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October 10 - November 20, 2022
By 2011, Homeland Security had spent $34 billion in domestic military grants to police forces, going to all-sized cities.56
The stigma of Catholicism was resolved through settler-colonial extreme patriotism, which they came to embrace.28 A major factor in Irish acceptance of US patriotism was Irish republicanism, as they saw the United States as a prior colony of Britain that revolted and became a republic, not recognizing the settler colonialism in the US that was patterned after the English settler colonialism in Ireland.29
It was a superior social order based on whiteness that they could join, even if they remained working class or poor, as part of the dominant settler class by virtue of being of European origin. As the inventor of the American Dream meme explained, “That dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” In other words, a sense of superiority, not prosperity, was the guaranteed reward.32
W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in his 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 that normal labor unity did not work, due to “a carefully planned and slowly evolved method, which drove such a wedge between the white and black workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest.”
As the editor of the Black-owned newspaper the Cleveland Gazette, put it: “Liberty enlightening the world,” indeed! The expression makes us sick. This government is a howling farce. It cannot or rather does not protect its citizens within its own borders. Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the “liberty” of this country is such as to make it possible for an inoffensive and industrious colored man to earn a respectable living for himself and family, without being ku-kluxed, perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed. The idea of the
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Then the administration went for the socialists, arresting Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party cofounder and four-times presidential candidate, on June 30, 1918. A few days before, Debs had given a speech in Canton, Ohio, urging resistance to the draft and the war.
Immigration historian Mae Ngai sees the character of US nationalism as the driver of its fear of immigrants: “Americans want to believe that immigration into the United States proves the universality of the nation’s liberal democratic principles; we resist examining the role that American world power has played in the global structures of migration. We like to believe that our immigration policy is generous, but we also resent the demands made upon us by others and we think we owe outsiders nothing.”32
