If you’re wondering why I selected Dennis Prager as the example of a Fake Nationalist in tonight’s Darkstream, just read this paragraph from a column on “nationalism” he wrote in 2015.
In the United States, however, a national American identity has always been a major part of what it means to be an American. The three pillars of Americanism, constituting what I have called the “American Trinity” — are found on every American coin and banknote: “Liberty,” “In God We Trust” and “e pluribus unum.” The latter is Latin for “out of many, one.” Because America has always been a nation of immigrants, it has no ethnic identity. Therefore, unlike almost all other nations, America could not depend on an ethnic identity to keep its people together. In fact, if all Americans retained their ethnic identities, America would simply splinter. So a non-ethnic American national identity had to be forged and preserved.
Count the lies. America was not, is not, and could never be “a nation of immigrants”. The claim is as false for Americans as it is for the English, the Germans, or the Swedes. The British colonists did not emigrate to the American Indian nations of the New World. One might as reasonably declare that “Palestine is a nation of immigrants” and insist on referring to Israelis as “Jewish-Palestinians”.
Fake Nationalists rely on the same sort of wizardry that the New Atheists and Jordan Peterson utilize. They substitute “nation” for “state”, then declare that if you have the right piece of paper, that somehow eliminates every tie of blood, birth, and DNA that connects you to your actual nation. Of course, a Fake American is no more a genuine American than a fake woman is a genuine woman, no matter what the state-granted paperwork says.
The state does not define reality. The state does not define sex. The state does not define gravity. And the state does not define nationhood. It may defy these realities, but it will not do so forever.