The
Demise of American Citizenship
By Steve McCann www.americanthinker.com
From 1860 to 2000, in the largest
legal migration in human history, over 61 million immigrants arrived in the United
States. They were not only escaping poverty and oppression, but they were
eager to assimilate and attain the most sought-after national status in the
world: American citizenship. Today in the 21st century, American citizenship
and its one-of-a-kind written contract with the central government, the
Constitution with its Bill of Rights, is under relentless assault by the
nation’s governing establishment and teetering on the edge of
meaninglessness.
No nation can maintain its status as
a nation without secure and identifiable borders. Citizenship means
nothing if untold millions of illegal immigrants openly defy the laws without
consequence. It is estimated that 22 million illegals resided in the United States
as of 2018. Responding to an explicit invitation from the Biden
administration, another 2+ million have walked unchallenged across the
border in the past 18 months.
These so-called undocumented
immigrants are becoming legally indistinguishable from citizens as they openly
reside in 500 sanctuary jurisdictions, receive welfare,
education and medical care, are granted drivers licenses, and given tuition
breaks at public universities as they, not legal immigrants or American
citizens, are exempt from federal immigration, health and travel laws.
The nation’s motto “E Pluribus Unum”
(“Out of many, One”) has been deliberately and maliciously replaced with
degenerate tribalism. The current iteration of the ruling class and their
radical left-wing allies have relentlessly promoted the concept that individual
citizens do not owe their allegiance to the United States but instead owe their
allegiance to racial or ethnic groups that look like them or to those that
profess certain sexual proclivities or to those that wallow in corrosive
anti-Americanism.
This elitist and progressive
heterodoxy aspires to destroy statues, rename streets, buildings and military
installations, re-write and recast American history, and erase the art and
architecture that does not reflect either their globalist views or their
narcissistic racial, ethnic, sexual, or class-structured
self-gratification. Being a “woke” citizen of the world is far more
important than being a citizen of the United States.
The vast bulk of the American elites and their
status-seeking hangers-on see nothing exceptional in America, either past or
present. Turning their backs on their American citizenship while
denigrating it, these apostates are deliberately attempting to fuel shame among
the citizenry over what they claim to be the iniquitous origins and traditions
of America. Regrettably, they have succeeded in perhaps permanently undermining the
distinctiveness and unique privileges of American citizenship which is the glue
that has held this society together for over two hundred years.
After the blatant and
unconstitutional voting law changes that allowed the Democrat party and the
ruling elites to fraudulently win the 2020 presidential election, one of the
basic birthrights of American citizenship, voting in fair and free elections,
has been permanently imperiled.
Millions of mail-in ballots with no security
controls were indiscriminately distributed and unaccounted for throughout the
length and breadth of the country, at least 4-8 million ballots were illegally
“harvested” by paid campaign workers, and per the
documentary film “2000 Mules” hundreds of thousands of ballots were feloniously
“stuffed” into innumerable drop-off boxes.
The denials of election fraud and
subsequent cover-ups by the media and the ruling class ring hollow and
insincere as they, in essence, have told the American citizens that they have
little or no say in who is chosen to run or how their leaders are elected.
The first seven words of the U.S.
Constitution are: “We the people of the United States.” It is a
document by the American citizens for the American citizens. Not only can
the citizenry no longer rely on open and honest elections to choose the
president and members of Congress, the judiciary and bureaucracy have
unconstitutionally evolved into uncontrolled powers unto themselves.
Activist federal judges habitually
overturn legislation they find contrary to their left-wing political beliefs
and willfully impose their cultural beliefs on American society. They do
so in the knowledge that there will be no repercussions from their political
allies in the other two branches of government nor do they care that they are
cancelling the votes of untold millions of American citizens.
Meanwhile, in the swamp of
Washington, D.C. the bureaucratic, administrative, and regulatory state has
become so vast, powerful, and unaccountable that desk-bound apparatchiks can
issue life-altering edicts that have the force of law, they can harass entrepreneurs,
and they can issue regulations that can drive a business or an American citizen
into bankruptcy. All without any oversight or constraint by those the
American citizens are supposedly electing and who are purposefully derelict in
their duties.
Among the most important and unique
aspects of American citizenship are the written guarantees of rights as
enumerated in the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Four of these
amendments (the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth) are devoted to making certain
that the legal process is fair and protects the citizens from injustice.
Another amendment, the fourth, limits the ability of the government to conduct
warrantless searches and seizures. Thus, five of the ten amendments in
the Bill of Rights focus on the citizen’s right to fair and impartial justice.
Yet over the past two decades, the
ruling class, in conjunction with their fellow-travelers in the state and
federal judiciary, has systematically ignored these enumerated rights of
American citizenship and created a two-tier system of justice. Their
political allies and followers as well as politically correct felons and
criminals are treated leniently or, in many cases not prosecuted, while their
political adversaries and their followers as well as non-politically correct
felons and criminals are hounded and punitively prosecuted.
The disproportionally harsh judicial
treatment of the non-violent protestors on January 6, 2021, as compared to the
lack of prosecution and leniency shown the de facto allies of the ruling class
who throughout the spring and summer of 2020 sowed death, destruction, looting
and arson, confirms that not all American citizens are equal under the
law.
It is no longer the Constitution but
the ruling class that defines what encompasses the rights and privileges of
American citizenship. All our constitutional rights, including freedom of
speech and the unalienable right of self-defense, are increasingly optional and
subject to the whims and fiats of the elected and unelected politically correct
and self-righteous elites and bureaucrats.
This nation is unraveling,
transforming American citizens into mere residents of a vast stretch of land
between the borders of Canada and Mexico.
The most meaningful day in my life
occurred in 1956 when as a boy of eleven or twelve I became a citizen of the
United States. Little did I know that in my lifetime I would see the
descent of American citizenship into near meaninglessness. A collapse
that came about internally and was not directly precipitated by the nation’s
foreign adversaries.
Unfortunately, the bulk of Americans
obliviously believe that American citizenship remains what it has always been;
in reality, it is rapidly disappearing.
