There's a tendency in Seppoland to conflate "being American" with "living in America (as a settler)". This idea is necessary to uphold settler-colonialism: settlers' claim to the land must be seen as natural, necessary, and just; and materially, settlers must comprise a majority of the colony's population, to keep the structure from collapsing. But if a settler-descended American like myself can in fact just live outside "America" as a minority, then this disproves the colony's whole raison d'être, doesn't it? This is what frustrates many Seppolanders when I call myself an American without having ever lived in the colony — for that matter there's Americans' relationship to Seppolandic foreign policy, necessitating the colony distancing itself from Americans.

Americans being negatively impacted by Seppoland's foreign policy and hegemony isn't necessarily coincidental, however: I'd argue that Seppoland is actually materially aligned with not only Americophilia, but also, "paradoxically", with anti-Americanism, insofar as these phenomena discourage settlers from leaving, and encourage the settlers who left the colony to return. The tactic of making "diasporans" feel like perpetual foreigners to vindicate the idea that their "rightful place" is in the colony, should be a familiar strategy from other settler-colonies.

Indeed, if fully quitting settlerism wasn't made as difficult and burdensome as uninstalling McAfee, we might expect a lot of settlers to quit for "light and transient causes" once the treats started running out — and that type of "settler hemorrhage" would certainly prove fatal for the colony.

The contradictions I've described between Americans and Seppos in this post aren't very prominent at the moment, but these contradictions will certainly grow more prominent as the Empire turns necrotic. There's a lot more I can get into about this topic, but those other more specific aspects of the contradiction can maybe get their own separate posts...

...In any case, yes, I'm proposing flipping the idea of "true Americans live in America" on its head as "true Americans live in diaspora" — I don't know how much this makes sense, or if this is cringe and I'll reach a different analysis later, but in any case I hope this is at the very least interesting for you all.