American descendants of loyalists often hide their roots.
I know this because my grandmother told me a few years before she passed that her father, a mason and devoted patriot, once confided a scandalous family secret: there are loyalists in our family tree.
Sadly, grandma's research never got her to the root of this claim despite much research, but thanks to online resources and some helpful Canadians, I discovered the truth.
Grandma's grandfather had emigrated from New Brunswick, Canada, during the Civil War, in which he served the Union.
It turns out his great-grandfather was a captain in the Queen's Guard during the American revolution, born in Connecticut. He and his wife and children had fled after the war with other loyalists to New Brunswick, Canada. They suffered many deprivations, although the loyalist commission board compensated them about half their worldly goods they lost in America.
This captain had married a woman whose brother fought for the Americans at Bunker Hill.
While researching my grandmother's grandfather from Canada, I discovered a telling white lie: he would tell the local busybody newspaper that he was visiting his sister in New York. Thing is, he had no sister in New York. Instead, I discovered the Canadian newspapers not long after were reporting he had arrived from America to visit his sister in New Brunswick.
I was blown away by all this rich history, but when I shared my discoveries with all the remaining family on that side, nobody expressed excitement. In fact, the one person who used to call me up to discuss family history, stopped calling me.
I have always thought the fact Boston was a hotbed of revolution and New York city was a loyalist stronghold (as the article mentions) has had some small subconscious effect on the ongoing rivalry between the two cities all the way to the present day.
We joke about the Red Sox and the Yankees but deep down there is this smidgen of it that goes all the way back.
Also from the article, amazing how William Franklin has been almost erased by history even though Benjamin Franklin is endlessly discussed in elementary history in the US. A fascinating addition to the story. I'm sure historians are familiar with this, but it's likely something every day Americans should all know about. I know it was not mentioned in my education through high school, including AP history. There was scant discussion of loyalists, the Tories were definitely mentioned but it was not covered in the same way the community & family divisions of the Civil War were.
Not only was William a loyalist, he was the last colonial governor of New Jersey and was one of the chief leaders of the loyalists. His early years and heritage are just crazy stuff, even for our times.
There is a good reason you've not heard about ol William before, because his story and relationships are totally nuts. My lord, the conflicts of interest are at actual war.
Imagine if Putin's bastard son was one of Zelensky's most important generals.
>What’s more, much of the
population, “probably a
statistical majority, [just]
wanted to get on with
their own lives without
worrying about declaring their allegiance to one
side or the other,”
But Reddit in particular is nasty about this. I think HN does a bit of a better job but the issue here is that the majority of users are generally well off. This skews the discussions.
Thanks for sharing, I’ve always enjoyed the Smithsonian magazine and its articles, hope to visit some day.
I’m hoping all the RIFs, reductions / eradication of IMLS, etc. don’t reduce the gains in & sharing of knowledge from these institutions, but if I am being honest it kind of feels like it’s purposeful destruction.
I’m planning to take my kids to Washington this summer to see the Smithsonian museums. It doesn’t seem like a great time to go to Washington, but I don’t know if they’ll be there, or in what state, next summer or the summer after.
When Americans were “resisting authority” by not wearing masks and keeping their businesses opened despite lockdown orders did you feel the same pride in anti-authority behavior then?
One person’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist. Always has been and always will be that way. The winning side when there is one usually gets to write the history of who was what.
Do you still feel pride in American anti-authoritarianism today or do you think the US may have turned out to be governed more like the UK, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand complete with trust in government run healthcare had it not succeeded in rebellion?
Important to remember all of these things when you are being introspective of an issue like the protests ongoing in Los Angelas and elsewhere.
Anyway it’s hard to resist authority when you can’t find parking for the local protest.
Well the point of wearing a mask is mostly to protect vulnerable people, and to slow the spread of a disease. These protests are also about protecting vulnerable people. And, I would argue, to slow the spread of a disease.
It is still an ongoing research topic if wearing masks against an airborne virus that primarily spread through aerosols does anything beyond a psychological effect of getting people to distance themselves and reducing spread that way. Airborne virus are notarial at spreading in places like planes, trains, busses, subway and buildings that recycle air. Meta studies looking at the effectiveness of early measures against covid pandemic points strongly towards shutdowns of mass transportation and borders, rather than masks, as being effective. Airports being particular problematic since travelers sits closely packed in a metal tube for hours.
This is incorrect. Masks reduce the spread of airbone diseases, by capturing the majority of small particulates emitted from coughing, sneezing, or simply breathing.
The exact amount of effect mask wearing had on the spread of COVID may be interesting to study, but probably the most significant factor is whether people were actually wearing masks (e.g., in America, they weren't, not really, but in Taiwan, we were).
For something like cotton masks, the effect is somewhere in the range of 10-20% reduction of aerosol virus, and that is only for a very short time (minutes) while the mask remains dry and not saturated (which is why studies generally describe them as having an marginal effect). After that the rate of virus becoming aerosol increase back to the same rate as without masks. Those masks are not rated nor designed to prevent airbone viruses from becoming aerosols.
There are diseases that primarily spread through droplets where mask are more effecting in addressing coughing and sneezing. COVID was initially thought to be such diseases, but was later found to primarily spread through virus aerosol. This is why the recommendations to address covid was significantly changed in the later part of the pandemic.
In order to address medical problems you got to use the right tool for the job. In the same way you do not use antibiotic to treat viruses, different masks are effective at different diseases. In order to filter respiratory aerosol viruses that remain airborne for a long period of time over extensive distances, you need the kind of masks that generally comes with their own air source. Indoor ventilation and avoiding crowded spaces demonstrated a much better result than cloth masks could ever perform.
> Lest we all forget, the messaging coming out the the White House at the beginning was "masks are ineffective"
If I recall correctly, at the onset of the covid pandemic the general guidance was to not rush to buy masks with the goal to prevent a supply crunch that would impact first-line responders.
This guidance was quickly switched to a global recommendation to wear masks so to prevent and slow down how the disease was spreading, so that healthcare services could respond to the demand.
This all happened in the first few weeks of the global pandemic.
as someone who was wearing a respirator before the pandemic was even acknowledged by the government -
The original CDC statement was something like "masks have not been shown to be effective for the general population". It was technically correct, but if you weren't reading defensively you'd come away with the impression they were stating a negative suggestion rather than the null suggestion (ie nothing). So despite being technically correct, most people would consider this a lie, especially if they were misled by it.
It was definitely a black mark on the CDC response - they should have been honest with people that there simply weren't enough respirators, delay the statement by a day if the healthcare system needed more time to destock Home Depot.
But how that statement gets dragged out as an example of the government being deliberately wrong, to imply that it must have been prudent to do the opposite of what they said is also terribly misguided.
One key aspect of the initial guidances regarding facial masks were based on the assumption that covid was not easily transmissible, which was proven to be false. Once that fact was acknowledged, the whole world pivoted towards widespread adoption of masks and lockdowns to hinder spread.
> It was definitely a black mark on the CDC response (...)
To be fair, the initial criticism towards mask adoption were based on what little they knew then. As the pandemic progressed and observations in somewhat controlled environments started to trickle in, the focus shifted to prevent a supply crunch that affected first responders. I recall that there was also a period where health officials admitted masks were effectice, but regular people would only wear them wrong thus they wouldn't work, which was also dropped.
What matters to keep in mind is that this adaptation took place in a timespan of a couple of weeks at these start of the pandemic. Thus, it's not possible to use this to justify any anti-mask and anti-prevention militancy.
"masks have not been shown to be effective for the general population"
and something like:
"we do not know if masks are effective"
What was said was readily misinterpreted as "masks have ... been shown to [not] be effective for the general population", especially by a science-illiterate population reading with a non-individualist perspective. Whereas the second directly acknowledges the lack of understanding in an evolving situation.
I've said this before but I'll bring it up again - people get tripped up about Covid because they don't understand it was truly novel. We have never, ever had a situation like Covid and honestly we probably won't in our lifetimes.
Our common knowledge about how things should go or what recommendations are correct just does not apply. Nobody knew anything about anything. We had to figure everything out on the fly.
The result is that yes, we were often wrong and our guidelines were a moving target. This isn't like Polio or Measles - public health threats we understand. But, just because we changed our minds or were wrong doesn't mean anybody was lying. It means that we made mistakes.
And, doing super low-risk things like masking, even if we're not 100% sure it works, makes a lot of sense. Nobody dies from wearing a mask. So even if we think there's a chance it could save some lives, it makes absolute sense to recommend it. I mean, it's not surgery or medication.
This is actually a perfect example of the difficulty of scientific communication to a large audience. You need to communicate concise easy to understand guidance about complex topics. Asking “are masks effective” isn’t a simple question and the answer is, it depends. The first part is “effective at what task”, the second is “to what extent”, third is “in what situation”, fourth is “with what risks and tradeoffs”. I’ll be talking about the non-N95 masks unless specifically stated, to avoid any confusion.
Masks are not very effective at preventing an uninfected person from contracting Covid when in proximity to someone infected with Covid. The masks do not form a seal around the mouth and nose, allowing significant amounts of air around the mask when breathing in, as well as not being able to prevent being infected through the eyes. They do provide some protection, including possibly reducing the severity of the infection if contracted while wearing the mask, but that is not their primary benefit.
Mask are effective at preventing the spread from an infected person (either asymptomatic or symptomatic) to others. Breathing out directly into a mask allows the material to catch and trap the majority of the virus carrying condensation, and what gets out around or through the mask is slowed down significantly, allowing the droplets to be pulled down by gravity before traveling as significant distance (or fog up your glasses). Especially when combined with social distancing, this is very effective at prevent the spread of the virus. This is the masks primary benefit and is effective when there is large scale adoption, so that people that have the virus but are not aware, don’t unknowingly pass it. Its effectiveness comes as an aggregate effect similar to herd immunity, rather than an individual effect, since the vast majority of transmission comes from people unaware they are carriers.
Mask come with risks. People tend to touch their face more while wearing masks, and contracting the virus by touching your face is a primary infection mode. People tend to relax other more effective protection methods when wearing a mask, both unconsciously and due to a false belief in the protective capabilities of a mask.
So, in March we had a situation where we were running a shortage of masks. We had people wearing masks (either homemade or surgical) because they believed the mask provided good protection from contracting the virus, which is not true, and may cause people to engage in risky behavior that would put them and others at more risk. We also didn’t have enough masks to be used for their actual benefit of “herd immunity”. The assessment was that non sick people wearing masks was likely to put the individual at greater risk, and deplete the resource from places it was needed, without providing a medical benefit to the individual greater than the risks. In March, the average non sick person should not be wearing a mask.
After several months, we had a situation where we did not have a shortage of masks. We had a situation where the public has been educated through awareness campaigns on how masks work, like the “My mask protects you. Your mask protects me” campaign, so people are less likely to use the masks incorrectly and put themselves and others at greater risk. The assessment is that high compliance of mask wearing will have a greater positive effect through “herd immunity” to outweigh the risks and tradeoffs. But make no mistake, the risks are still there. In that case, the average non sick person should be wearing a mask.
If you don’t understand the underlying medical complexities of the situation, it seems like they can’t both be true. And when an expert organization is trying to provide a clear, short, easy to understand list of recommendations from analyzing and evaluating all those data, they can’t go into to a 45 min presentation every time. Dr. Fauci even tried to add context in March. He talked about how the masks don’t provide protection in the way people think they do, how it can cause people to put themselves at greater risk, both through a false sense of protection and other behaviors like face touching, and how masks primarily protect you from infecting others, not the other way around. If you go back and look at his quotes at the time, he consistently tries to bring that additional context into it, but since it is a complex issue of competing risks and benefits, it’s hard to convey how masks can be good in some cases and bad in others.
> Dr. Fauci in March 2020. “When we get in a situation where we have enough masks, I believe there will be some very serious consideration about more broadening this recommendation of using masks. We're not there yet, but I think we're close to coming to some determination. Because if, in fact, a person who may or may not be infected wants to prevent infecting someone else, one of the best ways to do that is with a mask, so perhaps that's the way to go.” [1]
> And of course his 60 Minutes interview. “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”
They sent in riot police to clear out peaceful protesters in June 2020 so the president could have a photo-op, it's nothing new. The US population wanted this.
Not the same. They stormed a restaurant during business hours, arrested the entire staff regardless of paperwork, then flash banged all the patrons. Yes the patrons did start pushing back but they were literally there eating food prior to ICE showing up.
Yes. That is part of why the various COVID measures proved quite unpopular. In Australia for example we saw the standard crowd-control treatments [0] being used to break up protests of people who objected to the sudden spike in authoritarianism. There was also the internationally eyebrow-raising financial abuse that the Canadians were doling out that was a new low for anti-protest tactics and political repression.
You replied to "it doesn't count as anti-authoritarian if you don't get tear-gassed". I hope you are prepared for the follow up of "it doesn't count if it's not in the USA", and whatever form of special pleading to come after that.
The discussion was explicitly about American anti-authoritarianism, so countering with evidence of perceived government overreach in Australia is a laughably bad approach--no special pleading is required. It's a complete shifting of the goalposts, suggesting the person is really grasping at straws to make some kind of point.
That doesn't answer my question, which was about Americans.
> grasping at straws
So stay at home orders and gathering bans [1] aren't authoritarian? Note, I am not asking if they were justified, or necessary (or perceived as such, given the information known at the time), but if they were authoritarian.
If someone argues a point poorly, that doesn't make the point itself invalid.
Oh, I'm not here to indulge you in some petty argument. I was just pointing out that the comment about Australia wasn't the slam dunk you made it out to be.
By all means, believe whatever you want. I doesn't bother me one bit.
> I'm not here to indulge you in some petty argument.
You're the one focusing on the specific arguments made, instead of the substance of the point being argued itself, and running away when faced with an argument you can't weasel out of.
I live in Australia, I don't think government overreach in Australia is a laughing matter; beyond maybe a few dark jokes. We're people too.
Old mate was asking a stupid question - people care enough about the COVID restrictions to protest in every country they were bought in. Exactly how heated the protests get isn't really a factor and how unreasonable the police response gets isn't really a factor either. What is jeffbee's complaint supposed to be - COVID protesters in the US behaved too well for his liking? People only show they care about law and principle when they are physically threatening police? Maybe he wanted them to act like monkeys to show they were serious? Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer. The literal one is yes. People were tear gassed. Move on to the next question.
Equating not wearing a mask with assaulting federal agents, damaging federal property, or being part of an unlawful assembly doing the former is quite a stretch.
Be realistic about why the groups in LA are getting tear-gassed or pepperball’d.
> One person’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist.
Lol no, not even close. One person was asked nicely to wear masks and lock down and offered massive PPP loans, the other is resisting federal storm troopers kidnapping people at their place of work who are being sent to overseas concentration camps with their constitutional right to due process being violated.
> When Americans were “resisting authority” by not wearing masks and keeping their businesses opened despite lockdown orders did you feel the same pride in anti-authority behavior then?
As someone who was wearing a mask, getting the vaccine, but living in a community full of those people, I thought they were dumb and harmful.
And I still admired the "don't tell me what to do" spirit because I have actual objective principles that go beyond what benefits me. And I made people angry arguing that the government was overreaching the law in what they could force people to do.
Because I'm not an authoritarian. Words mean things.
Why didn't you wear you wear a mask while a deadly air-borne disease was going around the world? Was it just because your governor told you to? Was it because a governor from another state told you not to? Did you even think about it? Was it because you don't value your neighbor's lives? Do you not really value your own?
Not wearing a mask, not getting a vaccine in a global pandemic of a deadly airborne disease, and otherwise going out of your way to spread a deadly disease is not behavior of "resisting authority", it is the behavior of a death cult. This behavior may also shown by denying or ignoring climate change, cutting funding to health care, food assistance, child lunches, etc...
> When Americans were “resisting authority” by not wearing masks and keeping their businesses opened despite lockdown orders did you feel the same pride in anti-authority behavior then?
From an outsider's perspective, it's hard to see the people with a militant attitude against basic health and higiene measures as other than narcisist authoritarian fools, who believed their personal whims naturally took priority over anyone's interests and needs. There's a reason why they frequently resorted to attacking and outright assaulting anyone who dared not cater to their demands.
It's very hard to see these covid karens portrayed in the same light as the US founding father's revolutionaries or today's protesters.
I guess the point is to not be consistent or coherent with these remarks. The goal is cynicism. You see Trump's secret police kidnapping people off the streets in broad daylight and when people dare express concern or opposition then the cynical "but covid" remarks flow in to muddy the waters. No, your ICE agent throwing flashbangs into crowded restaurants while kidnapping US citizens is not Ruby Bridges. Why even pretend?
The point wasn't really to compare these two situations directly.
Personally, (and you can read through my post history if you'd like) I've been a staunch advocate of COVID-19 vaccines (and any vaccine really) and also of wearing masks as appropriate, but those who believed at the time that vaccine mandates were draconian government overreach literally believed they were freedom fighters just as much as those who are out in the streets of LA as the government comes down to do whatever it is that governments do about these various crises and concerns.
Neither group is or was fighting for a particularly worthy cause reminiscent of some conjured up spirit of the Founders. Enforce borders, get vaccines. Open borders, don't get vaccines. Yawn.
> (...) but those who believed at the time that vaccine mandates were draconian government overreach literally believed they were freedom fighters just as much (...)
This is simply not true. At face value that's the literal claims the typical covid karens blurbed, but the common thread was always cynicism towards others in attempts to antagonize and outright assault anyone who didn't complied with their demands. Those who value personal freedom wouldn't assault passer-bys for using masks and practicing social distancing, nor would they single out service workers for the audacity of enforcing basic higiene and safety precautions.
It was a massive country-wide persecution complex. The antimaskers loved to act like they were being persecuted, as if they were freedom fighters, defending themselves against oppression. Yet, they were the ones out there attacking everyone else who were just trying to be cooperative. And for what? Just to be performatively contrary to the mainstream. COVID's legacy is a massive, sustained, consequence-free civil disobedience campaign, but instead of being organized in service of a goal, it’s just vague anger, belligerence, and contrariness for the sake of contrariness.
"Not true" according to who? They sure seemed serious to me.
I think you are having difficulty separating your personal opinion of those folks with assessing what they believed and how they acted. You can make the same argument about the rioters in Los Angelas today [1].
The point was specifically about people who it's being argued are pro- or anti-authoritarian. In this case, people opposed to mask wearing are being argued as "anti-authoritarian" perhaps in an attempt to accuse those of us that support the LA resistance against ICE as hypocritical.
It was argued that those opposed to mask wearing aren't anti-authoritarian because they went out of their way to attack people wearing masks, e.g. by trying to rip masks off their face (this happened to me personally twice in HEB lol).
Your point is that this isn't valid because that doesn't indicate their anti authoritarianism-ness or not, and your example is that at the LA protests, looting happened.
However, this doesn't work, because the incidence of looting in LA has nothing to do with the overall movement of ejecting ICE. There's crowds and chaos, and some people can thus take advantage of this to loot. It's not ideologically connected at all. Whereas in the mask example, it's a direct ideological and acting thread - the anti-maskers are personally attacking people for wearing masks.
The OP I was responding to was trying to invoke the spirit of the Founding Fathers to bless the anti-authority, freedom-loving protests going on in Los Angeles.
That attempt at moral blessing of the activities of some "anti-authority" behavior can be just as loosely applied to those who are protesting against other perceived anti-authority behavior regardless of whether you personally agree with their cause or not.
Getting lost in the muck of who exactly was violent when and whether that specific act of violence is ok because you happen to agree or disagree with the cause is a waste of time.
Surely you recognize the same “representative government forms the core American value” you laud is both the mechanism by which the current administration was elected, as well as the same mechanism that passed the immigration laws that are being enforced, right?
Cherry picking isn't compelling. The parallels between the philosophies of ICE and Israel are noticeable. ie Extraneous damage and laws broken along the way are justified collateral damage by sympathizers. A dark period for the US, indeed.
>The parallels between the philosophies of ICE and Israel are noticeable...
Only if you get your news from reddit comments. Practically every country in the world has customs, border, and immigration enforcement. The US, Israel, Japan, Poland, Czechia, etc. are no different.
>A dark period for the US, indeed.
The past decades of pro-illegal immigration were dark periods for the US, indeed. Glad we're finally enforcing our borders.
>>> No they're not. Deporting illegal aliens is not "wildly" illegal. - anonfordays
>> Cherry picking isn't compelling.
> Glad that's not what I'm doing. - anonfordays
Yes it is. "Actions" is broader than your cherry picked singular action - "deporting illegals". Rephrasing, graciously, something like "the deporting of illegals is the goal and that's lawful" would be more correct. Unfortunately, I don't think you have anything to add to a good faith discussion. Good luck with whatever.
This is a bad faith argument. ICE is not "deporting illegal aliens," they're throwing tear gas canisters into busy restaurants and locking people in without cause while they check their papers.
The America I grew up in would call that "commie shit," I'm not sure if you grew up in the same America as me or what but I'm pretty sure that I have a better representative understanding of American values to know that officers throwing a tear gas canister into the restaurant I'm eating at and then asking me to "show my papers" is exactly the kind of Soviet-ass behavior that it's my American duty to protest.
I don't care about any justification, if what it requires to keep undocumented migrants out of restaurant kitchens is that cops get to kick down doors and ask people randomly for papers, I'll take the America with the 4th and 5th amendments and the undocumented migrants in the kitchen before I take the communist alternative you're offering.
Liberty or death, and in this case it's not even death, it's cheap good food.
This is a bad faith argument. ICE is not "throwing tear gas canisters into busy restaurants and locking people in without cause while they check their papers," they're deporting illegal aliens.
>The America I grew up in would call that "commie shit,"
No they wouldn't have. The America I grew up in didn't have a political party that fetishized trafficking in the third-world into the US. That is "commie shit."
>I'm pretty sure that I have a better representative understanding of American values to know that officers throwing a tear gas canister into the restaurant I'm eating at and then asking me to "show my papers" is exactly the kind of Soviet-ass behavior that it's my American duty to protest.
Repeating false propaganda likely from Russian assets posting on reddit is Soviet-ass "commie shit."
>I don't care about any justification, if what it requires to keep undocumented migrants out of restaurant kitchens is that cops get to kick down doors and ask people randomly for papers, I'll take the America with the 4th and 5th amendments and the undocumented migrants in the kitchen before I take the communist alternative you're offering.
I don't care about any justification, if what it requires to keep illegal immigrant slaves out of restaurant kitchens is that cops get to kick down doors and ask people randomly for papers, I'll take the America with the 4th and 5th amendments and tear gassing rioters in before I take the communist alternative of importing slave labor you're offering.
Both of us can play this game. Flooding the West with illegal aliens is literal Soviet-era propaganda. Deporting them is democracy, as this is a country for the of the people, by the people, for the people
The People, historically, are immigrants. The facts back my argument.
15% of the population are immigrants since 1860.
Drops to 5% in the 60's to 80's, maybe that's the cause of your short-term understanding of American history, since in recent memory immigration was quite low (and thus begins the decline of American prosperity at the same time, interesting).
Increases back up to 15% in the late 2000's... right as we have historic increases in markers for prosperity (overlay the same chart against the stock market).
We are returning to the proper state of America, as the world's melting pot, and the most successful and prosperous nation on earth as a result.
>Deporting them is democracy, this is a country for the of the people, by the people, for the people
I doubt if it ever really was true to the fullest extent ever. I do think that America did it better that most other counties on earth, but my view is that ‘Democracy’ as is generally practiced is a form of oligarchy, a sophisticated one at that, where common people have the illusion of choosing the laws and leaders they like. In a ‘democracy’ consent is manufactured (words borrowed from Noam Chomsky).
I think early American settlers had a little extra moxie because there was excitement about how they were in a new world (to them, literally) and they were thinking big and creating something new.
It used to be that every American was basically frontiersman or explorer that was pushing boundaries, but things settled down and now people are largely content and nestled in place.
Concentration of media has allowed conservative think tanks to shape people's values. Ten years ago [0], this meant all conservatives were getting marching orders from Fox News. Today, there is the illusion of choice among conservative media outlets (Fox News, X, Newsmax, etc.), but they all send the same message. Even traditionally more moderate outlets, like the WSJ, are being bought by the corporate class and shifting their message to the right.
The hypocrisy is, as you spotted, all the way back to the original founders. The original agreement was freedom for whites only, and too many people want to go back there.
I don't think it died over the last few years. I think it's been dead for decades. Most Americans only seem to be anti-authoritarian when the authority is part of the opposing political party. This is nothing new. What is new is how much presidential power has expanded - allowing for increasingly authoritarian policies.
I would say that it's not "new" that presidential power has expanded. That's very new, and every president over my lifetime has expanded it bit by bit.
4547 is just doing so at a much more rapid pace and using obscure laws that no one wanted to take the time to clean up.
I expect that if we get out of this the American populace will insist Congress tighten up its books and repeal and clarify some of its more obscure laws.
> I expect that if we get out of this the American populace will insist Congress tighten up its books and repeal and clarify some of its more obscure laws.
Modern conservatism grew out of authoritarian monarchist philosophers of the French revolution. It's inherently tied to supporting an unquestionable social hierarchy with rulers at the top, be they kings, presidents or billionaires.
It's not so much as the philosophy is dead, but more that it's finally achieving it's goals. Anti authoritarianism is just a rhetoric device. Just like saying trans people shouldn't be allowed to use the bathroom is a rhetoric device for achieving the goal is forcing trans people out of existence, either by making their lives such hell that they take their own lives, or that they go back to the closet.
>Modern conservatism grew out of authoritarian monarchist philosophers
Not in the US. Modern conservatism in the US is tied to the individualistic self-reliance movement that rejects the concept of rulers at the top in favor of States' rights and local governance. It is classically liberal with special emphasis on individual autonomy, limited government, economic freedom, political freedom and freedom of speech.
You may be confusing it with conservativism in the UK/EU.
>I think you are a couple decades behind the times.
Not at all, stop getting political commentary from reddit comments. Bush, Romney, McCain were all in the past two decades.
>The current conservative movement is all in on monarchy, not what you are proposing. Look at Moldbug/Yarvin for their current philosophy.
The current Republican party's platform follows classical liberalism: "Classical liberalism is a political tradition and a branch of liberalism that advocates free market and laissez-faire economics and civil liberties under the rule of law, with special emphasis on individual autonomy, limited government, economic freedom, political freedom and freedom of speech."[0]
You can argue that Trump isn't following that, but it is what the Republican party has incorporated into it's platform for decades.
>Moldbug/Yarvin
Basically a non-player who is oversold on reddit as having some outsized influence.
You're thinking of classical liberalism, which is something the dominating political factions are highly against. The contemporary meaning of conservatism has been hijacked by the Republican party which does not employ any of those goals.
>which is something the dominating political factions are highly against.
The current Republican party's platform follows classical liberalism: "Classical liberalism is a political tradition and a branch of liberalism that advocates free market and laissez-faire economics and civil liberties under the rule of law, with special emphasis on individual autonomy, limited government, economic freedom, political freedom and freedom of speech."[0]
You can argue that Trump isn't following that, but it is what the Republican party has incorporated into it's platform for decades.
We're constantly pitted against one another. Ammon Bundy used actual armed militias to check the power of unelected bureaucrats who were constantly changing up the regulations against ranchers, and it actually worked.
Anytime something actually works, the first thing the establishment does is tell you they are on the right, or the left, or they're your enemy. No matter that Bundy actually was on the side of immigrants rights, and stood against Trump, nah all the people that have employed effective strategies are right wing or left wing loons who should be discarded.
The establishment has us all divided. The true enemy of the people is the unelected bureaucrats that snatch people off the street and impose ever changing demands with the power of law, all while bypassing constitutional rights.
Unfortunately this divide and conquer strategy is highly effective. Most 'sides' seem to think their guy will do better the next time and they are just protesting until the power can be used appropriately. The problem is that anybody's guy had the ability to do so in the first place.
I think a lot of people believe that there ought to be a statute of limitations on immigration; if you've been peacefully living and working in the country for many years, what's the actual public purpose of deporting someone? Including breaking up a family?
> Immigration is arguably even more important to enforce in this manner because of the clear-cut legal alternative.
We're talking about an immigration policy that is now rounding people up at their legal immigration appointments. This is not about maintaining a legal alternative, and to argue that it is feels disingenuous.
Under expedited removal, an established legal process, these undocumented immigrants are being deported, and are free to pursue their asylum claim in the meantime.
It’s disingenuous to argue that they have any more right to be here than any other undocumented immigrant, just because they happened to be detained at a courthouse.
The employers cast votes, illegals do not, seems like an easy calculus. Arrest the illegals to win the immigrant vote.
Rationally someone on HN is not going to want to understand this because it is not in their interest to understand it, because they benefit from illegal immigrants more than they don't.
And that's why they simply flagged my very valid point, no matter that it is well into the + and follows HN rules.
This is because employers are generally compliant with law enforcement requests. I don't think you're making a point there - if the employers are breaking laws they will also get punished and if they resist persistently then there will be violence.
He's talking about tear gassings and people being dragged away though. Have employers even formed a mob to assert their right to commit wage theft? That seems like it'd be a wildly rare event but a prerequisite to a tear gassing. I assume it must have happened at least once but I can't recall an example. Dragging them to a foreign prison isn't really a productive way to deal with wage theft. They get dragged to local prisons if they commit crimes though.
If the point is that employers get a trial and that is unfair then there might be something there, but the point isn't being expressed very clearly.
Yes exactly. For example about half my family is naturalized and the other half are jus soli citizens.
The naturalized half, most of who don't have degrees and often tell me tales of their coworkers getting deported, are fiercely pro Trump's immigration policies.
The “laws must be enforced, back the blue” folks voted in a convicted felon - exempting him from sentencing! - who then pardoned hundreds of people who assaulted cops on his behalf.
"critical of people for defending the city from ICE stormtroopers. I see people justifying paper-checking, something I'm sure we roundly mocked the Soviets for doing - I thought gestapo agents checking the papers of people in the streets was commie shit?"
Truly curious, what methods are you suggesting we use to keep our immigrant population tracked and controlled? If the immigrants aren't leaving after being asked nicely, what steps can we use other than force to remove them? Surely you don't believe unchecked immigration in our modern Nation is good? If you do, then how much is too much, at what number, and what if those immigrants still collected benefits of your tax dollars while not themselves paying into the system? What if they voted for someone you don't like?
> what methods are you suggesting we use to keep our immigrant population tracked and controlled?
You can't track and control only immigrants. Any such system would include tracking and controls of citizens, simply in order to sort them into the "not immigrant" category.
That is true, but it doesn't answer sQL_inject's point. You can't track and control only immigrants, therefore... what? Don't control immigrants at all, once they're here? Make it across the border and you're good forever? Or all, citizens or not, have to show papers to prove who they are?
I don't like either of those alternatives, but those seem to be the only options that are being advocated at the moment. Is there a better option?
And if not, are you really content to advocate for one of those two options? (Either of those two options? Because personally, no, I am not willing to advocate for either one.)
There is no other (let alone better) option — those cover all possibilities.
If you don't check papers (or an equivalent), you automatically don't control immigrants at all once they're in your borders. To control them requires everyone has an ID, because otherwise some immigrant who doesn't want to have ID for whatever reason can just say "of course I don't have papers, only immigrants have papers and I'm not an immigrant".
The entire point of papers is to determine if someone is or isn't in some category (including but not limited to "immigrant").
What you can do is automate ID checks. So long as you don't mind your ID being tested at random, and the way that such systems have a tendency to randomly fail and deport people who were actually allowed to remain.
It’s pretty simple, verify on the employer side. The fact that they are not doing this tells you all you need to know about how genuine this “immigration crackdown”is from a policy side.
It’s purely about terrorizing people and expanding the power of ICE. Citizens and non-citizens.
Surprise, you’re already tracked in a dozen harmless ways that enable modern life: drivers license, Social Security number, birth certificate, etc; even before you get into quasi-public records like credit reporting, bank accounts, and insurance.
Acting like showing ID to an immigration official is some unprecedented intrusion is absurd. Fly domestically, shop at Costco, or buy a 6 pack of beer and you’ll end up showing more “papers” than a typical interaction with Customs/ICE, assuming you’re not illegal.
"In 2017, Stevens began studying cases like Watson’s, combing through court records for instances of ICE detainees being released after the government acknowledged they were citizens. She connected with dozens, including many who had been deported before the government could correct its error, and who got in touch with her from other countries. 'This is happening all the time,' she says. In her study, she found that, on average, U.S. citizens detained by ICE spent 180 days behind bars. Deportation is always a real possibility. At a mass removal hearing she attended, Stevens remembers the judge declaring that all 50 defendants would be deported; as the bailiff cleared the room, a man stood up and shouted, 'I thought I’d have a chance to speak to a judge!'"
"It took years, but eventually the BIA, even with the naturalization papers in front of them, denied his request for a stay, concluding the government could deport him. The court’s argument was arcane: It maintained that Watson couldn’t prove his father had custody of him when he was naturalized."
"A court would eventually rule that Watson had been wrongfully imprisoned. But the statute of limitations to sue the government began the day he got locked in ICE detention; it had passed by the time he was released."
It is a core tenant for criminal trials, not the civil proceedings of immigration. Instead, lower standards, including probable cause for detainment, or a "preponderance of the evidence" standard for the immigration proceedings is sufficient. That is and has been the American standard.
Legal immigrants to America for over a century accepted and complied with these legal processes, many of which were even more burdensome or discriminatory (quotas, Chinese Exclusion Act, Immigration Act of 1924, etc).
It's unamerican to undermine a core tenant of the US's national sovereignty: the "sovereign right of States to determine their national migration policy", by arguing that unregulated, irregular migration is the norm and that any action to enforce immigration law is unthinkable.
Your understanding of American immigration law is incorrect, I'd like to correct you to perhaps help align your understanding of American history with the somewhat wrong-headed idea you have of American values. America didn't become "the melting pot" by having communist-style border checkpoints.
For basically the entire first 80% of our history, the most the federal government would do in regards to immigration was write down someone's name and nationality, then send them on their way. You're right that in the early 1900s, there were finally some restrictions passed, but by that point the national fabric of America was already sewn, and even those restrictions only applied to specific countries. Right up to the modern era, millions and millions of people have been moving to the USA, and only very, very recently has there been an extremely formalized process, or efforts to go out of the way to deport people that aren't committing actual crimes (overstaying visas is a modern thing, and isn't the kind of crime I'm talking about) (and before you get on me about breaking the law making someone a criminal, lemme know how many times you've driven over the speed limit, and whether you verify your turn signals, headlights, and brakelights work every time you operate a motor vehicle).
I grant you that the government is often at odds at our values, such as with the Chinese exclusion act or when they put Japanese in internment camps, but the American culture has been pro-immigration and pro-refugee for our whole history. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses..." No way in hell bureaucracy is more important to us than that value.
American conservative media are really good at repainting history, so they seem to have convinced some people such as yourself that American sovereignty is predicated upon a tightly controlled and monitored border, but that's basically the opposite of the truth of our history. My guess is that the conservatives need scapegoats to distract from the collapse of the living conditions of the working class from the true reasons (higher concentration of wealth) and so they've picked immigrants this time, a typical target. What genuinely surprises me is that people on hacker news, who I consider typically more media-savvy than the average person, are falling for this as well.
If your argument against immigration regulation and enforcement boils down to “we’ve only been doing it for 120 years”, that’s got some pretty rough consequences for welfare, civil rights on the basis of race, and even the income tax, right?
If you want to go back to a pre-1900s American system and return to that national fabric, sure! Repeal the NFA and free our 2nd amendment. Repeal the income tax and welfare state, and go back to funding the government via tariffs and excise taxes (the liberal media sure convinced some people tariffs were an anathema to America, right?).
Your idealized “America the melting pot” thrived on the basis of people actually working for what they had, both immigrant and 3rd generation American; rather than sitting around drawing Social Security, disability, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, WIC,TANF, EITC, and housing assistance. I think you’re on to something!
Genuine question: Are you a communist, or perhaps a member of a former communist state? What you're discussing is how Americans perceive the Soviets or the Maoists, it doesn't really align with American values as I grew up understanding them.
"Show me your papers" is not something I think most Americans think is acceptable to be asked of them.
Excepting “sovereign citizens”, most Americans comply when asked to show ID on a traffic stop, their passport at customs, a drivers license when renting a car, or even ID when swiping a credit card at Walmart.
Do you think all Americans are just running around bartering for corn with bullets? Showing ID when engaging in modern society has become common - except when voting, of course, oddly enough :P
> most Americans comply when asked to show ID on a traffic stop
It's not just sovereign citizens asserting their rights to not identify themselves out of turn to a cop. You're right that cops in America are becoming increasingly authoritarian and trying to intimidate people into giving up their rights, but check out any youtube channel that's essentially just a reuploader for full cop chest cam videos, and almost every encounter with a cop has people pushing back on unlawful search and seizure.
Anyway, your examples are all not exactly good faith, since we were discussing random "show me your papers" stops, which is what ICE has started doing. Needing to prove you have a legal right to drive is relatively uncontroversial. As for showing your passport at a random DHS stop, I've refused every time (over 20 times, I'm a Texan), and everyone I know does as well, and we're certainly not sovereign citizens. "I'm an American citizen, thank you." On my way. They're completely used to it so I know we aren't outliers.
> even ID when swiping a credit card at Walmart.
I've never had to do this lol, not sure what this is about, but again irrelevant when discussing government overreach.
> Do you think all Americans are just running around bartering for corn with bullets?
Ok, this might be a rural American thing, but, yes, many people are basically doing this. Maybe this is just a Texan thing but there's whole ass grey market economies around this.
IDK man maybe we just roll in different circles, maybe it's a redneck thing, but my perception of American values is hot rodding cars so as to escape the cops, not welcoming federal agents into your city to deport your neighbor that watches your kid when you gotta run to the post office real quick, just cause of some frivolous bullshit paperwork.
We're being downvoted but no one has offered answers to my question.
In an advanced society where citizens are tracked, and receive the benefits of that tracking, why is it somehow okay for others to not be yet to reap the benefits? Why should others immigrate the 'proper way' if one can simply walk across? I can wait until anyone here who defends the lawlessness of the past ways answers.
the solution is trivial. It is easy. We've whitnessed it several times. Illegal immigration follows jobs. When the economy does poorly, less people come across. I recall a few years ago, they said it was negative immigration! More people were leaving because jobs were hard to get.
Instead of letting the economy do the work, simply enforce the laws we already have on the books. Don't let employers employ non-verified citizens.
The problem is that a common sense solution solves the problem and removes a platform for politicians to yell about and continue to do nothing over.
Step one: enforce labor laws. Step two, watch the system drain itself. Step three, look to naturalize and or remove those left behind.
Not really a theoretical, but either way, I would love it if the current admins were making an impassioned plea to answer the questions your asking, and working with Congress to get the laws changed. I think we desperately need to have that discussion. As it stands they’re not, they’re just appealing to emotion with arguments like “they’re eating your cats and dogs”, and forcefully bypassing due process.
The people who are pro illegals either 1) face zero consequences for not enforcing the border laws, 2) illegals themselves, or 3) people who are anti-anything-Trump/Republican.
America isn't a town square that the world is somehow entitled to inhabit. It's a country with borders and laws.
It’s also a country of crops that need to be picked by hand, livestock to be slaughtered, and other dirty, dangerous professions that its citizens don’t aspire to careers in.
As recently as 30 years ago the pragmatic class understood this. I’m not sure where reality will take us now.
In literally every jurisdiction in America, failure to enforce a law is not itself unlawful. It is protected by sovereign immunity at the federal, state, and lower levels as well. Discretionary acts of government regarding how to enforce the law are not subject to judicial interference.
OK, but in the current situation, the laws are federal, and the feds are choosing to enforce them. A state or city preventing the feds from enforcing them is not protected by sovereign immunity.
It seems to me that the most that can legally be done is to require the feds to actually follow due process. (But I thought different yesterday, and I may think different tomorrow...)
I think you're misrepresenting the situation and the relationship between the federal and state and local governments. There certainly is not anything in the Constitution that compels a local government to allow a federal agency to house their prisoners in the local jail, or to have offices in the local police station, or to have keys to the coffee room in the local courthouse. For that matter, if the feds happen to have their own offices there's absolutely nothing that dictates that there has to be a local road to that place, that anyone is allowed to drive on.
If a state or local government reckons that their material support for federal activities is limited to a certain extent, that is well within that state's purview.
Not giving material support, sure. "We don't like your law. You have the right to enforce it, but we are not going to help you do so." Sure, that's fine.
Actively hindering is a whole additional step, though. I'm pretty sure at least some cities crossed it.
(How actively? Not to the point of arresting or shooting at ICE agents, but still further than "not helping". And if you're going to ask for references, I can't give them. This is my impression of several "sanctuary cities", but I can't point to a concrete incident.)
Under the lenses of a duopoly, American politics seems like a well oiled machine, oiled by the tears of the constituency, but they are working together. The orange tumor seems to be a new thing that for some reason smells like fundamentalist state.
There are a lot of similarities when it comes to their tendency towards Corporatocracy and military spending, but it largely ends there.
When it comes to taxes, fiscal priorities, rights for individuals, foreign policy, crime and punishment, and of course social issues they are very different and in most cases take the opposite approach.
For example, Republicans want lower taxes for the wealthy while Democrats want lower taxes for the lower and middle classes. Republicans want to restrict individuals rights - especially for non-christian white males, Democrats don't. Republicans favor heavy handed punishment including capital punishment, Democrats favor rehabilitation and a ban on capital punishment. Republicans want to blow up the national debt through tax breaks and pork, Democrats want to control the debt through responsible spending and investments. Republicans want to stop investment in education and science while Democrats want to increase investment in these areas. These are all very real and not just aesthetics.
This is a curious comment. HackerNews has always told me it was in fact the opposite - it's easy enough to source quotes from over the years. Could this forum have been wrong all this time?
Democratic voters want those things. It's not at all obvious the party establishment does.
The tell is that when Republicans push through their policies, Democratic opposition is weak and ineffectual. Instead of ferocious opposition the Dems send one of their famous sternly worded letters.
Since at least 2000 the party establishment has absolutely refused to do any of the things it could do to change this - including packing the Supreme Court, supporting and promoting grass roots activism between elections, using the filibuster, and so on.
Biden couldn't even get any of Trump's prosecutions over the line - including televised evidence of insurrection, and treasonous mishandling of official state secrets (!)
However it's spun, there is a very obvious reluctance to challenge the extremes of Republicanism.
The party is far more likely to censure one of its non-centrists than its centrists, while the opposite is true of the Republicans.
The Democrats operate as if they're controlled opposition. It's like their donors pay them to blunt their base. They haven't accomplished anything legislatively this century beyond pass the 1993 Republican healthcare plan under Obama's name. They couldn't even raise the minimum wage.
In my experience this is dead on. People have short attention spans but this has been happning the whole 21st century. In 2008 Obama won the primary despite the best efforts of leadership to nominate clinton. They even scrambled the "super delegates" (delegates who vote for the candidate chosen by senior leadership) hoping that even if Obama won more delegates, they could override the voters choice.
Of course, they failed, and democrats won 2 elections in a row running a candidate labeled a radical socialist. Obama became the only 21st century president to win the poplar vote twice, and the DNC has been trying to drag the party back in the 20th century ever since, blaming their own voters when it doesn't work.
It boggles my mind that they refused to even engage with the "undecided movement", which created a grass-roots get out to vote movement out of thin air. In swing states no less.
The starkest contrast between the two parties is womens rights and to a lesser extent LGBTQ rights. Although I'm not even sure how true this is anymore with so many politicians backing Cuomo, who resigned because an investigation found overwhelming evidence he sexually harrassed and assaulted female employees. And I'm pretty sure people like Chuck Schumer and other centrists view the LGBTQ community as a liability.
itsanaccount says "An oak tree's vote adds more to our democracy than your comment does to this conversation."
Now you're calling for the trees to vote! Have you no shame, sir? I assure those reading not to panic: no unregistered trees shall be allowed to vote, even in California, as long as Donald Trump is President! Simultaneously we extend our grief to all of those in CA whose registered and unregistered trees were slaughtered by the recent fires in CA.
"I've seen thing you people wouldn't believe... forests on fire off the hills of Redmond.... I watched fire retardants glitter in the dark streaming in the skies over San Bernadino. All those votes will be lost in time, like tears in the rain...Time to go."
- parting words of homeless anarchist who started the blaze.
The healthcare issue doesn't even make sense. Democrats passes the ACA and were going to create a public option but couldn't gather enough Republican support to ensure it could pass. It was an earnest attempt to provide healthcare for all Americans. The Republicans have done nothing even remotely similar and have only attempted to take healthcare away.
One item over the course of 12 years is uh lip service at best.
The lesser of two evils is still an evil.
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Somebody will certainly bring up the filibuster at some point. Thats not in the constitution and can be removed at any point by 51 senators. As a whole democrats are not united on what to do hence why they never remove it. Which then lets them point to it as a scape-goat as to why they can't fix any problems.
If you're not part of a group that will suffer under a white-supremecist theocracy they look very similar.
If you're part of a group that will, there is a visible difference.
Picking the lesser evil is actually a good thing if you can reduce harm. It doesn't solve the problem of it being a lesser evil, but it may make space to change that.
I agree with what you're saying, but it strikes me (& this is particularly poignant on THIS site), that this discussion is somewhat equivalent to the "blub" paradox (aka, how do you explain the power of lisp macro's to someone who grew up only with c & Java).
Americans are THAT brainwashed into thinking they really have a real choice at the ballot box, when in reality all choices that matter were weeded out long long before in the backroom selection process...
Counterpoint: folks not from America create a 2d projection of our government where on the whole Americans are very aligned and where (usually Europeans) are not and conclude that US parties are the same while their parties are very different.
Meanwhile I can't tell the difference between any of the (just picking one) UK parties. From an outsider perspective their government seems exactly the same no matter who is elected. But I don't conclude that the Brits are brainwashed and instead that I would have to be there to actually understand just how different they are.
We're at a point in the US where your political party is a dating dealbreaker for 60% of Americans and 85% of Americans only date within their own party. This isn't a small group of heavily politically involved with strong opinions, this is everyday people recognizing what are extremely different and fundamentally incompatible world views.
We're only 6 months in and I would hope the world can really feel the difference when a conservative government took power. I would be shocked if anyone couldn't tell the difference between our government pre and post january.
Rebuttal to your counterpoint: I've lived in the US for 25 years, so I'm not unaware of the "supposed differences".
What were saying is that these "supposed differences" are mostly over inconsequential things, designed to mobilise the masses into 1 camp or another, all while LEAVING THE MAJOR ISSUES untouched.
It doesn't matter if team red or team blue is in charge, immigrants get scapegoated and caged (happened under Obama & Biden).Just that team red takes greater visceral delight.
It doesn't matter if team red/blue is in power, the HOLOCAUST is armed, funded & covered for.
It doesn't matter if it's team red or blue, the military budget keeps going up, and the almost pyschopathic need to keep dumping military bases into other peoples backyards, the need to freeze conflicts into eternal points of instability (to then be exploited in the future), the need to keep poking at other people's pressure points to instigate war, the need to continuously "regime change" any sovereign country you like (all the while bemoaning "foreign interference" in your own elections... irony wants its ball back)
And failing all of that, the need to create/arm/fund terrorist groups of any stripe or persuasion to get what you want done. Be they right-wing death squads in Central America, to neo Nazis in Europe, to Daeesh in Syria/Iraq (and we can all drop the pretence now that CNN & the state dept all rushed in to validate the Daesh head honcho in Syria)
Etc, etc, boringly etc.
All of these things did happen, are happening, and will continue to happen - irrespective of team red or blue.
And irrespective of whether the bulk of the American population actually wants these things or not.
But yes, I'll grant you, voting team red or blue will impact the eternal question of who gets to urinate in which public bathroom.
Yeah, no. The Overton window is so incredibly small in America that normal, run of the mill political positions - either left or right - in the rest of the world are deemed extremist and radical in America.
Things have been far more polarised since the rise of social media. You can blame fox news and cnn or whatever all you want, but given how far the US is from the days of Clinton, Reagan, Nixon, Kennedy etc I don't see how you can simply blame "corporate media".
Corporate media used to have regulations on how much local media any single company could own. I think the consolidation of media ownership made it easier to have a single corporate vision.
Both are true. The end of the Fairness Doctrine normalised the psychotic distortions and lies pumped out by Fox. But the same machine that uses Fox also runs bot farms, astroturfing operations, and curated social media algorithms to normalise even more extreme RW POVs.
The problem is not the people taking advantage of a vulnerability, but the vulnerability itself. That such a significant portion of the US population is so gullible and so ready to believe misinformation that aligns with their desires is the real issue.
The problem is not media, at least not primarily. The problem is an ancient and not-democratic first past the post system, preventing emergence of any alternative, good or bad.
I agree with your sentiment, but Canada uses FPTP and as much as I would love to move to a proportional system, our politics is significantly less limiting than yours. Both of your major parties, and all of your corporate media are so captured by billionaires you don't even know how bad things are in your country without an external frame of reference.
Really? Is your speech freer than mine in Canada? Are your human Rights protected better than mine? I wonder what the rioters in LA would have to say about that?
The US is notably "freer" for some types of speech. Quite a few countries ban Nazi flags, hate speech, etc. to some extent. The EU bans direct-to-consumer marketing of prescription drugs. The UK banned political parties from advertising on TV in 1955.
In my opinion, doing so to some extent is important to preserve the rights of other parts of society, but that's not a universally held opinion by any means.
This feels odd. Many people paid dearly for being involved, period? It isn't like we have any dynasties that survived through the era, did we?
Specifically, 46 people signed the declaration of independence. How many of those are remembered today? Do I expect that people on the "other side" had it worse? Yeah, but this framing implies a spoils system.
This always makes it odd to read about narratives that go about people's connection to family land. It is almost anti American in how we were founded and grew. I know we have a few estates that are named and known. Is that a larger number than I realize?
I know this because my grandmother told me a few years before she passed that her father, a mason and devoted patriot, once confided a scandalous family secret: there are loyalists in our family tree.
Sadly, grandma's research never got her to the root of this claim despite much research, but thanks to online resources and some helpful Canadians, I discovered the truth.
Grandma's grandfather had emigrated from New Brunswick, Canada, during the Civil War, in which he served the Union.
It turns out his great-grandfather was a captain in the Queen's Guard during the American revolution, born in Connecticut. He and his wife and children had fled after the war with other loyalists to New Brunswick, Canada. They suffered many deprivations, although the loyalist commission board compensated them about half their worldly goods they lost in America.
This captain had married a woman whose brother fought for the Americans at Bunker Hill.
While researching my grandmother's grandfather from Canada, I discovered a telling white lie: he would tell the local busybody newspaper that he was visiting his sister in New York. Thing is, he had no sister in New York. Instead, I discovered the Canadian newspapers not long after were reporting he had arrived from America to visit his sister in New Brunswick.
I was blown away by all this rich history, but when I shared my discoveries with all the remaining family on that side, nobody expressed excitement. In fact, the one person who used to call me up to discuss family history, stopped calling me.
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