Denaturalize Domestic Terrorists
A 'one in, one out' rule to trade saboteurs for strivers
The Government lied about inventing the HIV-virus as a means of genocide against people of color. Governments lie! […] The election was stolen. We went from an intelligent friend to a dumb Dixiecrat — Governments fail…. The Roman government under Pontius Pilate failed. —No, no, no. Not ‘God Bless America’; God Damn America! That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God Damn America for treating her citizens as less than human.
— Rev. Jeremiah Wright, “Confusing God and Government” (2003)
How should a state respond to a citizen who joins its enemies and rejects its authority? The UK faced this in the case of Shamima Begum, born in London in 1999. At 15, she fled to Syria to join ISIS. In 2019, Britain stripped the “ISIS bride” of her citizenship,1 arguing she was eligible for Bangladesh nationality through her parents. Bangladesh refused, leaving her stateless. Her “statelessness” scandalized lawyer types.
Begum showed no remorse, and her defenders focus on procedure, not allegiance. Though she rejected the UK’s legitimacy, the liberal tradition treats membership as untouchable once granted. This vision obliges the state to defend even its declared enemies — often birthright citizens. But the state, if it wants, can trade up. For the right bundle of rights and protections, future citizens will wire five million dollars.
When passports cost nothing, the U.S. gave them out a bit too promiscuously. Homegrowns called for Amerikkka’s death, live from Havana. That’s where domestic terrorist Assata Shakur fled after killing a cop in 1973. And during the Cuban Missile Crisis, self-styled “exile” Robert F. Williams partnered with Castro to beam radio broadcasts into America, urging black soldiers to turn their guns on the U.S. army.2
By the 1980s, budget-minded reformers saw the peril in handing out prized passports that holders flicked away like bus tickets. Reagan’s workfare pilots, followed by Clinton’s TANF, steered citizenship toward a net fiscal surplus. Points-based visas attacked the other side of the ledger, bidding for the planet’s reserve of top talent.3 One line still bleeds red: the low-skill, low-loyalty liabilities already inside the walls.
The Wages of Citizenship
When Kabul fell to the Taliban in 2021, Washington set a $2000 price per seat on its evacuation charter flights. Waiving the fee for passport holders left taxpayers with a $37 million tab.4 Socialized airlifts, like socialized medicine, may feel free at the gate, but somebody still pays in the end. Insurers may swallow a deductible to keep a prized client, yet they’ll still cancel the policy after too many claims break the balance sheet.
Of course, citizenship is not just “taxes paid minus benefits drawn.” Security counts too. Millions wear the uniform or simply keep quiet about troop movements. The state repays them with the guarantee that no one is left on the runway. When defectors like Begum or Williams sew suicide vests or call for mutiny, the cost spreads to all citizens through expanded surveillance and security forces looking inward.
Beyond money and guns lies a third ledger: civic credit. Only citizens can sit twelve to a jury box or sign off final vote tallies. These are the thankless, unpaid shifts that keep a high-trust republic humming. A handful of towns now extend the ballot to non-citizens, and many newcomers rise to the occasion. Yet the deeper drain comes from within, when homegrown jurors decide guilt based on race rather than evidence.5
A more visible expression of this asymmetric ingroup bias plays out in the streets. Oakland, 1968: 5,000 chant “Free Huey.” Philly, 1999: 10,000 for “Free Mumia.” Jena, Louisiana saw 60,000 marchers in 2007. New names, same storyline.6 This month, Karmelo Anthony crowdfunded over $412,000 within weeks of killing his classmate. In the economy of tribal vengeance, any killer can cash in as a revolutionary martyr.
Trust as a Load-bearing Wall
Every “Free X” crusade teaches the same lesson: loyalty outranks law. The resulting lack of faith in impartial justice seeds interpersonal distrust, which makes everything downstream more inconvenient and expensive. Contracts grow ten clauses longer, ballots need notarizing, and cops patrol schools like airports. Guard-labor spending keeps rising: the TSA budget trickled up from $4.5 B in 2004 to $11.2 B in 2024.7
Patch the pipe and the water tastes of rust. Surcharge the leak and every bill swells. Eventually the crew just cuts the line to lay new pipe. States face the same trilemma. Patch trust by adding guardrails (like body cams and six-hour jury selection) and the bureaucracy swells. Surcharge it through security fees and compliance taxes, and you soak the diligent more than bad actors. But what does it look like to shut the valve?
When governments do shut the valve, they rarely touch the main pipe. Britain has revoked passports from 175 dual nationals on security grounds since 2006; Denmark, France, and the Netherlands have followed this cautious policy by only clipping the branch nationality and leaving the birthright trunk untouched. The policy may work for jihadis but not for America’s leak of lone-passport citizens who crowdfund murder.
Israel’s 2023 “pay-for-slay” fix shows a valve welded shut. Pay for slay isn’t so cute: it was Palestinian Authority stipends that increased with every year an Israeli spends in prison for domestic terrorism. But with a court order, Jerusalem can now yank the passport and bus the bomber over the Green Line. America’s homegrown slayers crowdsource their “pay” from Cleveland, not Cuba, so where does that pipe drain?
Off-ramps for Chronic Civic Debtors
The term “Israeli Arab” reflects both a reality and a tension. Among this ancestry group, just a 9% minority identifies as Palestinian above all else; most balance Israeli nationality and Arab ethnicity relatively equally. Likewise, most African Americans probably hold a combination of ethnocentric and patriotic views.8 Armed extremists exploit this gray zone, claiming to speak for “their people” without a clear mandate.
Still, a historically and presently influential strain in black nationalist and separatist movements reject civic nationalism and treats the U.S. as a foreign enemy.9 Marcus Garvey courted the KKK because both sides wanted a clean ethnic divorce; Liberia’s founding answered the same urge. Sierra Leone granted citizenship to 59 DNA-verified Black Americans in 2021, and Ghana naturalizes “Diasporans” more broadly.
In 1964, Malcolm X demanded “the complete independence of people of African descent here in the Western Hemisphere… by any means necessary.” Those words taught dissidents to hate their birth-passports. Today, Benin and other African countries offer a new one for a cheek swab. Let defectors trade in, fly out, and spare Washington a lifetime of TSA queues, parole boards, and jury‑nullification theater.
A passport was once a birthmark; today, biometrics and global ledgers treat it like a menu item. Menus clarify appetite. If some citizens crave a different flag, let them hand back the book they burn for one they will stamp with pride. More than four million would‑be Americans wait in the green‑card queue. Trade them in for the “hostages” who keep threatening to torch the place.10 Ledger balanced, kitchen clean.
Under Section 40 of the British Nationality Act 1981, the Home Secretary may deprive an individual of British citizenship if, among other reasons, deprivation is “conducive to the public good.” This particular reason is used for national security or terrorism cases.
The Radio Free Dixie station provided to Williams by the Castro regime on October 26, 1962 addressed “oppressed North American brothers” telling them “When you are armed, remember this is your only chance to be free.” He said that Cuba was “the only territory in the Americas that is free from racism” and instructed soldiers “We’ll take care of the front, Joe, but from the back, he’ll never know what hit him. You dig?”
At this time, black-on-white “fragging,” or killing a superior officer covertly with a grenade, was common.
Canada pioneered the “points-based” immigration system in 1967 that priced degrees, English scores, and seed capital; Australia’s SkillSelect, New Zealand’s talent visas, and Britain’s Tier‑1 investor route are other examples.
Voice of America estimates that the State Department spent $37 million on evacuation flights from 16 to 31 August 2021; later charters and housing under “Operation Allies Welcome” have pushed total costs above $3.3 billion.
Under 22 U.S.C. §2671 citizens are normally billed for repatriation, but, as Snopes notes, the Biden administration waived all repayments after public outcry.
A 2005 meta‑analysis in Law and Human Behavior pooling 46 verdict effects and 20 sentencing effects from mock‑jury experiments found extreme asymmetry in racial bias. Black jurors showed strong favoritism toward Black defendants (d = 0.428 on guilt, d = 0.731 on sentencing), while White jurors displayed minimal in-group bias (d = 0.028, d = 0.096).
Huey Newton shot an Oakland police officer dead in 1967. As a member of the “Black Panther Party for Self-Defense,” he argued that cop-killing is community self-defense, with community meaning blacks only—not all Americans.
Mumia Abu-Jamal became a folk hero (ABC: the devotion “verges on worship”) after killing a Philadelphia cop in 1982.
The Jena Six were six high school students who severely beat up a white classmate in 2006. Like many cases before and after, racially-motivated protests successfully pressured prosecutors into reducing charges and giving the Jena 6 probation or short sentences.
Sources for protest numbers: Jena - see previous link (Pamela Oliver); Mumia - WSWS; Huey - PBS.
For more on trust, see Pew’s 2019 “Trust and Distrust in America,” which reports 70% of respondents agreeing with the statement “Americans’ low trust in each other makes it harder to solve many of the country’s problems.” while only 29% agree that “The country’s problems would be just as hard to solve even if Americans’ trust in each other was higher.” Few cite “rising racial schisms” when asked about causes of deterioration, but concerns about “lack of trust among neighbors,” polarization, and “tribalism” are possibly related.
A June 2024 Tel Aviv University survey found that “Only 9% of Arab Israeli respondents said that ‘their Palestinian identity is the dominant component of their identity,’ with 33.9% noting Israeli citizenship, 29.2% citing religious affiliation and 26.9% their Arab identity as the ‘dominant elements’ in their personal identity.”
Precise data is difficult to find for “to what extent black Americans identify as American?” If you can help, leave a comment.
See Message to the Blackman in America (1965) by Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam’s founder. (This book was cited by the Supreme Court.) In “Chapter 60 - NOT YOUR BROTHER” it reads, “You are not American citizens or members of the white man’s world. The only American citizens are the white people who are originally from Europe.”
Torching isn’t always literal, though riots supply plenty of fires. Sometimes it’s agitprop, like Amiri Baraka’s 1996 poem “Home”: “The black artist’s role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it…. other men will be moved by the exactness of his rendering and, if they are black men, grow strong… and if they are white men, tremble, curse, and go mad, because they will be drenched with the filth of their evil.”
The thing about denaturalizing people is that it’s pretty serious so like everything else if you are going to do it then you need due process and so on. You don’t want to set a precedent where people just denaturalize their enemies. You give the federal government power and they’ll also denaturalize far right people. Rather than actually denaturalize anyone, we should normalize telling very unpatriotic Americans that they should leave if they hate the country so much.