Culture Wars

Ostrich with its’ head stuck in the sand.

Some of the most fascinating passages in the book Project 2025, are the references to being “woke” and the “culture wars.”
The authors clearly find the idea of America as “a melting pot,” extremely distasteful.
To them, it’s obvious that white male Northern European Americans should be in charge of everything.

One goal of Project 2025 is to erase many aspects of the modern world—trans people, books on race and climate change, consideration of sexual orientation—from society.
It’s as if Trump, and his MAGA cohorts, believe that they can make all of these ideas go away.

The 919-page book proposes some bizarre actions.
It wants NPR be stripped of Government funding.
It wants all discussions of identities (sexual and racial) to be deleted from laws, and government web sites.*
Project 2025 wants “psychologically destructive” books—ie, books that discuss “woke” subjects—to be removed from libraries and schools.
Furthermore, Project 2025 suggests that librarians, professors, and doctors, be reclassified as registered sex offenders, for trying to help trans children. 

Less than 1% of NPR’s funding comes from the Federal Government.
While the percentage is small, $445-$500 million is directed by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (another entity) to public TV and radio stations, under the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act.
Since Trump is in charge of the CPB board, he could mold the CPB into a right-wing group, just as he made himself head of the Kennedy Center. 

Page 20 of the Stop Project 2025 comic book points out that that the book is openly about white supremacy.

As I read Project 2025, I realized that its’ authors are more than just upset with Leftists and “wokeness.”
It’s as if they constantly hear The Left whispering into their ears that they are wrong and stupid, and they want this whispering to stop!
Kevin Roberts (President of the Heritage Foundation) remarks that “The Left does not believe that all men are created equal. They believe they are superior.” 

At the same time that Project 2025 wants the U.S. to discontinue DEI, it also wants the Government to load up on weapon systems, as well as build up Special Operation Forces.
Section Two of the book advocates accelerating the Sentinel system, the U.S. Space Force, and the U.S. Cyber Command.
On 3/21/25, the 47th President announced a new generation of fighter jets, the F-47.
(This one plane will cost as least $20 billion.)

Cover of Ralph Stone’s The Irreconcilables.

Nativism and fear of immigrants is nothing new in American society.
When going through a pile of inherited books, I came across a 1973 copy of Ralph Stone’s The Irreconcilables.
It’s an analysis on how16 nativist Senators defeated the Treaty of Versailles, and refused to authorize the League of Nations. 

Senator Reed (Missouri) fought the agreement because the majority of the countries making it did not “belong to the white race of men.”
Senator Borah (Idaho), feared that Great Britain would dominate the League.
Sherman (Illinois), feared that far too many League members would be Catholics.
The Irreconcilables gradually wore down 80 fellow Senators, and convinced them that a League of Nations would “do more harm than good.”

Poster for 2024’s Cabrini in which Christiana Dell’Anna played Mother Cabrini.

In 2024, a film called Cabrini was issued as a DVD, and briefly seen in theaters.
It’s about Mother Cabrini, the first U.S. citizen to be canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church.
However, it’s also about the fight between nativists (who despised Catholic immigrants as vermin), and Mother Cabrini who wanted immigrants to be given a chance at the American dream.
(Mother Cabrini became a U.S citizen in 1909.)
New York city officials tried very hard to ship her back to Italy.

At the beginning of the film (set in 1899) a dying Italian immigrant mother isn’t admitted to a New York hospital, because of her ethnicity.
Later on, one Italian immigrant child dies, and another is injured, when they work at low-paying jobs in a dangerous factory.
In another scene, Mother Cabrini is called a “guinea,” by a WASP businessman, on the streets of Manhattan.

Director Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, was set about one generation before Cabrini.
It’s also about New York nativists who despised Italian and Irish immigrants as “guineas” and “micks.”
It’s no surprise that Vice-President JD Vance completely misunderstood this film!
Vance revealed in a 2021 interview (with podcaster Jack Murphy) that he saw Gangs of New York as the story of criminal immigrant gangs.
Scorsese’s film is actually about criminal nativists persecuting immigrants.
(Read more about 2002’s Gangs of New York in my memorandum “The War on Immigrants.”)

Page 63 of the Stop Project 2025 comic book talks about proposed changes to the T-Visa, U-Visa, and H-2A Visa programs.

Although immigrants have long been our most industrious citizens, there’s also been a “glass ceiling” in terms of the U.S. Presidency.
Southern European candidates, in particular, have never been selected for any position higher than the Vice Presidency.

This glass ceiling (for male immigrants) has not existed in big business or in earning money.
The first American millionaire—a billionaire if his worth was figured in modern dollars—was French-American Stephen Girard, a shipowner and banker.
Girard lived from 1750 to 1831.
His only child died in infancy.
Therefore, he left the bulk of his wealth to the education and care of orphans.

Andrew Carnegie reading in a library (1913). Carnegie and Carnegie money built over 2,500 libraries.

Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919)—ranked as the second richest man in American history—was born in Scotland, and arrived in America at the age of 12.
Like Gerard, Carnegie eventually became a philanthropist.
He gave away $350 million dollars during his lifetime, and over 90% of his fortune, after his death.

Immigrants are more likely to be wealth-makers, than native born citizens, in every country in which this subject is studied.
According to an MIT study, American immigrants are 80% more likely to be successful entrepreneurs, than native-born Americans.
According to Fortune magazine, nearly 44% of the 2022 Fortune 500 list were founded by 1st or 2nd generation immigrants. 

Because the colonies were originally settled by the Virginia Company of London, and the Plymouth Company (also of London), some people believe that the U.S. was built by Northern European Christian men, and that everyone else should be second-class citizens.
Just because wealthy people in the South lived off the unrecompensed labor of black Americans for five generations, that’s hardly an argument.

*All references to Enola Gay (the bomber that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima) were removed from U.S. government web sites (because the paragraphs and captions used the word “gay”), as part of the initiative to eliminate DEI content.

The War on Immigrants

In the Martin Scorsese film Gangs of New York, Bill Cutting “The Butcher” (Daniel Day Lewis, center front) particularly hates Irish immigrants.

America has had a love-hate relationship with immigration ever since the French arrived in Canada, and the Virginia Company was founded (in 1606) to settle sections of the North American coast.
French Canada wanted the Ontario region to be more French, and the Virginia Company wanted the colonies to be predominately English.

I’ve discussed Americans resenting immigrants (while at the same time Big Business needing immigration).
However, I’ve not written an entire memorandum.
Like many third-generation Americans, I’ve enjoyed the “polite fiction” that we live in a “happy melting pot,” and that most Americans believe in “liberty and justice for all.”
Over the last few years, I’ve come to the realization that this may be a delusion.

Redman Toys issued action figures for 2002’s Gangs of New York.

Bill Cutting (Bill the Butcher) wore the red, white, and blue sash of the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party.

By necessity, the Americas were originally settled by men.
(Of the first 18 Puritan wives who sailed on the Mayflower, 13 died during the first winter.)
During the early years of settlement, many men developed romantic partnerships with indigenous women.
However, the TPTB back in Europe frowned upon these relationships.
(My 2/8/24 memorandum: “Tobacco Wives and King’s Daughter” deals with how the French, and British, governments dealt with the issue of not enough “white” women.)

Later, the Founding Fathers made disparaging remarks about non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants.
Men of British heritage (like Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson), worried as Anglo-Saxon families journeyed back to the safety of Britain, while rude Germans and unintelligible Swedes kept arriving.
Then, as now, the Founders were displeased with the quality of the immigrants.
It wasn’t enough that newcomers be from the British Isles; the Irish were despised, about as much as the Germans. 

The Redman Toys “The Butcher” action figure (Gangs of New York) came complete with extra weapons, and a stand with the Know-Nothing Party banner that read “Native Americans, Beware of Foreign Influence,” (with the “Ns” reversed).

As a woman of Southern Italian descent, this hatred is difficult to understand.
How are Brits able to dislike a people that looks, and acts, so similarly?
However, there’s a long history of Anglo-Saxons holding the Irish in contempt.
Just as ambitious Southern Italians traveled up to Lombardy, to find work after WWII, ambitious Irish men and women traveled to Britain, and the U.S., to “better themselves.”
However, while they did find jobs, Irish people didn’t find acceptance, especially at first.

The book Jane Austen’s England, by Roy and Lesley Adkins, makes clear that the Irish poor were considered the lowest of the low in England.
(The Adkins book covers the period from 1775-1817.)
In describing his fellow countrymen, teacher Thomas Finnegan said:

The [Irish] children were most depraved; they are exposed to every species of vice. . . and as for the parents, they are very dissolute, generally; on Sundays particularly they take their children with them to public houses.

1881 British cartoon showing a “Irish-American Dynamite Skunk” caged, in a London zoo.

When Irish Immigrants arrived in America, they were greeted with “No Irish Need Apply” signs in shop windows, and in newspaper advertisements.

Like other immigrants, the Irish were given the lowest-paying, dangerous, and most menial jobs.
After a few generations, however, the Irish were forgiven for not being Anglo-Saxon.

It’s no accident that—with the exceptions of Van Buren (Netherlands), Eisenhower (Germany), and Trump (Germany and Scotland)—all U.S. Presidents have had strong Anglo-Saxon, and/or Irish roots, on at least one side of their family trees.
(Scotland is only partially Anglo-Saxon.)
In nearly 250 years, there have been no primarily Italian, French, Greek, Slavic, Jewish, Hispanic, or Asian U.S. Presidents.
President Obama’s father was born in Kenya; ancestors on his maternal side were mostly Northern European and lived in this country since the early 1600s (earlier than the Mayflower).

American financier Stephen Girard was born in Bordeaux, France.

He bequeathed his entire fortune to social welfare institutions.

This portrait hangs in the U.S. Treasury Department, and is by James Reid Lambdin.

While not having Anglo ancestors is detrimental to being elected President, this “hardship” has not been as big a barrier to making money.
From the beginnings, recent immigrants have built fortunes faster than other Americans.
The first American millionaire was a Frenchman named Stephen Girard (1750-1831).
Today, one of the richest persons is Elon Musk, born in South Africa.
Studies attempt to analyze why entrepreneurship is so much stronger among first-generation Americans, than it is among Americans with long histories on American soil.

Seventeen Chinese men were lynched during the Los Angeles Massacre of 1871.
The Columbus Day holiday (1891) was a direct result of eleven dark-skinned Sicilian immigrants being lynched in New Orleans.
While these stories are horrific, we should remember that at least 6,400 African-American kidnapped immigrants—a group that didn’t arrive willingly—were lynched in the U.S., since the Civil War.
(”There Have Been More than 6,400 Lynchings Since the End of the Civil War, New Study Reveals” by Anagha Srikanth, 6/16/2020, The Hill.)
Lynching creates fear, and fear is a method of keeping the underclasses down.

Jane Lynch, and Jim Gaffigan, appeared on Finding Your Roots.

There’s little about the war against immigrants in grade school and high school textbooks.
Instead, we learn bits and pieces in college-level history courses, on Finding Your Roots (PBS), or the podcast “Untextbooked.”

I recently discovered a series of Chicago Tribune columns—one entitled ”Many Sicilians Are Here; Difficult to Assimilate”—in which anthropologist George A. Dorsey (1868-1931) expressed theories about Sicilian-Americans that are similar to what Trump is saying about current immigrants.
In one 6/4/1910 column, Dorsey said that Sicilians make zero contributions to American society, because Sicily is a land of “mediocre genius.”
He goes on to say that many Sicilian immigrants are criminals and Sicilian women are uneducable.
(One passage describes a Palermo woman drawing a knife on a physician.)

Statistics prove that immigrants are 30% less likely to commit crimes than home-grown criminals.
However, no one cares about statistics.
Trump signed a Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) bill on 1/20/2021, giving an estimated 200,000 Venezuelan exiles protection from deportation, but no one cares about that either.
(Link to Politico article “Trump grants Venezuelans Temporary Legal Status on His Way Out,” 1/19/21, by Sabrina Rodriquez.)

The fact remains that it isn’t just American society that’s built on immigration.
It’s human society.
Only a small number of us have sent our DNA to Ancestry, or 23 and Me.
Yet, so far, 10% of Southern “white” Americans are shown to have some Black ancestry.
Before Great Britain welcomed immigrants from Africa and Asia, England itself was a blend of Anglo-Saxons, Normans, Celts, and Scandinavians.
(As Dorothy L. Sayers put it, “the English are mongrels, and . . . they pride themselves upon being mongrels.”)
Each of us is a blend, even if we’re 100% Northern European, 100% Southern European, Asian, Jewish, Black, or any other type of person.

In Quatermass and the Pit, many Londoners descend from humans “altered” by insect-like Martians (Dr. Quatermass and Barbara Judd, center and right), while a few haven't been altered (Dr. Roney, left).*

An alien space ship is dug up, activates the altered humans, and chaos results!

Borders around countries aren’t solid.
Every region of the world has ethnic divisions.
Some Mexican-Americans lived on the same land since the 1700’s.
However, now that land isn’t part of Mexico; it’s part of the USA.
Ukrainians know themselves as a separate ethnic grouping, but Putin insists that Ukrainians are Russians.
Italy didn’t become a separate Italianate country until 1861.
(Giuseppe Garibaldi, who unified Italy, had hoped to make Nice—his birthplace—part of Italy, but he failed.)
It’s all a crap shoot whether you call yourself—Italian or French, Mexican or American, German or Slavic, Ukrainian or Russian, white or Black. Wars, social constructs, or forgetting your history, may place you on the “wrong side” of a divide.

*In 1967’s Quatermass and the Pit, Andrew Keir was Dr. Quatermass; James Donald was Dr. Roney; and Barbara Shelley was Barbara Judd (shown above, wearing the remnants of an EEG-like device that read her brain waves).