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petite6
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Trump Calls Diversity a Threat. For Our Founders, It Was American.
10/22/25 11:34 AM




By Leighton Woodhouse
Mr. Woodhouse is a documentary filmmaker and the author of the newsletter Social Studies.
In 1764, perhaps 200 largely Irish settlers from Pennsylvania’s back country rode to Philadelphia to confront a government they despised. The angry country folk, who had already slaughtered a group of peaceful Indians in their outrage, blamed the English Quakers who had long run the colony for the attacks they had endured in previous years from Indian raiding parties. Expecting mob violence, many of the Quakers abandoned the pacifism they were famous for and picked up muskets. The colony was spared from potential civil war only by the diplomacy of Benjamin Franklin.
Instead, a war of pamphlets ramped up, one that had been giving voice to the toxic stew of grievances held by the wide mix of ethnic and religious groups in the middle colonies.
There were pamphlets that accused the Quakers of taking secret satisfaction in the slaughter of Irish and German settler families at the hands of the Indians, and that called for Quakerism to be “extirpated from the face of the whole earth.” In the reverse direction, Irish Ulster Presbyterians were described as “Ulceration” “Piss-brute-tarians.” Franklin himself referred to the Irish settlers as “Christian white savages” and Germans as “Palatine boors” who refused to assimilate or learn English.
This was the state of relations between European settlers on the brink of the American Revolution. It’s a history that is inconvenient to the latest ideological project of the nativist right.
True Americans, proponents of this emerging patriotic mythology believe, are the cultural descendants of founders who were united by a shared system of values and folkways even more than by an Enlightenment political creed of equality, liberty and democracy. Those founders were Protestant, largely English-speaking, Northwestern Europeans. Those who can trace their bloodlines to that group, which one essay describes as a “founding ethnicity,” are, in some spiritual sense, deemed more American than those who cannot. And the dilution of that pure American stock by mass immigration has made the country less culturally unified.
It’s a sentiment that’s been warmly welcomed in the Trump administration.


https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/opinion/trump-diversity-culture-founders.html


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* Trump Calls Diversity a Threat. For Our Founders, It Was American.
petite6
10/22/25 11:34 AM

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