#Declaration of Independence

[diablo1776]

[nodynasty4us]

When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

United States Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776)

[eugenedebs1920]

There are some on the right, the pro-fascist side, who would claim Dems, liberals are the establishment.

First I would like to start out with the definition of liberal. Liberal: Willing to listen to, or accept ideas and opinions different from one’s own. Open minded.

Now let’s take a loo at conservative. Conservative: Adverse to change or innovation. Holding to “traditional” values.

When one thinks of movements that have bettered humanity, and the world at large are these done in the name of tradition? Are these done by the ideals of old?

Tradition in this country can be rooted back to slavery, back to a time when white people lorded their superiority over others based solely on the color of their skin. It can be traced back to the most wealthy among us, exploiting workers to enrich themselves with as much as possible while no care is given for the health and safety of those who make their wealth possible. Tradition can be traced back to voter suppression and Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising the votes of those who don’t fit their socioeconomic standards, who don’t fit their color code.

This tradition can be traced back to TODAY! Because this tradition of disenfranchisement is happening TODAY! Nearly every state with a GOP majority has done, and is doing all it can to drop voters off the roles. Pretending there’s some kind of fraud. This fraud is simply the poor, those of color, and those who don’t fit a white Christian mold, that they seem to think this country is.

Through years of scheming and planning, through a lack of foresight from our founding fathers, trying to appease slave states. The GOP has found a way of minority rule over the vastly diverse country America is. This minoritarian rule can be seen clearly in SCOTUS, it can be seen in the senate where millions and millions of Americans have little to no say on the goings on in government. Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, all those states combined don’t have the number of citizens California does. All those states are “conservative” states, but California gets 2 representatives, the collective there is 10! A 10-2 vote with not nearly as many constituents. There’s the house though!? Some may argue. The house is a joke! So gerrymandered, useless idiots like Margery toilet Greene will keep her seat for decades to come. We outnumber conservatives in the real world but are trampled by them in representation.

We are the revolutionaries! We are the fight against the forces of old and evil! We are the fight for change! For a better America, for a better world where ALL have equal rights! Where ALL get the same shot at the American dream! Where ALL are treated as members of this country despite their origins or preferences or religion! We are the rebellion against “tradition”. A tradition that seeks to benefit one sect of peoples. We are the other sect and we will not be gaslit to think otherwise.

All of us in the pro-democracy movement are the heart of this nation. The liberals who will take the pinnacle of diversity and thrive with the ideas of all! We are the change. We are the next generation. We are love! We are hope! We are the open minded, accepting, tolerant, compassionate, ever learning, ever growing liberals of the United States of America.

[notaplaceofhonour]

“The British would’ve called the Founding Fathers terrorists.”

Speculation. The British did not and could not have called the Founding Fathers terrorists because that was not a word or concept at the time of the American Revolutionary War. This is a made up “what if” scenario with no historical basis.

Irrelevant. Whether the Crown would have called American Revolutionaries “terrorists” has no relevance to whether modern day acts of terrorism are terrorism.

What we “call terrorism” today is people strapping bombs to themselves and their children to blow up buses, hijacking planes to fly them into buildings, shooting up schools, music venues, and places of worship, randomized violence against non-military targets, taking civilians hostage. We call these terrorism because they fit the bill of terrorism by nearly every possible definition of the word:

The American Revolutionaries’ guerrilla-esque tactics may have been seen by the British as “unfair” or “uncivilized”, but they were not terrorism. Shooting up music venues, beheading & mutilating civilian victims by hand, hunting down and executing children, and taking hostages are not comparable to ambushing troops in the woods.

[quovadisamerica]

Johnny Midnight 

This is absolutely Wonderful by Charlie Kirk, for those of you that don’t think our Country was based on Christianity! If you are Christian, Please share!

[okimightbecrazy]

I couldn't resist

[usnatarchives]

Ahead of our nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026, the National Archives is celebrating #Declaration250: the spirit of equality and liberty enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, 250 years of our nation’s resilience and pursuit of happiness, and our collective growth toward a more perfect nation.

As the home of the Declaration, we will be hosting exhibitions, special programs, themed events, civic education initiatives, and other activities, culminating with a special Independence Day celebration in 2026.

Join us on this journey: https://www.declaration250.gov/

📸: A Declaration250 logo on top of an image of the Declaration of Independence.

[reality-detective]

Do you get it now?

[deadpresidents]

"He is an old friend with whom I have often had occasion to labor on many a knotty problem, and in whose abilities and steadiness I always found great cause to confide."

-- John Adams, on Thomas Jefferson, 1784

•••

"It is with much reluctance that I am obliged to look upon him as a man whose mind if warped by prejudice and so blinded by ignorance as to be unfit for the office he holds. However wise and scientific as a philosopher, as a politician he is a child and a dupe of party."

-- President John Adams, on his Vice President Thomas Jefferson, 1797

•••

"I always loved Jefferson, and still love him."

-- Former President John Adams, expressing his fondness for former President Thomas Jefferson to Edward Coles, which ultimately led to the two former Presidents rekindling their friendship and beginning a remarkable correspondence that lasted until they both died, within hours of one another, on July 4, 1826 -- the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

[borbon-casual]

𖥻🌻𝙇𝙤𝙨 𝙣𝙤𝙫𝙞𝙤𝙨 𓂃 ‌

𓄹 ¡Estos bebés están enamorados! ¡Son tan lindos juntos! ♡ . 💞੭

𓄹 ¿Es una pareja rara? ¡Puede ser! Pero el ship tiene una base y es que ¡Ambos se conocieron de niños! ♡ . 💞੭

𓄹 Esto sucedió durante el primer viaje de Simón a España, el cual acompañaría a Manuel Mallo a la Corte. Él era el amante de la reina Maria Luisa en ese entonces y por eso, el joven Bolívar pudo conocer al Príncipe de Asturias. ♡ . 💞੭

𓄹 Quizás no empezaron con buen pie, pero, seguro que se llegaron a ser amigos. Tengo un headcanon al respecto ☝🏻:

❝ Cuando Simón golpea a Fernando accidentalmente con el volante, el Príncipe se enfada y abandona el juego, sintiéndose humillado pero también molesto por el dolor del golpe y no tarda en romper a llorar.

El joven criollo, movido por Mallo y muy a regañadientes, se disculpa con el heredero y cuando este está curando su herida, se acerca para darle un "besito de rana" pero el Borbón mueve su cabecita y ambos se besan sin desearlo.

Por la noche, mientras el caraqueño descansaba en su habitación, el Príncipe de Asturias lo interrumpe cuidadosamente. Mientras ambos se sientan al borde de la cama, Fernando le pide al americano con timidez si puede volver a besar sus labios pues le gustó cómo se sintió antes. Bolívar no duda y vuelve a besar a su amigo pero esta vez con mucho más esmero, marcando el inicio de su inocente relación. ❜❜ ♡ . 💞੭

𓄹 ¡Espero que os gusten los dibujitos! ♡ . 💞੭

[areacode868]

[usarmytrooper]

[eugenedebs1920]

Am I the only one who finds it a little more than coincidental that Trump uses phrases, dates and locations with direct links to either the third Reich or white supremacist. The rhetoric in this clip, from the Nazi propaganda playbook, this rally at MSG with the EXACT same name a a large collection of American Nazi sympathizers in the 30’s at the same location on the same date. A while back he held a white pride thing on Juneteenth, he started this campaign off the same day the Waco shit went down. Project 2025 is straight up a totalitarian, how to manual. Strange 🤔

[beardedmrbean]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Hate Speech

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 30, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUL 01, 2024

In addition to his comments about Russia in Ukraine, Trump said something else in Thursday’s CNN presentation that should be called out for its embrace of one of the darkest moments in U.S. history. 

In response to a question about what the presidential candidates would say to a Black voter disappointed with racial progress in the United States, President Joe Biden pointed out that, while there was still far to go, more Black businesses were started under his administration than at any other time in U.S. history, that black unemployment is at a historic low, and that the administration has relieved student debt, invested in historically Black colleges and universities, and is working to provide for childcare costs, all issues that affect Black Americans. 

In contrast, Trump said: “As sure as you’re sitting there, the fact is that his big kill on the Black people is the millions of people that he’s allowed to come in through the border. They're taking Black jobs now and it could be 18. It could be 19 and even 20 million people. They’re taking Black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs and you haven’t seen it yet, but you’re going to see something that’s going to be the worst in our history.” 

Trump was obviously falling back on the point he had prepared to rely on in this election: that immigration is destroying our country. He exaggerated the numbers of incoming migrants and warned that there is worse to come.

But what jumped out is his phrase: “They’re taking Black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs.” 

In U.S. history it has been commonplace for political leaders to try to garner power by warning their voters that some minority group is coming for their jobs. In the 1840s, Know-Nothings in Boston warned native-born voters about Irish immigrants; in 1862 and 1864, Democrats tried to whip up support by warning Irish immigrants that after Republicans fought to end enslavement, Black Americans would move north and take their jobs. In the 1870s, Californian Denis Kearney of the Workingman’s Party drew voters to his standard by warning that Chinese immigrants were taking their jobs and insisted: “The Chinese Must Go!” 

And those were just the early days.

But while they are related, there is a key difference between these racist appeals and the racism that Trump exhibited on Thursday. Politicians have often tried to get votes by warning that outsiders would draw from a pool of jobs that potential voters wanted themselves. Trump’s comments the other night drew on that racism but reached back much further to the idea that there are certain jobs that are “Black” or “Hispanic.”

This is not a new idea in the United States. 

“In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond told his colleagues in 1858. “That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill.” 

Capital produced by the labor of mudsills would concentrate in the hands of the upper class, who would use it efficiently and intelligently to develop society. Their guidance elevated those weak-minded but strong-muscled people in the mudsill class, who were “happy, content, unaspiring, and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations.”

Southern leaders were smart enough to have designated a different race as their society’s mudsills, Hammond said, but in the North the “whole hireling class of manual laborers and ‘operatives,’ as you call them, are essentially slaves.” This created a political problem for northerners, for the majority of the population made up that lower class. “If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners,’ and could combine, where would you be?” Hammond asked his colleagues who insisted that all people were created equal. “Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided.” 

The only true way to look at the world was to understand that some people were better than others and had the right and maybe the duty, to rule. “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal’” Hammond wrote, and it was on this theory that some people are better than others that southern enslavers based their proposed new nation. 

“Our new government is founded…upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth,” Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, told supporters. 

Not everyone agreed. For his part, rising politician Abraham Lincoln stood on the Declaration of Independence. Months after Hammond’s speech, Lincoln addressed German immigrants in Chicago. Arguments that some races are “inferior,” he said, would “rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and…transform this Government into a government of some other form.” The idea that it is beneficial for some people to be dominated by others, he said, is the argument “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.” 

According to the mudsill theory, he said the following year, “a blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be—all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understandingly. According to that theory, the education of laborers, is not only useless, but pernicious, and dangerous.” He disagreed. “[T]here is not, of necessity, any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life.”

He went on to tie the mudsill theory to the larger principles of the United States. “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it, where will it stop,” he said. “If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!” To cries of “No, no,” he concluded to cheers: “Let us stick to it then. Let us stand firmly by it.” 

One hundred and sixty-six years later, Black and Hispanic social media users have answered Trump’s statement about “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” with photos of themselves in highly skilled professional positions. But while they did so with good humor, they were illustrating for the modern world the principle Lincoln articulated: in the United States there should be no such thing as “Black jobs” or “Hispanic jobs.” 

Such a construction directly contradicts the principles of the Declaration of Independence and ignores the victory of the United States in the Civil War. Anyone who sees the world through such a lens is on the wrong side of history. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[misscromwellsmonocle]

Behind the Myth of Benevolence (2014) by Titus Kaphar

“Titus Kaphar Behind the Myth of Benevolence exposes, complicates and disrupts the notion, narrative and positionality of the so-called ‘benevolent’ founding father, Thomas Jefferson, our third president and author of the Declaration of Independence which articulated ‘all men are created equal with an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ who owned more than 600 human beings.

The ‘curtain’ is simultaneously revealing and concealing Sally Hemings, a Black woman he owned whose six children he fathered, portrayed in a more stark and dark representation than other images of her." (source)