00:00:00.000hey everybody how's it going thanks for joining me this afternoon i am orin mcintyre before we
00:00:14.560get started today i just want to remind you that one of the ways we keep the lights on around here
00:00:18.340is of course subscriptions to blaze tv so if you want to support this show and get access to all
00:00:23.780your favorite blaze tv hosts need to head to blaze tv.com slash orin to get 20 off your
00:00:29.720subscription today. That's blazetv.com slash Oren to get $20 off today. All right, guys,
00:00:37.600if you're not aware, the latest online battle for conservatives that is now bleeding out,
00:00:44.720I think, into the larger sphere is that of American identity. I told you guys that the
00:00:50.920question of the next 10 years, 20 years is going to be, who are we? Who are we as Americans? Who
00:00:58.960are we as a people? What does it mean to be American? This is the question that we are going
00:01:04.320to be grappling with nonstop going forward. There's no way to ignore it. There's no way to
00:01:10.200avoid it. There is no way to have a discussion about anything else. This is going to be what
00:01:16.360we are going to be focused on going forward. If we cannot resolve this question, we simply will
00:01:22.960not make it as a country. This is a central question that we have to discuss. So what
00:01:31.860triggered this to go kind of back into the limelight? Well, the candidate for Texas Railroad
00:01:39.340Commissioner, which is actually a more important position than it sounds, it's actually the
00:01:43.740person who gets to handle the oil industry in Texas. The candidate for the Republicans,
00:01:48.600beau french tweeted out a picture from a texas game a ut uh texas game uh and in that picture
00:01:58.320almost everyone grouped together in that picture celebrating during the game was an indian they
00:02:05.700were of indian descent not only were they of indian descent apparently they were like splashing
00:02:10.860milk around in a celebration that's normal for that culture i'm not sure i saw sarah gonzalez say
00:02:16.220that but i'm not super familiar with indian uh traditions so i can't claim that directly but
00:02:22.180she seems like a reliable source on that either way the concentration of indians filling up the
00:02:28.220entire picture made it very clear when both bro french remarked on this that there had been
00:02:33.360significant demographic change in texas and if you have been to a place like dallas you know this is
00:02:40.600true this is everywhere the entire city there that entire area is just radically transformed
00:02:47.800you don't know if you're in dallas or mumbai and so this set off a whole bunch of people of course
00:02:53.580all the democrats called this racist a large chunk of the texas gop decided to come out and call both
00:02:58.940french racists a bunch of mainstream conservative political commentators came out to say how
00:03:04.620horrific this was how monstrous this was how it has to be condemned by all right-thinking americans
00:03:10.600Now, I don't want to get into all that today because I'm actually going to have Matt Williams, the Prudentialist, on to talk about that.
00:03:17.800He's from Texas. He's familiar with Beau French.
00:03:20.440He has a lot of direct experience with this, so I don't want to preempt that conversation.
00:03:25.940I think his direct expertise and experience is useful in that.
00:03:29.960So we'll go into the larger question of Texas specifically.
00:03:34.660Actually, I'll also be in Dallas this weekend giving a speech at the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles event about the demographic transformation of Texas and how it impacts politics there.
00:03:47.900So that was the topic they picked out for me months ago.
00:03:51.180So I guess a little, you know, preempting.
00:03:54.700They managed to predict where the conversation was going.
00:04:34.160Is it some kind of commodifiable identity? Or is there something more to being an American?
00:04:40.980Does it mean something? Or is it just something anyone could obtain by walking into the border and attending the right sporting event, right?
00:04:48.660That's the question. Now, obviously, when we were talking about legal and illegal immigration, the discussion was much easier.
00:04:55.620we could say that republicans could point to a procedural issue okay the problem is that the
00:05:03.240law has been violated that ultimately uh you know the the big issue with immigration is whether it
00:05:10.540is legal or illegal right we've heard lots of people like ted cruz say this uh you know i love
00:05:15.680legal immigration the only thing i don't like is illegal immigration we can have all the legal
00:05:19.860immigration we want and as soon as we started to address the illegal immigration issue quickly
00:05:25.480people realize oh no we're gonna have to go much further because the transformation of the country0.96
00:05:29.860is not just happening through illegal immigration though that is the first type you should shut down
00:05:33.600and kudos to the trump administration yet again for closing the border as they have very big deal
00:05:39.220not a small task something we were told was basically impossible my entire life they did it
00:05:44.340in just like basically a few months massive change you know huge huge deal however
00:05:50.580we've discovered that it's not just illegal immigration changing our country and especially
00:05:57.100since there's been so much immigration and much of it illegal for so long along with the 14th
00:06:01.740amendment that now apparently thanks to the supreme court reinforcing it says that anyone
00:06:06.720and everyone who's born on american soil even if their parents were here entirely illegal doesn't
00:06:11.560matter if your your parents were drug dealers you know smuggling in stuff to kill people in the
00:06:15.620united states if you were born here on soil while your mother happened to be mewling drugs into
00:06:20.580the United States, congratulations, you are now an American citizen with all the rights,0.66
00:06:26.020the ability to determine our political future, withdraw money from our system, everything
00:06:30.680involved. And so when you've had that for many, many decades, the transformation of our culture
00:06:36.660is going to occur one way or the other, whether it's legal or illegal. These people were here
00:06:41.400illegally, but their children are born here. So now they're legal citizens. And all of a sudden,
00:06:44.980it doesn't matter. They have every right to be here as much as you do. Obviously, this is a huge
00:06:49.460problem with the h1b system because it's supposed to be a temporary worker visa but the people who1.00
00:06:54.200are coming over well if they have kids now those kids are american and many h1bs come here planning1.00
00:07:01.380to be here indefinitely they think it's basically citizenship and you can tell because so many h1b0.97
00:07:06.500workers start complaining the minute they lose their status saying oh i bought a house here i0.63
00:07:10.920i bought i my life is here now okay you're on a temporary worker visa and you picked up a 30-year
00:07:16.880commitment on debt right like that that speaks to what they really believe about the h1b program
00:07:23.100they don't see themselves as temporary workers they know the visa isn't there to give them
00:07:26.640temporary work they know the whole point is to basically cheat their way in and become citizens
00:07:32.020that way and that is entirely what they do they act as if they have already achieved citizenship0.51
00:07:36.780once they have an h1b because for a long time that basically was the case right and certainly
00:07:42.420if you have children here, yeah, you've basically sealed the deal. And so this is transforming the
00:07:47.360country just as radically as illegal immigration, especially when the populations come from very,
00:07:53.760very different countries. We are starting to notice that it's easier to assimilate some
00:07:59.660peoples than others. Now, of course, our ancestors knew this. This is why up until Heart Cellar,
00:08:04.780we had a preference for European immigration that was baked into our system. If you're going to0.74
00:08:11.300immigrate you probably need to come from europe first it was northern europe then it was western
00:08:15.520europe and eventually it was expanded to all of europe so we kept expanding the definition of who
00:08:21.300could come but it was very clear from the beginning that that was the preference that that was the
00:08:26.540easiest groups to assimilate not all of them of course not every person from europe can become an
00:08:31.020american not even close but the chances are higher that you might be able to make that cultural
00:08:36.800transition if you were from a culture that shared a lot in common shared christianity shared many
00:08:42.960of the norms that had circulated through europe for a long time again not one-to-one not perfect
00:08:47.840we took a long time to americanize the germans they were actually very resistant to assimilation
00:08:53.840for a long time so it's not like every urine people european people just pops in and becomes
00:08:58.240american it really took us multiple world wars before we truly assimilated our german population
00:09:03.760now a lot of people say well that just means we can assimilate anyone no that's the long
00:09:08.320wrong lesson to learn it tells you how difficult assimilation can be but like i said i don't want
00:09:14.300to get too far into the specific texas incident because i'm going to be discussing that with
00:09:18.960matt on friday today i want to talk about three models of american identity if you've been
00:09:26.220following uh my show you know that i think that samuel huntington's book who are we right here
00:09:32.740is a really excellent way to start thinking about American identity.
00:09:36.720It's an issue that most people have just not thought that much about.
00:09:41.400And so we have not put a lot of work into considering what it means to be an American,
00:09:46.800where that came from, what the real history is about all of this.
00:09:52.260And so I think that Samuel Huntington is good for a few reasons.
00:09:54.980One, he's a very well-respected thinker.
00:10:24.620Huntington, I think, is also useful because he is not a bomb thrower.
00:10:27.440He's not some far right esoteric philosopher. He is not some hardcore racial identitarian. Far from it. Huntington is a man of the center left. I mean, I think he worked for Jimmy Carter. He's a harder Harvard professor. Now, he's noted for being a more conservative leftist, I guess, more conservative Democrat.
00:10:47.280so he's not like crazy he's not there giving you woke theories of identity in fact this book who
00:10:53.080are we was very controversial at the time because well center-left harvard professors don't
00:10:58.900affirmatively talk about the anglo heritage of the country but the good thing about huntington
00:11:05.720is that he cared more about getting this right than pleasing people who are theoretically near
00:11:10.820him politically so we have a book from a guy who isn't a bomb-throwing radical isn't even right
00:11:16.600wing, but is a little more conservative and honest in a way that Democrats used to be
00:11:21.860about the nature of American identity. And so that makes this a very helpful book because really it's
00:11:27.140the most moderate way to explore this question. And still it brings us some very hard truths,
00:11:33.540some truths that many Republicans today are actively calling racist and a violation of
00:11:39.880the founders. So why are all these people more left-wing than Samuel Huntington? Why are the
00:11:45.720Joel Berry's of the world, the James Lindsay's of the world? Why are the National Reviews,
00:11:51.760the Dana Loach's, like, why are these people to the left of this moderate Democrat on this issue?
00:11:57.360Why did they think that the founders were racist when Samuel Huntington doesn't? That's a really
00:12:03.520interesting question. And so I think we should take some time to go through a few pages of the
00:12:08.360book today and discuss this idea of models of American identity. Huntington presents us with
00:12:15.180three possible models of American identity and tells us about the history behind them.
00:12:21.520And I think that's very helpful because many people today only have ever heard about the
00:12:25.340melting pot. But where did that concept come from? Is it something that our founders believed?
00:12:30.860Well, Huntington's going to lay that out here. So let's go ahead and turn to the book.
00:12:36.780The assimilation debate. In 1908, Israel Zengwill's play, sorry if I end up mispronouncing names here,
00:12:44.600the melting pot provided widespread discussion of an ethnic endorsement from or sorry of an
00:12:51.080enthusiastic endorsement from president theodore roosevelt the play brought to the fore a confused
00:12:57.500debate that had been developing over the ways and possibility of assimilating the new immigrants
00:13:03.060flooding into the country did the assimilation mean that immigrants would would and should
00:13:09.240absorb and be absorbed into the Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers. So here we're
00:13:17.480already acknowledging what the actual culture, the founding culture of America was. It's Anglo-Protestant.0.53
00:13:23.960And that's what Sammy Huntington says throughout this book, that Anglo-Protestants are the founding
00:13:29.160stock of the country, that they define the identity of the country, that this is the central
00:13:33.940central idea around which American identity is formed that's the heritage and the faith the
00:13:40.140Anglo and the Protestant that's why it's why we speak English that's why we have common law that's
00:13:45.240why most of our Bill of Rights is just a recapitulation of the English Bill of Rights
00:13:49.160right like that's where we come from that's the cultural heritage along with the genetic heritage
00:13:57.140of the original Americans and the faith that they ultimately believed in so will these new
00:14:02.920settlers be absorbed into the Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers? Or did it mean
00:14:08.380that they should and that they would and should join with the descendants of settlers, slaves,
00:14:14.260conquerors, and prior immigrants to create a new American culture, the new American man?0.72
00:14:20.120All right. So the next thing is, okay, should these people be absorbed in? Should they become0.99
00:14:25.380more like Anglo-Protestants as much as possible? Or are we creating a new identity? We're taking1.00
00:14:31.660the old American stock and were mixing with the new immigrants and creating a brand new1.00
00:14:36.440American identity, something totally separate from what existed when it first came over0.66
00:14:41.940on the Mayflower? Or was the creation of a common culture either desirable or undesirable or
00:14:49.800impossible? And should or must Americans be a conglomerate of people with different cultures?
00:14:55.180So the third model here, we've got three, right? We're seeing here the emergence of three models.
00:14:59.300the adaptation model we expect foreigners to become more like anglo-protestant americans0.53
00:15:07.220when you come to the united states you must assimilate right we love that word you must
00:15:11.480assimilate to the culture of america which is anglo and protestant or are we forging a entirely
00:15:19.240new identity in the 1900s right we're not talking about when america was founded we're talking about
00:15:26.440all that culture from the 17 you know well well before america was was here before the united
00:15:33.040states was founded the american people were here hundreds of years before but we'll start from
00:15:36.800you know the the actual revolution all the way from 1776 all the way up to 1901 should we just
00:15:45.560forget that culture and instead take those people who are already here the heritage americans if you
00:15:51.640will and mix their culture with everybody else who's coming in and turn that into what we would
00:15:58.400call a new american man a new soviet man some might say or a third model is america simply
00:16:06.780always going to be multicultural is it just always going to have peoples from all over and you can't
00:16:12.460really do anything about it there is no such thing in assimilation and so america is just going to be
00:16:16.560this mixture of peoples living in the same geographical space, but not sharing the same
00:16:21.680culture because the sharing of the culture is basically impossible. Those are kind of the three1.00
00:16:26.560models that are being brought forward here. These questions went to the heart of America's
00:16:31.460ethnicity and cultural identity. The three concepts developed in response to these questions frame
00:16:36.500debates over assimilation for the following century. In keeping with the prevalence of
00:16:40.920metaphors, particularly culinary ones, in the debates over assimilation, they can be labeled
00:16:45.540the melting pot tomato soup and salad concepts of assimilation now i think these these metaphors are
00:16:53.300a little embarrassing but they're the ones that he uses and to be fair these are ones that have
00:16:57.320been in use for a long time so i'll stick with them even though i think that the terminology
00:17:01.200is pretty goofy right the melting pot concept had been initially set forth by hector john st
00:17:08.500for sure maybe in the 1780s in america he argued individuals of all nations are melted into a new
00:17:17.820race of men this new american man is a mixture of english scottish irish french dutch germans
00:17:25.300and swedes the new american he also says leaves behind him all of his ancient prejudices and
00:17:32.040manners and receives a new one from a new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced the
00:17:38.120new government he obeys and the new rank he holds. Trevis Sear thus appears to view America not just
00:17:46.000as a new nationality produced by the intermarriage of people from old ones, but also a society with
00:17:53.360a new culture produced by this amalgamation of peoples on his shores. So he's not just talking
00:17:59.860about the classic blending. I think this is a huge problem that people have when they try to discuss
00:18:05.300this concept uh ironically uh the people most worried about like kind of the nazis and race
00:18:12.680science and all of that ugly parts of kind of uh world war ii germany uh they uh are hilariously
00:18:20.640the most strict about needing hard racial categories like scientific genetic racial
00:18:26.540categories uh as where for most of history identity was something that was real uh like
00:18:33.900you could recognize it. You knew who was Greek. You knew who was English. But those identities
00:18:40.600obviously had some shifting over time. People intermarry. Different groups intermarry. They
00:18:48.560tend to kind of shift the balance, the way that the culture is working. That doesn't mean that
00:18:54.460you have an entirely different culture. It doesn't mean that the Greeks stopped being Greeks or the
00:18:59.400English stopped being English because a few people intermarried into them, but there was that idea
00:19:04.680that you had some level of cultural drift over time through things like intermarriage, and that
00:19:10.740didn't end your civilization. It didn't mean like, oh no, all of a sudden there are no Greeks. It's
00:19:15.080all propositional. It doesn't mean anything. No, that's not what it meant, but there was this idea
00:19:20.760that it could shift over time, right? But the melting pot is not that idea. It's not the idea
00:19:27.520that, okay, well, a few foreigners are going to come over and marry some people in the United
00:19:31.700States, and then their children will be American, and they'll be kind of new Americans in the sense
00:19:36.540that, you know, they had some other ancestry that melded in. No, we're talking about a revolution,
00:19:43.440right, a identitarian revolution, where America needs to become something totally different from1.00
00:19:50.040its Anglo-Protestant heritage, now that these new immigrant groups are here. You can no longer1.00
00:19:54.820maintain that classic american understanding zeng will broaden the blend beyond northwestern
00:20:01.460europeans to include celts latins slavs and teutons greeks and syrians black and yellow
00:20:08.960jew and gentile for him curvier's uh this melting and reforming also appears to involve
00:20:16.880not just the intermarriage of ethnicities and races but the creation of a new common culture
00:20:21.160in which all will be united to build the republic of man and the kingdom of god so he takes this
00:20:27.380original idea of a melting pot which was basically heavily restricted to western europe he says
00:20:34.540actually you can kind of just add everybody in there so so his melting pot idea isn't even the
00:20:40.500one that was suggested by some people during the founding and by the way that one that melting pot
00:20:45.820idea was not adapted like that was not what americans saw themselves as that was floated by
00:20:51.920a few people but it did not take we'll get more into that in a second however the point is that
00:20:56.760even this new version from zeng will is not actually the original melting pot it very radically
00:21:04.740expands who could be an american so he so it is as revolutionary as the melting pot idea itself
00:21:12.660was revolutionary at that time and neither of them ultimately took as we'll see here
00:21:17.300in contrast to the anglo conformity model focuses uh which focuses on cultural assimilation it's
00:21:25.400based on the premise of immigrants and their descendants duly adopt the standard anglo and
00:21:30.400cultural pattern in milton gordon's words uh and sorry in milton gordon in milton gordon's words
00:21:39.120and should adapt to the cultural history of the Anglo-American part of the population.
00:21:45.100And Michael Novak, it assumes, in short, the centrality and durability of the culture of
00:21:50.980the founding settlers. So the Anglo conformity model says, no, when we have new people come,
00:21:57.260they need to become more Anglo and more Protestant. We have an expectation of the0.96
00:22:03.040culture that exists when you show up. Now, obviously, you don't magically genetically
00:22:07.520become Anglo. That's not what they meant, right? They knew that was impossible. So these hard
00:22:12.500modern definitions of ethnicity, they miss part of this process, of course, because that's not
00:22:19.340how people thought pre this hyper-scientific age. They didn't think of culture as just that
00:22:26.020option. They didn't think of ethnicity as just that option. Now, it's not that your heritage
00:22:29.840didn't matter. Obviously, it was very important. However, there was a much wider understanding of
00:22:35.620what it meant to conform to being Anglo.
00:22:38.280It didn't just mean you magically wave a wand
00:22:55.260You would change the way you dress.0.85
00:22:56.900The Founding Fathers talked about this.
00:22:59.140You can see John Jay, the Founding Father,
00:23:01.860talking about the importance of homogenizing America,
00:23:04.640forcing the people to dress the same way, speak the same language, adopt the same character,
00:23:10.920right? That's what we're talking about here. Obviously, you could not genetically transform
00:23:15.280yourself, but you were expected to conform as much as possible to the way of being of the people who
00:23:20.600founded the country, the Anglo-Protestants. The culinary metaphor is an Anglo-Protestant tomato
00:23:26.120soup to which immigration adds celery, croutons, spice, parsley, and other ingredients that enrich
00:23:33.360and diversify the taste, but which are absorbed into what remains fundamentally tomato soup.
00:23:39.480So in this model, you know, we have the melting pot, right, where everything just kind of
00:23:43.440gets pulled together and creates this new thing. But in this model, we have a tomato soup, right?
00:23:49.260You have this base of tomato soup. That's the Anglo-Protestant. And yeah, you add croutons and1.00
00:23:54.500you add some celery and you add some spices. And those things are good, right? They change the
00:23:59.460flavor of the soup a little bit. They make it more interesting. They might add some strength to the
00:24:03.700soup, but ultimately the soup remains tomato soup. It doesn't transform into something else. It
00:24:10.100doesn't melt down into a new identity. It gains only a little bit of newness from those ingredients,
00:24:18.280but ultimately stays tomato soup. So the Anglo-Protestant society doesn't stop being1.00
00:24:23.260Anglo-Protestant society just because everybody in it isn't Anglo and Protestant. Instead,
00:24:28.600those people join they add something but they conform to that society they meld into the
00:24:36.380society ideally that celery tastes of tomato soup the crouton is soaked in the tomato soup
00:24:43.160everything absorbs that aspect and even though you're adding texture and flavor
00:24:47.520you are absorbing and becoming more tomato soup becoming more anglo-protestant as you go along
00:24:55.400That's the ideal understanding under this model of assimilation explicitly and even more pervasively, implicitly, sorry, explicitly and even more pervasively, explicitly, this Anglo conformity model in various guises, as Gordon remarks, has probably been the most prevalent ideology of assimilation in American historical experience.
00:25:19.600More accurately than any other model, it describes the cultural absorption of immigrants until the 1960s.
00:25:26.500So what Huntington is saying here is that this idea of Anglo-conformity was American identity.
00:25:34.300It was the expectation of American identity for basically all of American history up to Hartzeller Act.
00:25:40.980up until the heart seller act up until we decided to have a culture revolution and throw open our
00:25:46.340borders and say we're no longer allowed to be selective about who comes to the america
00:25:50.340until we did that the anglo absorption model this anglo conformity model was the model it didn't
00:25:57.640mean that every person coming to the united states had to be protestant didn't mean every person
00:26:01.820coming to the united states need to be anglo it didn't even mean that when you got here you had
00:26:05.320to convert to protestantism though you should however and it obviously didn't mean you magically
00:26:10.860became of Anglo heritage. But the expectation is that anyone who wanted to be an American
00:26:16.300had to become these things. They didn't keep praying their Hindu prayer. They didn't keep0.84
00:26:22.780wearing their burqa. They didn't come in and try to enforce their cultural norms.
00:26:29.880They don't manipulate elections in Minnesota based on tribal politics from Somalia.
00:26:35.280when you come to the u.s you have to be as anglo-protestant as possible even if you don't
00:26:42.180do the total conversion you still have to conform your ways as much as possible and by the way
00:26:48.640huntington points out that american catholics are seen as very american compared to other
00:26:54.400catholics much more protestant than most other catholics he also says the same thing about jews
00:26:59.180an American. So he says, even if you maintain those other religious traditions, you largely
00:27:05.040adopt many Protestant understandings about those religions because you're an American. That's kind
00:27:10.800of what's expected at the end of the day when we come to assimilation. That's what we really mean0.98
00:27:15.520when we say assimilation, not just wearing a t-shirt for a college team. The melting pot and
00:27:21.440tomato soup concepts in different ways express American nationalism and portrayed a coherent
00:27:27.380American identity. In 1915, they were challenged by Horace Kalin's vigorously setting forth a
00:27:37.040salad image of America, which he labeled cultural pluralism. The name has stuck, but in fact,
00:27:44.060it was more of a theory of ethnic pluralism. For him, groups were based on ancestry, not culture.
00:27:51.380An often misquoted statement, he argued, men changed their clothes, their politics, and their
00:27:56.700wives, their religions, their philosophies to greater or lesser extent. They cannot change
00:28:03.160their grandfathers. An Irishman is always an Irishman. A Jew is always a Jew. An Irishman1.00
00:28:09.800and a Jew are facts of nature. Citizens and church members are artifacts of civilization.
00:28:17.460In short, people can change their culture. They cannot change their ethnicity. Biology
00:28:23.200is destiny. Identities are ancestrally determined, and these identities represent0.77
00:28:29.580permanent group distinctions. Immigration, according to Kalen, dissolved an earlier
00:28:35.020American nationality and changed America into a federation of nations, a democracy of nationalities.
00:28:40.980The model he saw for America and Europe were many nationalities coexisting within a framework of
00:28:46.380common civilization. Kalen's argument for biological determinism reflects the racial concept of
00:28:52.480national identity pervasive in American thinking in his time. His racist assumptions are not very
00:28:58.580different from the racism of images of pure Anglo-Saxon America, which he attacked. So here
00:29:04.920you have a man who believed that every part of identity was strictly biological, that there was
00:29:12.280no chance that anyone ever assimilates, that anyone ever changes. There are no Americans anymore
00:29:19.060because we had enough immigration that we had too many people from too many different places1.00
00:29:24.500and because no one can assimilate and no one can change ultimately that's just the hard truth like0.98
00:29:33.220once you have people from different places together the only thing to do is basically to
00:29:37.700balkanize is to say okay well we're going to be one set of people over there and we're going to
00:29:41.880be one set over people over there and yeah technically like we'll still have a government
00:29:45.060that we all share but like ultimately uh you know that there there is no assimilation there is no
00:29:51.240uh american identity it's just all these previous ethnic identities brought over to the united
00:29:57.880states that's his model his understanding and so basically you just need to have this
00:30:02.740multiculturalism right like and this is obviously in some ways what the left is calling for because
00:30:09.140they don't think they think the idea that asking a black man or asking an indian or asking an asian0.99
00:30:17.680person to act more like an anglo-protestant well that would be horrific right like they do they do0.79
00:30:24.060this whole thing about you know being asked to act white right like being asked to adopt the
00:30:29.780cultural norms of white people like being on time or doing math that's not me asserting that that's
00:30:35.840like literally what i think uh with the smithsonian listed as traits of white people so the idea that
00:30:42.600you would conform to this anglo culture to this white culture is forbidden right so in many ways
00:30:48.360this is what the left believes well you have to let each racial group kind of have its own uh0.58
00:30:53.880identity uh and that just then they'll stay separate from each other and you can't really
00:30:59.180change that you can't ask them to change that uh not because they can't in in the leftist view
00:31:04.640They don't have quite as hard of this racial identity where they say, oh, it's impossible for a black man to act like a white man.
00:31:10.900They just say it would be beneath them to be asked to do that.0.63
00:31:14.000It would be beneath an Indian to be asked to act like an Anglo-Protestant.0.96
00:31:17.520It would be beneath a person from Japan to ask them to adopt Anglo-Protestant norms, right?1.00
00:31:23.800Like that's the offensive part for them.0.99
00:31:26.400kalen's uh kalen's stress on the overpowering role of ancestry in shaping identity uh leaves
00:31:35.340ambiguous what he meant by cultural pluralism if people can change their religion language
00:31:41.300politics and philosophy cultural identity must be divorced from the unchanging ethnic or
00:31:47.280ancestral identity but then however it but then however is left the ancestral identity that kalen
00:31:54.580sees as permanent. In that sense, an Irishman or a Jew who changes his language, religion,
00:31:59.920philosophy, and politics is still an Irishman or a Jew. Kalen's contemporary admirers,
00:32:06.920Randolph Bourne, attempted to formulate a less extreme and more fluid critique of the melting
00:32:11.700pot and Anglo-conforming theories. He nonetheless still saw America in European terms, a cosmopolitan
00:32:19.700federation of national colonies of foreign cultures from whom, unlike Europe, the sting
00:32:25.560of devastating competition has been removed. The result would be an American nation, sorry,
00:32:32.480an American nationality, but, sorry, from the beginning here, the result would not be an0.69
00:32:37.880American nationality, but a trans nationality, a weaving back and forth with other lands and other
00:32:44.200threads of all sizes and colors. Again, this sounds a lot more like the leftist construction0.63
00:32:49.140ironically. However, the one group that the leftists would not, of course, give that option
00:32:54.600to would be Anglo-Protestants. In this version, it sounds much more like the leftist version where
00:33:02.200we're going to have these like unchangeable communities and it's going to be multicultural0.87
00:33:06.080and you just have to deal with that. That's the way it is. However, the one people who aren't1.00
00:33:10.420allowed to know that they have their own culture, that they are a people, that they are a separate
00:33:14.220nation would, of course, be the Anglo-Americans, the heritage Americans that ultimately were
00:33:19.880defining the country. And so you have this, you know, leftist construction where everybody else
00:33:25.080gets to have a culture in the multicultural milieu, but the Anglo-Americans don't. The0.79
00:33:31.640Anglo-Protestants do not. The ideas of Kalin and Bourne were a reaction against the popularity of0.79
00:33:41.600the two nationalist concepts of America. Very much on the defensive, Arthur Mann observed,
00:33:47.120Kalin proposed cultural pluralism as an alternative to both the melting pot concept
00:33:52.160and the doctrine of Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Kalin's ideas aroused some interest in intellectual
00:33:57.860circles, but had little impact on public attitudes and pervasive nationalism. Kalin was roundly
00:34:05.640denounced by establishment figures for advocating the balkanization of America. His supporters,
00:34:11.600Mann argues were of two sorts, Zionist and non-Jewish but philo-Semitic intellectuals
00:34:18.900fascinated by the ethnic diversity of American urban life. Many years later, Kaelin conceded
00:34:25.060his failure to have an impact in the early 20th century. Americans were determined to maintain
00:34:30.420an America that might eventually become a melting pot through ethnic intermarriage,0.73
00:34:34.860but would staunchly remain a tomato soup in its Anglo-Protestant cultural identity.0.84
00:34:39.860So very interestingly here, of course, you have two Jewish men providing these alternative options, right? You had the Anglo version early on, the Anglo conformity model. But then you have Zingwell, who is a Jewish man who proposed the melting pot and a much more radical melting pot that had been presented previously.0.88
00:35:01.680And then you had Kalen, who was interestingly presenting a model that is supported by Zionist and non-Jewish but philo-Semitic intellectuals because it preserved the idea of Jewish identity that didn't have to conform, right?
00:35:17.940Like you didn't have to worry about Jews losing their identity when they came to the United States because you're basically saying it's impossible for anyone to assimilate, not just Jewish people, but Irish people or German people or people from Norway.
00:35:30.140And so ultimately, since no one can assimilate, then all of these ethnicities stay intact, including a Jewish identity, which was very, very attractive to Zionist or Philo-Semitic academics, as Samuel Huntington lays out here.
00:35:45.820So we have the original formulation of the Anglo-conforming model, and then these two different versions brought forward.
00:35:55.340Theodore Roosevelt expressed the prevailing nationalist view then after initially endorsing
00:36:01.820Zengwill's melting pot he then questioned its relevance and embraced the tomato soup concept
00:36:07.240of American culture so at first Teddy Roosevelt you know sitting in a time of large upheaval
00:36:13.420where the American identity is shifting and he says well maybe we are a melting pot like maybe
00:36:19.240that is the way to do it so he kind of endorses Zengwill's new melting pot theory at first but
00:36:24.700ultimately he sees and agrees with others in America who are saying, you know what, actually
00:36:30.800that is not going to work. This new version of assimilation, which isn't assimilation at all,
00:36:36.780it's a creation of a new American identity, that is not going to work. That is not what the American
00:36:41.840people believe at this time. So he pivots back to the tomato soup concept, back to the Anglo
00:36:47.720conformity concept that had been the standard up until that point the crucible in which all the
00:36:54.800new types are melted into one he said was shaped in uh from 1776 to 1789 our nationality was
00:37:02.860definitely fixed in its essentials by the men of men of washington's day so this is really important
00:37:09.200okay a lot of people are going to tell you that the founders just believed in this infinite
00:37:15.500immigration, that America was just an idea, that America is not a nation. It's not a people. It's
00:37:21.840a set of principles, an idea. It's a system, right? And they'll claim that this is what our founders
00:37:28.920or our great presidents or great leaders believe. This is what America was. That is not true. That
00:37:34.600is not even approaching true. If you go back and look at what the early founders really believed,
00:37:39.880they believed in severely limiting citizenship and immigration. If you go back to the seven0.69
00:37:45.400the act of 1790 the immigration act of 1790 it explicitly says white men of good character
00:37:50.620that's who gets to immigrate to the united states benjamin franklin thought that we should only
00:37:54.940allow northern europeans into the united states like that's how radical the
00:38:00.920kind of the the level of restriction was for the founders so they understood
00:38:09.260that that was how they were going to allow America to grow. Now, you can agree with that.
00:38:16.660You can disagree with that. You can say that's far too extreme. America has become something
00:38:20.000else. That's fine. But you can't claim that that's what the founders believe. They did not believe
00:38:24.700that. They believe something very different, something that all of these establishment
00:38:29.540conservatives would say is radical, racist, white nationalists. That's exactly how they would0.65
00:38:34.760describe that if you explained it to them if you explain the founders actual beliefs on immigration
00:38:40.780national identity they would tell you that you look at john jay in federalist number two he says
00:38:45.560we're one nation speaking the same language descended from the same people sharing the
00:38:51.300same customs and traditions does that sound like a man who believes america is a melting pot of
00:38:57.640everyone now i think teddy roosevelt is a president that usually gets a lot of respect
00:39:03.980often from both sides you know left and right seem to like teddy roosevelt for one reason or another
00:39:08.580and teddy roosevelt here says well our identity was shaped between 1776 and 1789 he says yeah
00:39:16.000there's definitely like people from different places in europe coming over but that is the
00:39:20.760core of american identity it's shaped in 1776 to 1789 it was drawn out by the men of washington's
00:39:29.280day. It was established by them. It's not some nebulous thing. It's not some undefinable thing.
00:39:34.980It's not some set of principles or a system set up somewhere. This is what American identity is.
00:39:42.220American determination to maintain the essentials and the nationality manifested itself
00:39:49.000in immense efforts to Americanize immigrants before and after World War II.
00:39:53.280So it's not that there weren't any immigrants. It's not that Teddy Roosevelt didn't realize
00:39:57.500that we're having a lot of non-Anglo people coming into the country.1.00
00:40:02.500And he's trying to figure out, how do we deal with that fact?
00:40:05.560And his answer was, you need to make yourselves more like the guys from 1789.
00:40:11.700And so the plan was, up through World War I, to Americanize every immigrant,
00:40:18.020to work as hard as possible to make them American.
00:40:22.860Andrew Jackson is often decried for the idea that he drove Indians into reservations, which is not true.
00:40:32.600But what he did say was ultimately, look, I want to preserve the American people and have the American Indians have the opportunity to preserve their own way of life.
00:40:45.200He said, look, if you as an American Indian want to become an Anglo-American, you can.
00:40:51.860Like, obviously, again, not in the genetic sense, but you can become part of this nation.