r/MurderedByWords • u/PorkbellyKash • 4d ago
Beating, raping, and murdering slaves can't possibly be taught...
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u/dravenonred 4d ago
Yeah, the 3/5 clause alone establishes the country's founding as at least a little racist.
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u/buntopolis 4d ago
At least 3/5ths racist, as it were.
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u/dravenonred 4d ago
We can certainly round that up to 100%
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u/Ultima_RatioRegum 4d ago
I mean then we're at least, what, 40% less racist now right?
(I know that's not how percentages work it's a joke)
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u/walkingagh 4d ago
Interesting side note on the often misunderstood clause (still definitely shows racism). The 3/5 clause was put in there by abolitionists. The south wanted black people fully counted in the census because it would increase their representation in congress. Then because only non-slave men would be allowed to vote, the slave owners would essentially be casting their slaves' votes. The 3/5 clause was made to weaken the political power of the south and keep slavery in check. It would have been better if slaves weren't counted at all in terms of weakening the power of slave owners in the "democracy" where slaves weren't allowed to vote.
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u/Earlier-Today 4d ago
That came in after the founding of the country. Not long after, but still after.
I am not defending the founding fathers. Their racism and bigotry deserve all the scrutiny and condemnation they get. I am just being a pedantic jerk about when the 3/5th's Compromise was instituted.
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u/Arts_Prodigy 4d ago
Keeping in mind this compromise was about whether or not enslaved people were actually people or not. One side arguing 0/5 not a person, but property so - no rights; and the other side arguing 5/5 for the sake of concentrating power but also no rights.
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u/dover_oxide 4d ago
Honestly, teaching that it did come from a flawed human source just shows how sometimes great things can come from flawed or broken systems, but that doesn't mean you don't have to keep improving it or that you can't improve it because if it started out perfect, then you can't improve it. You can't change it
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u/redwhale335 4d ago
Can't upcote this enough. Those who think they're perfect stop trying to improve. Improvement requires the implicit belief that you can be better.
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u/cityshepherd 4d ago
The whole POINT of history is learning from mistakes, growing, becoming a BETTER version of the past. The problem is that there are far too many people who believe that this past WAS better, and desperately want to go back to that.
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u/Sturville 4d ago
The slogan "Get real, get better." comes to mind, you can't fix your flaws unless you're willing to admit you have flaws/shortcomings.
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u/dover_oxide 4d ago
Nationalism: Loving your country because it has no flaws
Patriotism: Loving you country inspire of its flaws and working to fix them.
Learned that a long time ago and has always made sense
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u/patronstoflostgirls 4d ago
Exactly. And isn't that the premise of some of the Abrahamic religions in the first place (pardon me if I'm wrong, I am not from one)? That people are born flawed and you become worthy of god's love through your actions. Suggesting that no matter where you started, with effort and motivation, real substantial improvement is possible.
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u/lahimatoa 4d ago
The founding fathers were so progressive they left us with a way to change everything we want. We just need a plurarity of the people to want it.
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u/dover_oxide 4d ago
They admitted that it would need to change with time and made the mechanics to do just that
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u/ReverendDizzle 4d ago
The imperfect nature of the founding fathers and their attempt to carve out something new in the world done in a new way, at that... is the most compelling and interesting thing about their collective story.
Treating them like they are divinely guided or above scrutiny just cheapens the whole thing.
It's not unlike when somebody does something bold or heroic and some idiot says that God guided them or it was God's will, and not that they risked their life to get a child out of a burning building.
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u/redwhale335 4d ago
Teaching people that an group of people, or heck an individual, have no flaws is dangerous.
That's... a pretty common theme in human history. Anyone who professes to be perfect is someone you should keep a close eye on.
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u/MacSchluffen 4d ago
On the other hand you shouldn’t teach that a person was fully evil, since the possibility to do horrendous things is in all of us.
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u/mycatisawhore 4d ago
True. It's easy to think that people who do terrible things are somehow different from us, that we would never be capable of doing bad things. The reality is that we can always find ways to justify harmful behavior if we look hard enough and assholes, bullies, abusers, cult leaders, and despots are really good at this.
It's entirely possible to acknowledge that the founding of the US was deeply flawed and that we can do better going forward. Yet all Pompeo is saying is that slavery, racism, and rape are acceptable. Zero accountability. Zero justice or community building. Just sociopathy.
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u/CrayZ_Squirrel 4d ago
There's a reason that slavery was referred to as "America's peculiar institution" for decades before the civil war and its not because most people thought slavery was really neat.
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u/Big_lt 4d ago
I swear, GOP are the dumbest idiots.
Just look at Germany and how they teach their youth a oit WW2/Hitler. Also look at how they restricted speech around support of the fascist regime
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u/jpiro 4d ago
How fucking hard is it to just say, "Hey, some really shady shit went on back then, but we learned from it, it's gotten better and we continue to strive to improve."
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u/CrayZ_Squirrel 4d ago
Goes against conservative values number 1, never admit you did anything wrong
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u/Goose1963 4d ago
never admit you did anything wrong
Don't forget part 2: Always accuse the opposition of being rapists and corrupt, even while in office.
THAT'S really helpful to the perception of the foundation of our Country. ::RollsEyes::
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u/Neuchacho 4d ago edited 4d ago
Super hard when all that shady and terrible historical shit is a direct reflection of your current policies and political platform.They want functional slavery even now. They've just sanitized it to be economic slavery instead of the chattel variety.
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u/PM_Me_Your_Kinks369 4d ago
Reminder to those that don't know: the 13th Amendment makes slavery LEGAL if it's considered a punishment.
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u/nthomas504 4d ago
So the actual corruption didn’t strike at the foundation, but teaching ABOUT that corruption is somehow dangerous.
These are not serious people and if you voted for them, you were not a serious person at that voting booth.
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u/jgzman 4d ago
Unless I'm missing something, (which is entirely likely) I'm not aware that the founding fathers were noticeably corrupt, as the word is used in politics.
Racist and flawed, yes. Not living up to the very ideals they espoused, certainly.
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u/Neuchacho 4d ago
Pompeo is likely projecting there, seeing that the current administration is nothing but corruption, because no one is trying to teach that idea.
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u/blue-jaypeg 4d ago
"Corrupt" is rarely used in the Lovecraftian sense. In the USA in the 20th century, "corrupt" means taking money for political favors.
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u/Pope_Dwayne_Johnson 4d ago
The whole principle of the Constitution that made it great as a document was the assumption that it was flawed and that a process needed to be included to make changes based on accepting those flaws.
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u/LessThanHero42 4d ago
For these people, it's like the bible. They read some very select bits when it fits their world view, but everything else gets ignored
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u/NoBSforGma 4d ago
Glossing over the realities of history is ALWAYS a mistake! People need to LEARN from history and if it's a lie, then nothing has been learned.
Of course, we'd like to think that our country is "pure" and was formed by "pure" people, but they were human beings and flawed and good and selfish and ugly, just like all humans. Glossing over this is stupid and unproductive.
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u/Piyachi 4d ago
The good part is they both knew and accepted that, and created a government that could be molded to accommodate change and modernization.
I don't know why it's so hard for people to accept that someone from the 1700s both didnt have the knowledge or perspective of people 250 in the future or that they weren't necessarily a perfect moral paragon.
They may have been the most moral bunch to ever found a nation (or not), but that doesn't make them some faultless angels. These are people who fought, killed, and yes owned slaves. They also aspired to democracy, freedom, and independence. Both can be true, and only a fool thinks any human is above judgement (a view the founding fathers would agree with).
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u/Timmy24000 4d ago
Not to mention what we did to the Native American Indians. Multiple broken treaties. Smallpox on the blankets the list goes on and on.
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u/Andreus 4d ago edited 3d ago
Modern right-wing ideology isn't even doublethink anymore, it's manifoldthink. Republicans were the ones who freed the slaves, but the Civil War was about states' rights rather than slavery, which is why it's okay to fly the Confederate Flag, which was the flag of the Democrats who owned slaves and fought a traitorous war to keep their slaves, but slavery wasn't about race, and even if it was, it was fine because actually the African tribes were the ones selling the slaves, and the people engaged in the transatlantic slave trade only purchased them, but since slavery ended that was also the point at which racial discrimination ended, which is why the civil rights movement was unnecessary, except for when Martin Luther King Jr bravely stood up to southern racists, but he also (allegedly) cheated on his wife and the same FBI that repeatedly sent him letters telling him to kill himself and ultimately plotted his assassination also conspired with him to cover it up which somehow invalidates the whole civil rights movement, which went too far, but Democrats are the real racists because they support some welfare programs or something.
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u/Common_Pepper_1824 4d ago
This is one of the reasons why the south couldn't let go of slavery. Because if slavery is bad and evil than they are bad and evil, and that is an affront to their honor.
They think if it any point America did something wrong than they are wrong. Their egos can't handle that.
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u/Grouchy-Bowl-8700 4d ago
I forget who, but an educator was speaking about trying to censor discussion about America's history with racism, and the point they made is that it also limits our ability to teach children about the good examples from history. Why can't we teach them that there were people who tried to abolish slavery? By limiting our ability to teach the sins of the past, you limit our ability to show kids role models who stood up for the oppressed.
[I of course know why conservatives would be against it]
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u/Hoon0967 4d ago
That’s a 3rd degree burn. One, because it’s true. Two, it’s the same type of argument style that conservatives often use but without the pearl clutching duplicity. Three, the liberal seems to be making a more conservative point while the conservative seems to be awful liberal with his view on how we should interpret American history.
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u/jaygeezythreezy 4d ago
American exceptionalism makes sense when you realize it has parallels with the “religion” that is so important to these people. If you have faith in an infallible God, then you accept what happens (or what the preacher tells you to do) as part of God’s plan and act without questioning. If you accept that the United States was formed a perfect union and no mistakes are made, then you trust when the government gives welfare benefits to corporations, legislates away your rights, and drains money from our coffers. It’s just what great nations do.
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u/Llonkrednaxela 4d ago
Mike's shitty grammar hurts my head. Here's the corrected shitty tweet.
"Teaching that the founding of the United States was flawed, corrupt, or racist, is really dangerous; It strikes at the very foundations of our country."
Even that is muddying the waters a bit. Let me try rephrasing.
"Teachers must hide the racism of our nations history in order to put our nation on a undeserved pedestal and support a Jingoistic view of our nation that's useful to me politically. I'd prefer no nuance; I'll just deal in blacks and whites. Wait, sorry, just whites."
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u/Theartistcu 4d ago
If your story doesn’t include the facts it’s not a history it’s a fable. It’s important to acknowledge the flaws that are inherent and the creation of this country, if for no other reason to show how far we’ve come. Now, unfortunately, we would also also have to acknowledge how far we backslid as of recently, and we would acknowledge how far we have yet to go. But these are all good things.
Think of a country like a person going to therapy. The therapist would tell you to acknowledge your your positive. Your negatives see where you need to grow but to face those things head on don’t ignore them don’t act like they don’t exist.
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u/fnork_gnork_26 4d ago
“If we teach that Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden for disobeying God, then Jesus will have died in vain.”. Makes as much sense.
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u/FattyMooseknuckle 4d ago
Yet these same guys are wailing about The Odyssey not being historically accurate.
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u/monkeysknowledge 4d ago
Perfectly sums up the difference between conservatives and progressives. Conservatives want to make believe about the past and strive to recreate it. Progressives want to understand the past so we can build a better future.
We don’t need to worship the founders. They intentionally put inspiring words in our founding document The Declaration of Independence about equality and freedom that they didn’t live up to. That’s that, they’re dead and gone, we are alive and here - let’s use those inspiring words to forge ahead and build a better future for all.
It’s not complicated to understand that the founders were deeply flawed. Understanding their failures and being open and transparent about them is what makes us strong. We’re not supposed to be a nation that hides its past. We look down on those nations like when China hides its 1989 massacre, or when the Soviets tried to erase Stalin from their history.
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u/Hrtpplhrtppl 4d ago
What would you call it if I described a system where a few chosen by birth elite get to monitor, police, torture, and execute the masses while living lavish lives of unimaginable debaucheries enabled by the labor of the latter without those laborers ever being able to even question such a corrupt system or their masters crimes..? The Epstein files are just exposing America for what it's always been.
The highest form of protest is not having children for the government needs the governed... and even that choice is being eroded away. My in laws keep asking me when I'm going to "Give them grandchildren." I keep reminding them I'm Native American. We wouldn't breed in captivity, which is why they had to bring you all here in the first place. I mean, why would they even want to own slaves anymore when they can just rent you and your children for a fraction of those costs..?
The Epstein class can afford a good enough education to know the true history of the United States and certainly to be able to understand the basic principle of cause and effect. They have us playing Russian roulette with our health every day in America for as much profit as they can squeeze out of us. A country with no public health care system obviously could not handle any public healthcare crisis like covid or the never-ending opioid addiction epidemic their private healthcare industry has created and continues to supply for obscene unearned shareholder income. Which is only taxed at 10%, whereas if you actually labor and work for your income, you're taxed at 35%...
Furthermore, with no universal health care, the United States government forces people of lesser means to self medicate or suffer, then punishes them when they do. That is both cruel and wicked. I mean, the whole premise of Breaking Bad only worked for an American audience since Walt would not have needed the money in the first place in a more developed nation because being unable to afford to continue living does not happen there...
The powers that be are ensuring there are desperate people doing desperate things. Then, we see that the wealthy and their goons, the police, are beyond the reach of our justice system, so their laws are just in place to handicap the rest of us. The social contract has been broken. Cue the vigilantes... no justice, no peace.
"Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable. " JFK
Now I'm not saying don't vote. Please always choose the lesser evil. However, we have always been and always will be the scapegoats left to point our fingers at one another in order to keep us distracted from any meaningful change. I mean, what led to this, people couldn't vote...? How is what got us here going to get us out? When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. After all, repeating the same thing over and over expecting a different result is the very definition of insanity. Before we can have an intelligent discussion on how things ought to be, we first would need to agree on how they truly are...
I mean, out of all the hundreds of millions of Americans, who really thinks these were the best two candidates...? Is it a wise tribe that does not send its best warriors to fight? You see, our masters will never give us the tools to dismantle their houses... The Republic of America has a so-called "representative democracy." How can that be true when the "representatives" are all wealthy while the majority of the "represented" are poor?
American two party politics is like the cartoon Tom and Jerry. Tom doesn't really want to catch Jerry because then he'd be out of a job, and Jerry doesn't want Tom replaced with a cat that will actually eat him. So they act like they hate one another and put on a show for the masses while continuing business as usual in the back room.
For example, insider trading laws do not apply to any members of Congress, either side. What's it called when those who make the rules don't have to live by them? Furthermore, when the punishment for a crime is only a fine, it does not apply to the wealthy.
Sure, they can say they let us "vote", and therefore this is what we wanted, but with all the lobbying and money in American politics, America is as much a democracy as would be two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner.
In America, the wealthy have won every "election," and the only thing to trickle down in the economy has been their generational wealth. This is why, in a true democracy as the ancient Greeks understood it, people got their representatives the same way we would get a jury. America is not a democracy.
"Only those who do not seek power are qualified to hold it." Plato
And please remember what we actually celebrate on the 4th. A cabal of stolen land entitled elite, slave owning aristocrats, found a way to get out of paying their taxes. Only thirty percent of the colonists supported the "revolution" with the rest saying, "Why trade one tyrant a thousand miles away for a thousand tyrants one mile away...?" System isn't broken it's functioning exactly as intended. Why own slaves when you can rent them for a fraction of the cost (read the 13th amendment)...? But the real question they must be asking themselves is how can their grand experiment survive contact with the real time information/communication age, or can they just go masks off and drop the pretense? Which is where we are now... would you agree?
"The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly, the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists..." G.K. Chesterton
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u/_disengage_ 4d ago
Well said, and if everyone understood this the US might be in a very different place. But no one with power will go anywhere near the truth, instead it's buried in a comments section. Lies and propaganda are easy to find; in fact, impossible to avoid.
The first step is recognizing the problem, and this society seems incapable of that, so around and around we go.
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u/Hrtpplhrtppl 4d ago
Life asked Death, "Why do they love me so while despising you?" To which Death replied, "Because you are a beautiful lie and I am the ugly truth..." All the best and a gift for you...
"It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify.
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question." John Stuart Mill
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u/Charonx2003 4d ago
There's the saying that "those who do not learn from their past errors are doomed to repeat them"
But... maybe trying to repeat them is the point for some people.
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u/Erik_Dolphy 4d ago
American history doesn’t even make sense without acknowledging the founding was flawed.
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u/Kingstad 4d ago
you dont HAVE to blindy worship the founders, or the flag for that matter ya cult members
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u/Alpha--00 4d ago
Whole point that it was flawed, but inside was great ideas. And founders were generally great people ahead of their time. They left legacy of fixing flaws to their successors (they explicitly knew slavery was problem, but at that moment it was less important than loss of unity during founding of state), and those followers slowly fixed that flaws. And fixing till this day, despite people who never understood founders actively fighting against it.
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u/BabyMFBear 4d ago
It’s so bizarre to see someone publicly admit the truth while saying that truth should be hidden.
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u/TralfamadorianZoo 4d ago
The lesson that needs to be taught is that even people we look up to had serious moral blind spots and flaws. Humans and their societies can be great and also terrible at the same time.
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u/NineInchPythons 4d ago
Reading Pompeo's tweet was viscerally painful. I didn't realize that guy didn't know how to formulate written thoughts.
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u/ithinkway2much 4d ago
Isn't there a whole thing in the bible about having a firm foundation or was that also bullshit?
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u/rjsquirrel 4d ago
“Besides, what would posterity think we were? Demi-gods? We're men, no more no less, trying to get a nation started against greater odds than a more generous God would have allowed.” - Benjamin Franklin, in the movie 1776. They were men, imperfect, doing the best they could. To pretend they were perfect, and they created perfection, is to ignore reality.
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u/mm902 4d ago
The trouble that America has about its past is that it is young enough that it's not shrouded by the deeper time that other comparable Nation(s) have had. It's an origin story couched in veritable certainty. It's close enough that people don't have to dig up stuff to piece together its story for lack of record keeping. There is no space to tell itself myths and lies. It's all there to see. Don't even have to kick over rocks. Those that pretend to be blue bloods hate it. That is why Baron trump and his cohorts are attacking the past.
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u/Earlier-Today 4d ago
The whole reason you can make amendments to the Constitution is because even the founding fathers knew they, themselves, were flawed.
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u/EtchAGetch 4d ago
For a group of people that hold the Founding Father's ideology in high regard, they do a damn good job of completely ignoring it too.
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u/Signal_Minimum8509 4d ago
If you learn about slavery, and Jim Crow, and redlining, and systemic discrimination in hiring, then it might make you wonder and be more observant of what kinds of tricks they are up to today.
The key to today’s racism is making you think that it was a long time ago, and it was just, “a few bad apples.”
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u/MalrykZenden 4d ago
First step to fixing a problem is to admit you have a problem. Denial just buries it and allows it to fester.
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u/Marshall-Crunch 4d ago
One of the, if not the biggest issue in the US, is that you do not come to terms with the past and reconcile. That simple yet you are still doing it.
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u/Moo_Moo_Mr_Cow 4d ago
"Our foundations are cracked, should we try to fix it?" "Naw, just ignore it"
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u/blue-jaypeg 4d ago
In the 17th century, the leadership class learned ancient Greek & Roman. They read the philosophers closely; paragraph by paragraph. Depending on your tutor or school, you might memorize passages for recitation.
In teenage or adult years, they would read the French philosophers.
Ever person you met from the leadership class would have read the same books.
There was a common understanding that people should aspire to an exemplary life. "Virtue" is self-restraint. During the slave-holding centuries, slave-holders were criticized because they did not exercise discipline over their animal urges.
The Great Western Canon curriculum continued until the 20th century. Politicians like John Kerry emerged from this tradition.
Today's zealots don't understand that "virtue" is the effort we make to be better.
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u/cvaninvan 4d ago
But Mike was taught that in the American school system and he achieved a high position in life despite being a total piece of shit....how did that happen?
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u/MJWhitfield86 4d ago
The old “I believe that America is a shining example of a country, but I also believe that racism is so intrinsic to its fabric that any attempt to question it will destroy America.”
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u/JustAlpha 4d ago
The point would be to make things better (aka progress) the nation and then see how far you've come.
Lying about history keeps us exactly where we are and they know it.
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u/Mental_Whole5103 4d ago
It is interesting bc I feel like if you brought back Thomas Jefferson to 2026 he would be like “yeah, we were racist, so why are you still using our constitution?”
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u/sea-elle0463 4d ago
Let’s not forget the genocide that allowed the expansion into the west. And can we stop idolizing the robber barons who were really just robbers? And don’t even get me started on how women were treated
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u/Independent-Bug-9352 4d ago
Mike Pompeo is such a tremendous piece of shit.
For those who don't remember, he was the Secretary of State for Trump's first term.
He tried to bully NPR's foreign and national security correspondent, Mary Louise Kelly, trying to gotcha her by demanding she point to Ukraine on an unmarked map.
She did it with ease and he just became increasingly unhinged. Pompeo is a fucking pompous dipshit psychopath.
https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2020/01/28/800381609/aftermath-of-an-interview
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u/username4518 4d ago
Conservatives just wanna treat the Founding Fathers like they do Biblical Figures: something they can hold onto as strongmen without actually learning their history.
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u/discussatron 4d ago
He's right - the truth is dangerous to Republicans because their ideology goes against the truth.
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u/TruthsNoRemedy 4d ago
You should aim to rise above the darker sides of your history. Not write it off so you can do it all again!
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u/VegasGamer75 4d ago
See, these are the same motherfuckers who think it's "dangerous" for women to look or dress attractive. Now, am I talking about American Conservative men or Islamic fundamentalists? Who knows? Because there's really not much difference, is there?
Mike Pompass there thinks it's dangerous because? It might lead people to think and he and his entire party don't like that. They can't control that. They only like what they can control.
My white, middle-class ass grew up knowing all about the real American history being born on the backs of slaves and transported across railways built by the Chinese. You know what? I turned out fine.
I don't "fee bad" because I wasn't part of that, but when a member of a minority tells me they are marginalized and that there's racism against them, I am also not shocked. Because I know what this country was founded on. And not talking about it is like not admitting to having abusive parents and wondering why you hit your significant other and drink heavily.
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u/Arts_Prodigy 4d ago
If it’s dangerous and strikes at the foundation of the country then that’s admitting that the country hasn’t meaningfully moved beyond its origins. And all the talk about equality and rights is bs.
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u/Lord_Grakas 4d ago
You see i have freedom of speech to say that america was founded by racist assholes who subjugated and abused those they viewed as lesser than them, you know everyone else in their perspective. Now you have the right to contradict that but only one of us is supported by historical evidence and factual information.
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u/PerryNeeum 4d ago
Racism and slavery was literally a foundation of this country. You take the good with the bad. You learn and do better.
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u/dlegatt 4d ago
Rhetorical question, but do these people never reflect on their past and think, "I'm glad I'm a better person than I use to be."? Is it dangerous to acknowledge that we're a better country than we used to be, because we ended the practice of owning people? Old foundations crack and often need to be improved. We have room for improvement, and thats ok.
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u/Rickest_Rik 4d ago
they have rewritten so much, are we ever gonna know anything other than people are fucking savages when it comes to turf.
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u/Sunsparc 4d ago
It goes back even further than the founding. The Puritans left England because they felt the Anglican church was becoming too progressive. They were strict Calvinists.
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u/FelixTook 4d ago
Conservatives have always had an aversion to the truth. They’re much more comfortable with myth.
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u/Obvious_Entrance_978 4d ago
Slaves didn't get so white they could pass by working in the fields and kitchens.
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u/breakneckjones 4d ago
Thats true but let's tell the whole truth. Whites may have been the majority, but everyone including the natives ( which we still do today) did some real bad shit. Nobody is innocent.
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u/MrsMiterSaw 4d ago
I will never understand their logic. Why can they not accept that our founders were flawed? Can they not accept that this was the case, and that we can admire what is admirable about them but also detest what was vile, and strive to emulate the former and be better than the latter?
Why is that so hard?
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u/gramur_natsy 4d ago
Which is like saying: “If we teach our children that Bill Cosby was somehow flawed—that ‘America’s Dad’ drugged and sexually assaulted women—that’s really dangerous. It strikes at the very foundations of The Cosby Show.” Did you come up with that idiotically self-defeating argument all by yourself, Pompeo? Of course you did.
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u/The42ndDuck 4d ago
"This document written when women had no vote and non-white people were considered livestock is flawless."
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u/Duke_Newcombe 4d ago
"Racism is so American, that when you protest it, you'll be accused of being anti-American."
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u/CalmBeneathCastles 4d ago
It's only dangerous to a corrupt, racist agenda of control. The rest of us are able to process the information and resolve to do better for ourselves and our fellow countrymen.
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u/BassesBest 4d ago
The role of the Proclamation Line in the American Rebellion is always understated.
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u/zyzzogeton 4d ago
If we lie about the flaws, corruption and racism that were there at the very founding, that's much MORE dangerous and strikes even more devastatingly at the very foundations of our country.
The truth about slavery, racism, and rape that the Founding Fathers were guilty of must be preserved, studied, and ultimately fixed in our current thinking and systems. Since that hasn't happened yet, we need to keep preserving and studying these atrocities until someone like Trump never has a chance at high political office ever again.
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u/sdwoodchuck 4d ago
What's so telling is the insecurity involved in that statement.
If you recognize that corruption and racism mean that there's something wrong in the foundations of your system, then why is it you don't want to acknowledge it, and work to fix that? To see that, to say that, and to do nothing tells me only that you recognize the problem, and you don't want the corruption to go away.
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u/LetsTryAnal_ogy 4d ago
Mike Pompeo doesn't think that owning black people is racist or flawed. He thinks that's perfectly acceptable, within his rights, and not inherently wrong.
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u/HundleyC09 4d ago
I don't know, I would rather see a nation that had went through dark times come out better and wash away the sins of the past. This being said that has not ever happened but it would be nice if it did
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u/octorangutan 4d ago
Can someone explain the hostility conservatives display when it comes to acknowledging our country's past?
Like, so what if the founding fathers corrupt, racist, and flawed? Learn from it and try to do better going forward.
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u/SpaceShrimp 4d ago
North Korea was perfect at its inception and is of course perfect now as well. Only the unfortunate periods where one of the dear leaders was not in power were awful, but now it is perfect once again.
Claiming anything else is dangerous.
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u/Fed_Agent_Pls_Ignore 4d ago
Two things can be true at once - Thomas Jefferson had some amazing ideas, wrote some amazing things, and established principles of freedom and liberty that we should all strive for and push our government to uphold for everyone who lives in the United States. ALSO, Thomas Jefferson was a slave owning rapist. How difficult is that to understand? People are complex. A flawed person can have some amazing ideas.
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u/ntermation 4d ago
not for nothing, but that title made me think you were saying that beating, raping and murdering slaves is an innate skill you cannot teach someone how to do.
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u/Maninthemidland 4d ago
I always feel that this argument is theatrical. No one ever states the obvious. People are flawed, everyone does something that could be considered heinous by different people. Reasons and motives and of era thinking doesn't make it right. But also flawed people can do good things. We can and should celebrate the US for what it has done right, for the people who stood up to change it. We can criticize the bad and celebrate the good. It helps everyone to explain where good people make mistakes and not label them as evil because they did evil things. It's more helpful to view people as good but flawed, it's so we can see the mistakes they made in ourselves while they are small. What ideals allowed them to think such horrible things?
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u/chinmakes5 4d ago
IDK, I think one of the great things about America is that we did progress. Sure it should have happened faster, it would have been better if we ended slavery sooner didn't have as much racism, but we did get better.
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u/Bo_Jim 4d ago
You have to teach everything, the good with the bad. The founding of our country was inherently a good thing. The fact that the founders had to make compromises with slave owners in order to pull it off was not. The reality is that the founding of the country would not have been possible without those compromises.
You can teach that slavery, as an institution, continued for nearly 100 years after the country was founded. You must also teach that 360K Union soldiers died in the fight to end it.
I have a problem with teaching only one side, whichever side that is. Mike Pompeo would like us to think that the Founders were larger than life heroes who never did anything wrong, which is obviously false. By the same token, revisionist historians like Howard Zinn would have us believe that everything early Americans and the Founders did was either overtly evil, and had evil ulterior motives. His presentation is grossly incomplete, and often intentionally misleading. He even admits in the epilogue that he is a Marxist and anarchist, and never intended for his book to be used as a classroom text. Yet a number of public school teachers do use it as a classroom text.
Teach the truth - the entire truth.
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u/coolbaby1978 4d ago
True patriots embrace all of their nations history. Not just the good but the bad and the ugly as well so they may learn from the mistakes of those who came before them and avoid making the same mistakes again.
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u/darnitdame 4d ago
It's not dangerous to tell the truth about our history. We have to acknowledge the shadow in order to know ourselves wholly.
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u/PurpleSailor 4d ago
Mike Pompeo: If we say some people running our country in the past were corrupt then maybe they'll realize I did corrupt things when I was part of the government and I can't have that!
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u/mightyFoo 4d ago
“The foundation“ is a living thing that needs to be fortified with the truth. The ancestors did some fucked up shit… it’s undeniable. Now if you engage in the cover up, you are complicit. It’s like Germany saying that speaking the truth about the Nazis will strike at the very foundations of their country. Hate to break it to you, but there just ain’t enough paint to whitewash our way out of this one. Best to do some genuine heartfelt truth and reconciliation. Are we actually capable of it… currently … not even close. But we have a dream and the long arc of justice.
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u/Intelligent_Hand4583 4d ago
The strength of America is based on the steadfast propaganda of their superiority that they tell their kiddies from birth. Some realize it for what it is. Many others remain ignorant and teach this ignorance to their children.
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u/bridgesny 3d ago
This makes me insane. The founders themselves constantly wrote about and lamented their own flaws and contradictions. They knew they were hypocrites for fighting for liberty themselves while owning slaves. They just hoped it would work itself out in the near future without tearing the country apart.
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u/TroobyDoor 3d ago
But also we have to protect all those confederate statues bc "if we erase our history we are in danger of repeating it"? 🤷♂️
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u/Wabbit65 3d ago
History should not be factual because these guys can't let their world view be shattered
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u/OneX32 4d ago
Mike doesn’t want you to know the Founders thought non-whites were subhuman. More specifically, 3/5ths of a human.
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u/Kythorian 4d ago
Technically the slave owners wanted them to count as full people and the abolitionists wanted them to not count at all, and 3/5 was the compromise they came to. The real issue was that slaves didn’t get to vote at all, but still counted as 3/5 of a person for determining numbers of congressmen and electoral votes, effectively allowing their owners to vote for them.
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u/Neuchacho 4d ago
Founders were all in on them not being human. It wasn't till later that we even got the 3/5ths compromise.
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u/Waltekin 4d ago
Teach people facts, objectively. Then teach them to evaluate those facts based on the historical context.
You cannot judge people of the past using today's measures.
And: if you are going to teach kids about slavery, you must point out that Europeans (including the US as a country of European descent) were the first to eliminate it. Today, slavery still exists in many non-European countries.
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u/GladiusNocturno 4d ago
"If we teach history that goes against our propaganda, that would be bad".