There is a curious feature of the modern “heritage” movement: its loudest champions speak as though ancestry were a notarized form of sovereignty, a private deed to the nation written in blood instead of law. They do not argue policy; they assert prior claim — citizenship not as covenant, but as inheritance. In their telling, America is not a republic one joins, but a homestead one inherits, and the rest of us are merely boarders grateful for the privilege of still being allowed to occupy the guest room.

What they call patriotism is simply genealogy with delusions of jurisdiction. It is a soft aristocracy that mistakes residence for title and memory for possession. Their vocabulary gives them away: our heritage, our country, our birthright. When they say “real Americans,” they do not mean participants in a common civic project — they mean first heirs to a family estate.

The spectacle would be comical if it did not come packaged as a theory of legitimacy. Because the claim hiding beneath the bunting is not cultural pride; it is dominion — the belief that some Americans are “from” the nation in a way others merely arrive in it. They are not defending history. They are defending exclusivity: a velvet eviction notice wrapped in nostalgia.

I am not speaking in abstractions. I say this from a place of inconvenient intimacy with the past. My 12th great-grandfather was Degory Priest — a man who arrived at Plymouth in the ragged aftermath of the crossing, whose daughter Mary Priest was born in Holland in 1613 and died in the Massachusetts Bay settlements in 1689. His wife, Sarah Allerton (born 8 November 1599), is recorded among the names that made that first, terrible winter less impossible. A few branches over, my 10th great-grandfather, John Harris (1588–1638), is one of the early patrons of Jamestown. These are not anonymous colonists in a generalized myth; they are the receipts in the margin of the story the “heritage” crowd pretends to own.

 Beyond those anchors are more than a hundred other immigrant forebears we’ve identified — one hundred and thirteen distinct arrivals to the New World who populate the tender scaffolding of early Massachusetts and Virginia. The family tree in my drawer stretches backward past the comfortable myth of 1620 and into centuries of English lineages other people now rehearse as costume. The deeper branches run through New England founders, Virginia patrons, and a lattice of Anglo-Scottish gentry that would be called aristocracy in another register.

So, if the argument is to be framed in the language of blood and possession, let us at least be candid about whose blood we are talking about. I have the literal kind on paper. I possess the receipts. And having them does not thrill me; it steadies me. It is the reason I can say, with absolute clarity, that the invocation of heritage as title is not a preservation of memory but an attempted re-erection of private sovereignty in public life.

The irony is that if ancestry truly conferred political entitlement, I would have standing to treat the nation as personal inheritance. If the right’s mythology were correct — that legitimacy flows through bloodline — then I would not be a participant in the republic. I would be its landlord. Under their own rules, I should be the one issuing visitation rights.

And yet: I reject the premise.

Because the people who actually descend from those first colonial foundations understand something the costume-heritage movement does not — that the only thing the early settlements were trying to become was something other than a hereditary order. The arc is bent away from the bloodline by necessity: disease does not respect pedigree, winter does not care about ancestry, and civic life cannot endure if hoarded like heirloom silver.

That is the quietly devastating truth:  the people who could claim hereditary legitimacy are the ones who decline to do so — while those with no such claim demand it the loudest.

Heritage, in their hands, is not remembrance.

It is cosplay dominion.

What the “heritage” movement is performing is not continuity but theft. The movement is not protecting a legacy — it is stealing one. It drapes itself in a past it never carried, inherited, or paid the cost of. It claims ownership of a memory that is not its own and then weaponizes it against the very political order those settlers bled to create.

They speak as though they are restoring something ancient and sacred — when what they are restoring is the one thing the earliest colonists had already begun to bury: the idea that legitimacy can be hoarded through lineage. Plymouth turned survival into a covenant; Jamestown turned a settlement into governance. Both were messy, flawed, and often brutal — but both moved forward, away from blood-right jurisdiction and toward self-rule. The modern heritage crusade is not an honoring of origins. It is a rollback of their achievement.

What they are trying to resurrect was already discredited by the people they pretend to descend from.

It is a counterfeit inheritance draped over an empty chest.

A republic has no landlord. That is the point of the form. It cancels the presumption that birth conveys jurisdiction. “The people” are not the heirs of a private estate; they are the authors of the state itself. The only title to this country is participation — contribution, consent, stewardship — not ancestry.

Heritage politics inverts that order. It treats citizenship as a lease granted by those who believe they arrived first, as though the Republic were merely the administrative wing of a family holding. But a nation is not an heirloom. A nation is a covenant, one that is continually ratified by those living within it, not embalmed by those nostalgic for a past they never occupied.

This misappropriation is where the scam collapses: if lineage truly granted dominion, democracy would be a breach of contract.

But if democracy is legitimate, lineage confers nothing.

The Republic does not care who your grandfather was.

Only monarchies do.

So, the irony lands where they never look for it: the only people in this country who could plausibly claim a blood-right to its founding are the very ones who reject the concept — because we understand what was built here was meant to replace dominion, not disguise it. We do not brandish lineage because we know a republic is not an heirloom — and because the minute ancestry becomes authority, self-government ceases to exist.

It is not the founders' descendants who are trying to turn America into private property. It is the descendants of no one in particular — those who arrived far later, stripped of imagination and terrified of equality, draping themselves in borrowed memory like a second-hand coronation robe. They chant “heritage” not because they possess it, but because they rent it as camouflage for hierarchy.

And so, I will state this plainly: if heritage truly conferred sovereignty, I would outrank every one of them.

And I am telling them no.

I am not here to reclaim a throne.

I am here to deny them one.

~ Dunneagin

PS If you enjoyed this chapter of our national chaos chronicles, you’ll love the eBooks — a curated archive of America’s ongoing attempt to govern itself while on fire.

Collected volumes are available on Kindle (Trump’s Big Top: How Politics Became a 3-Ring Circus) and Gumroad (The Liar’s Guide to Autocracy & Mr. Dunneagin Speaks, Vol. 2). 

There is a curious feature of the modern “heritage” movement: its loudest champions speak as though ancestry were a notarized form of sovereignty, a private deed to the nation written in blood instead of law. They do not argue policy; they assert prior claim — citizenship not as covenant, but as inheritance. In their telling, America is not a republic one joins, but a homestead one inherits, and the rest of us are merely boarders grateful for the privilege of still being allowed to occupy the guest room.

What they call patriotism is simply genealogy with delusions of jurisdiction. It is a soft aristocracy that mistakes residence for title and memory for possession. Their vocabulary gives them away: our heritage, our country, our birthright. When they say “real Americans,” they do not mean participants in a common civic project — they mean first heirs to a family estate.

The spectacle would be comical if it did not come packaged as a theory of legitimacy. Because the claim hiding beneath the bunting is not cultural pride; it is dominion — the belief that some Americans are “from” the nation in a way others merely arrive in it. They are not defending history. They are defending exclusivity: a velvet eviction notice wrapped in nostalgia.

I am not speaking in abstractions. I say this from a place of inconvenient intimacy with the past. My 12th great-grandfather was Degory Priest — a man who arrived at Plymouth in the ragged aftermath of the crossing, whose daughter Mary Priest was born in Holland in 1613 and died in the Massachusetts Bay settlements in 1689. His wife, Sarah Allerton (born 8 November 1599), is recorded among the names that made that first, terrible winter less impossible. A few branches over, my 10th great-grandfather, John Harris (1588–1638), is one of the early patrons of Jamestown. These are not anonymous colonists in a generalized myth; they are the receipts in the margin of the story the “heritage” crowd pretends to own.

 Beyond those anchors are more than a hundred other immigrant forebears we’ve identified — one hundred and thirteen distinct arrivals to the New World who populate the tender scaffolding of early Massachusetts and Virginia. The family tree in my drawer stretches backward past the comfortable myth of 1620 and into centuries of English lineages other people now rehearse as costume. The deeper branches run through New England founders, Virginia patrons, and a lattice of Anglo-Scottish gentry that would be called aristocracy in another register.

So, if the argument is to be framed in the language of blood and possession, let us at least be candid about whose blood we are talking about. I have the literal kind on paper. I possess the receipts. And having them does not thrill me; it steadies me. It is the reason I can say, with absolute clarity, that the invocation of heritage as title is not a preservation of memory but an attempted re-erection of private sovereignty in public life.

The irony is that if ancestry truly conferred political entitlement, I would have standing to treat the nation as personal inheritance. If the right’s mythology were correct — that legitimacy flows through bloodline — then I would not be a participant in the republic. I would be its landlord. Under their own rules, I should be the one issuing visitation rights.

And yet: I reject the premise.

Because the people who actually descend from those first colonial foundations understand something the costume-heritage movement does not — that the only thing the early settlements were trying to become was something other than a hereditary order. The arc is bent away from the bloodline by necessity: disease does not respect pedigree, winter does not care about ancestry, and civic life cannot endure if hoarded like heirloom silver.

That is the quietly devastating truth:  the people who could claim hereditary legitimacy are the ones who decline to do so — while those with no such claim demand it the loudest.

Heritage, in their hands, is not remembrance.

It is cosplay dominion.

What the “heritage” movement is performing is not continuity but theft. The movement is not protecting a legacy — it is stealing one. It drapes itself in a past it never carried, inherited, or paid the cost of. It claims ownership of a memory that is not its own and then weaponizes it against the very political order those settlers bled to create.

They speak as though they are restoring something ancient and sacred — when what they are restoring is the one thing the earliest colonists had already begun to bury: the idea that legitimacy can be hoarded through lineage. Plymouth turned survival into a covenant; Jamestown turned a settlement into governance. Both were messy, flawed, and often brutal — but both moved forward, away from blood-right jurisdiction and toward self-rule. The modern heritage crusade is not an honoring of origins. It is a rollback of their achievement.

What they are trying to resurrect was already discredited by the people they pretend to descend from.

It is a counterfeit inheritance draped over an empty chest.

A republic has no landlord. That is the point of the form. It cancels the presumption that birth conveys jurisdiction. “The people” are not the heirs of a private estate; they are the authors of the state itself. The only title to this country is participation — contribution, consent, stewardship — not ancestry.

Heritage politics inverts that order. It treats citizenship as a lease granted by those who believe they arrived first, as though the Republic were merely the administrative wing of a family holding. But a nation is not an heirloom. A nation is a covenant, one that is continually ratified by those living within it, not embalmed by those nostalgic for a past they never occupied.

This misappropriation is where the scam collapses: if lineage truly granted dominion, democracy would be a breach of contract.

But if democracy is legitimate, lineage confers nothing.

The Republic does not care who your grandfather was.

Only monarchies do.

So, the irony lands where they never look for it: the only people in this country who could plausibly claim a blood-right to its founding are the very ones who reject the concept — because we understand what was built here was meant to replace dominion, not disguise it. We do not brandish lineage because we know a republic is not an heirloom — and because the minute ancestry becomes authority, self-government ceases to exist.

It is not the founders' descendants who are trying to turn America into private property. It is the descendants of no one in particular — those who arrived far later, stripped of imagination and terrified of equality, draping themselves in borrowed memory like a second-hand coronation robe. They chant “heritage” not because they possess it, but because they rent it as camouflage for hierarchy.

And so, I will state this plainly: if heritage truly conferred sovereignty, I would outrank every one of them.

And I am telling them no.

I am not here to reclaim a throne.

I am here to deny them one.

~ Dunneagin

PS If you enjoyed this chapter of our national chaos chronicles, you’ll love the eBooks — a curated archive of America’s ongoing attempt to govern itself while on fire.

Collected volumes are available on Kindle (Trump’s Big Top: How Politics Became a 3-Ring Circus) and Gumroad (The Liar’s Guide to Autocracy & Mr. Dunneagin Speaks, Vol. 2).