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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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I'd like to register that both Seder and the young woman didn't come out looking well.

Oh, she came out looking very well. Her ideas…. eh, whatever.

(I would do her, is what I’m getting at.)

The thing is, both she and Seder are correct about “what America is.” Both strains of thought have been equally prominent and influential throughout American history. The people who believe it’s purely a colorblind “propositional nation” of ideas divorced from ancestry need to explain the Naturalization Act of 1790, and why so many of the Founding Fathers — particularly Thomas Jefferson, who was obsessed with the specifically Anglo-Saxon character of America’s founding stock — wrote so much about their race and about the vast differences between themselves and both the Africans and the Amerindians with whom they shared a continent. The people who believe white Christian nativism is core to American history, though, similarly have to deal not only with the strongly universalist rhetoric of many of the Founding Fathers and of the religious denominations in which they were involved, but also the distinct lack of Christian belief among certain others important Founding Fathers.

There have always been lots of Americans who sincerely believe that America was a creedal land of universal promise, in which every immigrant can make good by working hard, and there have always been lots of other Americans who believed that America is an ethnos based, at least in part, on shared ancestral ties to a particular founding stock. America means very different things to different factions, and each of those factions is strongly and sincerely patriotic to its specific conception of what America means. This jockeying for control of the narrative, and the exclusion/suppression of the other side’s narrative, has been going on since before this country even properly began. Neither side in that exchange had any hope of moving the needle on that set of issues — especially considering someone on Twitter deduced that the pretty young right-wing zoomer is from Canada anyway!

(I would do her, is what I’m getting at.)

Wait, do you mean have sex with her, or something else? Is she single?

Sorry if I didn't get the joke 😞

(I would do her, is what I’m getting at.)

Watch out, Kanye, someone is out to steal your Subtle Allusion Award.