Follow the money, I said that a year ago.
My suspicion has always been that the Trumps (including Kushner) are involved in money laundering and corrupt practices (seems "due diligence" is something the Trump organization didn't comprehend).
Getting back to CD's complaint, I've always had a problem with the "politcally correct" version of history which is just as distorted as the "party line" version.
âThe past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.â
Most of the complaints about White Europeans are faulty, because they focus on their success, not on whether White Europeans behaved differently than other people.
That is, just about everything White Europeans did is what humans have been doing for thousands of years, so I consider it racist to hold White Europeans to a higher standard, as if they were somehow "morally superior" to brown and yellow people.
Slavery was universal in 1787, Muslims held millions of slaves, Europeans had slaves, Africans had slaves (where do you think Europeans got their slaves from?), Russian serfs were essentially slaves. The fact that some Founding Fathers had qualms about slavery demonstrates the slow change in thinking, the British didn't abolish the slave trade until 1807, and slavery in their colonies until 1833. So it was a far different issue in 1787 than in 1861, almost four generations later.
Genocide was common, conquered peoples survival depended on the motives of conquerers, if it was for land, kill the men and boys, if it was for slaves, slavery was the alternative to death.
American Indians were just as vicious as Europeans, they just had inferior killing technology (but see Aztecs, Mayans, etc.)
The Chinese were certainly as imperialistic as the Europeans, the Mughul empire, the Ottomans, etc.
So the "holier than thou" moralism of PC history should be dismissed as imposing on the past the attitudes of the present.
On the other hand, while we can dismiss false judgments of dead people we can't dismiss facts.
We stole the continent from American Indians fair and square. Whether it was wrong to do so can only be considered in the context of the time, but whether we did so is indisputable.
The Civil War wasn't about "states' rights" (the Fugitive Slave Act and Dred Scott, which triggered the conflict, trampelled states' rights to protect slaveowner property rights) but slavery. Many poor white southerners from the Piedmont were draft evaders or outright opposed to the Confederacy (which is why West Virginia is a state).
Nineteenth century industrialization was brutal, the Great Depression was ended by a Keynesian stimulus due to WWII not the New Deal, many Republicans tried to keep us out of WWII, the national anthem was a recent development by sports' owners trying to market patriotism, and so on. The prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s was an accident of history (our competition was in ruins), and not a product of a superior economic system (compare to Scandanavia, Netherlands and Germany who caught up in two generations).
We need to start teaching honest history based on facts, and not false moralizing by the left or right, Americans are neither saints nor sinners, we are an experiment in "intellectual nationalism," where our identify is based on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We are both a product of English culture and history, and the contributions of hundred of years of immigrants from all over the world. We are deliberatety NOT a Christian nation (the establishment clause was not an accident) but a secular one, and Sharia of any sort (Muslim or Christian) is simply not acceptable. However, our culture is permeated by Protestant thinking. Our bloody history should neither be whitewashed or taken out of context, eighteenth and nineteenth century men were violent, exploitive and sexist, across the globe. We can only judge them by attempting to see the world from their perspective, not our "morally superior" hindsight.
We should show modesty in throwing around terms like "justice" and "freedom," justice for whom and who decides what is just? Freedom from what and to remember that "freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose." If we want to honor our soldiers, more concrete support and fewer platitudes would be a good start. Patriotism too often is the last refuge of scoundrels.
I am at heart a Burkian conservative, skeptical but not opposed to change, but certainly not in favor of change for change's sake - beware the law of unintended consequences.