“It means you assimilate. You become part of America; America doesn’t become part of you.”

This is a fascinating statement. I'm not sure how much Moreno really thought it through. But something about it seemed weird and I kept looking at it; the second part just didn't make any sense to me. Like I couldn't even parse the language.

I think I finally figured it out: When you become part of America, he's saying, you lose everything else about you. Being "American" doesn't form one piece of your identity. It becomes your entire identity. For being American to be only a single part of your identity, and you to still have other parts, is forbidden, in his mind. That is, more or less, the literal meaning of what he's saying.

Then I thought, maybe I'm reading too much into it. I think he's trying to say that you're supposed to come to America and become part of what's already there; America isn't supposed to change to include part of what you brought with you. You're supposed to change, and America's supposed to stay the same. That's not literally what the words mean, but I think that's more likely what he was aiming to say and he just didn't take the language seriously enough to get there successfully literal-meaning-wise.

I'm not trying to make it more than it is. It's just a weird little throw-away sentence. I just kept looking at it. One of those two things is what he meant. And they're both just... wrong. Like the whole value and purpose of the American story is supposed to be the exact opposite of all of that. IDK. I know they're trying to change the whole meaning of what it means to be American, but it's weird to me that the most perfect distillation of what they're getting wrong about the whole thing from start to finish came from their own explanation of how it's supposed to be.

Edit: I can't let it go. America is the only big country in the world that works the way it does. Almost every country is an ethnic monolith. Italy is full of Italian people, Japan is full of Japanese people, but America is full of white/black/Asian/Hispanic/whatever else people all working somewhat more or less together. And, somehow, America wound up being by far the world's dominant economic / military / diplomatic superpower (for now). To me those two factors are cause and effect. "Diversity is our strength" is very much a literal and serious geopolitical statement. But these guys don't like it being that way. They want to undo everything that makes America a special type of country, for all its evils and all the stuff we do wrong or badly, just because they're too insecure to get by without having a badge that says "my race is special." Fuck 'em. I really don't like it and I don't like them.