An Editor’s Note before we begin: This recording presents two connected pieces — “The Inheritance They Wish They Had” followed by “The Heritage I Actually Have.” Together, they examine the stories we tell about where we come from, and the truths that history ultimately insists upon. These two essays belong together. First, the fantasy; then, the facts. Let’s begin.

Thank you for listening.

And now: “The Inheritance They Wish They Had: A Republic’s Real Heirs vs. Its Imitators.”

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.

🎧 Listen to the narrated edition of: The Real Heirs of the Republic: Heritage, Myth, and the Power We Inherit (12 minutes, 54 seconds).

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 bent away from bloodline by necessity: disease does not respect pedigree, winter does not care about ancestry, and civic life cannot endure if it is 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 — they are stealing one. They drape themselves in a past they never carried, inherited, or paid the cost of. They claim ownership of a memory that is not theirs and then weaponize 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.

And now, The Heritage I Actually Have.... 

When I told Gareth Jones — a Welshman with that glint of pride every Jones carries — that I had no idea how far back my lineage went, I was telling the truth. At the time, the idea of tracing the family past Wales’s green ridges felt absurd. I had consulting meetings to run, compliance memos to write, and dinner bills to sign. But Gareth was the sort who could turn genealogy into an act of diplomacy. “You never know,” he said, “your Jones might be one of ours.”

Decades later, with five thousand names sitting obediently inside an Ancestry.com research file, it turns out he was right — spectacularly so.

The Welsh thread in my ancestry runs clear through the oldest parish records of Glamorgan and Carmarthenshire, but it doesn’t stop there. It plunges straight into the deep strata of Welsh legend and law. The earliest figure on record isn’t a farmhand or parish clerk; it’s Rhodri Mawr ap Merfyn, Rhodri the Great, who ruled Gwynedd from 844 to 878 CE and forged the first truly national Wales. His son, Anarawd ap Rhodri, carried the line into the next century, dying around 916 CE, while another son, Cadell, became the ancestor of the southern princes of Deheubarth. Out of that southern branch came Hywel Dda ap Cadell — Hywel the Good — whose legal code around 940 CE bound a fractious country into something like civility.

From there, the tree in my file veers, as all Welsh trees eventually do, into poetry and warfare. Owain ap Hywel defended Dyfed from Norse raids in the late tenth century; Gruffudd ap Cynan reclaimed Gwynedd from the Danes in 1094; Owain Gwynedd ap Gruffudd, ruling until 1170, declared himself Prince of Wales long before the English crown learned the phrase.  After them come centuries of Joneses, Davieses, and Robertses who left their mountain parishes for English markets, then for American ports, until the line surfaces again in the paper trail of the New World — men and women who swapped chapels for meetinghouses and law codes for constitutions.

So yes: I now know how far back my Jones lineage goes — to kings, lawmakers, and a people who measured nobility not by conquest but by stubborn endurance.

It’s an inheritance that can’t be traded on. No one offers consulting contracts to the descendants of Hywel Dda. But it’s an inheritance that matters, particularly in a nation currently choking on counterfeit heritage. Every MAGA demagogue now parades as a constitutional heir, every plutocrat as a Founding Father reborn.  The loudest patriots claim ancestry not to service but to sanctity, mistaking lineage for license.

Mine, at least, comes with receipts. Rhodri’s line held power by consensus more than coercion; Hywel Dda’s laws placed women, tenants, and even poets within the bounds of justice; Owain Gwynedd fought for a sovereignty rooted in land and language rather than dominion.  Their Wales was no paradise — but it was an early rehearsal for the democratic idea that government draws legitimacy from the governed.

That is what I like to tell Gareth now, when we exchange the occasional note across the Atlantic. He still lives in Spain; I live just north of Washington, D.C. We both answer to Jones, a name so common in Wales it might as well mean citizen.  In that sense, the lineage is the argument: that democracy isn’t an invention of 1776, but a long, uneven apprenticeship in belonging.

When Americans talk about heritage today, they mean marble and myth — the Founders, the flag, the filtered memory of perfection.  But the real heritage, the one worth keeping, lies in those who wrote laws rather than slogans, who governed through consent rather than grievance.  Mine begins in ninth-century Wales, but its moral coordinates are universal: power restrained by justice, pride moderated by decency, and identity grounded not in bloodlines but in the shared work of keeping a people free.

So, the next time someone in a red MAGA cap insists he’s defending the heritage of the nation, I’ll think of Hywel the Good — a Welsh king who believed the rule of law was better than the rule of men — and I’ll smile.  Because I already have the heritage they wish they had.

~ Dunneagin

An Editor’s Note before we begin: This recording presents two connected pieces — “The Inheritance They Wish They Had” followed by “The Heritage I Actually Have.” Together, they examine the stories we tell about where we come from, and the truths that history ultimately insists upon. These two essays belong together. First, the fantasy; then, the facts. Let’s begin.

Thank you for listening.

And now: “The Inheritance They Wish They Had: A Republic’s Real Heirs vs. Its Imitators.”

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.

🎧 Listen to the narrated edition of: The Real Heirs of the Republic: Heritage, Myth, and the Power We Inherit (12 minutes, 54 seconds).

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 bent away from bloodline by necessity: disease does not respect pedigree, winter does not care about ancestry, and civic life cannot endure if it is 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 — they are stealing one. They drape themselves in a past they never carried, inherited, or paid the cost of. They claim ownership of a memory that is not theirs and then weaponize 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.

And now, The Heritage I Actually Have.... 

When I told Gareth Jones — a Welshman with that glint of pride every Jones carries — that I had no idea how far back my lineage went, I was telling the truth. At the time, the idea of tracing the family past Wales’s green ridges felt absurd. I had consulting meetings to run, compliance memos to write, and dinner bills to sign. But Gareth was the sort who could turn genealogy into an act of diplomacy. “You never know,” he said, “your Jones might be one of ours.”

Decades later, with five thousand names sitting obediently inside an Ancestry.com research file, it turns out he was right — spectacularly so.

The Welsh thread in my ancestry runs clear through the oldest parish records of Glamorgan and Carmarthenshire, but it doesn’t stop there. It plunges straight into the deep strata of Welsh legend and law. The earliest figure on record isn’t a farmhand or parish clerk; it’s Rhodri Mawr ap Merfyn, Rhodri the Great, who ruled Gwynedd from 844 to 878 CE and forged the first truly national Wales. His son, Anarawd ap Rhodri, carried the line into the next century, dying around 916 CE, while another son, Cadell, became the ancestor of the southern princes of Deheubarth. Out of that southern branch came Hywel Dda ap Cadell — Hywel the Good — whose legal code around 940 CE bound a fractious country into something like civility.

From there, the tree in my file veers, as all Welsh trees eventually do, into poetry and warfare. Owain ap Hywel defended Dyfed from Norse raids in the late tenth century; Gruffudd ap Cynan reclaimed Gwynedd from the Danes in 1094; Owain Gwynedd ap Gruffudd, ruling until 1170, declared himself Prince of Wales long before the English crown learned the phrase.  After them come centuries of Joneses, Davieses, and Robertses who left their mountain parishes for English markets, then for American ports, until the line surfaces again in the paper trail of the New World — men and women who swapped chapels for meetinghouses and law codes for constitutions.

So yes: I now know how far back my Jones lineage goes — to kings, lawmakers, and a people who measured nobility not by conquest but by stubborn endurance.

It’s an inheritance that can’t be traded on. No one offers consulting contracts to the descendants of Hywel Dda. But it’s an inheritance that matters, particularly in a nation currently choking on counterfeit heritage. Every MAGA demagogue now parades as a constitutional heir, every plutocrat as a Founding Father reborn.  The loudest patriots claim ancestry not to service but to sanctity, mistaking lineage for license.

Mine, at least, comes with receipts. Rhodri’s line held power by consensus more than coercion; Hywel Dda’s laws placed women, tenants, and even poets within the bounds of justice; Owain Gwynedd fought for a sovereignty rooted in land and language rather than dominion.  Their Wales was no paradise — but it was an early rehearsal for the democratic idea that government draws legitimacy from the governed.

That is what I like to tell Gareth now, when we exchange the occasional note across the Atlantic. He still lives in Spain; I live just north of Washington, D.C. We both answer to Jones, a name so common in Wales it might as well mean citizen.  In that sense, the lineage is the argument: that democracy isn’t an invention of 1776, but a long, uneven apprenticeship in belonging.

When Americans talk about heritage today, they mean marble and myth — the Founders, the flag, the filtered memory of perfection.  But the real heritage, the one worth keeping, lies in those who wrote laws rather than slogans, who governed through consent rather than grievance.  Mine begins in ninth-century Wales, but its moral coordinates are universal: power restrained by justice, pride moderated by decency, and identity grounded not in bloodlines but in the shared work of keeping a people free.

So, the next time someone in a red MAGA cap insists he’s defending the heritage of the nation, I’ll think of Hywel the Good — a Welsh king who believed the rule of law was better than the rule of men — and I’ll smile.  Because I already have the heritage they wish they had.

~ Dunneagin