that might stand up the test of time.
You just don't see that.
And I think that's true in this case too.
And what you're pointing out is the reasons why they're not getting what they want instantly.
Now, none of that means we're out of the woods.
And it doesn't mean they're going to stop.
And it doesn't mean they've given up.
And it doesn't mean that there's not a large cohort of MAGA people and Stephen Millers and whoever else that are like, we'll just keep on this until we get it because, you know, this is a signature part of how we see the world.
Like we are adherence to great replacement theory.
We are adherence to the idea that white people are not having enough babies.
We are adherence to the idea that if you allow them, that brown people and black people and Asian people will just continue to have children.
And if you're going to look up in 2055 and the United States is going to be something like one-third white, and that to us is a problem.
And this is not like limited to people that either you think of white nationalists like Nick Fuentez, but we talked about Peter Thiel in recent weeks.
We've talked about Elon Musk.
We've talked about, there's so many essays out there showing you the ways that people coming from Silicon Valley, coming from the upper echelons of the economic ranks of this country, are willing to buy into this idea of great replacement and the need for more white children.
Elon Musk has something like 16 children.
I mean, there is an ethos, a pro-natalist ethos in Silicon Valley.
So I think we need to think about that too.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and we'll tie this into DHS and what we've seen there over the last month and just this last week in the tweeting out of a white Christian nationalist piece of propaganda that just has so many historical dimensions.
All right, Dan.
So this week we had DHS tweet out John Gass's tweet out John Gass's image progress.
And here is the quote that went with it.
A heritage to be proud of, a homeland worth defending.
Now, if you are not familiar with John Gast's work, you should just go look this up.
So just go Google Department of Homeland Security, John Gast, Progress, you'll see it.
Many of you know what this is.
It's an image of the goddess Columbia, who is heading west in what is meant to represent manifest destiny and the westward expansion of the United States.
Now, this image, Dan, initially appeared in 1872 in a kind of Western tourism magazine.
It was really meant to kind of give people this image of what it would mean to move west.
And if you've not seen it, I'm going to describe it.
And Dan, jump in here if you want to describe other aspects of it, okay?
The center of the image is this goddess Columbia.
She's wearing a white toga or robe, carrying the Bible, I believe.
I think actually I was looking at this.
I can't tell if it's a Bible or a schoolbook.
Okay.
So it's either, but either way, it's you're taking the faith, you're taking civilization, you're taking education out west.
Either way, it goes hand in hand.
Yeah.
So she's at the center.
Behind her is the sun that is rising.
And therefore, the right-hand side of the image is full of light and illumination.
The way that she's moving toward, she's moving to the left, which is to the west, is dark and in need of light is what you take away from the image.
Walking in her direction are people you would take to be settlers, people you would take to be homesteaders, people who are going to quote unquote civilize the American West.
These are people on horseback who are walking.
But there are people being trampled and run out as she moves this way.
So in the bottom left-hand of the picture are Indigenous people, Native Americans who are fleeing.
They're clearly afraid.
They're scared.
And this explicitly represents the removal of Indigenous people from the land, the attempted genocide, in my view, of this era, and the broken treaties, the broken promises that were continually made to Indigenous tribes and peoples.
So this is the image.
Dan, fill in, like, what am I missing?
If somebody's driving in their car right now and they can't picture it, what else do they there's so I should say behind them are trains and and civilizational like representative representations of modernity in front of her are simply horses and open prairies so it's like she's leaving civilization to go to go civilize the west that's one other aspect I should have missed so it's it's all of that the westward expansion as you say part of manifest destiny it's bringing civilization and light to a dark and uncivilized world so like that's that's how the indigenous populations are shown
And that's what this represents there.
As you say, they're fleeing before her.
For those who don't know, if somebody's like, what is Columbia?
This is, it's kind of funny.
It's a long Western historical thing where you would have these usually feminine, divine personifications of states.
And so like you would have in Rome, you have like Victoria, the sort of personification of victory.
Britannia, this personification of Britain, you know, during the period of the British Empire.
And so it was Columbia and Columbia was a common term for the Americas, like a common European term for the Americas in like the 17th, 18th centuries.
Within American iconography, Columbia comes to be displaced by Lady Liberty eventually, or to the Statue of Liberty, wherever that becomes the more iconic image.
So people aren't familiar with Columbia.
That's why.
That's what this figure is.
So it's Columbia, the spirit of America, like literally the spirit of America sort of leading the way.
And as I look at this, other things that I note is just, to me, there's got kind of linear progression here because out in the front you have, you know, you've got fleeing herds of buffalo.
There's even like a bear that's fleeing.
Native Americans are fleeing, but you have like a wagon being pulled by an oxen team and you've got like an individual horse.
And then a little bit behind that, you have like a stagecoach.
And so I see this, this almost like the building of civilization.
It's like, you know, it starts with the individual frontiers people and their covered wagons.
And then, you know, you get more civilization.
And now you get the stagecoach.
That's, you know, sort of the night, you know, 18th, 19th century mass transit kind of thing.
Then you have the railroad coming behind that.
You have a log cabin that's built behind.
So to me, it also shows this kind of linear view of the progression of civilization.
And it's interesting too, to tie that, tie in with that.
If you look at Columbia, she's also stringing a telegraph line.
Like she's got like a bundle of, I guess, telegraph wire on her arm and is like carrying it.
You can see the, the telegraph line.
So all the things that we're familiar with, even, even if, if, if,
it's older mass communication mass transportation the ability to move somewhere at at speeds and with a rapidity that was mind-blowing at the time when you have the railroad you know what you don't see outside of the native americans anybody who's not white all the settlers are white you certainly don't see immigrants and certainly not asian immigrants like building that railroad yep such a central part of of American history.
So, this is very much to bring civilization, to bring religion, to bring education, the quote-unquote civilizing mission of Europe.
It's a white project and it's about white Europeans.
And I was thinking about this too.
I didn't know much about John Gast.
I still don't know that much about John Gast, but he was a Prussian-born immigrant.
And I can hear it now.
I can hear it, Brad.
When you talk to Uncle Ron or somebody, you say, God, this image is so offensive.
And like, what do you mean it's offensive?
We're just celebrating like American history.
How can that be offensive?
And you say, well, you know, like they're, they're displacing the Native Americans.
It's like they're colonizing.
And I was like, what are you talking about?
An immigrant painted this, Brad.
This is, this is a, like, we're a nation of immigrants.
I don't know how you can say that we're racist with this, but he was the right kind of immigrant.
Prussian born, sort of Central European, somebody who would be red as white, not quite British Isles, like that was that top tier, but not too far removed by 1872.
And putting forward this mythic image of the westward expansion.
So there's just so many elements to this that we can tease out, but it's an excellent, and it's intended to be, right?
A very evocative visual representation.
As you say, it was in publications, like you say, these sort of adventure tourism publications, I guess we would call them now.
But it becomes sort of popularized.
It becomes this image, this call to go west, and it becomes very evocative and very powerful and to masses of people who might not be able to read.
They can't read a description of Manifest Destiny, but they can see this, they can feel it, they can identify with it.
If you're an immigrant coming to America and you want to be the right kind of immigrant, then sort of jumping on board with this image, living this out can help make you American, American enough that maybe you can get a homestead out west or whatever.
So very evocative, very powerful.
And I think the last point I'll make, very telling that like, it's not 1872 anymore, DHS.
I Googled it and the first thing it was their Facebook page also has this.
So Facebook, you know, in other forms of social media, it's kind of everywhere.
The very explicit use of this, as you say, as a homeland worth defending.
What's the homeland?
It's the one where the Native Americans are gone.
It's the one where nature has been tamed.
It's the one where white people have settled and occupied and controlled the territory.
That's the homeland worth defending.
Well, let's dig into the history.
Let's dig into like what's behind, what's the, what's the, the, the historical context of this.
Because it's going to open the dimensions you mentioned here, Dan.
And then it's going to, it's going to ricochet right into the present in terms of what the attempt is in this country right now.
Like the connections are going to be like immediate and intimate.
So let's talk about the history.
Manifest Destiny was really something in the kind of mid-1800s.
And the idea was that, you know, as you just said, folks were going to go west as white settlers and that they had a duty and a right to conquer the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
That was Manifest Destiny.
Just to add to that, a calling to do this, right?
It was like a calling and an obligation to do this.
Well, and Dana Raimi Berry and Nakia Parker are historians of this period and of this issue.
And they talk about Manifest Destiny as kind of a fever, that going west is our calling.
Okay.
Now, what that Manifest Destiny included, Dan, that is not in this painting, it is like conspicuously absent, is the expansion of enslaved people, the expansion of enslavement, that you were going to uproot people from the American South, what was Georgia or other parts of colonial antebellum South and expand slavery westward.
There was a sense there that the expanding empire was also going to expand the institution of slavery.
And if you don't believe me, if you listen to Raimi, Berry, and to Parker, here's what they say about it.
In California at the time, there was enslaved people working in the gold mines and on ranches in the Sonoma Valley, as well as 300,000 migrants of all nationalities who had arrived to this region by 1860.
The slave population included not just African Americans, but Native Americans as well.
In fact, Native American slavery was legalized.
Dan, not illegalized, it was legalized in California in 1850 with the state legislature's passage of the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians.
Through this legislation, Native Americans had to provide documentation of employment or they would be arrested for vagrancy and sold to the highest bidder.
So like when you represent Manifest Destiny, you're calling on a history that was a fever, a call to colonize and conquer the American West by way of labor, of enslaved people, and by the subjugation of Native Americans.
That was like explicitly built in.
Not to mention, Dan, not to mention that railroad that Columbia is bringing with her was built by largely Chinese migrants who 10 years after the appearance of this image were banned from the country by way of the Chinese Exclusion Act and run out of town after town out of town in the American West,
including Tacoma and including San Francisco and other places, sometimes burned, sometimes lynched, sometimes simply chased until they were no longer seen again.
Okay.
Let me give you some more history, Dan.
And I know that I'm famous for this, and I hope that all of my historical barrage of information will make sense.
So here's the National Constitution Center talking about the citizenship of Indians, of Indigenous peoples, Native Americans.
It was in 1924 that Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Indian Citizenship Act, which marked the end of a long debate and struggle at a federal level over what, Dan, birthright citizenship for American Indians.
Now you're thinking, wait a minute, we're talking about the 14th Amendment today.
We're talking about The birthright citizenship amendment from just after the Civil War, 1868.
Why did it take until 1924 to address the citizenship of Indians, of Native Americans, of Indigenous people?
Well, here's what it read: This is the 1924 Act, okay?
All non-citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be and they are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States, provided that, provided that the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.
Now, the reason you needed this act is because going all the way back to the formation of the Constitution, Article 1 said that Indians not taxed couldn't be counted in the voting population of states.
Slaves, we all know, enslaved people were counted as three-fifths, right?
The three-fifths compromise.
But Indigenous folks who were not taxed couldn't be counted in the voting population.
Okay?
So what happens when you fast forward all the way to 1868 and the passage of the 14th Amendment, the Birthright Citizenship Amendment?
The 14th Amendment's ratification in July 1868 overturned Dred Scott and made all persons born or naturalized in the United States citizens, with equal protection and due process under the law.
But for American Indians, interpretation of the amendment immediately excluded most of them.
It said that they were still not eligible to be citizens, not to be counted in the census.
At the time, the U.S. Census figures showed that 8% of American Indians were classified as taxed and eligible to become citizens.
The estimated American Indian population in 1870, Dan, right when this image appears, was larger than the population of five states and 10 territories.
So there were more American Indians than in five states and 10 territories, with 92% of them ineligible to be citizens.
The issue of American Indian birthright citizenship wouldn't be settled until 1924 when the Indian Citizenship Act, which I just talked about, Calvin Coolidge, converts citizenship on all American Indians.
At the time, 125,000 of an estimated population of 300,000 Americans were citizens.
That's 1924.
But here's the most modern component of this.
The Indian Citizenship Act didn't offer full protection of voting rights to Indians.
As late as 1948, the year my dad was born, Dan, Arizona and New Mexico had laws that barred many American Indians from voting.
American Indians faced also some of the same barriers as African Americans until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965.
If you're listening and driving in your car, you're like, Brad, that was like a ton of information, man.
You got to give me a break.
So I'll give you the takeaways.
We don't talk about this enough a lot.
And I don't think most people are aware of the ways that until the civil rights movement, in essence, American Indians, Native American folks, Indigenous folks were granted in every state, in every part of this country, the right to vote.
100 years ago, almost, almost, right?
We're 101 years ago.
It's like there's some ridiculous kind of symmetry here is when you get the passage of an act that finally confers upon most, almost all Native Americans the right to citizenship.
But it's 1924.
It's a full like generation after the passage of birthright citizenship.
So I'll shut up here.
What I'm trying to point out down, and I'm going to ricochet us into the future, into the present, is that when you're attacking the 14th Amendment, when you're attacking birthright citizenship, and then you're posting the John Gast progress picture, you're recalling the demons and the ghosts and sins of what was called manifest destiny.
You're recalling attempted genocide.
You're recalling bringing enslaved peoples across the continent so that they can labor on farms or in the gold rush.
You're recalling the ways that in 1850, the goal was not to outlaw enslavement, but to legalize enslavement in a place like California so that more labor could be found for the needs on farms and in the gold rush and so on and so on and so on.
Manifest Destiny recalls some of the most violent and disgusting chapters in American history.
And to just simply tweet out a homeland to defend and a heritage to be proud of with this picture is not an accident.
It shows you the kind of country that they want, the kind of American body that they want to build.
Thoughts from you?
Yeah, so you did the sort of historical dive.
I'm going to do the political philosophy dive here because another piece of this, I think, is to recognize how non-accidental this is.
This wasn't even just an American thing.
This was a very European vision.
Like the U.S. was not the only place that did this.
The U.S. started as a settler colony of a powerful European state and so forth.
And what I'm reminded of are arguments that come up.
And so a couple ideas here, but one comes from the philosopher John Locke, important philosopher for the liberal tradition, big influence on people like Thomas Jefferson, you know, checks and balances and sort of different powers of government and so forth.
Very Lockean principle that I think everybody listening would accept, I accept.
But there was also a side of Locke that completely licenses this.
And the reason I highlight that is just that there were strong ideological grounds of this.
Manifest Destiny was not just something that people who wanted land held on to.
There were thinkers and intellectuals and sort of statesmen who were the spokespeople for this.
And so one of the things that'll come up is John Locke, for example, says that in a kind of democratic state, you should only, you should have to consent to be governed.
The whole notion that those who are subject to law should consent to that governance and so forth.
Really central idea to Like modern democratic political theory and so forth.
Except for Locke, there was this issue of you're like, okay, so like, what if you're born somewhere and like you didn't explicitly say or sign on the dotted line and say, well, yeah, I consent to be governed.
His argument was that if you stayed somewhere under a government, you were implicitly giving your consent to that.
And people would say, okay, so what you all said, well, you have to go somewhere that doesn't have a government.
And guess where he explicitly names in his text?
The Americas, because they don't have civilization.
They don't have government.
He talks about the barbarians and wild people living in the Americas.
He's talking about American Indians as not having civilization, as not having a social contract, as not having all of these things that Western civilization and political theory is built around.
And it licenses explicitly the colonization.
Another piece that he does is he has a theory of private property.
So if somebody comes along and says, well, how can you displace these Native Americans?
You're stealing their land.
A Lockean would say, I'm not stealing anything.
Because John Locke argued that unimproved land was not property.
So if you just have, say, ancestral homelands, maybe you hunt the buffalo herds, maybe you move around seasonally, but you don't build permanent dwellings.
You don't, maybe you're not a primarily agricultural people.
And yes, there were lots of American Indian tribes that were agricultural, but there were lots that weren't, right?
It's not property.
It's just land.
It's literally up for grabs.
And so if the white people go in and they put up a fence and they plant a cornfield, guess what?
They just turned it into private property.
They now own it.
It doesn't matter who occupied it before.
So all of this is built into this very rigorous, very philosophical European ideology that is also at the heart of the kind of American, you know, sort of social and political system.
And I think it's important to recognize that, that this is not, it's not fringe.
This was not something that just a few people did.
So when people now, because I can hear this, when somebody says, you guys get all bent out of shape, they just put up this, this image and it's iconic and it's cool and covered wagons and stagecoaches and cowboys.
And yeah, like, why do you take everything so seriously?
That's why we take everything so seriously, because as you say, it hearkens to all of this.
And so again, as you highlighted, when they say a heritage to be proud of, that's all of it, right?
It's not just, I mean, if lots of us can trace, especially people like me, we can trace our ancestry to people who came west and so forth.
And that's complex and it's difficult to know what to do with that.
And I don't think it's wrong for somebody to think about, you know, their ancestors who came here and what they struggle against and so forth.
But it's also wrapped up in slavery.
It's wrapped up in genocide.
It is wrapped up in this political theorist who is central to the American project, whose ideas I fully affirm in some places, but he also puts forward the ideological license to displace those populations and steal their land.
All of that comes with it.
And the fact that you have a national government agency putting this out is just profoundly disturbing for those reasons.
You might be thinking, well, what does this have to do with religion?
Come on, guys.
You guys are the religion dudes.
You're supposed to be the theologian, Christian nationalist people.
Well, if you've been waiting, we're going to tell you.
Be right back.
So, Dan, there's a discourse that has been hanging around for decades, but it's finding new traction amongst Christian nationalists and those who are really disposed to white nationalism with a Christian flavor.
And one of those, the most egregious examples, and I know that, you know, we were talking offline that people like Dan Coulter might have talked this way or others in the past.
But here's the line.
You ready?
Here's the line.
White people, especially white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, if you're a white Protestant who has that lineage going back to the English, perhaps, you know, Englishy, but, you know, Englishy, Western Europe-y, like, you know, maybe like Calvinist.
Yeah, maybe, yeah.
Germanic.
Exactly.
British Isles.
Sure.
Yeah, we're good.
Switzerland.
We'll throw in some Switzerland.
You know, yeah.
Maybe that counts.
Okay.
Here's the line, though.
If you're a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant and you can trace your heritage to those folks, you, unlike Brad O'Nishi, who traces his father's side to Japanese, to Japan and then to Maui and then to California, you don't have a far-off homeland to wax nostalgic about.
You are not somebody who's an immigrant.
You are not, you have not spoken to your grandmother about what it was like in Poland when she was growing up or what it was like in Thailand or in Mexico or in China.
No, you are not an immigrant like those other people.
You don't have another homeland because this is your homeland.
What does it say on the John Cast picture that DHS pointed out?
What did they say?
A homeland to defend, a heritage to be proud of.
Here's the line.
The white Anglo-Saxon Protestant is not an immigrant.
They are a settler.
And that makes them a Native American.
Let me say it again.
Some of you like, don't believe me or you didn't hear me.
You ready?
The white Anglo-Saxon Protestant is not an immigrant.
They are a settler.
And because they settled this place, which Dan, as you just said, many people believed had no civilization, no social contract, no actual humans, just Indians, you are a Native American.
If you don't believe me, listen to Stephen Wolf, the author for, what's the book called?
The Case for Christian Nationalism, make this exact argument at a conference about a year ago where he said these very words.
Here it is.
But we, the unhyphenated, those who trace our ancestry to Western Europe whose roots extend beyond the Immigration Act of 1965 and Ellis Island, and which unite to this soil, we the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who founded, built, and died for and led this country for most of its history, we are not permitted in this new America to have a people or a place that is distinctly ours.
There is no distant place that we call home.
We have nowhere else to go.
But this is our home.
This is our native land.
We are Native Americans, born of those who didn't immigrate, but who settled here.
So Dan, I'll throw it to you, but if you think that there's no religious elements to what we're talking about, if you think that there's not a Christian nationalist dimension to manifest destiny and the entire cornucopia of issues that are tied in here, including the 14th Amendment, including birthright citizenship, this is a pretty stark reminder that there are Christian nationalists right now who have large audiences that are telling people that white Christians are the Native Americans.
No one else is.
And they have therefore a special status in this country, a special privilege in this country, and they should have more say in the country than anyone else.
Yeah, so, I mean, again, historically, and I don't want to get too wonky, but people will talk about, you know, broad movements like colonialism and so forth.
But one model is what it was called, and I referenced it earlier, settler colonialism.
And you had some colonialist models or aimed just really at extracting resources from a place and wealth and so forth.
The settler colonialism, which is really a favorite model of the British, was about transplanting Europe.
It was like moving part of Europe into new places.
And so whether that was, you know, different parts of the world or in North America, the British colonies, parts of Canada, places like this, this notion of making it European.
And I think that that's what ties in with this.
So early on, I mean, pretty early on in that period, you get this shift of language where white settlers, colonizers, white people of European descent who want to expand further remove Native Americans, they will refer, like if you look in the documents, they'll just refer to like removing quote unquote Indians, right?
From Native lands.
And they don't mean from like traditional Native American lands.
They mean from lands that are rightfully theirs because they are the Americans.
You get this nativization is a word that some people will use within the discourse, this kind of shift where once you've got a generation or two of these people of European stock who are born here, this is their land.
And the Americans are like, they're now interlopers, even though they may have thousands of years of history in those spaces.
And that becomes very much a part of it.
And I think tied in with all of this, another broad overarching sort of cultural and religious theme, there was a doctrine that was developed called the doctrine of terra nullius, which was basically an empty earth.
And it goes, it predates Protestantism.
It was a big Catholic doctrine when you had European powers going all over in different places, especially in South America.
But it was the idea that anywhere where Christian civilization didn't exist was empty.
It was empty land, empty earth.
And so you have this religious overlay over the whole thing.
Well, it goes with the doctrine of discovery too.
Sorry.
Oh, yeah.
Doctrine of discovery and Terenolius, all that.
It's all sort of part of this, this same complex thing.
So the Christian piece is just like baked in there.
It's pardon me for saying it.
It's in the code.
This language of going there, by definition, we are spreading Christianity.
We are spreading Christian culture, Christian civilization.
This is what makes this land ours.
This is what constitutes these quote unquote heathens or pagans as not Christian and therefore people who can be enslaved or they can be eradicated or we can do whatever else we want.
That religious dimension is there.
And I think people need to know that because it's there whether somebody's like quoting the Bible or not, whether we're talking about pastors and missionaries or we're talking about farmers, that broad consciousness, the civilizing mission is the Christian mission.
And the European mission is the Christian mission.
The Christian mission is the white mission.
These things are all taken as equivalent.
So to participate in it is to participate in the whole thing.
And the last thing that I'll say about this, you talk about, you know, what kind of America do we want is just invite people, look at that image.
What is your place in it?
Because if you look like the people marching west, you have a place.
If you look like Columbia, you have a place.
If you're Native American, you need to get out.
And everybody else is just absent.
But you know what?
There.
Dan, like as we're talking, I'm just like, you know, we talked about Christy Noam two weeks ago and we talked last week about psychopathology.
Dan, if I we are like, and if this happens, somebody needs to send me 50 grand.
Okay.
I'm going to just tell you right now, I'm going to call it.
And if this happens, somebody in the world needs to send me some money.
Don't you think we're like three months away from them redoing John Gas Progress, but instead of Columbia, it's Christy Noam?
Like, like, is Christy Noam not Columbia in the 21st century?
Like, is Christy Noam not the one who is like cosplaying as an ICE agent, a Marine, everything, going with all of the CBP and the National Guard and anywhere she can go to basically be Columbia,
the civilizing quote-unquote force that is driving out these people from the native lands and these people being the enemy invaders that they are calling folks who have brown skin or who are Asian or any number of other people, black people as well.
We're not far from Halloween.
When the image comes out of like Christianoma at a Halloween party dressed as Columbia.
Yeah, right, yeah.
I mean, yeah.
And, you know, if one of you out there is creative and you make this image of Christianomas Columbia, at least tag us, all right?
Like at least just tag us and just say, you know, hat tip, a straight white American Jesus.
All right, Dan, you want to say anything about Epstein or do you want to go to Reasons for Hope?
Those are two drastically different things.
So just you choose.
Just briefly, the Epstein thing, all I want to highlight is it's still blowing up.
You have the DOJ interviewing, you know, his accomplice who's serving a 20-year term, all of these kinds of things.
We talked about this last week, that one of the ways that this is hindering the Trump administration is they are not getting to do things like selling the Big Beautiful bill and all that sort of stuff.
I guess the Big Beautiful law now and all of these things.
But I think it's important to remember that what it's also doing is giving them some political cover.
Another awful story is coming out this week about Gaza and the situation in Gaza and the U.S. withdrawing, the sort of negotiators for a ceasefire and so forth.
The noise about Epstein is also giving the Trump administration cover for some of these other things.
And as you say, just other things that we're not talking about or that the news media is not picking up on.
And that's my only, I think my only real observation this week is to just, it is important to cut through the noise and see what these other things are and what, you know, the way that this is also providing political cover for the Trump administration.
Any thoughts on that or should I go to return?
Well, no, I'll just give you a thing that they're, they're also like, we're also not talking about, and we could, we, we, we should.
And the Trump administration is going to destroy 500 metric tons of emergency food.
Yeah.
Enough to feed 1.5 million children for a week.
And they're going to incinerate them.
Like there's so much there about manifest destiny and who deserves to eat and who deserves to, but there's also, Dan, I just, I just, I will leave folks with one.
You might be thinking, Brad and Dan, a lot of information today.
Brad's over here talking about laws from 1868, 1924, and I can't keep it straight.
And you want something to keep straight today?
If you made it this far into the episode, here's this.
Dan, when you and I were young, simple question.
You had the bracelet, I had the bracelet.
What would Jesus do?
What would Jesus do?
And Jesus, at least in a couple of examples I remember, fed the 5,000, fed the 4,000, depending which gospel you read, if I remember that.
He turned how many loaves of bread, a couple into food for all kinds of folks.
And now we have an administration that we are talking about Epstein, like meaning, you know, the sort of attention span of the American media is talking about Epstein.
We could be talking about the fact that an administration that is sending out every chance it can get Christian imagery and forming an anti-Christian task force or anti-Christian bias task force would rather destroy food than give it to people who are hungry.
Like the money's spent.
The food exists.
But they're like, nah, burn it.
Would Jesus, like ask Uncle Ron this week, would Jesus ever do?
Don't Uncle Ron.
I don't care where the people are.
I don't care what their status is.
I don't care what kind of papers they have.
I don't care if they live in Angola or if they live in England.
I don't care if they live in Tampa or Turkey.
Would Jesus ever burn food rather than just give it to them?
Would he do that?
And I just, I know that we're so numb at this point, 10 years of this, but we're not talking about that either.
We're not talking about Gaza.
We're not talking about this stuff, at least in the ways that could be.
And one of the reasons is Epstein, now, yeah, if Epstein takes down Trump somehow, then I get it.
But there's a lot of things here that are travesties, I guess, is what I'm talking about.
I'm not the only one listening to this who can be old enough to have had grandparents or parents who did that old like, you know, when you didn't eat all your food.
There are starving people in Fill in the Blank who would love to have that.
That used to be the kind of American ethos, the kind of American Christian ethos, not burning food so that starving people can't have it.
Well, what about the folks?
And this is another example of like people, like historical memory being gone, like the generation that lived through the Great Depression.
Do you ever meet somebody who lived through the Great Depression?
So like, Dan, my landlady, the woman who owned the house I rented when I was in graduate school.
In graduate school, I lived in a crazy house, 12 people, 12 bedrooms.
Someday I'll write the chronicles of that house.
Sounds like you said material to me, Brad.
Well, yeah.
A bonus, bonus, bonus episode.
There was a Danish woman who owned that house.
She was a refugee and she owned a 12-bedroom house in the middle of Santa Barbara.
I don't know how much that's worth right now.
It's got to be six, seven million right now.
She lived next door in a little apartment she rented and she would come over every day to the house where there was all these people living and like pick up all the stuff we'd left out.
Like if somebody had left out a little bit of whiskey bottle or like some bread, she'd just take it home.
She's like, you're not waiting.
Like her towels, she would like hang on the fence next door to us were like rags.
And I'd be like, Henny, what are you doing with these towels?
She's like, they're still good.
And I'm like, Henny, these are from like 1976.
She's like, you don't throw stuff away.
She lived through waste.
And now we're just going to incinerate food.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Reason for hope.
The reason for hope, you kind of mentioned it earlier, but another poll coming out just continuing to show declining support for Trump among independents.
And I know that that was important in the election.
I know that polls changed and so forth, but approval rating, Trump's right now is only 37% among U.S. adults.
Among self-identified independents, it's only 29%.
To put it in perspective, that is a 17-point decline since January.
Immigration policy is a big part of that.
I can lose my mind if I think about the fact that the same people who now are saying how much they disapprove of Trump are all the same people who could have heard for years and years and years that this is exactly what Trump is going to do.
But if I choose to be hopeful, which I am trying to do, it's that I think this is a trajectory that if we want to see something happen in the midterms, if we want to see something happen in the next presidential election, these kinds of shifts are important.
So I take hope in that.
I've got a couple.
France is recognizing the statehood of Palestine, and that may have some, as Josh Marshall said, it may be a really good start, and it may build some momentum.
So I think that's good.
One of our most dogged researchers in our Discord server posted an article that outlines how they're having a hard time securing indictments against protesters from LA, you know, during the whole National Guard Marines thing that's still happening.
It's not over, but nobody's paying attention anymore outside of LA.
So that's also good news, I think.
All right, y'all.
Thanks for listening.
Thanks again to our subscribers who hung out with us earlier this week.
Thank you for all of you who subscribed.
The bonus episode will be up this weekend, so check that out.
And we will be back next week with a great interview.
I have a great interview with Anand Pandian who talks about his new book about the walls that divide us and how to take them down.
Well, if it's in the code, the weekly roundup and much more, check it out.
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