How You Got Hasan Piker: It Started With Cowardice in the Public School System

Posted on | August 29, 2026 | No Comments

A couple of months ago, I saw this brief video clip on X, and grabbed the transcript of what Piker said:

“This is such an insane and fundamentally un-American concept. I cannot begin to explain this to you, okay? Ellis Island, like, every — every American citizen that currently is a natural-born U.S. citizen has — is like a couple generations removed from not being a U.S. citizen, that became a U.S. citizen due to birthright, Okay? Not just birthright, but also especially due to birthright. Like, go back far enough and every single American, every single American — go back far enough — is the children of migrants. Okay? This is literally the United States Of America. This is the most un-American thing that you could push for. I don’t understand how you can even push for it.”

What a Gordian knot of misunderstanding! What Piker is sharing here is not, however, a fringe extremist belief, but rather what has become a mainstream view of American history. We hear similar things said by Democrats and Republicans alike, and said so often that many Americans don’t even realize that it’s wrong. Why? Because our schools long ago stopped telling the truth — which some might consider offensive — and instead promoted the “Nation of Immigrants” myth Piker now preaches.

The pioneer settlers of the British colonies in North America were not “immigrants.” The territories in which they settled, claimed by the British crown, were not a nation-state with a government that might grant them a visa. Rather, they came to a remote wilderness whose only human inhabitants were illiterate heathens lacking any written law or any government beyond tribal alliances to whatever chieftains and warlords might emerge from time to time among them. However much anyone may romanticize those natives as “noble savages,” they didn’t have established ports of entry where immigrants could apply for admission. It is absurd and insulting for Hasan Piker to compare the first English settlers of Jamestown, Plymouth, etc., to 21st-century “migrants.”

When Daniel Boone led a group of pioneer settlers through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky in 1775, how in any sense were they “migrants” comparable to the people Hasan Piker was defending as entitled to automatic citizenship for their offspring, without regard to the legality of the parents’ residency in the United States? It is absurd. I would argue that it is because so many have been miseducated.

How has this confusion arisen? Why does this kind of rhetoric not meet with universal condemnation from educated Americans? I would argue that it is because so many have been miseducated about our history.

This miseducation has its roots in the 19th century. From the time of our War of Independence until about 1840, there was not much foreign immigration to the United States. Europe became embroiled in the Hapoleonic wars, which consumed whatever excess energies might otherwise have led adventurous young Europeans to seek their fortunes in the New World and, when that era ended, the Industrial Revolution supplied new opportunities (including a demand for wage laborers) that sufficed to keep the population of Europe too busy at home to think of sailing off to America. The dramatic population growth of the United States, from about 4 million at the first census in 1790, to more than 17 million in the 1840 census, was almost entirely due to natural increase among the Americans who had fought the Revolution, with only small additions from new immigrants. That changed after 1840, however.

First there was the wave of Potato Famine Irish, and then there were refugees (mostly German) from the failed revolutions in Europe in 1848. The arrival of these thousands of foreigners in the 1840s spawned a new political party that came to be known as the “Know Nothings.”

“Bill the Butcher” in Gangs of New York is based on an actual historic figure, William Poole, who was an enforcer for the Know Nothings in their battles against the Democrats of Tammany Hall. The Know Nothings gained their greatest power in Massachusetts, where in 1854 they won a landslide, electing Henry Gardner as governor and a massive majority in the state legislature. Having arisen from the remains of the Whig Party, the Know Nothings quickly dissolved in the mid-1850s, however, and were largely absorbed by the new Republican Party as the chief opposition to the Democrats. In the intervening 1856 presidential election, however, divisions among this opposition (John Fremont as the Republican candidate and Millard Fillmore as a fusion “Whig American” candidate) made possible the election of Democrat James Buchanan with 45% of the popular vote. For years later, crisis produced the Civil War.

Once the war (and Reconstruction) ended, new issues arose in politics that led Americans to forget the controversies over immigration that fueled the brief life of the Know Nothing party, and both Democrats and Republicans sought to attract support from the immigrants (and their descendants) whose arrival in the 1840s had caused such a remarkable surge of nativist sentiment. There gradually emerged from this a tendency toward what has been called “The Proposition Nation” thesis, whose most emininent recent advocate is George F. Will. Supposedly, as long as anyone accedes to sentiments expressed in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence, it doesn’t matter who he is, where he comes from, how or when he got here, or whatever else he might believe, that fellow is just as much an American as any descendant of the First Families of Virginia. This is obviously nonsense — idiotic and counter-factual — yet it has been promulgated by our educational system largely because teachers wanted to flatter the offspring of immigrants, and not risk offending them by any veneration of the colonial Old Stock.

Many of my conservative friends are Catholics, more often Italians or Poles than Irish, and none of them are offended by my recitations of the actual history of our nation as it pertains to immigration. They understand that I do not wish to insult them or their ancestors, nor to vaunt my status as a “Heritage American” in attempting to counteract the damage done by misleading rhetoric of the sort emitted by Hasan Piker. Most of our problems in America today can be traced to the decline of our public schools, and it would not be necessary for me to write at such length on this subject, if Americans had not been so misled by teachers whose cowardly refusal to speak the truth has helped foster the “Nation of Immigrants” mythology that Piker uses a weapon, daring to accuse us of being “un-American”! Shall we blame Emma Lazarus?

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

However fine this is as poetry, should it really be given the status of constitutional authority? This is an issue I’ve addressed before (e.g,, “American History 101: No, Emma Lazarus Did Not Write the U.S. Constitution,” Sept. 10, 2018) and reiterate here merely to demonstrate how we got to the point where we have Hasan Piker, who grew up in Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey, presuming to lecture us about our own Constitution, particularly the Fourteenth Amendment, which had nothing to do with Turkish immigrants, and everything to do with the erstwhile slaves and their descendants. What nerve he has!

Would the slaves ever have been freed — would there have been a Civil War, a Union victory, a Fourteenth Amendment — had it not been for the Know Nothing nativists who battled the Tammany Hall Democrats before eventually becoming Republicans? Of course, being the descendant of Confederates, I’ve often contemplated questions of alternative history like this, but as it relates to our current crisis, I am more allied with Bill the Butcher than with the Democrats whom my ancestors supported.

Public policy ought to be based on reason, not sentiment, and we should prefer fact to falsehood. Hasan Piker tells an outright lie, claiming “every American citizen … is like a couple generations removed from not being a U.S. citizen,” and then accuses us of being “un-American” for disputing his falsehood. Only a coward would be shamed into silence by this tactic, and say what you will about me, I am not the descendant of cowards.

It’s time to stand up and tell the truth, America.

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