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SPEAKER_01 This is a video by RealLifeLore, done in a collaboration with Wendover
Productions.
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SPEAKER_01 What is a country?
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SPEAKER_01 The traditional definition is a state with sovereignty over a
geographic area, with a permanent population, defined territory, one
government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other
sovereign states.
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SPEAKER_01 So, does the United States perfectly match this description?
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SPEAKER_01 And perhaps even more importantly, what exactly is the United States?
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SPEAKER_01 When you say the words United States of America, you sort of assume that
the country is in America, but that's not really the case.
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SPEAKER_01 America means the continents of North and South America, but only 99.5%
of the United States of America is actually located here, and 1.6% of all
Americans live outside of America.
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SPEAKER_01 Most of this non-American yet still American land is located on islands
in both the Caribbean and Pacific.
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SPEAKER_01 In the Pacific, we have Hawaii, which is the only state out of 50 to be
located outside of America, and a bunch of other islands that together
make up something called U.S.
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SPEAKER_01 Territories are part of the U.S.
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SPEAKER_01 and are divided between incorporated and unincorporated territory.
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SPEAKER_01 But they are all directly governed by Congress, which means that they
are essentially ruled by what the 50 states decide, all without any
representation for themselves and without the ability to even vote for
president.
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SPEAKER_01 The furthest away of these territories is Guam, which is a little chunk
of America 3,633 miles away from the nearest state, Hawaii, and 7,912
miles away from the U.S.
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SPEAKER_01 Capitol building, where the laws governing the island are decided.
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SPEAKER_01 There are 160,000 people who live on Guam, and there are four other
island territories with people on them.
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SPEAKER_01 The Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, the U.S.
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SPEAKER_01 Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico.
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SPEAKER_01 There are eight other islands scattered around there too, but nobody
lives on those, so they're not really that important.
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SPEAKER_01 Constitution only partially applies in all of these territories,
which is getting more and more awkward all the time in a place like Puerto
Rico, which has a higher population than these 21 actual states.
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SPEAKER_01 Puerto Rico may very well someday in the future actually become the 51st
state, but a place that likely won't anytime soon is this tiny island in
the middle of nowhere in the Pacific.
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SPEAKER_01 This is Palmyra Atoll, home of nobody but the only incorporated
territory of the United States, meaning that the U.S.
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SPEAKER_01 Constitution fully applies here and anybody born here for whatever
reason automatically becomes a U.S.
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SPEAKER_01 Weirdly, the person who is given the right to administer this island is
the U.S.
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SPEAKER_01 president, which I'm sure is probably very high on the list of
presidential things to be doing.
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SPEAKER_01 The president also has to worry about some U.S.
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SPEAKER_01 land that is contested with other countries, like these two
uninhabited islands covered in bird **** that are claimed by Columbia,
or these islands off the coast of Maine that are claimed by both the U.S.
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SPEAKER_01 and Canada, which strangely means that if you were to give birth on
either of them, your child would automatically gain both American and
Canadian citizenship.
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SPEAKER_01 And perhaps most controversially of all, this piece of land in Cuba
called Guantanamo Bay.
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SPEAKER_01 It's actually not a small space.
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SPEAKER_01 Guantanamo Bay is larger than five UN-recognized sovereign states,
and is about the same size as the island of Jersey between England and
France.
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SPEAKER_01 Cuba has laid claim to the territory ever since 1959, but the United
States has so far decided to keep it instead.
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SPEAKER_01 Now that's all of America that isn't actually located in America, but
what about the other 99.5% of the country that we've been neglecting so
far?
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SPEAKER_01 Well, that would be the 49 states that make up the rest of the United
States along with Hawaii.
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SPEAKER_01 The states have the power to elect representatives that are sent to
Congress, which creates laws for the entire union.
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SPEAKER_01 The individual states are granted a considerable amount of power on
their own by Congress, and they share this power with the federal or the
national government.
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SPEAKER_01 The states and federal government are both allowed to pass their own
separate laws, which has caused a huge amount of trouble in the nation's
past over which laws are more valid.
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SPEAKER_01 The Civil War answered the question once and for all, though, however.
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SPEAKER_01 Federal law always wins over state law.
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SPEAKER_01 The Civil War also decided that states never have the right to leave the
Union once they have joined, even today.
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SPEAKER_01 So a state could actually vote to leave the Union, but it would not ever be
recognized by the federal government.
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SPEAKER_01 States also cannot ever declare a federal law to be invalid, but they can
kind of get around that by legalizing things that the federal
government has declared illegal.
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SPEAKER_01 The most famous instance of this is marijuana, which continues to be
illegal everywhere in the United States on the federal level, but has
been fully legalized for all uses in the states of Nevada, Maine,
Colorado, Washington, California, Massachusetts, Alaska, and
Oregon.
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SPEAKER_01 Since federal law always wins over state law, the federal government
could, in theory, at any time enter any of these states with federal law
enforcement and arrest the hundreds of thousands of people
participating in legal state laws, but illegal federal laws.
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SPEAKER_01 The only reason why they haven't yet is just because they've decided
that it isn't worth their time.
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SPEAKER_01 But if states can ignore federal law, or even legalize things that are
technically illegal, then what does that say about our definition of a
country, particularly the sovereignty part?
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SPEAKER_01 Further, how many people in states identify more with their own
individual state over the actual country of the United States?
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SPEAKER_01 Despite how we just discussed earlier the illegality of secession, the
states that continue to have active separatist movements regardless
of that are Alaska, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, Vermont,
New Hampshire,
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SPEAKER_01 the former Confederate States of America, and most famously, Texas.
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SPEAKER_01 The only remotely significant ones, however, are Texas, Hawaii, and
probably biggest of all, Alaska, where the Alaska Independence Party
is currently polling at around 6% of the population, and even got their
candidate elected governor of the state back in 1990.
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SPEAKER_01 And finally, there is one more significant way that you can challenge
the definition of a country in regards to the United States, the defined
territory part that we went over in the beginning.
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SPEAKER_01 This map leaves out the numerous American Indian reservations located
within the U.S., of which there are 326.