It Could Happen Here - How the United States Built its Colonial Empire, Pt. 2

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

Journalist Carlos Berríos Polanco talks with James about how the United States acquired its inhabited overseas colonies, why the constitution doesn't fully apply there, and what it means as Trump says he wants to add new territories or states.  How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State edited by Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture by Amy Kaplan https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/182/244/  https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/182/1/  https://theconversation.com/why-russia-gave-up-alaska-americas-gateway-to-the-arctic-74675?xid=PS_smithsonian  https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-CARIBBEAN/MILITARY-BUILDUP/egpbbnzyrpq/  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/magazine/venezuela-empires-colony.html  https://apnews.com/article/venezuela-us-state-trump-rodriguez-chavismo-silence-634203c885803b018ecd8ac012bb249d  https://time.com/article/2026/06/02/trump-annex-canada-51st-state-rhetoric-carney-us-partnership-message/  https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/28/nyregion/new-light-on-old-fbi-fight-decades-of-surveillance-of-puerto-rican-groups.html  https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/atc/1685.html https://theconversation.com/us-territories-have-a-voice-in-congress-but-no-vote-heres-why-283547  https://www.nminewsservice.com/cnmi-covenant-united-states-50th-anniversary-explainer-timeline/  https://apnews.com/article/american-samoa-voting-citizenship-alaska-trump-eda6c32ce0fcdca6edb22efac26e403d  https://elecciones2024.ceepur.org/Escrutinio_General_123/index.html#es/default/PLEBISCITO_Resumen.xml  https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/099257005212415735  https://www.doi.gov/oia/compacts-of-free-association  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/30/puerto-rico-independence-movement  https://time.com/7024574/puerto-rico-status-vote/  https://www.uog.edu/_resources/files/schools-and-colleges/college-of-liberal-arts-and-social-sciences/droessler_whose-pacific.pdf  https://juntasupervision.pr.gov/abril-y-mayo-2025/ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/21/trump-strait-of-hormuz-american-territory  https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/20/politics/trump-iran-war-strait-of-hormuz https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:School_Begins_(Puck_Magazine_1-25-1899).jpg   Las carpetas: persecución política y derechos civiles en Puerto Rico by Ramón Bosque Pérez y Javier Colón Morera Soldiers of the Nation: Military Service and Modern Puerto Rico, 1868-1952 by Harry Franqui-Rivera See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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In the last episode, we left off by talking about how the U.S. took over the Guano Islands and how it established U.S. expansion as a mission of resource extraction. The Guano Islands were uninhabited, but this episode is all about how the U.S. overseas expansion took over people as well as land. So to talk about the five inhabited U.S. colonies, we need to talk about the Spanish Empire. Throughout the 19th century, Spain's expansive empire shrunk considerably. Several of their colonies were either overtaken by the U.S. as in the case of Florida or became independent as in the case of Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and others.

By the end of the 19th century, the Spanish Empire was on its last legs, but it did have a few remaining colonies, Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Cuba, the Philippines, and to a lesser extent, Puerto Rico had been fighting insurrectionary wars against Spain for years by the time that 1898 rolled around. In a final bid to keep some type of control over them, Spain gave Cuba and Puerto Rico autonomy, meaning that they could form a local government. Meanwhile, Spain entered into a truce with the Philippines with promises of future reforms. However, their insurgencies essentially continued. This wouldn't last long because the U.S. government invaded the Spanish colonies a few months later as part of the Spanish-American War.

As I've talked about, the end of the 19th century was marked by the wish to expand America's influence beyond its continental borders. It had partially done this with the purchase of Alaska as well as the coming annexation of Hawaii, which would happen in great part because the U.S. needed a military outpost in the mid-Pacific to support operations in the Philippines and Guam. However, it still wanted more, and Spain's weakness presented the perfect opportunity. So throughout the years before 1898, the government had been talking about intervening in Cuba's struggle for independence. This was done for yellow journalism, which we talked about a little bit in the last episode, but essentially the newspapers were talking kind of directly to the United state government and being like, we need to spread liberty to them and freedom. We need to

teach them how it goes. And this was, of course, mixed with manifest destiny and the Monroe doctrine where they wanted to, quote, unquote, protect American hegemony in the new world. Yeah. I'm trying to remember who said this. Uplived, civilized and Christianized our little brown brothers. Was it McKinley? It seems like it would be. But when I, when I search that specific thing in quotation marks, I don't. Oh, wait. So William Howard Taft, the first American governor general of the Philippines and lady U.S. President, use the phrase, quote, little brown brother in cables to McKinley. So maybe it was there. Okay. Yeah, I think I may have, like, combined two quotations. The paternalist racism there is fantastic. I'll drop it in later when we're talking about somebody else. I wasn't sure if it's Cuba or which country they were referring to. I mean, based on how pocket drew them, we could all be the Little Brown Brothers. Right, yeah, that is the stereotype, don't they going cool?

Absolutely. So, speaking of protecting U.S. business interests overseas, in January 1898, the United States sent a warship, the USS Maine, to Havana Harbor, to safeguard American business interests there as well as U.S. citizens. However, the USS Maine sank about a month later. And while the cause was likely an internal fire, according to recent experts, the contemporary opinion in the United States blamed it all on Spain. Right. There was a smattering of yellow journalism that was like, you know, they did it. Oh, yeah. The Spain did it to us, even though they didn't really have a way to prove that, especially not in 1898.

Yeah, yeah. And like the whole like going to the bottom of the ocean to look at the USS Maine, it's a thing. Like there have been a series of like, I guess underwater archaeology is what it is, but like expeditions to ascertain exactly which direction it blew out. And like various ones have had various conclusions. I think you rightly phrase it here. It doesn't matter what caused the explosion. It became a fact for the yellow press that the Spanish did.

Absolutely. And I think it's really interesting that there's still, right, I understand that why you want to like have a genuine conclusion. but the fact that it's still being litigated more than, what is that, like a hundred, twenty-eight, hundred-thirty years after? Yeah. A little bit more, a little bit less, a little bit more. Yeah. Is still, you know, kind of this conception of American nation building where it couldn't be that the press got it wrong, that the government got it wrong, and that it became a fact in the media.

And that's why the U.S. invaded Cuba and other Spanish colonies, right? that the U.S. kind of has to prove itself innocent in this regard. So per how to hide an empire, the U.S. government and the U.S. media wanted to intervene, but anti-imperialists in Congress, imagine that,

didn't want Cuba to be annexed to the United States. So to ostensibly show that they didn't have colonial ambitions, Congress passed the Teller Amendment that stated that they would not annex Cuba. However, Congress said nothing of Spain's other colonies. I should also say that before the U.S. officially entered the war that year, Teddy Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, had sent ships to essentially surround all of the colonies, not just Cuba. Yeah. So they were kind of pretty

clearly preparing for something, you know. Yeah, yeah. So the U.S. went to war in 1898, and it won pretty handily, in large part, and this is the stuff that a lot of American history books won't tell you because of the help of the independence movements that had already been fighting in these colonies for decades. However, the U.S. did as the U.S. does and essentially discarded these independence movements ambitions once they had helped the U.S. win the war, showing once again that allies are not necessarily friends. I feel like this is a recurrency. A lesson that has to be taught and learned throughout American history, right? You know. Yeah, yeah. Many, many, many, many such cases. Yep. In my opinion, nowhere is this more evident than in the Philippines,

where the liberation movement declared independence from Spain in June of 1898, yet it went unrecognized by the U.S. Instead, the U.S. choreographed a mock battle with Spain that eventually led to them handing over their colony to the U.S. per how to hide an empire. The American's lack of recognition for the Filipino independence movement would eventually lead to the Philippine-American War, where the U.S. trampled and devastated the Filipino insurgency that wanted independence from one conqueror, Spain originally, and their newest conqueror, the United States. Yeah.

You know, ostensibly, they came in to help these people and then essentially massacred them. Yeah. Little vexological aside. This star and triangle device that you see on, like, lots of flags, has its, like, birth in this period. I believe it begins with Jose Marti and the Cuban independence movement. Obviously, like, it characterizes many of these states in their independence movement. But for a while there, like, that flag was, like, the symbol of fighting against imperial conquest.

That's why they incorporated it into the Catalan flag. The Independence Senile has the triangle. And then the Catalonia, just as a thing without any particular political ambition, doesn't have the triangle. on the star. And then you have the red triangle for like socialist-dependentist. But like this blue triangle in flags, like it just shows how these actions like reverberated around the world, right?

Like Spain had been the empire. Yeah. And like it had this. In Spanish, we call it the Anas for Riblus of 1898, right? Like the complete collapse of Spain's external possessions. And like for a while there, people were like, huh, yeah, empires can fall.

We can defeat them, unfortunately. A new one took its place. Yeah, exactly. Empires can fall if a new empire slides in there and, like, yes, helps with the fighting and it doesn't do all. Like you said, like these people have been fighting. Like, Marti was dead by the time

Roosevelt arrived, but he had already begun the independence movement. And actually, now that you mentioned that about the triangle, I didn't include it in this script, right? But the Puerto Rican flag is actually directly based on the Cuban. flag as well. It was made in 1895, I believe, by Puerto Rican exiles in New York who were fighting for independence from Spain. And so they essentially adopted this Cuban design, but inverted the

colors to show kind of Caribbean solidarity and brotherhood. And, you know, it's been our flag ever since, right? And there's a thing about the Puerto Rican flag that I'm not going to get into too much, but like based on the kind of color of the blue in the flag is the political status that you support, right? That's kind of a myth that has essentially become the fact, right? Right. Now, I love a little hidden flag shit, like the floundrians with their flag, like if the lion has claws or not, it denotes their states on independence.

Yeah, it doesn't matter if that's what it was designed for. Again, it becomes true because everyone knows it to be true. and they're using it to signal that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So in Puerto Rico, the light blue is kind of the independence flag. The medium blue, which is kind of the one that most often is used depending on the place, is kind of the status quo sometimes independence. And then the darker blue, similar to the dark blue used in the U.S. flag,

is the one that stands for statehood. That's cool. You shouldn't necessarily take this as fact because, you know, sometimes it's hard for people to get their hands on a specific color blue Puerto Rican flag. flag, but you can usually tell based on the flag that they're waving around what they support. Yeah. Also, actually, speaking of flags, the flag of the Northern Mariana Islands, it goes hard. Have you seen it?

No, I haven't. The Marshall Islands flag is fucking thick. Yes. I'm actually looking at it right now. I have a Marshallese football shirt. Let me send a picker real quick. Okay, yeah, that's a sick one. Yeah.

Yeah, wow. There's a lot of very cool flag designs that I witness while writing this script. Oh, wow. Yeah, that one's great. So speaking about the Philippine-American War and the American occupation of the Philippines post-1898, quoting from Colonial Crucible, the four years of counter-guerilla warfare that followed would make accurate intelligence an imperative, forcing a marked expansion of the military's limited capacities,

particularly in the area of operational field intelligence. During the campaign in Manila, the U.S. Army, quote, created a modern metropolitan police force that applied military intelligence and data management to the problem of political espionage, developing covert techniques of surveillance and penetration to fight a dirty war in the city's slums and back alleys, end quote. And according to How to Hide an Empire, American GIs tortured Filipino guerrillas by administering the quote-unquote water cure, a torture method similar to the waterboarding, which has happened in Vietnam and Afghanistan, right?

And in Cuba, in the little U.S. base that we have there. As well, right. And you kind of see this as part of the imperial feedback or the imperial boomerang, that colonization of the U.S.'s colonies has sent back into the United States and how it's reverberated in future imperialist or colonialist conquest, right?

This one torture method, which is very similar, actually, to waterboarding, has reverberated throughout American counterinsurgency history. So here you can see how the management of empire has instructed the U.S.'s military apparatus in quelling nationalist movements the world over. And this is obviously something that's come back towards the American metropole,

particularly the kind of counterinsurgency used in policing American military occupations. Right. This is very common because, quoting from colonial crucible, quote, colonial regimes only had finite resources for costly social controls and generally shows to apply them to policing, prisons, and law enforcement. And kind of the colonial policing apparatus has reverberated throughout every single empire's history, right? I'm thinking

of Smedley Butler taking the policing techniques he learned in Haiti back to Philadelphia with him. The Filipino police kind of setting the scene for some of the policing that would happen in the United States, this is like very much a thing that happens the world over or, God, why am I blanking? George Orwell in India, the policing that he did. Burma, yeah, in Burma, sorry. Yeah, which was part of India at the time in the British conception. So Orwell, being a policeman there and kind of seeing how it impacted back home, and we see this the world over, right, in terms of militarization, the military exports that the U.S. is taken to

many, many, many countries the world over is now reverberating back into U.S. streets. Yeah. And actually, in terms of ICE and the kind of paramilitary campaign of terror that they're doing, we're seeing the people that the U.S. displaced in other places kind of fleeing there, trying to get a safe haven in the U.S. and the paramilitary tactics that were used against their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents, now being used on them. right so that the cycle of abuse and violence doesn't really end sadly yeah so you know it won't

invest resources in policing prisons and law enforcement these advertisers we can't say that for sure right might be the Washington State Highway Patrol again hey I'm ruby car the host of the podcast on core check out our brand new episodes featuring music from the show that everyone is reheating as we speak heated rivalry. Join me as I go behind the songs that brought Shane and Elia together. I'll tell you the stories of Fice, My Moon, my Man, wolf parades, I'll believe in anything,

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and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just, started screaming.

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the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments,

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And Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook on the Big Money Players Network. Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners. Each week, we talk to someone in show business, aka The Biz, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time, and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, not that great. Actually, can you help me shape this?

How about we flip it on his head, right? How about we flip this script? What is the surprise woman? Actually, you think is the straight man, is actually. actually the one who's acting weird. Adam Scott, this entire time you've been expecting

Adam Sandler to come to visit the show. I would never expect, I would never set expectations for something like that to happen. If the universe allows for something like that to happen, I'm open to it. I'm always going to accept.

You know, Danny McBride, fine. Yeah, it's all this fragile masculinity. Exude. I could smell it walking down the hallway, to be honest with you. I was like, is that weed? Nope, it's fragile masculinity. Ben Stiller, no. Because a lot of times, out of context, people don't get it or even know what a circle is.

You know what I mean? They're like, oh, what's a state. Everyone's so dumb. And fake. Right, fake and also not interested or just like, oh, I've got my life. I don't care about your life. And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode, but he's just so busy.

Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Meanwhile, in Cuba, as I mentioned previously, anti-imperialists in Congress passed a law that met the U.S. couldn't annex it. However, that didn't mean there couldn't be a military occupation, which lasted until 1902 when Cuba declared independence. However, the Platt Amendment stipulated that the U.S. could intervene in human affairs even invade if they wanted to. It also meant that the U.S. could establish a permanent naval base there, which is now and then called Guantanamo Bay. Actually, that might be the one piece of American Overseas Empire that I think is very present in the American consciousness, right? It's much more so than, like, Puerto Rico or Guam or whatever.

Yeah, the fact that it's like a cutout from Cuba this country that like the whole thing of this half of the Trump administration is hating Cuba and be like, oh, psych, we also own a little bit of that island. Right, exactly. And own it like for more than a century at this point as kind of a bastion of continued control on it, right? Because they couldn't annex it completely. But if you just take a little small piece of it and then use it for a lot of evil things, you know. Yeah, to your point about it, affecting the metropole, like, so much of the worst parts of U.S. history run through that little naval enclave there. Absolutely. Like the worst parts of the war on terror.

We're now using it for a deportation camp, right? Like, it's where we do our deniable crimes. Yeah, absolutely. And that actually ties very much into a thing that I'll give a little preview on, which is why the U.S. Constitution does it really apply in the, the colonies. So the U.S. would go on to occupy Cuba two more times, from 1906 to 1909 and once more from 1917 to 1922. Even after the U.S. occupation ended, the U.S. would go on to have a very good relationship with the Batista dictatorship because of American business interest in the Cuban archipelago. However, the Cuban Revolution of 1953 would eventually mark the end of this relationship

But the U.S. oscillating between wanting to outright take over or destroy Cuba again as the current Trump administration wants to do or to just being kind of very critically wary of the government, right? There was a point in recent American history where tensions between the two countries and I say tensions, but it's really an extremely lopsided kind of hate from the U.S.'s part. There was a time in recent memory where tensions were kind of mellowing out, then you could visit Cuba without there being. Yeah. And a major international incident under Obama. Right. And similar to the Philippines, Cuba became an important part of how the U.S. would portray itself overseas.

There were several things that happened in Cuba and have happened in Cuba that have defined the colonial empire, right, like Guantanamo Bay. But this time, I don't want it to be something so dark. So per colonial crucible, American forces occupying Cuba worked ceaselessly to control that dreaded yellow fever in Havana and the rest of the island. But like the public health campaigns of other colonial powers, these efforts were not an expression of medical beneficence. As elsewhere, public health in Cuba served the needs of the colonizer rather than the colonized, to protect commerce, maintain the labor force, safeguard troops, and colonial administrations, and justify colonial

rule. The eradication of yellow fever in Cuba, an unprecedented success of colonial public health, achieved for the United States nearly all of these goals. American public health efforts in Cuba were a colonial enterprise that provided economic and political benefits to important supporters of the American imperial state, demonstrated that American imperialism could succeed where European powers had failed and so inspired further American colonial expansion in the region. So here you can kind of see how even if the U.S. is doing something like patently good, like eliminating U.S. Yellow Fever in the Cuban Archipelago, it's still because they want to further control Cuba and its

neighboring islands. Yeah. So a similar hookworm eradication campaign took place in Puerto Rico, which remains a U.S. colony to this day. This hookworm eradication campaign would go on to inform a similar campaign throughout the American South. However, as noted by How to Hide an Empire, the Southern Campaign largely succeeded, in part because of a million-dollar philanthropic donation from John D. Rockefeller.

Meanwhile, a victim of colonial neglect, the Puerto Rico Project received only $5,000, and no matter how many hookworm pills Puerto Ricans took, they became reinfected again and again, because the government did not care to uplift them from poverty, which would have significantly reduced hookworm rates. In comparison, the U.S. South essentially received this mega-donation, nation, which helped them uplift them, as well as investing in, like, school and several other programs that made it so this hookworm infection wasn't so disastrous for the region.

However, Puerto Rico being a colony, they were like, you know, we don't need to do as much. So here we see how colonial health campaigns can be used to benefit the metropole at the expense of the colonies. Yes, Cubans and Puerto Ricans got help for their illnesses, but in one case, it was used to just further colonization, and in the other, they were used essentially as guinea pigs to help white people of the American South. Puerto Rico was under military rule from 1898 to 1900, and was eventually placed under civil administration in 1900 under the Foraker Act. Puerto Ricans would become American citizens 17 years later, just as the U.S. was entering

World War I. It's commonly stated as a myth that we were made citizens exclusively to become soldiers, and this is like half right, the thinking by the U.S. government was that citizenship would convince Puerto Ricans to fight any foreign aggressors that could possibly attack the archipelago, as well as help the U.S. military project military force into the Caribbean. I should say that this is according to the book, Soldiers of the Nation, by Harry Franke-Rivera, and actually, Puerto Rico is called the Gibraltar of the Caribbean in World War II because of its coastal defenses. Got it, yeah.

However, it wouldn't be until 1949 that we were able to choose our own governor and we became, quote, Estado Libra Associated or Commonwealth in 1952. I'm going to spare the political conjecture. Truthfully, Estado Libra Associated is kind of a nonsense statement. It's essentially just colony with a fancier name. Right. Right. There is not really any difference between Puerto Rico and Guam in this sense.

Puerto Rico is a commonwealth, same as the northern. Mariana Islands, actually. But there's really no difference legally from other colonies by being called an Estado Libra Sociado. Yeah. And speaking of political repression by the U.S. government, the Puerto Rican independence movement has waxed and waned over the years. All the while, the movement has faced pretty brutal political repression throughout all that time, including being bombed by the Air Force during the 1950, Hayjuja U.S. uprising one of the few times that the U.S. bombed its own citizens, as well as the longest domestic surveillance program in U.S. history that spanned roughly six decades and tracked somewhere over 100,000 people, according to the book

Las Carpetas by Ramon Bosque-Perez and Jose Javier Colong Morera. Here, like the Philippines, we see how the U.S.'s imperial quelling of nationalist movements would go on to boomerang back to the metropole. Las Carpetas, as the program is colloquially known, preceded Co-Intel Pro, and and its DNA can be found throughout the domestic surveillance programs that we know of, and surely those that we don't. And I want to stop here to speak a little of the Puerto Rican status debate, because I've seen a lot of people who don't know anything about it,

acting like experts on Twitter.com over the years. Shocking. Puerto Rico has performed several referendums over the decades where you vote on the status. And over the last decade, a state had his won three of them. truth be told, these referendums don't actually mean that much in terms of measuring public support because they've been boycotted and many people view them in the same way that they would have public poll. Also, it's non-binding, which means even if whatever option wins, nothing's going to happen. Congress is the only one that could approve statehood for Puerto Rico, no matter how much Puerto Ricans asked for it.

Even so, in the last referendum during the 2024 election, some form of independence, meaning either full independence or compact of free association received 41% support while statehood received 59%. So while statehood is ostensibly the majority choice, it's not as clear cut as many people would want you to believe. There's also the fact that the government has inculcated a sense of if you don't vote for statehood, federal funds will be taken away from Puerto Rico and in a colony where about 46% of the public budget is federal funds. And nearly half of the people fall below the poverty line, that's a very, very powerful boogeyman. Yeah.

And now I'm sorry to say that I'm going to summarize a lot of the history of Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands to get to how the Constitution doesn't fully apply there. But I still want people to know some of the basic facts about the other colonies. Guam was under military rule for 47 years, first by the U.S., then Japan for four years during World War II, and again by the U.S. until 1950, when Truman signed the Organic Act of Guam. giving them a civilian administration and a civilian court.

Meanwhile, the U.S. annexed American Samoa in 1900, when local chiefs seated Tutuila, the largest island to the U.S. This was followed by Manoa in 1904 and Swain's Island in 1905, although it's also claimed by Tokelau, a colony of New Zealand. As I said during the last episode, American Samoans are non-citizen nationals, and they have to naturalize if they want to become American citizens. the ACLU being a non-citizen national means that they can't be firefighters, paramedics, and public school teachers. The U.S. Virgin Islands were bought from Denmark for $25 million in 1917. The U.S. had been negotiating this in one way or another since 1865, and like Puerto Rico,

USVI is an important strategic foothold in the Caribbean for military purposes. Finally, the Northern Mariana Islands have oscillated rulers between several empires. However, after World War II, they became United Nations Trust territories under American administration. It became a colony of the U.S. in 1986. The Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau were also part of this trust, but they chose to enter into compacts of free association instead of becoming colonies. There is a common trait among all of these colonies that I've mentioned throughout, which is being key to military force projection by the United States in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Pacific. Bases in each of these colonies are crucial to the U.S. military's logistical ability to deploy throughout the world. Recently, a long dormant naval base in Puerto Rico, Roosevelt Roosfeld

Rhodes, was brought back to life as part of the Trump administration's attacks on Venezuela and the boat strikes throughout the Caribbean, as well as including the Pacific. The planes that are doing the boat strikes aren't leaving from Puerto Rico to do in the Pacific, obviously. Another common trait that all of these colonies share is that stuff is super expensive, in part because of the Jones Act, a 1920 shipping law that mandates that any goods traveling between two U.S. ports has to move on a U.S. flagged, owned, and crude ship. People might be most familiar with this law based on the amount of times as sitting U.S. president has put it on pause. In fact, Trump extended the Jones Act waiver for another 90 days just a few days ago to assuble. wage pressures from oil price increases. A 2024 working paper by two Purdue University economists with backing of the World Bank found that the Jones Act imposes an annual welfare burden on Puerto Rico

of $1.4 billion. Because foreign flagged commerce ships can't stop in Puerto Rico, then go onto Florida, for example, they have to go to Florida first, have all their stuff moved onto a U.S. flagged ship, then it comes here. And all of this cost is passed on to the consumer. The Genz Act also affects Hawaii and Alaska. Yeah, I think people who have not experience this will not realize the profound nature to which this. And just being so far from the colonial core impacts everyday life. Like, the way you eat is fundamentally determined by the fact that this shit is so expensive. I know, like, this gets particularly the case in, you know, like interior of Alaska where just getting there is in and of itself,

but this has a big role to play. Absolutely, actually. This isn't the script, but in terms of Puerto Rico, part of the American industrialization of the archipelago, as well as the kind of the way that it was backed up by the local government, meant that we switched from a kind of agricultural society to an industrial one, and we went from growing a ton of our own food to only growing about between 10 to 20% of it, which back then was like very good because there was a boom.

time for the Puerto Rican economy, but kind of now it means that everything is incredibly expensive because it has to come from all over the world, get moved on to a U.S. flagship in the contiguous 48 states, then come back here. Right. It places you not only at a place where you're already paying more, but also at the whim of shipping costs, oil prices, right? These things that we're all seeing go up right now. Absolutely.

And part of those costs have been assuaged recently because of the waivers, but there is a very big contingent of people in Puerto Rico who are really dreading the moment those waivers stop because things are going to get really expensive again. And they're, I mean, they're still expensive, but they're going to get even more expensive, right? Yeah. Yeah. So at this point, if you've been listening closely, you'll notice that there's a pretty glaring emission in what I've covered so far, Alaska and Hawaii. He only oversees U.S. territories to become states have gone almost completely unmentioned. I purposefully left them out because they overcomplicated the whole history and it was easier to put them at the end than in the middle. So Alaska was bought from Imperial Russia in 1856 for $7.2 million and Hawaii was annexed in 1898 after U.S. businessman and Marines did a bloodless coup against the kingdom of Hawaii and its then queen.

they eventually became the 49th and 50th state in the middle of the 20th century. And the kind of annexation of Alaska in Hawaii is the thread that's been running throughout these two podcast episodes, right? In terms of Alaska, it's resource extraction. By buying Alaska, they got access to miles and miles of pristine nature that had in it gold, fur, and oil. In Hawaii, they received a strategic foothold in the Pacific, which has become extremely important over the years, particularly at the time that it was annexed during the Spanish-American War where the U.S. military had to use it as a launch pad, essentially,

for its war in the Philippines in Guam. According to How to Hide an Empire and an article in the Conversation titled Why Russia gave up Alaska America's Gateway to the Arctic by William L. Iguagruk Hensley. The purchase of Alaska brought with it a cornucopia of natural resources, including gold, fur, and oil that could be mined from this new territory as well as nearly 400 million pristine acres of new land with a comparably small addition to the U.S.'s majority white racial calculus.

And this is a very important thing. The United States has never really added territories at this point that would significantly throw off the amount of white Anglo-Saxon people that inherit it, right? in I'm thinking of choosing to incorporate Oklahoma instead of the indigenous state of Sequoia because of how it would affect the amount of white people in the United States. Yeah, and the way that it would affect the representation in Congress too, right? Like specifically partitioning states off in such a way that they don't tend to give people who are not white representation. Yeah, absolutely.

Meanwhile, Hawaii, with a much more multicultural population, was a foreign-year issue, but the U.S. decided to make them a state anyway because it helped them reach Pacific markets and because it provided an important geopolitical strategic interest during the Cold War. Hawaii was made into a state because of the Spanish-American War, but it was annexed, not made into a state, a claratory note there. Right, yeah. I'm severely flattening history here, but that's the gist of how they became states.

And, dear listener, you might be asking what makes them different from Puerto Rico and the rest of the colonies. The key difference is that Alaska and Hawaii were both, quote, unquote, incorporated territories. Meanwhile, Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa are quote unquote unincorporated territories. If that distinction means nothing to you and it sounds kind of racist, welcome to the club. I'm Ruby Carr, the host of the podcast, Oncourt. Check out our brand new episodes featuring music from the show that everyone is reheating as we speak. Heated rivalry.

Join me as I go behind the songs that brought Shane and Elia together. I'll tell you the stories of Fice, My Moon, My Man, wolf parades, I'll believe in anything, and tattoos all the things she said, and how they all became a part of this global phenomenon. Stream encore on IHeart Radio, crave, or wherever you get your podcasts. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months.

I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was something. someone at the end of my bed and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.

But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsesives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.

I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages.

Hey, this is Hayes, Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook on the Big. Money Players Network. Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners. Each week, we talk to someone in show business, aka the biz, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time, and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do

our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman. Can you help me shape this? How about we flip it on his head, right? How about we flip this script? What is the surprise woman? But actually you think is the straight man is actually the one who's acting weird. Adam Scott, this entire time you've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show.

I would never expect. I would never set expectations for something like that to happen. If the universe allows for something like that to happen, I'm open to it. I'm always going to accept. You know, Danny McBride, fine. Yeah, it's all this fragile masculinity exuding. I could smell it walking down the hallway, to be honest with you. I was like, I was like, is that weed?

Nope, it's fragile masculinity. Ben Stiller, no. Because a lot of times, out of context, people don't get it, or even know what a circle is. You know what I mean? They're like, oh, what's a state. Everyone's so dumb except for you. And fake. Right, fake and also not interested or just like, oh, I've got my life.

I don't care about your life. your life. And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode, but he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This distinction was created in 1901 by a series of racist Supreme Court decisions called the Insular Cases. A critical part of the Insular Cases created the doctrine of incorporation that governed, non-contiguous territories, as well as created the idea of incorporation versus unincorporation, creating the legal framework saying that the Constitution does not fully apply to the unincorporated

territories. Downs v. Bidwell was the most important case here because it created the term unincorporated territory to describe Puerto Rico's legal status shortly after it had been acquired. The case created the distinction that some territories were unincorporated and others were incorporated, like Alaska and Hawaii, which were integral parts of the U.S. and thus bound for statehood. However, unincorporated territories like Puerto Rico and Guam were not on that path to statehood, and they were appurtenant to the United States,

the same word the U.S. used for the islands it claimed under the Guano Islands Act. We were, and this is a quote, foreign in a domestic sense. What an amazing legal fucking term to come up with. Right? Yeah, great. It's like very incredible because all of this is like a legal fiction applied. Right. Like literally, right.

Yeah, it's a bunch of people dancing around saying long words to be like, totally not a colony, dude. No, absolutely not. No way. Totally different, bro. I don't know what you're talking about. The US would never have colonies. They're just foreign in a domestic sense.

Another case, the Lima v. Bidwell was decided on the exact same day. It explained that Puerto Rico belonged to the US. I'm simplifying the explanation here, but when you mix it with downs and other cases over the years, you get the phrase that we know all too well, owned but not part of. To drive the point home, I want to paraphrase from Amy Kaplan's The Anarchy of Empire. The insular cases put Puerto Rico and other colonies in a liminal space, both inside and outside of the boundaries of the Constitution, relegating the people who live there to a permanent state of limbo, neither fully citizens nor completely foreign. The insular cases cemented the imperial mode of governance so furrowly that many Americans would not even consider their home country to be an empire. These colonies remain in limbo to this day, likely never going to be made states, yet equally as likely to never become independent.

This ideological and legal framework has extended past the colonies, the most salient example being Guantanamo Bay, a colonial holdover from U.S. occupation in Cuba. Per Kaplan in her essay, Where is Guantanamo Bay? Court decisions built on top of the insular cases recognize the base as domestic for some purposes and foreign for others, thus facilitating the, quote, global reach of U.S. power

by creating a shadowy hybrid legal system coextensive with the changing needs of empire. Yeah. There have been several attempts to overturn the insular cases, but they remain case law. These cases that describe the people of Puerto Rico and other U.S. colonies as, quote, alien races and savage tribes remain the way that the United States views

its overseas possessions. The last challenge to the insular cases came in 2018 in a case titled Fittisamano versus United States, where free non-citizen nationals from American Samoa challenged the U.S. government's denial to extend to them birthright citizenship. A Utah federal district court, right, not an American Samo. court, a Utah federal district court declared that American Samoans were citizens of the United States and deserved birthright citizenship. But the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision citing the insular cases. And in this process, there is kind of a very specific othering of people of the colonies, right? You don't get to go to your local court and, like, show

them, hey, I want to be a part of this, a part of this nation, which is what they wanted, right? You have to go to Utah to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals and be like, hey, I want you to recognize my constitutional rights. That has now got me wondering, like, what circuit they're in. Like, do they fall into a federal circuit? No, it doesn't have a federal court, apparently. No, because part of the reason that American Samoa is so different from the rest of the colonies, right, is that the indigenous population there has kind of wanted to keep them separately. And right, there's varying opinions on this, right? Which is why we saw that challenge to the insular cases.

During that challenge, the country or the government of American Samoa, they were pro-insular cases being like, hey, we want to continue to be case law because it wouldn't challenge certain laws that they have in the books that people with certain amounts of American Samoan ancestry. can buy land and those without it can't buy land there. Yeah. Okay. So they didn't want to get equal protectioned or something under the equal protection

cause of the constitution. They felt like it was a net positive for them. Yeah. So, but like obviously this has changed through time, I should say, right? Because for some, it means that they can stop gentrification and further colonization of their island. Sure. But it also means that their people face significant challenges if they choose to travel outside of American Samoa,

which, based on how the U.S. economy works, usually means that a significant portion of that population has to leave in order to find employment, right? Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I think of how Marshallese people, they're not U.S. citizens, but they can travel to the U.S. without a visa and reside and work in the U.S. for the visa. Like if they join the military, they can join the US military, but then if they want to access their VA benefits, they have to go to Hawaii, like across, like a, it's a several hour flight. Like, it's several days on a boat, right? And like, obviously not all of the, you know, the services that they might need medically available on Marjora. So, like, they have to take that journey just to access the benefits, like, in theory. are owed to them.

Yeah, it's not exactly the same situation here in Puerto Rico, but the VA benefits system here is not that great compared to the contiguous United States, which in and of itself is also not that great from what I've read and people have told me. Yes, yeah. But there's only one hospital here in several clinics. Yeah. So if you live far away from the hospital, you have to travel to that to get VA care. and that that's like one of the many, many things where the U.S. colonies are forgotten and left by the wayside

in terms of these things that the U.S. government should ostensibly provide for its citizens and the people under its dominion, right? Yeah. So the insular cases essentially said that people in the U.S. colonies were owned but not part of the United States. That meant that we had to be given American citizenship if we got it, not the case of American Samoa, through federal statute. This is different than people born in the contiguous United States or Alaska and Hawaii where they get birthright citizenship through the Constitution. Because the Constitution doesn't fully apply to us, we had to get it through a federal statute. Yeah. This means that it would be pretty easy to take away birthright citizenship in the colonies compared to taking away birthright citizenship in the colonies compared to taking away birthright citizenship.

right citizenship throughout the entire U.S. This is something that Virginia Congressman Morgan Griffith wants to do. Griffith presented a law to eliminate birthright citizenship in the U.S. colonies, saying that it was the only thing that the U.S. could do to protect American citizenship. And because our American citizenship is through statute, several laws for history in Puerto Rico's. It was in 1917, then codified by the American Nationality Act. He could do it if the law passed Congress and Congress shows to eliminate birthright citizenship here. His press release specifically cited the insular cases as giving Congress the power to take it away.

However, to be clear, it's very unlikely that this bill will even make it to a vote much less become law. But through this kind of fret to take away birthright citizenship, we see how the U.S. still has kind of, extremely direct control over its colonies. Yeah. You know, as I hope I have evidence throughout this episode, the American colonies, the current American colonies, not the 13 colonies, right? Have always been laboratories for the American experiment, right? In terms of surveillance, in terms of military occupation.

And here, with this bill that, again, won't even, probably won't even make it to a vote, we are seeing the Republican administration trying to experiment with how they can take away birthright citizenship, which they failed to do through Trump's executive order. But they are trying to see how they can ram it through to take it away from people. And recently, we saw Trump sign an executive order to do a similar thing to ostensibly address, quote unquote, birth tourism, a thing that doesn't really matter. Yeah, in the grand scheme of things. It's an infatimally small number of people. Exactly. The thing that I want to express is that the U.S. colonies have always been laboratories of empire. What happens here doesn't stay here. And contrary to the way that many people think, the U.S. and other empire, is to be clear, doesn't just exert power, ideology, and movements

outwards. Instead, it is in a continuous feedback loop with its colonies that have shaped what happens in the imperial core, the same way that it has shaped what happens in the imperial periphery. And I want to end this episode by talking about how Trump has signaled several times towards U.S. territorial expansion. He has made moves or said that he wants to annex Canada, Venezuela, Cuba, the Gaza Strip, Mexico, and Greenland, among others. And as I mentioned in the last episode, he's been obsessed with Greenland for a hot minute, even reportedly saying that he wanted to trade it for Puerto Rico, which was then ravaged by Hurricane Maria, according to NBC.

His most recent signal was posting a picture of Venezuela with the American flag on it, essentially saying that he wants to make it the 51st state. To be clear, there are several other places that he could do that in, but he is projecting this idea of the 51st state as a way of, kind of colonial capture. Right, right, by promising to bring liberty and freedom to Venezuelans. He is saying, we will make you equal, even though he has forgotten a bunch of equal rights for

four million people in the U.S. colonies. And while a lot of Trump's rhetoric about territorial expansion of the United States has been brushed off as the mad ramblings of a despot without any real power to do so, he did genuinely kidnap Nicholas Maduro and has kind of made the country into a vassal state. of the US, right? Yeah. And I learned that this is called Asusurane. Okay.

A souserane is a political leader that expresses power over a separate sovereign entity. Okay. Yeah. So like in like an informal fashion like this. Yeah. Okay. While the lines aren't quite clear enough right now, it's become increasingly evident that the U.S. is exerting more than simple influence in Venezuela, making it into a U.S.

protectorate in all but name. And to be honest with you, in my opinion, the U.S. would never add another state to the union, particularly one that would add 28.6 million Latinx people to the nation's demographics. However, as I hope I have evidence throughout the episode, the American Empire has various forms of exerting its colonial influence throughout the region and the world. It doesn't necessarily have to become a state to become owned by the United States, as Puerto Rico, Guam, and several other colonies. Within its treatment of its colonies, in the insular cases, the U.S. has established a separate ideological and legal framework to treat those people and pieces of land that it wants to own and occupy but not incorporate. Carlos from the future here, a couple days after we recorded this episode, Trump announced that he already considered the Strait of Hormuz's quote-unquote American territory. This was reported by several news outlets, including The Guardian, which is where I read it originally. While it seems pretty obvious that the U.S. government has no way of actually establishing

control over the strait because it's on the losing side of the war, the overture towards taking it over is an attempt to establish a new sphere of U.S. hegemony in the region. Imperialism is a business enterprise, and much like the conquest of the Guano Islands and the inhabited colonies meant access to new resources and military footholds, U.S. control of the strait, which again, very unlikely, would be an incredible boon for the U.S. economy. The most comparable thing here would be the Panama Canal. Control of the canal helped the U.S. become a major global power because it controlled shipping in the region. The U.S. government likely wants to do something similar with the Strait of Hormuz,

a major maritime passage for all types of things that make the economy move. While the threat against the strait is the newest in the long line of threats to annexed new territory to the U.S., we should normalize them. Through its colonies in the insular cases, as well as decades of colonialism and imperialism, The U.S. has built the apparatus to expand its empire to people and places beyond its borders. While it's unlikely, we shouldn't write it off completely, especially as the Trump administration continues to signal that it wants to regain domination over the Western Hemisphere and other parts of the world. If they'd like to read more of your work, where can they find you?

Yeah, I'm at Fackero 2XL on social media. It's V-A-Q-U-E-R-O-2-X-L. I'm a freelancer, so I've written for a bunch of places. My most recent work has been a series of short documentaries about different immigrant populations in Puerto Rico, the Dominican population, the Chinese population, and the Palestinian population. The Palestinian one came out a little less than a month ago, and that's pretty much where you can find me. Thanks for accompanying me on this colonial journey, James. That's what I do. But yeah, thank you for explaining that.

I feel like it's pretty good to have these things all wrapped up in a way people can understand like that. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. I survived nine months in your... captivity and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.

I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the Survivor Files. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshops, if your bookshould and your for you page are equally important to your personality. Welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island to serve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators,

and plenty of overthought opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. Listen to Pro Society on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook. Each week, we talk to someone in show business and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us.

Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stillard, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nick Tuturo.

You probably know me from NYPD Blue. The Longest Yard or Spike Leaves Black Klansman. And on my new podcast, Delivering Happiness with Nick Titoro, I deliver pizza to a new guest. I've shared a slice with everyone from Seth Rollins. What are you doing, my belt? To Bill Burr. I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of their mind as I am.

And now, we even have more great guests coming up, including the great John Tituro. It's called Happiness, Delivering Happiness. And many, many more. Open your free High Heart Radio app. Search Delivering Happiness with Nick Tuttle. And listen now. This is an IHeart podcast.

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