npr.org
ICE officers are taking DNA samples from protesters they've arrested
People arrested while protesting ICE say federal agents took samples of their DNA. It's legal, but experts say the practice raises questions about what the government is doing with that genetic data.
!["America is not a 'universal nation.' ... [American] principles are not abstractions. They are living, breathing things — rooted in a people and embodied in a way of life."
Senator Eric Schmitt got a standing ovation at Nat Con DC for saying America as a nation is the property of a distinct ethnic people.
Americans are a mix of “the most adventurous, the most courageous, the most curious and innovative” of the English, Scotch-Irish, and continental Europeans, who came as settlers and have spent hundreds of years building, fighting, and dying for "a homeland for themselves and their descendants."
"We’re a nation of settlers, explorers, and pioneers — born on the ocean waters that carried the first ships to our shores and forged in the crucible of a wild frontier. Our people tamed a continent, built a civilization from the wilderness, and wrote our nation’s name in history.
"Our ancestors were driven here by destiny, possessed by urgent and fiery conviction, by burning belief, devoted to their cause and their God."
"The Continental Army soldiers dying of frostbite at Valley Forge, Pilgrims struggling to survive in the hard winter soil of Plymouth, pioneers striking out from Missouri for the wild and dangerous frontier, [and] outnumbered Kentucky settlers, repelling wave after wave of Indian war band attacks from behind their stockade walls, would be astonished to hear that they were only fighting for a 'proposition.'
"They believed they were forging a nation — a homeland for themselves and their descendants."
"America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations.
"It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, our heritage, our destiny.
"If America is everything and everyone, then it is nothing and no one at all."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:hbpefio3f5csc44msmbgioxz/bafkreif3x7re3lubuj7kzurj3ayotcnq2l46kwb2p5hp2zid2dagzth5nu)
