Nationalism Is Self-Love in a Flag

My citizenship was sworn. Theirs was inherited. Their government sells it for a million dollars. Only mine gets questioned.

Jul 06, 2026

By Vivify Mariposa 🦋 No Filter. Just Facts.

I love to be challenged and criticized, because that is how I improve my work. But the other day I was reading comments that challenged me to prove that I love this country, something many natives take for granted, along with their own history, which they hardly know. When I had a conversation with Rich about how President Trump was helping the DR, I read many comments that were not patriotic but nationalist. I know the difference. Many people don’t. A patriot respects others who love the country. A nationalist only loves whoever makes him look good for loving the country.

That conversation came after the disastrous Supreme Court ruling granting citizenship to the children of people here illegally, something that I oppose. I support birthright citizenship only for the children of legal residents and citizens. After reading those comments, some that I responded to were ignored, because it was obvious they assumed I would never read them. But I did, and I replied, and then another person addressed the same point.

There is also the misconception that people who come to the US are poor, and it is the most false one. Many people take a loan to come here. Only people with money are able to do that. Yes, there are a few who arrive with nothing, but many are escaping the politics of their country, not their own economic situation.

THE COMMENT AND THE SILENCE

One comment said the problem was people who live in America and send money out of the country to support someone else’s economy. Twenty-two people liked it.

I answered it. I asked if he knew how many Americans reside in the Dominican Republic, invest there, and pay both US and DR taxes. I explained that Dominicans send money to their families because we were raised to take care of our relatives, and that we lend to our own instead of feeding banks that charge ridiculous interest. I told him I have lived in the US all my life, paid taxes here, and still sent money to my country, the same way he is free to spend his money however he chooses. I told him to imagine paying 18 percent interest on everything he purchases, even food.

Silence.

Not a rebuttal. Not a correction. Not a single fact offered in return. The accusation had done its job the moment it was posted. The answer was never the point.

That silence is the subject of this article. Because the silence was not empty. The silence was full of everything these commenters do not know about their own country. And what they do not know is not trivia. It is the law, the Constitution, the courts, the money, and a price list their own government publishes on a government website.

They challenged me to prove my love of country.

Fine. Let’s take the exam together. All of us. Question by question.

They will not enjoy their score.

THE ACCUSATION

The charges, in their own words, exactly as posted.

There is no such thing as dual citizenship. You pledge allegiance to one country, not two.

The money should stay in America.

When you leave where you came from, you are expected to leave that one there.

Everyone goes back home.

Only in America do you get citizenship even if your parents aren’t born here.

Twenty likes on the first one. Twelve replies. That comment outperformed almost everything else in the thread. The most confident sentence in the entire conversation was also the most wrong, and the crowd rewarded it.

THE DEFINITIONS THEY BORROWED BUT NEVER UNDERSTOOD

Before we continue, define the words correctly.

Patriotism is love of country with duty. It is not a party. It is not a slogan. It is not a flag emoji. It is not blind loyalty to whoever controls the government this year. Patriotism means you love the country enough to know its law, respect its Constitution, defend its sovereignty, and tell the truth when the people waving the flag are lying about what the country actually says.

Nationalism is different. Nationalism is what happens when the nation becomes part of a person’s ego, image, status, or political tribe. The nationalist does not love the country as it legally exists. He loves the version of the country that makes him feel powerful, clean, superior, or chosen.

That is why nationalists can wave the flag and still not know the law.

That is why they can scream about citizenship and never read the oath.

That is why they can claim to defend America while contradicting the State Department, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution in a single comment.

And this is not only a disease of the right. Democrats carry the same infection when they call everything “democracy” while trying to manage, redefine, or override the republic. They do not always worship the flag. Sometimes they worship the moral image of themselves saving the country from everyone who disagrees with them.

Different costume. Same sickness.

One side wraps nationalism in the flag. The other wraps it in “democracy.” Both are identity protection. Both are status. Both are a way to avoid facts.

Patriotism serves the country. Nationalism uses the country to serve the self, the party, or the tribe.

I made this argument before this comment section existed, in an article called Patriotism Is Not a Dirty Word. Patriotism is attachment to your people, your land, your culture, your history, and it does not require the dehumanization of anyone else. Back then I documented how the machinery blurred patriotism into nationalism and nationalism into extremism so that ordinary love of country would feel dangerous. Now watch the same blur run in reverse: nationalists borrowing the patriot’s word to dress up the self-love underneath. The blur serves whoever wears it. The definitions do not move.

Most people confuse the two because they were taught to treat love of country as a performance. And a performance needs an audience, not a Constitution.

I watched the performance in the other costume this same week. A woman burning the flag because she hates the president, declaring that she is not free, refusing to celebrate Independence Day because she does not feel free. The country gave her the FREEDOM to insult its flag without a single consequence, and she used that FREEDOM to announce it does not exist. She was not protesting the country. She was performing herself, with the flag as the prop. I have written it before: the flag belongs to the people, not the state. She burned what belongs to everyone to insult one man renting one office. The commenters run the same act in reverse: the flag as costume, the self as subject, the country nowhere in sight.

That is the distinction the comment section missed. They thought they were being patriotic because they were protecting the image in their head. But the country is not the image in their head. The country has laws. The country has courts. The country has an oath. The country has a Constitution.

If your love of country requires you to ignore all of that, it is not patriotism.

It is nationalism wearing a cheaper suit.

So the exam begins, with their most confident sentence.

THE LAW THEY NEVER READ

Question one: does dual citizenship exist?

The United States government answers this on its own website. The State Department recognizes dual nationality. US law does not require a naturalized citizen to give up citizenship in another country. That is not an opinion column. That is the standing policy of the same government whose flag decorates these comment sections.

The Supreme Court settled the deeper question sixty years ago, and the story behind the case is worth knowing, because the man at the center of it was exactly the kind of person these commenters think they are protecting America from.

Beys Afroyim was born in Poland. He became a naturalized American citizen. Years later he voted in an election in Israel, and the State Department used that vote to strip his American citizenship under the Nationality Act. He sued. The Supreme Court ruled in 1967, in Afroyim v. Rusk, that the Fourteenth Amendment does not permit the government to take citizenship away from any citizen who does not voluntarily give it up. Citizenship belongs to the citizen. Not to the State Department. Not to the mood of the public. Not to a comment section.

The Court reinforced the rule in 1980 in Vance v. Terrazas. The government must prove a citizen specifically intended to surrender citizenship. Holding another passport is not that proof. Loving another country is not that proof.

Sixty years of settled constitutional law. One search away. On a government domain. Free.

Twenty people liked the comment saying none of it exists.

They never read the law. They never read the ruling. They never read the oath.

That last one matters most. Because the oath is where this entire argument dies.

THE ONLY AMERICANS WHO EVER SWORE

Question two: who in America has actually pledged allegiance under penalty of law?

Not the commenters. Natural-born citizens never swear anything. Citizenship arrives with the birth certificate, the way a surname arrives. No test. No background check. No oath. No choice. It is the single largest unearned inheritance in American life, and the people who inherited it are the ones demanding that I prove myself.

I did prove myself. Every naturalized citizen did.

The oath of allegiance is written into federal law, Title 8, Section 1448 of the United States Code. The naturalized citizen swears to support and defend the Constitution, to bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by law, and to renounce all allegiance to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty. Sworn out loud. In public. In front of a federal officer. Recorded.

The commenter wrote that you pledge allegiance to one country, not two.

He has never pledged allegiance to any country in his life. I have. Under oath. In a federal ceremony. The only people in America who have ever formally promised this nation anything are the naturalized. The people being told to go home are the only ones who signed the lease.

Let me draw another line clearly, because legal precision matters. I do not believe naturalized citizens should hold political office. Citizenship gives belonging, protection, duty, work, taxes, voting, family, property, and allegiance. But governing power is different. The authority to command the state should belong to natural-born Americans, people born into the country’s inheritance, not naturalized into it later. That is not an insult to naturalized citizens. I am one. It is a recognition that citizenship and political command are not the same thing.

And before the oath comes the test.

Every naturalized citizen passes an examination on American history and civics. Questions about the Constitution, the branches of government, the founding documents, the amendments, the wars, the presidents. Study guides, an interview, an officer across the table.

I love history, but many natives do not know anything about their own. I studied for that exam and passed it, and then I sat with my own relatives, studying for the test with them, until they passed it too. I know I would pass it again tomorrow, with green colors. Would a native? I doubt it. They are not teaching history anymore, just social studies.

I documented that replacement in Patriotism Is Not a Dirty Word. Civics disappeared from American classrooms across the 1960s and 1970s, replaced by Social Studies, and the two produce different people. Civics produced patriots, citizens who understood the system well enough to hold it accountable from the inside. Social Studies produced activists, trained to organize around grievance and aim at each other. You cannot love what you do not know. You cannot defend what you were never taught existed. The comment section is not an accident. It is a graduating class.

Surveys have put the share of Americans who could pass that same test at roughly one in three. A third of the country. The people questioning whether I am American enough would, in large numbers, fail the exam that made me American.

Ignorance dressed as patriotism is still ignorance. Putting a flag on it does not change the score.

TWO FLAGS, TWO CONSTITUTIONS

Question three: did I abandon my country, or did both of my countries write my loyalty into law?

The commenters believe love of country is a glass that spills. Pour some into one flag and the other goes empty. Neither of my countries agrees with them.

The Dominican Constitution addresses me directly, by name, in Article 20. Doble nacionalidad. It recognizes the faculty of Dominicans to acquire a foreign nationality, and it states plainly: la adquisición de otra nacionalidad no implica la pérdida de la dominicana. Acquiring another nationality does not mean losing the Dominican one.

That sentence did not fall from the sky. Dominicans abroad fought for it. The dual nationality provision entered the constitution through the reform of 1994, championed by José Francisco Peña Gómez, and the government that followed actively encouraged Dominicans living abroad to naturalize in the countries where they legally resided. My country built legal machinery to keep its people abroad attached while they put down roots elsewhere. It understood something the comment section does not: a person who builds a life in two nations is an asset to both, not a traitor to either.

And remember the name Peña Gómez, because my Caribbean Machine series already showed you what counterfeit patriotism did to him. Two years after he won Dominicans abroad their two flags, the political alliance built to stop him from the presidency branded itself the Frente Patriótico. The Patriotic Front. The costume organized against the man; the man had already given millions of Dominicans their second flag. The costume is never new. It only changes countries.

And the United States? The country these commenters claim to defend takes the same position. The State Department recognizes my two flags. The Supreme Court protects them. Congress never banned them.

Both constitutions. Both governments. Both sets of law. On my side.

The commenters are not defending American law. They are defending a rule that exists only in their heads, against the actual law of the country they claim to love. That is not patriotism. Patriotism would require knowing what the country’s law says.

They never read the oath. They never read Article 20. They never read anything. The feeling was enough.

THE AMERICANS THEY FORGOT TO COUNT

Question four: what do they think Americans do?

The money should stay in America. Leave your old country there. Go back home.

Apply those rules to Americans and watch what happens.

Somewhere between 4 and 5.5 million Americans live abroad. The Federal Voting Assistance Program put the number at 4.4 million. The Association of Americans Resident Overseas puts it near 5.5 million. Millions of Americans living in Mexico, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia. Living in other people’s countries. Sending money across borders. Holding property, businesses, pensions, and often second passports.

For years the State Department claimed the number was 9 million. It has now quietly retired that figure, admitting it cannot stand behind it, because the United States government does not actually count its own citizens overseas. The Census excludes them. No registry exists.

Sit with that. The government whose supporters demand immigrants account for every dollar sent to a grandmother cannot account for its own citizens abroad to within a million and a half people.

And the second passports. One commenter wrote that her family came from Denmark in 1863 and she feels nothing for Denmark, so no one should feel anything for anywhere. Her family preserved the name of the country and the year of the crossing across five generations. That is heritage, transmitted carefully, exactly what she condemns. She just doesn’t mail it.

Another commenter identified himself as Irish American in the same breath he declared that he could never claim to be an Irish citizen. He is wrong about his own inheritance. Ireland’s Foreign Births Register grants citizenship to anyone with an Irish-born grandparent. Millions of Americans qualify. Mexico’s constitution transmits nationality by blood to children born abroad. Tens of millions of Americans report Irish ancestry. Tens of millions more trace their roots to Mexico. America is a nation of dormant dual citizens lecturing active ones.

They hold the same rights I hold. The difference is that I know mine exist.

THE PRICE LIST

Question five: while they guarded me, who was selling the door?

This is the question that ends the argument, so read it slowly.

The commenters are angry about a Dominican woman sending money to her family. Here is what their own government was doing while they typed.

The President signed Executive Order 14351 in September 2025, creating a program called the Gold Card. The program went live that December on an official government website, trumpcard.gov. The offer: a fast track to lawful permanent residence, the document immigrants wait decades for, in exchange for a payment.

The price list, published by the government of the United States:

One million dollars from an individual, paid as an unrestricted gift to the Department of Commerce, plus a nonrefundable fifteen thousand dollar processing fee. Two million dollars from a corporation buying residency for an employee. The corporate version comes with a one percent annual maintenance fee, and the corporation can transfer the card from one employee to another for a five percent fee.

Read that again. American residency, structured as a corporate asset. With a maintenance contract. And a transfer fee. A lease on belonging, held by an employer, movable between humans like a parking spot.

And before anyone reaches for the technicality, no, the Gold Card does not sell citizenship outright. It sells the green card. The green card is not a souvenir. It is the line for citizenship, the same line every naturalized citizen stood in for years before the test and the oath, because lawful permanent residence is the gate the law requires you to pass through on the way to naturalization. The government did not sell the certificate. It sold the front of the line, and posted the price.

The government’s own website describes the million dollars as “evidence that the individual will substantially benefit the United States.”

A wire transfer as evidence of benefit to the nation. Not an oath. Not a test on the Constitution. Not years of residence, work, and taxes. A gift, in the legal sense, to the Commerce Department.

It gets worse. The same operation floated a Platinum Card at five million dollars, offering the wealthy up to 270 days a year inside the United States without paying US tax on their foreign income. Hold that against the naturalized citizen, who owes US tax on worldwide income for life, and against the immigrant nurse whose remittance to her mother enraged twenty-two people in a comment section. The worker’s two hundred dollars is a scandal. The billionaire’s tax exemption is a program.

And the machinery, like most machinery built on a slogan, does not even work. The Department of Homeland Security admitted in a federal court filing that Gold Card applicants will not be processed faster than anyone else, directly contradicting the website’s promise of residency in record time. By spring, 338 people had applied, 165 had paid the fee, and exactly one had been approved.

Congress built the older version decades ago. The EB-5 program, created in 1990, sells a green card for an investment of 800,000 to just over a million dollars in an enterprise that creates ten jobs. It has run for thirty-five years, through fraud scandals, collapsed regional centers, and securities enforcement actions, and it is still running today.

Now place the two ledgers side by side. Dominicans abroad sent US$5,170.1 million to their families in the first five months of 2026, most of it from the United States, through formal banking channels, reported by the Dominican central bank. That is post-tax money. Earned legally, taxed by the IRS first, and then spent by free people on their own mothers, groceries, medicine, and school. Spending your own money on your own family is not a leak in the economy. It is the definition of FREEDOM, the exact thing the flag in their profile picture claims to stand for. The workers they resent moved five billion dollars through the front door in five months, feeding two economies at once. The government’s million-dollar back door processed one customer.

So the record stands as follows. The commenters spent their energy guarding the front door against a woman who swore an oath at it. The owner was at the back, selling keys for a million dollars apiece, posting the price list on a government domain, and charging a five percent fee to move the key from one stranger’s hand to another.

They guarded the wrong door. For free.

LONDON WROTE THE BLUEPRINT

This is where citizenship stops being a culture-war argument and becomes a market product.

Washington did not invent selling belonging. It licensed the idea.

The passport-for-sale industry was born in the Caribbean and industrialized from the Square Mile. St. Kitts and Nevis launched the first citizenship-by-investment program in 1984, and the model spread through the islands: Dominica, Grenada, Antigua, St. Lucia. A passport for a payment, no residence required. The firm that turned this into a global industry, Henley and Partners, operates from London, advising governments on how to price their nationality and advising the wealthy on where to buy.

The same firm now publishes the migration reports the financial press quotes as neutral data. Its own count projects 165,000 millionaires relocating across borders in 2026. The market maker is also the scorekeeper.

Follow the sequence. London’s advisers taught small Caribbean states to monetize citizenship in the 1980s. The model matured for four decades. Washington studied it, branded it, and put it on a .gov domain with a payment portal.

The people in the comment section have never heard of any of this. They think the threat to American citizenship is a Dominican grandmother receiving groceries. The actual commodification of their nationality was designed by consultants, priced by governments, and sold from the same Square Mile this publication has been auditing for a year, and it never once appeared in their feed.

Their anger was aimed for them. It always is. Downward, at the visible immigrant. Never upward, at the invisible ledger. I wrote the rule in Patriotism Is Not a Dirty Word and this thread performed it on schedule: activists fight the people next to them, patriots fight the system above them. A nationalist is an activist holding a flag.

THE RULING AND THE LINE

Question six: and what about the babies?

This fight is older than everyone in that comment section. The Supreme Court recognized birthright citizenship in 1898, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, for a man born in San Francisco to Chinese parents in the era when federal law barred Chinese immigrants from naturalizing. The country litigated his Americanness and lost. Every ruling since stands on his shoulders.

Four days before the nation’s 250th birthday, on June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court blocked the executive order in Trump v. Barbara. The judgment was six to three. The constitutional holding underneath it was five to four: children born on US soil to parents here unlawfully or temporarily are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Kavanaugh supplied the sixth vote against the order on statutory grounds and declined to join the constitutional holding. Read the split carefully. The rule the commenters treat as untouchable marble survived by a single vote.

I oppose that ruling. I said so in my opening and I will not soften it here. I believe birthright citizenship should belong to the children of citizens and legal residents. Legal presence should be the line.

Some readers just flinched. The immigrant is supposed to celebrate the ruling. The critic of the ruling is supposed to want immigrants gone. I am neither, and the script does not survive contact with an actual naturalized citizen who read the documents.

Because here is what the comment section does not know about the position I hold. My birth country already adopted it. The Dominican Constitution of 2010, Article 18, grants citizenship by birth on Dominican soil with an exception: the children of foreigners in transit or residing illegally in the country. Legal presence is the Dominican line. Australia draws it there. Germany draws it there. The United Kingdom draws it there. Automatic citizenship for the child of the lawful resident, not for the child of the unlawful one.

When the Dominican Republic drew that line, American institutions called it cruel. When American commenters demand that same line, they call it common sense. Same rule. Same facts. Different face on them, so a different verdict. Hold that thought, because it is the key to everything in the next section.

And notice what the honest version of this position requires. It requires distinguishing the legal immigrant from the illegal one, the sworn citizen from the smuggled entry, the woman with an oath on file from the man with no record at all. One commenter in that thread actually made the distinction, agreeing with me about legal immigrants and aiming his complaint at illegal entry. That is a position a person can argue with respect.

But that is not what most of the thread wrote. Most of the thread wrote go back home to a citizen. Most of the thread said dual citizenship does not exist to a woman holding sixty years of Supreme Court precedent. The line between legal and illegal takes knowledge to draw. Rage draws a simpler line: us and you.

THE BLIND SIDE

Now the real question. Not what they got wrong. Why they need it wrong.

They confuse inheritance with achievement. For the natural-born, citizenship cost nothing. That is fine until they meet someone whose citizenship was measured: tested, vetted, sworn. My existence proves citizenship can be examined, and if it can be examined, the inheritor could fail the exam. Attacking me is cheaper than taking it. The less a person paid for a status, the more violently he polices its border, because the border is the only thing giving his copy value.

Their patriotism is a cheap signal. A flag emoji costs nothing. A comment costs nothing. An oath costs years: legal residence, applications, background checks, an exam, a ceremony, a sworn renunciation of every other allegiance on earth. Costly signals are honest. Cheap ones are noise. The loudest flags in that thread fly over the emptiest knowledge, and the pairing is not a coincidence. The volume is doing the work the knowledge cannot.

Their ignorance is load-bearing. This is the core, so I will say it plainly. They do not happen to not know that dual citizenship is legal, that the oath exists, that trumpcard.gov is selling residency. They need to not know. Because the moment they know, the anger has to move. Off the Dominican woman with the oath on file, and onto the government auctioning what she earned. Knowledge would force them to aim at power. Ignorance lets them keep aiming at me. The ignorance is not a gap in the wall. It is a beam holding the ceiling up. Remove it and the whole posture collapses into a question they cannot survive: what have I ever done for this country besides be born on it?

And they cannot see the same facts twice. George Orwell wrote about this species of mind in 1945, in Notes on Nationalism, and defined the condition in seven words: “power-hunger tempered by self-deception.” The patriot loves a place and a way of life. The nationalist loves a unit that makes him feel large, and he places that unit beyond good and evil. Orwell observed that this mind loses the ability to recognize identical facts when they wear different faces. The Danish descendant honoring 1863 while condemning my heritage. The Irish American attacking dual citizenship while unknowingly holding the right to an Irish passport. The crowd demanding the exact birthright rule the Dominican Republic wrote into law, a rule their own media condemned when the faces on it were Dominican. Same facts. Different face. Opposite verdict.

That is the blind side, and if reading this section stung, the sting is the diagnosis arriving. I am not going to soothe it. Every institution in your life already exists to soothe it. This page exists to show it to you. I already gave you the biology of it in Everyone Has Bias: you cannot think your way out of how you think, and moral superiority is just bias in a tuxedo. The comment section is the field study.

And the poverty myth completes the picture. The final ignorance is about who we are. The thread assumes immigrants are the world’s poor washing up on the shore. Migration costs money. Families take loans to send one person. Airfare, visas, lawyers, documents, months of no income on arrival. The poorest people on earth cannot afford to leave; they are trapped where they are. Many of us who came were not fleeing our own empty pockets. We were fleeing what politics and corruption did to countries we loved, countries where you can pay 18 percent interest on food. The commenters are guarding America from people who had the resources, the discipline, and the will to cross the world and pass the exam. If that is the threat, the threat is that we make the inheritance look unearned.

It does not just look unearned.

THE VERDICT

So the exam ends. Score it.

They said dual citizenship does not exist. The State Department, the Supreme Court, and two constitutions say it does.

They said you pledge allegiance to one country. They have never pledged allegiance to any. I pledged under federal oath.

They said the money should stay in America. Their government cannot count its own five million citizens abroad, and it sells residency for million-dollar wire transfers on a website with a payment portal.

They said everyone goes back home. Their own law says home is where the oath was sworn.

They challenged me to prove I love this country. I proved it years ago, out loud, on the record, in a federal ceremony, and again every year in taxes, and again in raising an American daughter, and again in defending the actual Constitution against people who have never read past its flag.

You were never angry that I love two countries. You were angry that I proved my love and you never had to prove yours. I was the mirror, and you called the mirror a foreigner.

And while you guarded me, the people you refuse to look at sold your inheritance out the back door, a million dollars a key, five percent to transfer, one percent annual maintenance, posted on a government domain.

You guarded the wrong door. For free.

I would tell you to go read the oath, the ruling, the price list. They are all one search away, and they have been the whole time. But we both know the search was never the hard part.

The hard part is what happens to your anger when you finally know where to aim it.

After spending the 250th birthday in Washington, DC, surrounded by fellow Americans who love this country, shouting USA, and watching how we come together as a nation, I showed my own daughter, who was born here, how I love this country. The part I loved most of the fair was the history part. I love history, sue me 😂.

I was able to sign the US Declaration of Independence. Many people were there for the concert; I was there for the history and for the speech from President Trump. I did enjoy both. I watched the plane show, how NASA is evolving, how SpaceX is reaching into space, how GE is helping aircraft, how the Navy is changing.