How Dumb Is Kevin McCarthy On A Scale Of One To Manifest Destiny?
This is true blackout drunk history.
Kevin McCarthy is not a smart man. This isn’t breaking news, considering he was outwitted by Matt Gaetz. However, he continues to astound us with unsolicited demonstrations of the intellectual vacuum between his ears.
The former House speaker, who is now just an average colleague of George Santos, posted a video of himself at a black-tie function where he boasted about America’s sinless nature.
“Peace without freedom is meaningless. Think for one moment. It is human nature that we all crave peace but we never attain it unless we have freedom. In every single war that America has fought, we have never asked for land afterward — except for enough to bury the Americans who gave the ultimate sacrifice for freedom.”
Seriously? As my friend journalist Victoria Brownworth noted, every day McCarthy gets less smart. He can’t even properly operate his bow tie, which is all crooked like he couldn’t decide if it should hang vertically like a normal tie.
Anyway, if McCarthy saw Hamilton, he’d know that the very first war the US fought ended with the new nation walking away with a good chunk of property — namely, the American colonies, which became the United States.
His Brittanic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz., New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be free sovereign and Independent States; that he treats with them as such, and for himself his Heirs & Successors, relinquishes all claims to the Government, Propriety, and Territorial Rights of the same and every Part thereof.
It’s right there. McCarthy probably thinks that doesn’t count because the colonists were merely asserting their independence … to own land (and Black people). That’s not colonization or imperialism. That’s “spreading democracy.” This was a sort of theme in the US as the nation significantly grew in size over the next century.
McCarthy is from California, a state with cities named “Los Angeles” and “San Francisco.” These are not especially Anglo names, like “Chadville” or “Otisburg.” The United States seized much of California during the Mexican-American War, along with New Mexico and territory that would become future states in the southwestern US.
The US straight up conquered Texas, when an increasingly large population of American settlers waged an armed rebellion against the centralist Mexican government.
As I wrote a couple years ago when Gov. Greg Abbott was pushing historical MAGA revisionism:
A major catalyst for the Texas Revolution was — you guessed it! — slavery. The Texas economy was dependent on cotton, which was only profitable when enslaved people picked it for free. Vicente Guerrero, then president of the Republic of Mexico, declared that all enslaved people were emancipated, and those were fighting words for Anglo settlers.
Later, after the Spanish-American War, the US took over Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Phillippines (the later would become fully independent of the US in 1946). Germany and the US divided the Samoan archipelago in 1899, which is how we acquired American Samoa.
The US actively participated in overthrowing the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893 as part of a coup against Queen Liliʻuokalan. Congress sheepishly admitted to this in a 1993 Apology Resolution that states “the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii occurred with the active participation of agents and citizens of the United States and [...] the Native Hawaiian people never directly relinquished to the United States their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people over their national lands, either through the Kingdom of Hawaii or through a plebiscite or referendum.”
Oh, and there’s all the native genocide (distrust those who attempt to redefine this word, as it’s usually an attempt to cover up all sorts of atrocities). Yes, the United States used a lot of legal trickery when removing indigenous people from their land, but they also resorted to outright massacres. Wonderful Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum argued for the outright extermination of natives after the massacre at Wounded Knee.
The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.
More recently, US foreign policy has involved assisting in coups to keep countries “friendly,” even if we didn’t take their land, which has never once backfired against us, ever.
The United States has been a source for great evil and great good. It’s one of the more complex imperialist nations, but too many Americans dismiss this complexity and instead embrace fairy tale, cherry tree-laden narratives of American exceptionalism. Of course, Kevin McCarthy is far too simple for actual US history.
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"This isn’t breaking news, considering he was outwitted by Matt Gaetz."
That makes him less intelligent than yoghurt.
“The acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching..."
-- Thomas Jefferson