“Defend Your Culture”—Or Destroy What It Means to Be American
“Defend your culture” isn’t patriotism—it’s propaganda, and it should alarm every American.
I was planning to send out a newsletter marking this week’s 60th anniversary of the Gateway Arch. But then I saw a screenshot that really hit a nerve. In other housekeeping news, I’m going to try and limit newsletters going forward to 2-3 days a week. With this administration and the daily happenings, it is easier said than done. If something happens and I feel the need to say something, I’m going to say so.
When the Department of Homeland Security posts something like “Serve your country! Defend your culture!” with a link to apply for ICE, it’s not just a recruiting pitch—it’s a mask slipping. There’s a quiet part being said out loud. “Defend your culture” is the kind of phrase that looks innocuous on the surface until you stop to ask whose culture they mean, and who they imagine it needs defending from. That language isn’t about unity; it’s about drawing a line.
ICE, under this administration, has become a tool not of justice but of cruelty—a blunt, unaccountable instrument of fear. Agents have conducted raids in homes and workplaces, swept up lawful residents and even U.S. citizens, and carried out deportations in open defiance of court orders. Families have been separated, detained, and deported—sometimes with one parent a U.S. citizen and the other not, or with children born here left behind while their parents are taken. Even U.S. citizens have been zip-tied, dragged from their homes, and held for hours or days without cause. These aren’t isolated incidents; they’re the pattern of a government that has lost its moral compass.
Just this month, Representatives Jamie Raskin and Pramila Jayapal renewed their demand for answers from DHS and ICE after repeated cases of wrongful arrests and detainments of U.S. citizens. They cited people like Rodrick Johnson, a 67-year-old Chicago resident dragged from his apartment and restrained outside for hours, and Leonardo Garcia Venegas, detained twice during Alabama worksite raids despite presenting his REAL ID. ICE policy explicitly forbids the detainment of U.S. citizens—but policy means nothing when agents ignore it with impunity.
We’ve seen this movie before—and it doesn’t end well. “Defend your culture” echoes the same kind of blood-and-soil rhetoric that propelled the rise of fascism in Europe ninety years ago. It’s about purity, not patriotism; exclusion, not safety. The moment a government starts defining culture by who doesn’t belong, democracy begins to rot from the inside out. The idea that patriotism means turning neighbor against neighbor or weaponizing bureaucracy to punish the vulnerable is as un-American as it gets.
Let’s also remember that this country’s culture has never been static. It’s been shaped and reshaped by immigrants, by dissenters, by people who believed that freedom was worth the risk of starting over. To “defend” culture by walling it off is to misunderstand what makes it thrive. America’s strength isn’t in its homogeneity—it’s in its capacity to evolve and include.
I want to be absolutely clear: opposing this is not about left or right. It’s about the soul of the country. A democratic nation cannot survive when it treats due process as optional or when government agencies behave like personal enforcers for political agendas. It’s no secret that many people have started to refer to ICE as his personal Gestapo. We’re supposed to be better than this—not because of some abstract notion of “values,” but because real people’s lives depend on it.
If this administration truly wanted to “serve the country,” it would start by serving its people—all of them—with dignity, compassion, and respect for the law. Until then, “defend your culture” reads less like a call to service and more like a warning flare from a regime that’s forgotten who it works for.