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When my father, the late investigative journalist Robert Parry, launched the website Consortium News three decades ago, the internet was widely seen as a haven for conspiracy theorists and eccentrics, and there wasn’t much serious journalism being done there. Although few really appreciated its potential, having worked for 20 years in the mainstream media and spending much of that time dealing with timid editors beholden to Washington’s conventional wisdom, my dad saw it as an opportunity to forge a new method of disseminating vital information to the American people.

In what seemed at the time like a radical and bold idea, Parry decided that instead of letting his frustrations with traditional journalism get the better of him, he would begin producing groundbreaking reporting on the World Wide Web — the emerging high-speed data networks touted by President Bill Clinton as “the information superhighway,” a medium that was still very much in its infancy.

Founded in November 1995 with funds from his Newsweek pension, Parry began The Consortium — later redubbed Consortium News — as an independent outlet for suppressed or underreported stories that the mainstream media avoided, conceived as a “consortium” of disaffected journalists and a refuge for serious reporting free of corporate or political constraints.

Inspired by earlier efforts of renegade journalists like George Seldes and I.F. Stone, the outlet was a true multi-media endeavor — with the website complemented by a biweekly newsletter and a bimonthly magazine, as well as books periodically published and marketed online — and was billed as “the internet’s first investigative ’zine.”

In the early days, the editorial focus was mostly on correcting the historical record of Reagan-era scandals such as the October Surprise and Iran-Contra, as well as critiquing the rise of ideologically driven conservative media. Parry published an eight-part series challenging the cover-up of Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign’s efforts to sabotage President Jimmy Carter’s hostage negotiations with Iran in 1980, investigated the influence of Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon in Washington, and offered in-depth reporting on the U.S.-backed dirty wars in Central America.

With its heavy focus on exposing misdeeds of the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, both Parry’s supporters and detractors might have viewed the content of Consortium News as progressive or liberal, but my dad would have bristled at these labels.

Although much of the output of Consortium News was arguably left-leaning by traditional standards — anti-interventionist, critical of U.S. power projection, and hostile to neoconservative foreign policy — Parry retained an old-fashioned investigative reporter’s distrust of all orthodoxies and narratives, whether they come from the left or the right, and maintained healthy relationships with journalists and sources from across the political spectrum.

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A pragmatist and a patriot, Parry was also often highly critical of the American left. He challenged liberal failures to counter media double standards and questioned left-wing groupthink, rejecting, for example, what he saw as unfair treatment of Al Gore in 2000. Pushing back on Green Party attacks on Gore during the 2000 election, particularly the claim that there was little or no meaningful difference between Gore and George W. Bush, Parry considered the decision by many progressives to back Ralph Nader as contributing to a series of disasters in the 2000s, including 9/11 and the Iraq War.

He also faulted the left for failing to properly respond to media-driven Clinton-era scandals and later Obama-era interventions, including in Libya and Syria. Parry pointedly criticized liberals for abandoning skepticism toward U.S. intelligence claims, especially around Russiagate, and adopting the same propagandistic tactics once associated mainly with the right. He stressed even-handedness and opposition to “weaponized” information on any side.

This commitment was driven by a principle ingrained in him when he was an up-and-coming beat reporter in the 1970s — that quality journalism should be fact-driven, not dictated by ideology but based on evidence, and that no one single perspective holds a monopoly on truth.

“I was taught that there were almost always two sides to a story and often more,” he once wrote. “I was expected to seek out those alternative views, not dismiss them or pretend they didn’t exist.”

In practice, this meant that Parry often ended up ruffling feathers among committed leftists as well as those on the political right.

Leftward Drift

After his death in January 2018 (from complications of undiagnosed pancreatic cancer), I briefly managed the site before Joe Lauria (a former Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and UN correspondent who had written for CN since 2011) was hired by CN’s Board of Directors as editor-in-chief.

While in many ways Lauria clearly strove to uphold my dad’s legacy and maintain his commitment to independent and non-ideological journalism — particularly when it came to coverage of Russiagate — under his leadership the site over the years drifted steadily to the left and adopted a rather hardline approach to coverage of various issues. This trend alienated a number of longtime supporters.

As a member of the Board of Directors, as well as a previous editor and longtime contributor to the website, I periodically received emails from veteran CN writers, distraught over Lauria’s sometimes rude rejections of their articles, as well as complaints from users of the website who claimed that the comments they left on articles were inexplicably rejected or deleted. While this moderation might have been reasonable in some instances, at times it seemed as though an ideological conformity was being enforced and that dissenters were being sidelined.

Hearing these complaints, I was sometimes troubled by accounts of Lauria’s heavy-handed style, but for the most part I deferred to his judgment and defended his prerogatives as editor.

I also continued contributing articles to the website — as I had done since 1996 — and even repeatedly lent my name as an endorser of Consortium News under Lauria’s editorial management. Understanding that any editor would naturally put his or her own stamp on the media outlet, I was genuinely appreciative that Lauria was maintaining a visible commitment to my dad’s vision — for example by frequently republishing Parry’s own histories and asserting fidelity to his non-partisan standards.

Anti-Imperialists and Communists

But while appreciating this outward display, it also became apparent to me that the site was adding regular voices with unabashedly leftist and anti-imperialist perspectives, steadily pushing the editorial bent further and further to the left.

As several longtime contributors with expertise in various issues disappeared, Lauria came to rely more heavily on the practice of culling content from elsewhere on the internet — regularly republishing pieces from progressive websites such as Common Dreams, Truthout, and Medium, and prominently featuring writers from the far left, including Vijay Prashad, Caitlin Johnstone, and John Wight.

The new contributors appeared to be motivated less by a commitment to serious investigative journalism or balanced commentary than by a seething hatred of the “U.S. empire.” Some were even self-avowed communists, for example Vijay Prashad — featured hundreds of times at CN since Lauria took over — who has publicly affirmed that he is indeed a Marxist and a communist.

These favored contributors have leaned heavily into foreign-policy skepticism and left-wing anti-imperialist analysis, with a relentless criticism of military-industrial influence, corporate power, and domestic “McCarthyism” or censorship against dissent. Story selection prioritized context that challenged Western official lines while elevating leftist narratives.

While in some ways, much of this was probably less of a sudden ideological conversion than an intensification and solidification of the anti-establishment, anti-interventionist stance that Parry had already practiced, clear signs began to emerge that the site was becoming less a consortium for disaffected journalists or a home for independent investigative reporting than it was a haven for the far left. While eschewing one form of conventional wisdom, it seemingly began to embrace another version of it — a trend that tended to color the site’s coverage of important issues and led to some deeply flawed reporting.

I began to notice this tendency most clearly in the heady days of 2020, when the world found itself locked down under a global pandemic and race-related riots rocked the United States. During that period, as “wokeness” took hold of the political discourse and Consortium News embraced an unabashedly left-wing perspective, I grew skeptical of traditional leftist narratives and increasingly found myself turned off by CN’s far-left commentary.

Lab Leaks and False Narratives

While many people grappled at the time with how to properly respond to the unprecedented events of COVID-19, unsure what — or who — to believe, and struggled to make heads or tails of contradictory official pronouncements, much of the media coverage unfortunately fell into a politicized dynamic in which left- and right-leaning outlets presented diametrically opposed versions of reality.

Consortium News unfortunately fell into this dynamic, jostling to find a position to the left of the conventional wisdom while eschewing any news coverage that might be considered “right-wing.”

To be sure, some of Consortium News’s extensive reporting in 2020 covered important themes, concentrating on U.S. response failures, inequality, and pharmaceutical industry power. But the leftist slant of the website also was increasingly evident, with its focus on tangential issues such as critiques of militarism and war as greater threats than the pandemic itself, as well as COVID’s disproportional impacts on the Global South.

While conservative media explored themes in the spring of 2020 such as the Wuhan lab leak origin of the virus — today widely accepted as the most likely explanation for how the pandemic started — and Anthony Fauci’s misleading statements on gain-of-function research, these discussions were not a major feature of CN’s reporting that year. In fact, the lab leak theory was dismissed in a May 2020 CN article as an example of “Trump’s Sinophobia” — denounced as “a new Chinagate false narrative” and “a foreign scapegoat to divert attention and blame” for the pandemic.

Without retracting this premature rejection of the lab leak theory, a year later, CN started to quietly reverse its editorial position. In May 2021, Lauria wrote an article based on reporting in an Australian newspaper which found that Fauci years earlier had supported gain-of-function research on viruses despite his understanding that it could lead to a global pandemic if such a fortified virus escaped from a lab. The revelation, Lauria noted, came as then-President Joe Biden announced an investigation into whether the coronavirus had leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s lab in Wuhan.

The next month, CN published an article by Jonathan Cook which unironically noted that “a year ago, the idea that Covid-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan — a short distance from the wet market that is usually claimed to be the source of the virus — was dismissed as a crackpot theory.” Failing to acknowledge that independent outlets such as CN had openly ridiculed the idea as a “Chinagate false narrative,” Cook blamed the “year-long blackout of the lab-leak theory” on “the corporate media and the scientific establishment.”

Years later, CN would finally treat the lab leak story with the seriousness that it deserved, publishing an article in 2024 by Jeffrey Sachs which asserted that “the U.S. government funded and supported a program of dangerous laboratory research that may have resulted in the creation and accidental laboratory release of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Republished from Common Dreams, Sachs’s article credited “a group of intrepid truth-seekers” — none of whom wrote for Consortium News, incidentally — who uncovered a vast amount of information pointing to the likely laboratory origin of COVID-19.

Vaccine Safety

While reversing course on the lab leak theory, however, there was still little to no attention at CN about possible side effects of the COVID-19 vaccines. This seems to be the case even today, despite information steadily emerging that Fauci and other government officials had repeatedly misled the American people about vaccine safety, downplaying, for example the possible effects on pregnant women.

In January 2021 private texts, released earlier this month by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Fauci noted a risk that the strong immune response (cytokine storm and fever) after the second COVID vaccine dose “could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.” He shared this with then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and Vivek Murthy while discussing vaccination timing in pregnancy.

Publicly, however, Fauci and his underlings emphasized “no red flags,” no increased adverse issues for vaccinated pregnant women, and clear recommendations to vaccinate, despite limited early data.

Yet, although Consortium News has published multiple articles on COVID-19 vaccines, it has typically avoided questioning the vaccines’ safety or efficacy — serious issues that are primarily associated with the political right and “anti-vaxxers.”

Instead, in keeping with its leftist bent, Consortium News has focused on issues of equitable access to the vaccine, intellectual property and patents, hoarding by wealthy countries, Big Pharma profits, and related geopolitical or economic critiques. Rather than questioning the vaccines’ safety or efficacy, CN criticized what it called “vaccine apartheid,” typically hyperbolic language referring to the lack of vaccine access for poor countries.

A Mostly Peaceful and Totally Legitimate Uprising

When riots broke out following the death of George Floyd in May 2020 and other alleged incidents of racially motivated police brutality, Consortium News published an extensive series of articles under the all-caps “UPRISING” header. In May-July 2020, the website largely celebrated the events as a legitimate response to systemic racism and broader issues of austerity and empire, with little skepticism shown towards the narratives promoting the unrest, or sympathy for the unintended victims.

Downplaying the financial and human costs of the riots — with an estimated $1-2 billion in property damage due to arson, vandalism, and looting, as well as at least 19-25 deaths — Consortium News’s coverage welcomed the mass protests and framed them in the context of the urgent need for racial justice and police reform. CN heavily criticized police violence and the official response and expressed skepticism toward public figures who sought to contain the riots.

Repeatedly advocating for defunding the police, CN tended to ignore data showing that violent crime rose sharply in 2020, with the spike heavily concentrated in cities that experienced major protests, police pullbacks, or explicit budget or staffing reductions. Little attention was paid to the numerous black individuals — including elected officials, civil rights leaders, community activists, mayors, and members of the public — who criticized calls to sharply cut police funding, arguing that a decreased police presence would adversely affect public safety in their communities.

During the riots, as dozens died and family-owned and small businesses were systematically destroyed during the looting and mass arson impacting some 140 cities across the country, articles at CN praised the “hundreds of thousands” marching for racial justice, noting that the anger was fully justified after decades of neoliberal austerity.

Echoing mainstream media coverage of “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests, an article by Lauria described “largely peaceful protests that also included some incidents of arson and looting,” pointing out that they had the potential to lead to “real reform.”

Caitlin Johnstone’s June 6, 2020, piece argued that police responses to the violent protests proved the institution was “completely sick” and that the defenders of law enforcement had “already lost the argument.” Johnstone mocked “copologia,” referred to law enforcement officers as “meatheads with batons,” and called for replacing “the armed goon patrol” with social workers.

Needless to say, there was little mention of the lethal shootings, fatal arson, and severe beatings amid the “UPRISING” that Consortium News romanticized. Scant space was devoted at the website to the local shops, restaurants, hair salons, and boutiques that were looted, vandalized, or burned, nor the stark class differences in how the riots affected communities. With corporate chains often better insured, they generally recovered faster while many small operators were underinsured and struggled for years — or never reopened.

Consortium News also apparently decided that no coverage would be given to a Dallas man, Charles Shoultz, who was beaten within an inch of his life for trying to protect a business, retired St. Louis police captain David Dorn — a 77-year-old black man — who was shot and killed by looters while checking on a friend’s pawn shop during widespread looting, Oscar Lee Stewart Jr., who died in Minneapolis from burns and smoke inhalation inside a pawn shop deliberately set on fire during looting, or Secoriea Turner, an 8-year-old girl who was shot by Black Lives Matter activists at an illegal blockade they had set up in Atlanta, Georgia.

Instead, CN sanitized the violent protests and amplified their narratives, even when the evidence contradicted key assertions made by BLM activists. For instance, when footage emerged that undermined some BLM claims, demonstrating for example that the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisc., was less clear-cut than initially claimed and in fact may have been justified after all, Consortium News declined to correct the record.

Anti-Zionist Crusade

Under Lauria, Consortium News also intensified its critical stance toward Israeli policy into a more explicit anti-occupation, anti-“genocide” framing that treats Palestinian armed actions primarily as legitimate resistance within a colonial context and largely ignores the jihadist motivations of Islamic terrorism.

Although the Parry-era Consortium News already published critical reporting on Israel, the volume, tone, and centrality of the issue expanded markedly after 2018 and especially after the Hamas-led atrocities of October 7, 2023. While my dad sometimes faulted Israel — particularly in its covert activities — for crossing lines of legality and morality and was also frequently critical of U.S. policy in the Middle East, he didn’t focus inordinately on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and maintained a nuanced outlook toward the issue.

In some ways, in fact, he was actually quite sympathetic to the state of Israel, and his publicly expressed sentiments would probably be considered “Zionist” by today’s standards. As he revealed in his 1993 book Trick or Treason, he had “long been fascinated” by Israel and was impressed by many Israeli intelligence and military officials he had met over the years — noting in particular their devotion to the security of their country.

“These were single-minded individuals who had contributed to a feat unprecedented in history,” Parry wrote. “They had returned an oppressed people to a historic homeland almost two millennia after their ancestors had been forcibly removed and scattered to the corners of the world.”

He marveled that “Israel’s leaders accomplished this remarkable undertaking after the Jewish people had survived the most relentless genocide known to mankind.”

While of course it should be acknowledged that these sentiments were expressed more than three decades ago and it’s quite possible that Parry’s views would have evolved since then, regardless, they could not be further removed from Lauria’s virulently anti-Zionist perspective. In numerous screeds over the past few years, Lauria has shown little appreciation for the existential challenges faced by Israel nor its need to protect its citizens from terrorism.

Instead, he has regularly denounced Israel as a “settler nation” guilty of “textbook genocide,” and offers this explanation for why the U.S. government continues to support Israel despite its alleged crimes: the two countries share “a natural, historical connection between settler, colonial nations founded on ethnic cleansing and genocide.”

Hamas’s Narrative

As editor, Lauria has featured articles downplaying and even obliquely justifying the October 7 atrocities committed by Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists. This content has framed the Hamas-led incursion (the so-called “Al-Aqsa Flood”) as a military assault primarily aimed at military targets and hostage-taking for prisoner exchange, quibbled over the civilian vs. combatant ratios on October 7, and argued that many atrocity claims were exaggerated or unproven.

At Lauria’s Consortium News, Hamas is routinely referred to as legitimate “resistance” operating under the conditions of an illegal occupation, rather than a brutal and vicious terrorist organization devoted to ending Israel’s existence and replacing it with an Islamic state across historic Palestine. The site has glowingly referenced Hamas’s own “Our Narrative” document which contextualizes the attack within decades of Palestinian suffering, and has framed the mass killing of civilians as justified.

John Wight’s October 6, 2024, piece, for example, “The Meaning of October 7,” describes the Hamas-led attacks as “less Israel’s 9/11 and more a Palestinian Tet Offensive.” He frames it as “a scream from the bowels of structural oppression” and “the killing rage of those who refuse to accept the status of an unpeople.”

The article places the attack in an anti-colonial lineage, likening the atrocities to the actions of the Mau Mau, an anti-colonial movement in Kenya that formed the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, or Irish revolutionaries such as James Connolly and Bobby Sands, and concludes that “No ugly oppression has ever given rise to a pretty resistance.” It asks, “What choice did they have? When the choice is between living on your knees or dying on your feet, is there really any choice involved at all?”

The piece, in keeping with CN’s vehemently anti-Israel editorial bent, treats October 7 primarily as an act of defiance by an oppressed people rather than as terrorism to be condemned on its own terms.

In order to justify this perspective, however, CN has had to also minimize the severity of the atrocities committed on October 7, including the Nova festival massacre, systematic sexual violence perpetrated against Israeli civilians, and the taking of hostages, while simultaneously amplifying Palestinian claims.

Downplaying Violence

Consortium News has repeatedly questioned claims of systematic or mass gender-based and sexual violence during the October 7, 2023 attacks, and has raised doubts over culpability for violence against civilians.

In the October 7, 2024, article “Hamas, Israel, & the Fog of October 7” by Robert Inlakesh, the site groups allegations of a “premeditated mass rape campaign” with other contested claims. It places them in the broader context of what it portrays as an Israeli narrative that has included unverified or later-debunked elements, such as the “40 beheaded babies” claim initially made by first responders.

The piece emphasizes the fog of the day’s events, noting that although “videos show Hamas fighters engaging in violent actions within civilian areas, [the evidence] does not conclusively prove that these actions were part of a broader premeditated strategy,” adding that “there is still no definitive evidence regarding the full extent of responsibility for the majority of civilian deaths that occurred on Oct. 7.”

Although it does not categorically deny that any sexual violence occurred, it treats the more sweeping “mass rape campaign” framing as part of a contested or propagandistic narrative rather than established fact. Dismissing independent investigations such as UN Special Representative Pramila Patten’s 2024 findings of “reasonable grounds” for sexual violence including gang rape in multiple locations, Consortium News has consistently ignored evidence of sexual violence as a feature of the attacks.

This fits the site’s wider pattern on October 7 coverage: skepticism toward official Israeli and Western accounts of the day’s events (including civilian-to-combatant ratios and specific atrocity stories), while “contextualizing” the Hamas-led attack as justifiable “resistance” and amplifying Palestinian narratives.

New Evidence

Even when new evidence has emerged, CN has generally declined to revisit this story or modify its earlier dismissals. In May 2026, for example, when the Civil Commission released its long-awaited report on the atrocities of October 7, which “identified thirteen recurring patterns of sexual and gender-based violence committed across multiple locations,” the findings were studiously ignored by CN.

The Civil Commission, an independent non-governmental organization and research body in Israel — formally named the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women, Children and Families — noted that “the repetition of these patterns demonstrates that the crimes were not isolated acts of brutality but formed part of a broader operational method used during the attack and its aftermath.”

Based on more than 10,000 photographs and video segments reviewed, nearly 1,800 hours of visual material analyzed and more than 430 testimonies and interviews with survivors, eyewitnesses, released hostages, experts, and family members, the report — entitled Silenced No More — documents the psychological terrorization of families, in which perpetrators committed acts of sexual violence in front of family members to intentionally induce immediate psychological trauma.

The perpetrators weaponized visibility and digital dissemination as part of the violence itself, including sexual content. Armed groups recorded acts of abuse, humiliation, and killing, and circulated the footage through social media platforms and victims’ own digital accounts.

Some of the most heinous acts included instances where family members — including children and parents — were physically coerced and forced by armed perpetrators to perform sexual acts on one another. Following these coerced acts of sexual abuse, perpetrators routinely forced parents to watch the torture and subsequent execution of their children, or vice versa, ensuring the family unit was psychologically shattered before physical annihilation.

“Some victims were subjected to targeted burning and injuries to the genital area or face, and others were burned alive at very high temperatures, often using accelerants,” the report states. “Testimony from first responders further documents the recovery of female victims whose bodies bore signs of sexual torture. Female bodies were found naked or partially unclothed, with objects, including improvised sharp items, nails and household tools, in their genitalia and other parts of their bodies.”

Despite these shocking and well-documented revelations, Consortium News declined to recant its earlier reporting that trivialized the scale and systematic nature of the violence committed on October 7 and failed to reevaluate its skepticism of the claims’ evidentiary basis.

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Amplifying Palestinian Allegations

While demands for high evidentiary standards could be seen as an important journalistic safeguard against the undue influence of “Zionist propaganda,” there is seemingly a far lower standard for documenting alleged crimes committed by Israel, including claims of sexual violence against Palestinians.

On May 19, 2026, just one week after the publication of Silenced No More, Lauria republished an article from Declassified UK in which writer Anne-Marie Simpson took a far less skeptical approach to evidence.

It presented a West Bank Protection Consortium report — entitled Sexual Violence and Forcible Transfer in the West Bank: How the Exploitation of Gender Dynamics Drives Displacement — documenting “gendered and sexualised violence” at face value, repeating Palestinian claims of forced nudity, invasive body searches, indecent exposure, and threats of rape as established fact. This sexual abuse, Simpson claims, is an “integral feature of Israel’s system of oppression, occupation and genocide.”

Of course, if true, the findings of the report are a cause for concern. Focusing on Area C of the West Bank, the report asserts that gendered and sexualized violence by Israeli settlers forms part of a coercive environment contributing to forcible transfer, which could be considered a war crime under international law.

But of course, there is ample reason to doubt whether the sensational claims are true at all. While on its face, the report’s sourcing appears impressive — based on 83 in-depth interviews conducted in 10 Palestinian communities — it has been credibly challenged for bias and weak evidentiary standards.

As pointed out by the pro-Israel website HonestReporting, the report rests almost entirely on the West Bank Protection Consortium, led by the Norwegian Refugee Council which has past affiliations involving some members of Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. There are also evidentiary gaps in the report, relying on anonymous testimonies and lacking specific dates and locations, and no indication that formal complaints were filed with authorities, nor any forensic evidence presented.

When contrasted with the extensive evidence for sexual violence committed on October 7 as documented in Silenced No More — crimes, it should be noted, that are far more severe than those being alleged against Israelis — it is curious that Consortium News would devote so much space to one report but not the other.

While the October 7 claims are subjected to demands for higher proof and placed in a “fog of war” frame that questions Israeli sources, the allegations against Israeli settlers are accepted as flat fact on the basis of poorly sourced NGO reports — a discrepancy that can’t be explained by a general commitment to healthy skepticism or unbiased editorial judgments of “newsworthiness.” After all, by any standards, the alleged crimes of October 7 were both more grievous and better documented than those claimed against Israel.

So why would so little attention be shown toward the report criticizing Hamas and so much attention to the report criticizing Israel? The inevitable conclusion is that Lauria’s editorial judgment is clouded by a far-left and anti-Israel bias.

Questioning Immigration Enforcement and Legitimizing Militant Resistance

This bias, of course, can also be seen in other controversial topics, including the enforcement of federal immigration law and the sometimes violent protests against it.

During the Biden administration, CN refrained from characterizing the record-high southern border encounters as a “border crisis” or faulting policy failure driven by lax enforcement. Little attention was given to the significant human costs of President Biden’s policies, with CN failing to cover the sharp rise in migrant deaths at the border, cities such as New York, Chicago, and Denver being inundated with large inflows, and unaccompanied children encounters exceeding 500,000 — and of course the related trafficking and exploitation risks to those children.

Instead, CN focused on what it called the border-industrial complex, lamenting that the system of agents, barriers, surveillance, and private contracts — built up over decades under both parties — continues largely unchanged regardless of who is in the White House. CN also criticized “closed border” policies as they relate to Afghan refugees and celebrated the contributions of Central American migrants to the U.S. labor movement.

In keeping with this leftist analytical framework, CN’s coverage since Trump returned to the White House primarily has focused on the immigration enforcement within larger critiques of authoritarianism and the supposed targeting of immigrant communities. It has referred to the lawful detainment of illegal aliens as “kidnappings,” and drawn historical analogies with Nazi concentration camps.

After largely ignoring the substantial costs of earlier open-border policies, CN has treated the government’s efforts to secure the border, enforce the law and remove illegal aliens as utterly illegitimate while openly celebrating militant resistance to law enforcement as necessary and heroic.

Following the tragic deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year — with Good shot while driving her vehicle into an armed federal agent and Pretti killed while carrying a concealed weapon and refusing to obey police orders — ICE agents were denounced at Consortium News as “gestapo” and “thugs,” while the protesters’ unhinged and erratic actions were portrayed as perfectly reasonable. Lauria downplayed Pretti’s poor judgment, pointing out that he simply “brought a legally obtained handgun to the protest against ICE agents,” while denouncing the “White House militia” that “murdered” him “execution style.”

Lauria provocatively asked how long Americans should tolerate “federal authority waging war on the population,” likening federal immigration enforcement to Israel’s alleged “genocide,” and asserted that the only answer is to defund ICE and increase public pressure “to get Trump to back down.” No suggestion is offered as to who should enforce immigration law once ICE is defunded — indicating, perhaps, that nobody should enforce the law, or that the law is illegitimate to begin with.

This of course would be in keeping with sentiments expressed on the far left end of the political spectrum, with activists routinely asserting, for example, that “no one is illegal on stolen land.”

Advocating Anarchism and Communism

While it does not appear that CN has specifically advanced that ahistorical mantra of the far left, it does seem that the website is increasingly veering into extreme left-wing territory, with some articles even advocating anarchism and communism as the best hope for humanity in these troubled times.

Themes in pieces by contributors such as Chris Hedges and others include radical critiques of capitalism, calls for revolution or systemic alternatives amid inequality and authoritarianism, and the platforming of communist, socialist and anarchist-leaning views.

In June, Lauria published an article — based on a talk he gave last year — that celebrated the political philosophy of Russian anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin. A deep dive into Kropotkin’s argument that human individuals and societies have innate cooperative tendencies that contradict the “survival of the fittest” ethos of social Darwinism, the lengthy piece explores the question of what the best way forward is to ensure the survival of the species.

Kropotkin, Lauria notes, ultimately concluded that although humans have a natural propensity to practice mutual aid, decentralized communities are better equipped to do so than state institutions. Lauria lamented that this reality is reflected in the largely failed efforts since the Second World War to build international institutions based on cooperation and multilateralism.

While Lauria’s piece may have offered some interesting food for thought and judging by the comment section seemed to be well received by CN’s readership, ultimately, by sympathizing with Kropotkin’s worldview, it also appeared to lend support to the theory of anarcho-communism, including the violence that this entails.

No pacifist, Kropotkin advocated expropriation and insurrection to achieve social revolution, which he saw as necessary to abolish the state and private property. He advocated a stateless, classless society of voluntary, self-governing communes and worker-run enterprises, based on free agreement and common ownership of the means of production, with goods distributed according to need.

Obviously, this is a radical ideology by any standard and indicative of a revolutionary political agenda being openly embraced at Consortium News. It should be noted, also, that Lauria’s Kropotkin piece was far from a one-off event, with CN regularly featuring writers espousing communist, Marxist, or socialist perspectives.

A recent article by Vijay Prashad, for example, discusses the need for a “genuine left” to counter the “declining imperialist system” through “traditions of political education, democratic mass organisation, collective discipline and internationalism.” Prashad unabashedly advances a revolutionary communist ideology in this piece, declaring in true Marxist-Leninist fashion: “When we fight, we win.”

“We stand on the shoulders of more than a century of organised working-class, peasant and national liberation struggles,” Prashad writes. “These struggles found expression in the Paris Commune (1871), the October Revolution (1917), the Vietnamese Revolution (1945), the Chinese Revolution (1949), the Cuban Revolution (1959), and a range of anti-colonial victories, including the remarkable and little understood events under way in the Sahel.”

While romanticizing these communist insurrections, Consortium News takes a far less enamored perspective on the American Revolution. In this semiquincentennial year of the Declaration of Independence, CN has invoked 1776 not as a moment of national pride but as the launching point for 250 years of war, expansion, empire, and unfulfilled ideals. With articles like “Yankee Doodle Dandy Is Done,” “Requiem for America on the 4th of July,” and “Two and a Half Centuries of War – A Timeline,” it uses the anniversary as an occasion for reflection on militarism and institutional decline rather than national celebration.

In other words, citizens of the United States and other Western countries should look not to their own past for inspiration but to the history of third-world communist revolutions as a blueprint for political action.

Clear Left-Wing Bias

With all this in mind, it is no wonder that external media-bias raters have increasingly come to recognize a clear left-wing bias at Consortium News and give it relatively low marks for reliability.

The outlet Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) rates it as left-biased due to story selection and advocacy that strongly favors leftist perspectives, noting in particular its one-sided opinion-based reporting. While offering CN credit for properly sourcing its information, MFBC observes that it regularly uses “wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes, publish[es] misleading reports, and omit[s] information reporting that may damage liberal/progressive causes.”

Ad Fontes Media, which maintains the Media Bias Chart, gives CN an overall score of −16.38 on a left to right scale of −42 to +42, indicating a “strong left” bias. Ad Fontes generally considers it untrustworthy, noting that some articles score in the low teens for reliability, which is considered “problematic.”

NewsGuard calls it “left-wing” and gives it a reliability score of 47.5/100, asserting that the site “generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability.” Incidentally, Consortium News pushed back strongly on this assessment and sued NewsGuard for defamation, a lawsuit that was summarily dismissed by a federal judge last year.

Without lending more credibility to these media monitoring organizations than they deserve — recognizing that they may suffer from their own internal biases — it does seem that such a clear consensus among so many fact checkers is a cause for concern. The undeniable reality is that CN’s far-left bias has become all too obvious and has diminished its reliability as a source of news and analysis.

In short, Consortium News has become a haven for the far left rather than a trusted source of investigative journalism and therefore, in some ways, it could be contributing to the very problems of media-led disinformation that so troubled my father three decades ago.

My Resignation

Recognizing this growing extreme left-wing bias and wishing to distance myself from content that I consider abhorrent, I made the difficult decision earlier this summer to resign from Consortium News’s Board of Directors. In my resignation letter, I noted “a clear ideological agenda being promoted which I don’t support and no longer want any association with.”

Despite being involved with the website since 1996, I had come to see “the somewhat rigid orthodoxy that is enforced at Consortium News as detrimental to the national discourse,” noting that the ultra-leftist approach at CN was not particularly helpful in promoting understanding during this era of “fake news” and hyper-polarization. In my view, what is needed today is a greater commitment to fact-based reporting free of political agendas, as well as a deeper appreciation for nuance and mutual understanding, a recognition that both “sides” of the political debate have legitimate viewpoints.

While I certainly recognize that there is room for improvement in the government’s response to illegal immigration and that there are legitimate critiques to be made of its Middle East policy, as I see it, CN’s hyperbole and radicalism are more often than not counterproductive and off-putting, and not especially useful in helping to make sense of the world. “The truth is that there is far more complexity in all of these issues than is portrayed at the website,” as I wrote to the Board.

Making clear that I don’t presume to know what my dad would think about each and every issue that has come to the forefront of debate in recent years (understanding that people’s views evolve and even if he had a previous opinion about Israel or illegal immigration there’s no guarantee that he would still feel the same way today), I nevertheless emphasized that he always made a good-faith effort to try to see things from different perspectives.

My dad’s old-fashioned belief that there are always (at least) two sides to a story seems to have fallen by the wayside at Consortium News, I regretted.

While I don’t claim to have intimate knowledge of my dad’s views more than eight years after his death — particularly on issues that he never expressed strong opinions on during his life — I do have some confidence that he would take issue with some of the far-left ideology that is increasingly prominent at the website. At the end of the day, he was a patriot who loved America and believed in its institutions, despite whatever flaws the country might have, and proudly celebrated its founding ideals.

In launching Consortium News, his motivation was not to enforce a left-wing orthodoxy, but to provide factual, evidence-based investigative journalism on under-reported issues in the hopes of empowering people with the knowledge they need to make wise and informed decisions at the ballot box. He certainly wasn’t an anarcho-communist who wanted to burn it all down or a terrorist sympathizer who justified violence against civilians in the name of anti-Zionism.

His journalism, of course, was not beyond reproach and he may have made mistakes here and there, but it was always based on a love of country and a steadfast commitment to the facts. As he was fond of saying, “I don’t care what the truth is. I just care what the truth is.”

This mantra reflected his commitment to following the facts where they lead, rather than manipulating the facts to follow an ideology, and should remain the guiding principle of truly independent journalism today.

Nat Parry has been a contributor to Consortium News since 1996. He has served as associate editor and editor of the website, and from 2018 to 2026 was on the Board of Directors. He is the co-author — along with Robert and Sam Parry — of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush and editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. His other books include Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era and How Christmas Became Christmas. Follow him on Substack and X.

Among the many “injuries and usurpations” King George III committed against the colonists as described in the Declaration of Independence, one line in particular continues to raise eyebrows today for its supposed insensitivity and racial bias.

In the final complaint in a list of 27 grievances over British tyranny, Thomas Jefferson included the following charge against the king: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” The three words “merciless Indian Savages” have not aged well, to say the least, and in modern times are commonly cited as proof of the Founding Fathers’ inherent racism and possibly their genocidal intent.

As the nation’s 250th birthday draws ever closer, a flurry of commentary has highlighted these incongruities, with the line emerging as a flashpoint for critics who see it as embedding racist, dehumanizing language in a foundational American document that otherwise proclaims liberty and equality.

A recent article at the Arizona Republic, for example, argues that the Declaration of Independence’s language “devastated” Native people by justifying policies of removal and erasure, and therefore America must mend the relationship by honestly acknowledging the history of seizing indigenous land. According to this piece, the phrase not only “bedeviled our country” but also “disenfranchised Native peoples.”[1]

While gaining some notoreity in recent weeks in the context of America’s Semiquincentennial, the controversy, however, is not new — and in the past has even garnered some international attention. U.S. adversaries have cited the Declaration’s language to deflect criticism of their human rights records, with the Chinese government in 2022 joining in the denunciation of the founders’ racism, pointing out that the Declaration of Independence’s language set the groundwork for a genocide that would eventually nearly wipe out America’s native inhabitants.

“On July 4, 1776, the United States of America was founded with the Declaration of Independence, which … slandered Native Americans as ‘the merciless Indian Savages,’” the Chinese foreign ministry stated in a communique. Based on this openly stated belief “in white superiority and supremacy,” the U.S. government then “set out to annihilate the Indians and attempted to eradicate the race.” According to China, U.S. leaders “coveted the vast Indian lands and launched thousands of attacks on Indian tribes, slaughtering Indian chiefs, soldiers and even civilians, and taking Indian lands for themselves.”[2]

Few people today would dispute that these words were ill-chosen, but are these criticisms of the founders’ motives actually fair? What would those who lived through the era have thought about Jefferson’s choice of words?

While clearly insensitive to modern sensibilities, a closer look reveals that the words “merciless Indian savages” were not employed lightly, nor were they chosen from a place of ignorance. While the Declaration of Independence was certainly motivated to rally the people to the revolutionary cause and may have employed incendiary methods to do so, the language employed about Native Americans was less based on propaganda than it was by the lived historical experience of the colonists.

Indeed, the fact that they are seen as “problematic” today probably says more about modern-day biases than it does about the founders’ supposedly genocidal views.

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‘Not Destitute of Merit’

In fairness to the founders, the issue was not as cut and dry as the Chinese government or historical revisionists might imply.

First of all, it should be appreciated that the founders’ general views of Native Americans were not necessarily bigoted or prejudiced, with a certain amount of respect shown towards their Indian counterparts, and efforts were made to establish a peaceful and mutually beneficial co-existence. The relationship between whites and Indians was not a simple one, of course, and was just as often a marriage of convenience — or even one of mutual admiration — as it was a rivalry.

It should be appreciated that Jefferson, despite disparaging them in the Declaration of Independence, was quite familiar with some tribes and would at times have some positive words to say about them — conceding, for example, that the Indian “in body and mind [is] equal to the white man.”[3]

Jefferson even appeared at times to be somewhat enamored by Indian culture, observing in Notes on the State of Virginia that the designs that they carved on their pipes were “not destitute of design and merit.” Jefferson further observes that Indians will “astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory,” which “prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated.”[4]

In a letter to John Adams in 1812, Jefferson explains that his intimate knowledge of certain Indian tribes arises from the fact that in the “early part of my life, I was very familiar, and acquired impressions of attachment & commiseration for them which have never been obliterated,” pointing out that “before the revolution they were in the habit of coming often, & in great numbers to the seat of our government, where I was very much with them.”[5]

Jefferson even recommends several writers who had studied Native American traditions, pointing out that the fullest accounts “of their customs & characters are given us by most of the early travelers among them,” in particular Joseph-François Lafitau, who published Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times in 1724.[6]

Jefferson knew, however, that attempts at white-Indian co-existence were often fraught and undermined by mutual suspicion and animosity.

New Technologies

Despite being widely castigated today as genocidal colonizers, English settlers who attempted to build a life in the New World were more than willing to develop good relations with their indigenous neighbors, often, of course, out of necessity.

Indians, for their part, while suspicious of those seen as encroaching on their hunting grounds and fertile land, generally saw the value of trade, which enabled some Native American tribes to enjoy a new degree of economic prosperity. Even the most distrustful of the Indian tribes could see the benefits of trading with whites,[7] and novel technologies and conveniences such as firearms and European clothing led to new lifestyles being adopted in indigenous communities that were considerably more comfortable than those they had previously been accustomed to. The whites, for their part, desired to obtain essentials offered by the natives, especially food, furs, and medicines.

Although considered by white settlers necessary and prudent, establishing trading relationships with Indians could be dangerous business. While both sides may have seen some benefit in trade, these were two radically different cultures, and while whites sometimes established alliances with Native Americans, just as often they would be victims of their raids. Indians, who held the warrior ethos in high esteem and greatly valued virtues such as courage in battle and manliness displayed by stoic endurance under horrific torture, were known to be brutal in their methods of warfare and cruel captors to anyone unfortunate enough to be taken captive. They quickly earned a reputation for indiscriminate violence against people of all ages and sexes.

Practices of torture were common among the Indians, a history of brutality that originates long before Europeans arrived on the continent.[8] Constantly at war with each other, Indians routinely abducted their enemies and put them to death through slow acts of torment that could take several days.

Burning the captives was common, and women and children sometimes participated in the torture, especially the wives and mothers of those who had been killed in battle. Sometimes, the captive was placed in the center of a circle of dancers and compelled to sing and dance, and often made to run a gauntlet of two lines of warriors armed with clubs, tomahawks, and other weapons.[9]

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Settlers and Missionaries

Whites’ first-hand experiences with both cruelties and kindnesses date all the way back to the first English settlement in the Americas, when the newly established Jamestown colony was promptly met with hostility and violence.

On May 26, 1607, just a month after Jamestown settlers had arrived in Virginia, they were attacked by 200 Powhatan Indians, who continued to launch sporadic raids on the colony in subsequent years.[10] The Powhatans, however, also coveted the new technologies brought by the English and frequently provided the settlers with desperately needed food, at times offering a lifeline for the struggling colony.

On March 2, 1622, a group of Powhatans came to the Virginia colony “with deer, turkeys, fish, fruits, and other provisions to sell us,” English explorer John Smith wrote in his History of Virginia.[11] The Indians were unarmed, signaling their friendly intent, but this was a ruse. As soon as they entered the settlement, they grabbed any tools or weapons available and killed all the settlers they could — men, women, and children.

“In this attack 347 of the English of both sexes and all ages were killed,” explained Captain Anthony Chester, who was in Virginia at the time of the attack. “Simply killing our people did not satisfy their inhuman nature, they dragged the dead bodies all over the country, tearing them limb from limb, and carrying the pieces in triumph around.”[12]

Early missionaries, too, would feel the wrath of inimical Indians. In 1636, a French Jesuit priest named Isaac Jogues traveled to the New World to bring Christianity to the indigenous peoples, committing himself to the “conversion and welfare of the natives.” It wouldn’t quite work out that way, however, mainly because the missionaries brought not only the Bible but also diseases such as smallpox.[13]

Unequipped with natural immunity for these diseases, tribes such as the Huron, Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca were hit hard with sickness and crop failures, and came to believe the missionaries, known as “Black Coats” because of their robes, were using magic to kill them. The suspicions were exacerbated by rumors spread by Dutch and English settlers that the French Black Coats were planning to kidnap women and children and sell the men into slavery. The Mohawks decided to eliminate the threat, and went into Huron territory to take the Christians captive.

The captives were tortured, with Father Jogues experiencing some of the worst abuse. The Mohawks ripped out his fingernails, gnawed his fingers until the bones were visible, and a woman cut off his thumb. He and his fellow Christians were placed on a platform where Indians pelted them with objects, including hot coals thrown by children.

Over several days, they were marched from village to village, where they were flogged and beaten by sticks and rods. Jogues was hung from a wooden plank and left to die but an observer took pity on him and cut him down. He was then banished, spending the next few years wandering alone in the woods, starving and cold, until finally managing to escape back to France in autumn of 1643.[14]

Wars of Aggression, or Resistance?

A few decades later, in 1675, King Philip’s War would break out, leading to unprecedented violence in the colonies and souring white-Indian relations for generations.

What initiated the conflict was a Christian Indian named John Sassamon warning the Plymouth Colony that Wampanoag enemies led by Chief Metacom — also known as King Philip — were planning to attack English settlements, an act of betrayal that led to the murder of Sassamon. After his body was found in an icy pond, a jury composed of both white colonists and Indians found three Wampanoag men guilty for the murder and hanged them on June 8, 1675.

This incensed King Philip and ignited tensions between the Wampanoag and the colonists, sparking the First Indian War, a conflict in which English colonists suffered unspeakable atrocities at the hands of their indigenous neighbors. The way that the Indians retaliated against the executions of the three Wampanoags, with vicious raids on homesteads and villages throughout New England, helped cement their reputation as “merciless savages,” as Jefferson would write a century later.

As described by Thomas Church in 1829, “The war of 1675, was the most important Indian war that New England ever saw. Philip or Metacom … had wrought up the Indians of all the tribes through New England, into a dangerous combination on to extirpate the English.”[15] Church’s account of the opening attack starts with the slaughter of cattle and burning of homes, but the Indians, he writes, “thirsted for English blood” and “did not long content themselves with that game.”

They proceeded to kill ten colonists at Matapoiset, “[u]pon whose bodies they exercised more than brutish barbarities; beheading, dismembering and mangling them, and exposing them in the most inhuman manner, which gashed and ghostly objects struck a damp on all beholders.” Church recalled that “[o]ne town after another felt the fury of the savage foe,” and noted that “[a]ccounts of the slaughter of helpless women and children, and the torch which turned happy homes to ashes, follow one another in dreary similarity.”[16]

King Philip’s warriors systematically assaulted English colonies throughout New England, attacking Plymouth Plantation and decimating Providence, Rhode Island. In early 1676, while pursuing Narragansetts who had burned down several Rhode Island settlements, Captain Michael Pierce’s force of about 60 Plymouth Colony militia and 20 Wampanoag warriors were ambushed in what is now Central Falls, Rhode Island. Pierce’s forces were overcome by their attackers, who killed nearly all of the colonial militia. Ten of the colonists were taken prisoner, with nine being gruesomely tortured to death at a site in modern-day Cumberland, Rhode Island, which has come to be known as “Nine Men’s Misery.”[17]

The war continued along these lines for years in New England. As colonist Nathaniel Salstonstall described the aftermath of a spate of Indian raids in 1676 across several towns, not only were all the buildings and animals wantonly destroyed, but the natives raped, tortured, killed and mutilated hundreds of innocent people. More than 800 men, women and children were reportedly slaughtered in the raids, with many having been killed with “exquisite Torments,” according to Salstonstall.

The Indians, he wrote, “rarely [gave] Quarter to those that they [took], but if they [were] women, they first forced them to satisfie their filthy Lusts.” After raping the women, the Indians would kill them by “either cutting off the Head, ripping open the Belly, or skulping the Head or Hair.” The Indians also allegedly used body parts as trophies, “wearing Men’s Fingers as Bracelets about their Necks, and Stripes of their Skins which they dress[ed] for Belts.”

Another colonist wrote that “our miserable inhabitants lye naked, wallowing in their blood, and crying, and whilst the Barbarous enraged Natives, from one party of the Country, to another are on Fire, flaming forth their fury, Spoiling Cattle and Corn and Burning Houses, and torturing Men, Women, and Children; and burning them alive.”[18]

By the end of this brutal conflict, as Richard Markham explains in A Narrative History of King Philip’s War and the Indian Troubles in New England, “the Indians were held as so many devils inspired by Satan, as so many wild and cruel beasts that should be shot down without mercy.” He added that “[t]his was no honest, manly foe who met them face to face, but a cowardly craven who fired upon them from ambushes, and who treated women and children with as much barbarity as they did the men.”[19]

Although devastating to the white settlers, the war also decimated several Indian nations, which lost between 60 and 80 percent of their population, with many more physically displaced or sold into slavery.[20] Fragments of defeated tribes joined Indian nations allied with the French to resist the continuing expansion of the English, but the Indians’ culture and way of life was further eroded as more whites settled the area.[21]

Some tribes continued to resist, leading to King William’s War in the 1690s and one of the most notorious incidents in colonial New England history, in which a group attacked the town of Haverhill on March 15, 1697, and captured 40-year-old Hannah Duston, her newborn baby and some of their neighbors.

According to the account Duston later gave to Cotton Mather, the Indians took the women captive and killed the baby. “They dash’d out the brains of the infant against a tree,” Mather wrote, “and several of the other captives, as they began to tire in the sad journey, were soon sent unto their long home.”[22]

The women were told that they would be stripped and forced to run the gauntlet, but Duston managed to arouse the other captives in the middle of the night and slayed their captors, tomahawking and scalping them while they slept. Only one squaw and one boy escaped, with Duston and the other escaped captives making their way down the Merrimac River to an outlying settlement, where they were welcomed as heroes.[23]

As Hannah Duston’s story recalls, white-Indian relations were often characterized by bloodshed, but at times, they were based on cooperation and mutual interests. The allegiances of the Indians were constantly shifting and were often motivated as much by intra-Indian conflicts as they were by resistance to white encroachment on their lands, and sometimes Indians found the whites useful in advancing their own interests against rival tribes.

In the Yamasee War of 1715–1717, for instance, which was launched by the Yamasee along with the Creek, Muscogee, Catawba, and Apalachee, the whites were allied with the Cherokee, who were motived by their traditional hatred of the Creek. The conflict ended in a colonial victory, with the power of the Yamasee broken and colonists establishing uncontested control of the Carolina coast, but also resulted in the deaths of hundreds of colonists, many of whom were killed through ritualistic torture.[24]

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Cultural Differences

While graphic descriptions of Indian “savagery” over the years provide some context to the seemingly racist choice of words in the Declaration of Independence’s 27th grievance, in their harsh assessments of Native Americans’ “savage” customs, what the whites may not have understood was that the Indians’ techniques reflected spiritual and symbolic belief systems.

Targeting children and women, or ripping fetuses from their wombs, for instance, was considered justified because it symbolized the destruction of a people that posed a threat to their way of life. The practice of scalping, moreover, held an important cultural significance to Indian warriors, who considered collecting as many enemy scalps as possible a status symbol and proof of their bravery.

Besides being a demonstration of a warrior’s prowess in battle, scalping was also an important tribal bonding custom, used to comfort those who were mourning the loss of a loved one. In a narrative published by an Irish immigrant named Mary Jemison, who was abducted and sold to the Seneca tribe after her family was murdered in a Shawnee raid in 1755, the function of scalping in easing the pain of the bereaved is described in detail:

It is a custom of the Indians, when one of their number is slain or taken prisoner in battle, to give to the nearest relative to the dead or absent, a prisoner, if they have chanced to take one, and if not, to give him the scalp of an enemy. On the return of the Indians from conquest, which is always announced by peculiar shouting, demonstrations of joy, and the exhibition of some trophy of victory, the mourners come forward and make their claims.[25]

Torture, likewise, was considered an important component of tribal life. Jemison explains that in her time living with the Seneca, she witnessed many cruel acts performed on captives, often justified as a method to comfort the bereaved:

All the prisoners that are taken in battle and carried to the encampment or town by the Indians, are given to the bereaved families, till their number is made good. And unless the mourners have but just received the news of their bereavement, and are under the operation of a paroxysm of grief, anger and revenge; or, unless the prisoner is very old, sickly, or homely, they generally save him, and treat him kindly. But if their mental wound is fresh, their loss so great that they deem it irreparable, or if their prisoner or prisoners do not meet their approbation, no torture, let it be ever so cruel, seems sufficient to make them satisfaction.[26]

Besides its function as a tool in the mourning process, torture also appears to have a religious component. Torture’s conventions were well understood by Indians, who viewed it as central to their spiritual identity and in defining masculinity, with the victim of the torment expected to demonstrate fortitude and bravery while he suffered.

Manly ideals were represented by the ability to stoically endure physical pain, which they believed also brought them closer to supernatural entities like Maushop — a giant who, it was believed, created the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard from sand emptied out of his moccasins.[27] For Indian men, maintaining these spiritual associations was essential to success in life, particularly in masculine endeavors like hunting, warfare, governance, and marriage.[28]

While this may have made sense to the Indians, to the white Christian settlers, naturally, the torture and wanton violence that they used routinely against men, women and children appeared to be nothing more than heinous brutality, adding to the Indians’ reputation as a depraved and cowardly enemy that employed shocking means to terrorize innocent civilians. This reputation would plague the indigenous tribes for the rest of early American history, with raids against settlements and stories of atrocities coloring whites’ views of Indians, who for their part also experienced cruelty at the hands of enraged whites. Often, this cruelty was retribution for an earlier incident, leading to a never-ending tit-for-tat escalation of violence.

This culture of violence and retribution would become further exacerbated by the specific political context of the revolutionary era, offering further insight into the thinking that led to Thomas Jefferson’s seemingly insensitive choice of words in the Declaration’s 27th grievance.

Royal Proclamation

In North Carolina, the Cherokees, who had allied with the colonists against the French, would soon find themselves in a different position a few years later as their one-time allies continued to demand more land. Following the French and Indian War, white settlers began to arrive in Watauga, Nolichucky and Horse Creek in the late 1760s and early 1770s.

Although these settlements were illegal according to the 1763 British Royal Proclamation, in 1772 colonists made agreements with the Cherokee to lease properties, which avoided the more legally problematic option of purchasing lands. Royal authorities, however, soon found out about settlements beyond the Proclamation Line, and white settlers were told to return to North Carolina and Virginia, which some did. By this point, however, the colonies were in a state of rebellion against the Crown and the British were unable to control their people through the law. Many colonists simply ignored the British demands,[29] and royal agents responded by telling the Cherokees that they were justified to drive the illegal settlers off the land and to seize their livestock.[30]

Emboldened by British agents who had assured the Cherokees that they were within their rights to enforce the Royal Proclamation of 1763 (as well as take their horses and cattle as a penalty for breaking English law),[31] the Cherokee forged an alliance with Mohawk, Delaware and Shawnee Indians, and resolved to go to battle against the whites. War was declared on the Watauga and Nolichucky settlements, and rather than pack up and retreat, settlers decided to defend their claims, leading to skirmishes in which numerous atrocities were committed.[32]

Similar difficulties played out in autumn 1773, when a hunter named Daniel Boone led a group of about 50 settlers to establish a colony in Kentucky County, Virginia. The whites believed that their expedition was sanctioned by the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, in which the British had acquired the land south of the Ohio River from the Iroquois, but was rejected by other Indian tribes who hunted in these lands.

The Shawnee, in particular, felt the treaty was illegitimate and organized an alliance known as the Shawnee-Ohio Confederated Indians to defend what they saw as their hunting rights. Soon after the arrival of the whites, a group of men and boys including Boone’s 16-year-old son James and Captain William Russell’s son Henry, were attacked and tortured to death by a band of Delawares, Shawnees, and Cherokees.[33] The viciousness of the killings shocked even the hardened frontier settlers, and Boone’s party abandoned their settlement.

The whites struck back, however, by wiping out of the entire family of the prominent John Logan, chief of the Mingos, a multi-tribal confederation allied with the Six Nations. Chief Logan was the son of a French father (who was adopted into the Oneida tribe as a child) and a Cayuga mother, and had maintained friendly relations with the whites, pointedly staying neutral during the French and Indian War. Despite these years of friendly interactions, on April 30, 1774, his brother and sister would be killed in the Yellow Creek Massacre — led by a notorious Indian hunter named Daniel Greathouse. The massacre is described in A Man of Distinction Among Them by Larry L. Nelson:

The attack was swift and brutal. John Sappington, one of the Virginians, shot and killed Logan’s brother and then scalped him. … Logan’s sister was panic stricken; she ran across the courtyard in front of the trading post and stopped six feet in front of one of Greathouse’s men. In the split second that their eyes met, he put a bullet into her forehead. Grabbing the infant from her cradleboard, he took hold of its ankles and was about to dash its brains out when one of his companions intervened to save the child’s life.[25]

The remaining Indians also were shot or tomahawked. Within seconds, all the Mingos were dead. The savagery of the attack was astounding, and even James Chambers, a neighbor of Baker’s who was not present, declared that the murderers “appeared to have lost, in a great degree, all sentiments of humanity as well as the effects of civilization.”[34]

Chief Logan felt betrayed and was infuriated by the loss of his family members, writing in a letter that “white People killed my kin at Coneestoga a great while ago, & I though[t nothing of that.] But you killed my kin again on Yellow Creek, and took m[y cousin prisoner] then I thought I must kill too; and I have been three time[s to war since but] the Indians is not Angry only myself.”[35]

He then led a campaign of reprisal against the white settlers, leading to what became known as Lord Dunmore’s War, named after the royal governor of Virginia who was seen as provoking the conflict. For the next several years, Indian nations opposed to the Treaty of Fort Stanwix attacked settlers, ritually mutilated and tortured to death the surviving men, and took the women and children into slavery.[36] The Ohio River became a bloody border, with raids and counterraids conducted with painful regularity and hardening the distinctions between the whites who wanted to settle the area and the Indians who wanted to keep them out.[37]

In March 1775, just weeks before the Shot Heard Round the World would be fired at Lexington, North Carolina land speculators were hammering out a sweetheart deal for valuable Cherokee hunting grounds — trading blankets, knives and gunpowder for 27,000 square miles of Cherokee land. Settlers were hoping to have their illegal land grab legitimized, but a resistance movement began to rally behind a Cherokee leader named Dragging Canoe, who warned of the folly of making such land deals with the colonists, astutely observing that the whites were attempting to have their illegal appropriations sanctioned by treaty.

“We never thought the white man would come across the mountains, but he has, and has settled on Cherokee land,” Dragging Canoe warned. “He will not leave us but a small spot to stand on.”[38] If warriors did not drive off the settlers, Dragging Canoe argued, the Cherokee people would be destroyed. Force, as Dragging Canoe saw it, was the only means for the Cherokee to retain their sovereignty.[39]

Lands and Liberties

Even as war brewed with the Cherokee in the southern colonies, up north, Samuel Adams was reaching out directly to the Mohawk Indians, appealing to religious sensibilities in seeking an alliance with the tribe.

“They have made a law to establish the religion of the Pope in Canada,” Adams warned in 1775. “We much fear some of your children may be induced, instead of worshipping the only true God, to pay his dues to images made with their own hands.”

He urged the Indians “to whet your hatchet and be prepared with us to defend our liberties and lives.” Although the Mohawks didn’t come through, Adams’s appeal may have won over two heads of the St. John’s tribe, who said they were joining the Penobscot Indians “to stand together, and oppose the People of Old-England, that are endeavoring to take your, and our Lands and Liberties from us.”[40]

Later that year, the Second Continental Congress established Indian commissioners that would answer directly to the Congress rather than each individual colony. Three departments of Indian affairs were established based on the geographical regions of the colonies, with Congress assuming centralized control.

Benjamin Franklin was placed in charge of diplomacy with the northern tribes, Patrick Henry with the mid-Atlantic tribes, and James Wilson with the southern tribes. Franklin was particularly concerned with neutralizing the threat of the Six Nations of the Iroquois and began negotiations in 1775, offering trade goods and blacksmith services in exchange for their support or at least neutrality.[41]

The sachems of the Six Nations met in German Flats, New York, to negotiate a treaty in case of war. An adopted Delaware named Charles Thompson took notes on the meeting, which revealed an intimate understanding of the ways of the Iroquois League.

Using metaphors and terms that would be relatable to the Indians, the commissioners responded to skepticism the Indians expressed about the lack of unity among the colonies. “[We] have lighted a great Council Fire in Philadelphia and have sent Sixty-five Counsellors to speak and act in the name of the whole,” the commissioners explained. Emphasizing the righteousness of the American cause, they told the Indians that “[w]e do not take up the hatchet … for Honor and Conquest, but to maintain our Civil constitution and religious privileges.” As a sign of his admiration, Franklin proposed the Pine Tree Flag as the first flag of the United States, a nod to the symbol of the Iroquois confederacy.[42]

The following year, when the Congress was considering the Articles of Confederation to govern the newly declared United States of America, some of the founders looked to the Indian confederations to learn how they had achieved unity. Franklin’s intimate knowledge of the Iroquois confederacy proved useful in building the foundations of government.

He and other founders drew on the 1754 Albany Plan of Union for the colonies, which had been discussed with input from Iroquois representatives but ultimately rejected, as Franklin explained, because “it was judg’d to have too much of the Democratic,”[43] for the 1777 Articles of Confederation.

The Iroquois had been providing advice about how to create a government across a great geographic expanse, such as the vast territory of the 13 colonies, and based on his understanding of the functioning of the Iroquois confederacy, Franklin included language in the Articles that borrowed both concepts and language from the Iroquois League. Article II, for instance, stated that the “Colonies Unite themselves so as to never be divided by any act whatsoever, and hereby severally enter into a firm League of friendship with each other.”[44]

Although the Iroquois League served in some ways as inspiration for the founding of the American republic, the confederacy was not a monolith, and just as the colonies in some ways were ripped apart by divided loyalties, so too were the Iroquois Six Nations. During the revolution, two of the nations — the Oneida and the Tuscarora — fought with the rebels, while the other four nations sided with the British. While the redcoats fought the patriots on the eastern seaboard, the Seneca, Cayuga, Mohawk, and many of the Onondaga conducted nonstop raids on western settlements.

Meanwhile, Abenakis from Penobscot and St. Francis guided Benedict Arnold through the New England wilderness and some 40 St. Francis Abenakis joined the patriots in the Quebec campaign. Other Abenakis from St. Francis, however, fought alongside British regulars in defense of Quebec and helped defeat Arnold’s fleet at the Battle of Valcour Island in October 1776.[45] The shifting allegiances of the Abenakis were indicative not only of the challenges facing Native Americans but also the broader problems facing the patriot cause, in particular the challenge of finding reliable allies and fighters.

Ultimately, General George Washington came to believe that Indian allies were too fickle to be trusted.[46] Jefferson, too, had his doubts. While not entirely hostile to Native Americans, he was skeptical about the prospect of assimilating them in America’s democratic experiment.

Although he expressed admiration for some tribes such as the Creeks who were “far advanced in civilisation,” Jefferson also believed that other tribes were “backward” and “English seductions will have no effect” on them. These backward tribes, Jefferson said, “will relapse into barbarism & misery,” and therefore whites “shall be obliged to drive them” into the mountains and ultimately subjugate them.[47]

The conquest of Indian tribes, Jefferson explains, “secures our women & children for ever from the tomahawk & scalping knife.” In this respect, Jefferson based his assessment on first-hand knowledge as well as the long and well-documented history of white-Indian interactions, which provides no shortage of context for his “problematic” choice of words in the Declaration of Independence.

Nathaniel Parry is the author of Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era and How Christmas Became Christmas. He is the co-author of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush and editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. Follow him on Substack and X.

If you enjoyed the above article, please restack it and click the like button. It would also be greatly appreciated if you recommend this newsletter in your Substack recommendations, and, finally, be sure you are subscribed to receive future articles from Essential History.

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[1] Greg Burton. “How the Declaration of Independence ‘devastated’ Native people”. Arizona Republic. https://eu.azcentral.com/story/news/usa250/2026/05/20/usa-250-david-martinez-declaration-of-independence/89986483007/

[2] “The American Genocide of the Indians — Historical Facts and Real Evidence”. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China. https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/2649_665393/202203/t20220302_10647120.html

[3] Thomas Jefferson to Marquis de Chastellux, June 7, 1785. https://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/66

[4] Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 14. 1784. https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch15s28.html

[5] Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, June 11, 1812. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-05-02-0100 Accessed October 22, 2022

[6] Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, June 11, 1812. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-05-02-0100 Accessed October 22, 2022

[7] Hinderaker, Eric. “The Amerindian population in 1763”. A Companion to the American Revolution, edited by Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole. Blackwell (2000), p. 95

[8] Abler, Thomas S. “Scalping, Torture, Cannibalism and Rape: An Ethnohistorical Analysis of Conflicting Cultural Values in War”. Anthropologica Vol. 34, №1 (1992)

[9] Rath, Richard Cullen . How Early America Sounded. Cornell University Press (2005), p. 156

[10] “History of Jamestown”. https://historicjamestowne.org/history/history-of-jamestown/ Accessed October 25, 2022

[11] Four Hundred Years of Virginia, 1584–1984: An Anthology. University Press of America, 1985. p. 17

[12] Voyage of Anthony Chester to Virginia, made in the year 1620. “Two Tragical Events.” William and Mary Quarterly 9, no. 4 (April 1901): 204–214.

[13] Scott, Martin. Isaac Jogues: Missioner and Martyr. P.J. Kenedy & Sons (1927), p. 45.

[14] Ward, Donna Patricia. “Mohawk Indians Kidnapped and Tortured a Jesuit Priest in New France for His Spread of Magic”. October 3, 2018. History Collection https://historycollection.com/mohawk-indians-kidnapped-and-tortured-a-jesuit-priest-in-new-france-for-his-spread-of-magic/

[15] Church, Thomas. The History of Philip’s War: Commonly Called the Great Indian War of 1675 and 1676. J. & B. Williams, Exeter (1829), pp. xxiii-xxiv

[16] Ibid., p. 32

[17] Philbrick, Nathaniel. Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War. Viking Press (2006), p. 299

[18] Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. Vintage (1999). pp. 71–72

[19] Markham, Richard. A Narrative History of King Philip’s War and the Indian Troubles in New England. Dodd, Mead and Company (1883), p. 146

[20] Cutter, Barbara. “The Gruesome Story of Hannah Duston, Whose Slaying of Indians Made Her an American Folk ‘Hero’”. April 9, 2018. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gruesome-story-hannah-duston-american-colonist-whose-slaying-indians-made-her-folk-hero-180968721/ Accessed January 9, 2023

[21] O’Brien, Andy; Chapman, Will. “Radical Mainers: A Brutal Race War Ends in Victory for the Abenaki”. February 11, 2020. Mainer News https://mainernews.com/radical-mainers-6/

[22] Mather, Cotton. “A notable exploit; Dux Fæmina Facti”, Magnalia Christi Americana: Or the Ecclesiastical History of New England from 1620–1698, vol. II, book four. (1702), pp. 550–552.

[23] B. L. Mirick. The History of Haverhill. Massachusetts (Haverhill: A. W. Thayer. 1832), pp. 86–95.

[24] Oatis, Steven J. A Colonial Complex: South Carolina’s Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War. University of Nebraska Press (2004), pp. 126–127

[25] A Narrative of the Life of Mary Jemison (1824), https://open.maricopa.edu/earlyamericanliteratureanthology/chapter/a-narrative-of-the-life-of-mrs-mary-jemison/

[26] Ibid.

[27] Caduto, Michael J. Keepers of Life: Discovering Plants through Native American Stories and Earth. Fulcrum Publishing (1997), p. 57

[28] Romero, R. Todd. “‘Ranging Foresters’ And ‘Women-Like Men’: Physical Accomplishment, Spiritual Power, and Indian Masculinity in Early-Seventeenth-Century New England. Ethnohistory (2006) 53 (2). pp. 281–329.

[29] “Early Tennessee Settlers of the Watauga Settlement of Washington County”. Piedmont Trails. February 14, 2020. https://piedmonttrails.com/2020/02/14/early-tennessee-settlers-of-the-watauga-settlement-of-washington-county/

[30] Marshall, Peter. “The West and the Amerindians, 1756–1776”. A Companion to the American Revolution. (eds. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole). Blackwell (2000), p. 163

[31] Dean, Nadia. “A Demand of Blood: The Cherokee War of 1776”. American Indian Magazine. Winter 2013 / Vol. 14 №4 https://www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/demand-blood-cherokee-war-1776 Accessed December 31, 2022

[32] Marshall, Peter. “The West and the Amerindians, 1756–1776”. A Companion to the American Revolution. (eds. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole). Blackwell (2000), p. 163

[33] Neal O. Hammon, ed., My Father, Daniel Boone: The Draper Interviews with Nathan Boone (University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 39.

[34] Nelson, Larry Lee. A Man of Distinction Among Them: Alexander McKee and the Country Frontier, 1754–1799. Kent State University Press (1999), p. 79

[35] Maj. Arthur Campbell to Col. William Preston, October 12, 1774, in Thwaites and Kellogg, Documentary History, 246–247.

[36] Faragher, John Mack. Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer. Holt Paperbacks (1993), pp. 89–96

[37] Salafia, Matthew. Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage Along the Ohio River. University of Pennsylvania Press (2013), p. 26

[38] Dean, Nadia. “A Demand of Blood: The Cherokee War of 1776”. American Indian Magazine. Winter 2013 / Vol. 14 №4 https://www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/demand-blood-cherokee-war-1776 Accessed December 31, 2022

[39] Baker, Jordan. “The Cherokee-American War from the Cherokee Perspective”. Journal of the American Revolution. July 29, 2021. https://allthingsliberty.com/2021/07/the-cherokee-american-war-from-the-cherokee-perspective/

[40] Stoll, Ira. Samuel Adams: A Life. Free Press (2009), p. 153

[41] Nies, Judith. Native American History: A Chronology of a Culture’s Vast Achievements and Their Links to World Events. Ballantine Books (1996), p. 200

[42] Ibid., p. 201

[43] Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (eds. Leonard W. Labaree, Ralph L. Ketcham, Helen C. Boatfield, and Helene H. Fineman). Yale University Press (1964), p. 210

[44] Nies, Judith. Native American History: A Chronology of a Culture’s Vast Achievements and Their Links to World Events. Ballantine Books (1996), p. 203

[45] Calloway, Colin G. The Western Abenakis of Vermont, 1600–1800: War, Migration, and the Survival of an Indian People. University of Oklahoma Press (1994), p. 208

[46] Calloway, Colin G. The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation. Oxford University Press (2018), p. 133

[47] Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, June 11, 1812. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-05-02-0100

Provided the standard education on the founding of the republic, Americans might be forgiven for believing that the abuses that colonists endured at the hands of the British Crown were the only difficulties that they faced. While most schoolchildren are well-versed on the excessive taxes such as the Stamp Act and the growing tensions that led to the occupation of Boston, for instance, few would be able to discuss social problems that existed in the colonies, or perhaps might believe that moral crimes such as adultery — as depicted in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, required reading for generations of sophomores and juniors in America’s high schools — were the most serious offenses that took place in strait-laced Puritan society. Some might even assume that crime as we think of it today perhaps didn’t exist, or if it did, was exceedingly rare.

But, of course, it would be a mistake to assume that colonial America was free from day-to-day problems such as crime and vice. The historical record makes clear that crimes such as theft, piracy and murder, as well as moral and religious crimes such as sodomy, witchcraft and prostitution, were common even in Puritanical Massachusetts. There was even a lexicon to describe delinquent activity and the various categories of criminals. Vagabonds who stole from the weak and begged from the strong were known as “rufflers,” while “upright men” were vagabonds who were strong enough to serve in legitimate positions such as magistrates. “Wild rogues” were children who were born to outlaw parents, while “priggers of prancers” were horse thieves and “tinkars and pedlars” were conmen who used their trades as a pretense for thieving.[1]

Dating back to the earliest days of colonial settlement in America, authorities had to deal with this sort of anti-social behavior and challenges to the social order. In 1621, John Billington — one of the original Pilgrims who signed the Mayflower Compact — became the first person to commit a crime in America when he refused to obey military orders. Billington quickly earned a reputation as a troublemaker, often involved in disputes and implicated in a number of scandals. Governor William Bradford mentioned Billington’s transgressions in Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation, noting that he and his family “had been often punished for miscarriages before, being one of the profanest families amongst them.” In 1630, Billington would hit the big time, becoming America’s first known murderer when he shot and killed fellow colonist John Newcomen over what Bradford simply referred to as “a former quarrel.” Billington was subsequently convicted of murder and hanged.[2]

Following the Billington case, several other murders and robberies would result in capital punishment throughout the 1630s. In one infamous case, in 1636, a young woman named Mary Sholy hired a guide named William Schooler to help her make the perilous 23-mile journey from Newbury to Pascataquack, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Entrusting Schooler — an English-born vagabond who had fled prosecution in the old country after wounding a man in a duel — turned out to be a grievous mistake.

Sholy never made it to Pascataquack, and several months later, an Agawam Indian walking through the Winnacunnet woods, north of Newbury, found her naked body lying in a thick swamp about three miles north of the Merrimack River, with her clothing in a pile nearby. Following an investigation in which it was discovered that he had blood on his hat and a scratch on his nose the “breadth of a small nail,” Schooler was put on trial and found guilty of murder.[3] Continuing to profess his innocence, he was hanged September 28, 1637, along with John Williams, a thief who apparently murdered a fellow criminal named John Hoddy after a falling out.[4]

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Far from being an isolated incident, the Sholy case was one of many heinous crimes committed in the 17th century. A comprehensive account of legal matters from 1630 to 1692 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony reveals a wide array of anti-social behavior in Puritan Massachusetts, containing a dozen references to murder, ten to rape, and about 85 references to theft.[5] Considering this record of crime, it was clearly an issue that required substantial attention of the Puritans even as they attempted to build their “city upon a hill,” based on what they believed was a holy covenant with God.

For the Puritans, dealing swiftly and harshly with criminal activity was essential. As John Winthrop declared in his 1630 treatise, “A Model of Christian Charity,” quoting Matthew’s Gospel in which Jesus warns that “a city on a hill cannot be hid,” Winthrop said that “the eyes of all people are upon us,” and their sins and mistakes would be seen by all. “So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us,” Winthrop warned, “we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.”[6]

In this spirit, when criminals were apprehended and convicted, they were executed publicly and with much fanfare — often with thousands of curious spectators in attendance. Ministers held sermons prior to the execution, which would then be reprinted and distributed widely. In one such sermon, from 1722, the Reverend Cotton Mather referenced the Valley of Hinnom, which is described in the Old Testament as the site where some of the kings of Judah had sacrificed their children by fire and was subsequently cursed by the prophet Jeremiah. Mather describes “the TERROURS of HELL” and “the TERRIBLE MISERIES of the PUNISHMENTS” that awaited a convicted murderer after his sentence was carried out.

Having been found guilty of bludgeoning his neighbour to death with an axe, Jeremiah Fenwick was described by Mather as a “miserable wretch” who was facing “a Destruction of Soul as well as of Body, in a dreadful HELL, after Death; A Destruction more dreadful than any Death.”[7] Sermons such as these were intended to remind all colonists of the grave fate that awaited sinners and reaffirm the divine purpose of the Puritan community that they were attempting to build in the New World.

But despite the Puritans’ best efforts, crime continued in colonial America and in fact was given a boost by a growing tendency of rootlessness that increasingly characterized colonial life in the mid- to late-18th century. While in early colonial history, the tendency was for individuals to remain rooted in small communities in which everyone knew each other, in the 18th century, increasing movement of people enabled the anonymity that career thieves relied on to carry out their crimes. In 1757, an American magazine fretted over growing vagrancy in the colonies, noting that “a vagrant life is unfavourable to instruction; and without settlements and fixed habitations, and that at no great distance from us, we cannot expect, in the present situation of affairs that their friendship will be steady and firm.”[8]

To counter the increase in vagrancy and to address the related issue of poverty and economic want, laws were adopted throughout the colonies to both control the movements of the poor and provide the destitute at least a minimal level of subsistence. Vagrancy laws placed restrictions on mobility and tackled the problem of idleness, which did not simply mean inactivity, but rather the wide spectrum of anti-social behavior associated with unemployment and indolence.

Communities used vagrancy laws to expel people who were seen as a burden on public resources or to summarily convict suspected thieves or other anti-social elements that might pose a threat to public order.[9] Idleness was criminalized to counter the unpredictable threat posed by those who were disinclined to perform traditional labor, particularly those who bounced from town to town. A South Carolina law of 1721, for example, forbade poor whites from freely migrating, identifying the threat to public order inherent to allowing too much mobility: “Whereas, notwithstanding the precautions taken for preventing the large credit given to the poorer sort of people, and more especially to loose, idle and disorderly persons, who, continually running in debt much beyond what they are able to pay, daily desert the Province.”[10]

In spite of these legal efforts to contain vagrancy and provide social welfare benefits to the indigent, crime continued to impact the colonies all the way into the revolutionary era. A review of hangings conducted in Massachusetts from the onset of the revolutionary crisis in 1763 to the signing of the Paris Peace Treaty recognizing American independence in 1783 reveals that crimes of all sorts were prevalent even as patriots struggled for the cause of liberty. According to one tally, there were more than 20 executions that took place in this timeframe,[11] for crimes including burglary, rape and murder.

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Following the patriots’ victory over the British and after the most difficult questions of founding the United States were settled — with the Constitution ratified, the federal government established, the first president elected, the revenue system implemented, state powers defined, and the Bill of Rights adopted — more mundane problems remained to be tackled, including a growing crime wave in the new republic. Samuel Adams, the firebrand revolutionary who had led the Boston Tea Party and later became governor of Massachusetts, came to realize that despite the high-minded rhetoric of the American Revolution, many of his fellow citizens continued to undermine the experiment that he and the Founding Fathers had launched.

In fact, one of his first acts as governor was to appeal to Arthur Fenner, governor of the neighboring state of Rhode Island, to extradite a group of men charged with theft by a grand jury in Worcester County. Citing the separation of powers delineated in the recently adopted United States Constitution, he asked Governor Fenner to assist in apprehending the criminals and handing them over to the attorney general of Massachusetts for trial.[12]

The matter of the Rhode Island fugitives was just one indication of the challenges facing Adams’s administration. Burglary was a growing problem in his state and had reached such a critical point that a pastor suggested in 1795 that guards be hired to protect the homes and property of churchgoers during Sunday services.^[13] In these challenging times, new ideas would emerge to counter the difficulties posed by the criminal element. Samuel’s cousin John hailed the effectiveness of burning the oil of sperm whales in streetlamps, which not only “gives the clearest and most beautifull Flame, of any Substance that is known in Nature,” but also helps prevent “Robberies, Burglaries and Murders.” Lighting streets with oil lamps, John Adams wrote to John Jay, helps to “chase away before the Watchmen all the Villains, and save you the Trouble and Danger of introducing a new Police into the City.”^[14]

Samuel Adams, too, felt compelled to offer new ideas to address the growing crime wave. In his January 17, 1794, inaugural address to the General Court, after waxing eloquently about the “laws of the Creator,” which dictate that “thou shall do no injury to thy neighbour” and that “every man hath an equal right by honest means to acquire property,” the new governor emphasized the need for a strong social compact to protect the citizens of Massachusetts. Without one, he said, “the weak cannot always be protected from the violence of the strong, nor the honest and unsuspecting from the arts and intrigues of the selfish and cunning.”^[15]

With these thoughts in mind, the founding generation would devote substantial attention to the question of how to properly deal with matters of crime and punishment. While subscribing in large measure to the arguments of Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke who argued that the government’s core legitimate purpose is to provide security for people and defend their natural rights, they also strove to ensure that criminal justice was administered in a way that was befitting a democratic republic.

Petty Crime and Capital Punishment

At the time of the nation’s founding, capital punishment was the norm even for non-violent crimes such as burglary, but typically only repeat offenders were eligible for the death penalty. Massachusetts law provided that a first-time burglar was to be branded with the letter B, while a second offense would entail a whipping. Only after a third offense would an offender be considered “incorrigible,” and be eligible for the death penalty,^[16] but even then, this punishment was sparingly meted out.

In Massachusetts’s Essex County, for example, only three public executions were carried out from 1781 to 1821, and in each case the crime was murder. The Newburyport Herald recalled that “the individuals executed were Isaac Coombs, an Indian, for the murder of his wife—Henry Blackburn, an Englishman, for the murder of a sailor,—and a black, by the name of Pomp, for the murder of his master.”^[17]

A number of other cases from the era demonstrate that it was just as common in those days to be branded than to be hanged, regardless of the crime’s severity. Israel Wilkins, for instance, was convicted on September 17, 1773, for killing his father but was spared the gallows and instead sentenced to be “burned with a hot Iron in the form of a letter T on the brawny part of the Thumb of his left hand, and it is further considered that the said Israel Wilkins forfeit all his Goods and Chattels to the King.”^[18]

John Patten cut Thomas Shirley on the head with a scythe blade on Christmas Day 1775, a mortal wound that would lead to Shirley’s death on February 1, 1776, and was convicted of manslaughter in September 1776. Patten was spared the gallows though and branded at the Superior Court of Hillsborough County. In September 1769 in Portsmouth, Massachusetts, Morris Cavenaugh beat George Henderson to death and was convicted of manslaughter, but despite the shocking nature of the crime, he got off with a branding instead of a hanging.^[19]

The differences in how punishments could be handed out, with many murderers walking free but those convicted of petty crimes sentenced to death, largely has to do with a practice called the “benefit of clergy.” This was essentially a legal loophole that granted first-time convicts a one-off chance for leniency even for serious crimes. Dating back to the Middle Ages, it was originally applied solely to clerics, but its practice was eventually expanded beyond the Church to cover civil affairs as well. Typically, a condemned prisoner was expected to read the third verse of Psalm 51, “O God, have mercy upon me, according to thine heartfelt mercifulness,” which became known as the “neck verse,” because it was so often used to save the neck of a convicted criminal.^[20]

Largely due to this practice, capital punishment was often administered somewhat arbitrarily. Courts would typically only hand this sentence down for offenders who frequently found themselves in the dock, when prosecutors and judges became convinced that they were beyond redemption.^[21]

With this arbitrariness in mind, some founders began looking to other methods of correction for criminal justice. Governor Samuel Adams, for example, addressed the Massachusetts state legislature in June 1794, alluding to the use of alternatives to the death penalty such as life imprisonment. He noted that “a great number of persons have been sentenced to confinement and hard labor” at Castle Island in Boston Harbor, pointing out that “this mode of punishment has been found by experience to be of great utility in the preservation of good order, and the producing of safety in the Commonwealth, and has a manifest tendency to render unnecessary those sanguinary punishments which are too frequently inflicted in other Governments.”^[22]

In other words, Adams was arguing that alternative options such as life sentences might be more effective in promoting public safety than the use of capital punishment, which he considered representative of tyrannies. While Adams did not explicitly question the morality of taking a life as punishment, his reference to “sanguinary punishments ... inflicted in other Governments” indicates that the governor had a distaste for the gory and bloody sentences – such as torture and execution – that some judicial systems handed out for relatively minor offenses in those days.

He may have specifically had in mind Britain, where the so-called Bloody Code laws included more than 200 crimes that were punishable by death. These were primarily concerned with defending property and included offenses such as stealing, cutting down a tree, and robbing a rabbit warren, with a disproportionate impact – naturally – on the poor and the destitute.^[23] The overriding principle behind these harsh laws was deterrence, as expressed succinctly by George Savile, member of the British House of Commons in the late 17th century: “Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.”^[24]

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With these dubious arguments offered for the death penalty, Adams had long pondered the punishment’s efficacy, recognizing, perhaps, that its overly liberal use was counterproductive, as it led in some cases to juries refusing to convict. Long before he became governor, he delivered a speech to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in January 1773 that sought clarification on the death penalty. Addressing Governor Thomas Hutchinson, Adams asked whether colonies are “vested with the power of ... enacting and determining what crimes shall be capital?” He insisted that colonies were empowered with “constituting courts of common law,” and therefore were capable of “hearing, trying and punishing capital offenders with death.”^[25]

Although Adams was not averse to the death penalty per se — he did advocate after all for the execution of the insurrectionists who took part in Shays’s Rebellion — he appeared to have something of a humanitarian impulse and was clearly preoccupied during his tenure as governor with concerns about how he might be judged by God. As Adams wrote to the General Court in 1796,

I ought not to forget that there are other important duties constitutionally attached to the Supreme Executive—I hope I shall be enabled within my department, with the continued advice of a wise and faithful Council, so to act my part, as that a future retrospect of my conduct may afford me consoling reflections; and that my administration may be satisfactory to reasonable and candid men, and finally meet with the approbation of God, the Judge of all.^[26]

Adams may have also been aware of calls for the abolition of the death penalty on moral grounds, with one of the strongest arguments from a religious perspective being that capital punishment denied criminals the chance at redemption. Proportionality was also a principal concern, with Benjamin Franklin suggesting in 1785 that disproportionate penalties such as hanging a man for theft was tantamount to murder. “To put a Man to Death for an Offence which does not deserve Death, is it not Murder?” Franklin asked. “Founded on the Eternal Principle of Justice and Equity, the Punishments should be proportioned to the Offences.”^[27]

Many of the American Founding Fathers had been influenced by Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria’s views on the death penalty as expressed in his treatise On Crimes and Punishments. A member of the Italian aristocracy, Beccaria developed a reputation as a humanist with his writings becoming widely influential in the late 18th century, and his ideas helping to shape American thoughts on criminal justice.^[28]

With a view towards deterrence as opposed to simply retribution, Beccaria argued for a humane legal system based on prompt and fair trials and proportional punishments. While traditionally, the purpose of punishment had been based in principles of morality and sought simply to provide redress for the crime, the reformers argued that punishment should also be geared towards prevention.^[29] Beccaria took both a utilitarian and philosophical approach toward the question of criminal justice, arguing that “if there were an exact and universal scale of crimes and punishments, we should there have a common measure of the degree of liberty and slavery, humanity and cruelty of different nations.” A “system of morality” that subjects “the best men to the severest punishments, render[s] the ideas of vice and virtue vague and fluctuating and even their existence doubtful.”

For a generation of American radicals such as Samuel Adams, whose revolutionary ideas were considered treasonous one day and then written into the Constitution the next, Beccaria’s relativist approach to questions of crime, vice and virtue made a good deal of sense. Although it is a matter of historical debate precisely how much influence he may have had over the founders, it is clear that Beccaria’s views were well-known among them, with John Adams even quoting him in his defense of the British soldiers in the 1770 murder trial relating to the Boston Massacre.^[30]

A lengthy passage of Beccaria’s views also appears in Thomas Jefferson’s Legal Commonplace Book, a collection of notes from his readings that he considered worth preserving in professionally bound volumes. A “legislator [who] has false ideas of utility who considers particular more than general conveniencies,” Jefferson quotes Beccaria in his book, “would deprive men of the use of fire for fear of their being burnt, and of water for fear of their being drowned; and who knows of no means of preventing evil but by destroying it.”^[31]

With these ideas in mind, from the 1770s on, alternatives were being explored for improving prisons and penal systems. Leading the way by experimenting with the confinement of criminals in penitentiaries intended to be schools of reformation, in 1794 Pennsylvania repealed the death penalty for all offenses except first-degree murder.^[32] Other states followed suit by introducing new kinds of prisons and a number of Founding Fathers proposed liberalizing the harsh penal codes of the colonial period. Jefferson even introduced a bill to limit the use of the death penalty in Virginia to the crimes of murder and treason, a bill that was defeated by just one vote. All in all, American penal reforms were more comprehensive and progressive than anywhere else in the Western world.^[33]

Nathaniel Parry is the author of Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era and How Christmas Became Christmas. He is the co-author of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush and editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. Follow him on Substack and X.

If you enjoyed the above article, please restack it and click the like button. It would also be greatly appreciated if you recommend this newsletter in your Substack recommendations, and, finally, be sure you are subscribed to receive future articles from Essential History.

[1] Keating, Neal. Foreword to The Autobiography of a Criminal. Breakout Productions Inc. (1993), pp. ix-x

[2] “America’s first murderer was executed for killing fellow Plymouth settler”. Mayflower 400 https://www.mayflower400uk.org/education/who-were-the-pilgrims/2020/may/john-billington/ Accessed October 16, 2022

[3] Hearn, Daniel Allen. Legal Executions in New England: A Comprehensive Reference, 1623-1960. McFarland & Company (2008), p. 6

[4] Hearn, Daniel Allen. Legal Executions in New England: A Comprehensive Reference, 1623-1960. McFarland & Company (2008), p. 7

[5] Records of the Court of Assistants of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay, 1630-1692. County of Suffolk (1901)

[6] Winthrop, John, The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649, Harvard University Press (1996), p.1

[7] Mather, Cotton. The valley of Hinnom. The terrours of hell demonstrated and the methods of escaping the terrible miseries of the punishments on the wicked there, declared. In a sermon preached in the hearing, and at the request, of a man under a sentence of death for a murder; just before the execution of the sentence; and upon a text by himself assigned for the sermon to insist upon. At Boston, 13.d. IV.m. 1717, p. 3

[8] “The Planter, No. II,” The American Magazine and Monthly Chronicle for the British Colonies, Nov. 1757: 83

[9] Nicolazzo, Sal. Vagrant Figures: Law, Literature, and the Origins of the Police. Yale University Press (2021), p. 4

[10] Early American Indian Documents: Treaties and Laws, 1607-1789, 20 vols, ed. Alden T. Vaughan (Washington, DC: University Publications of America, 1979), vol 17: New England and Middle Atlantic Laws, p. 168

[11] “Index by State: Massachusetts - 1630-1800” https://deathpenaltyusa.org/usa1/state/massachusetts1.htm Accessed March 10, 2023

[12] Samuel Adams to Arthur Fenner, governor of Rhode Island, December 6, 1794. Samuel Adams Papers, New York Public Library.

[13] Peres Fobes, A Sermon Preached Before His Excellency Samuel Adams, May 27, 1795. Mercury Press, by Yount and Minns, 1795, p. 38

[14] “From John Adams to John Jay, 25 August 1785,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-17-02-0196. [Original source: The Adams Papers, Papers of John Adams, vol. 17, April - November 1785, ed. Gregg L. Lint, C. James Taylor, Sara Georgini, Hobson Woodward, Sara B. Sikes, Amanda A. Mathews, and Sara Martin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014, pp. 354–362.]

[15] Wells, William V. The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams Volume 3. Little Brown and Co., 1865, pp. 324-328

[16] Friedman, Lawrence M. Crime and Punishment in American History. Basic Books, 1994, p. 44

[17] Newburyport Herald, Vol. XXIV, Issue 97, March 6, 1821, p. 1

[18] The Diary of Matthew Patten of Bedford, NH from 1754 to 1788. Rumford Press, 1903, p. 308

[19] Boston Evening Post, October 9, 1769.

[20] Hamlin, Hannibal. Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 174

[21] Williams, Daniel E. “Doctor, Preacher, Soldier, Thief: A New World of Possibilities in the Rogue Narrative of Henry Tufts.” Early American Literature XIX, 1984. p. 5

[22] Acts and Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Wright & Potter, 1896, p. 600

[23] Stamper, Peta. “The Death Penalty: When Was Capital Punishment Abolished in Britain?” December 10, 2021. History Hit https://www.historyhit.com/the-history-of-capital-punishment-in-britain/ Accessed August 2, 2022

[24] Werin, Lars. Economic Behavior and Legal Institutions: An Introductory Survey. World Scientific Publishing Co., 2003, p. 191

[25] The House of Representatives of Massachusetts to the Governor. January 26, I773. [Massachusetts State Papers, pp. 351-364; also printed in the Boston Gazette, February 1, 1773, and in The Speeches of His Excellency Governor Hutchinson (Boston, 1773), pp. 33-58

[26] Adams, Samuel. The Writings of Samuel Adams - Volume 4, edited by Harry Alonzo Cushing. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908, p. 393

[27] Letter From Benjamin Franklin to Benjamin Vaughan, 14 March 1785 https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-43-02-0335 Accessed January 22, 2023

[28] Hostettler, John. Cesare Beccaria: The Genius of “On Crimes and Punishments”. Waterside Press, 2011, p. 132

[29] di Beccaria, Cesare. An Essay on Crimes and Punishments. John Exshaw, 1767, p. 39

[30] “Adams’ Argument for the Defense: 3–4 December 1770,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/05-03-02-0001-0004-0016. [Original source: The Adams Papers, Legal Papers of John Adams, vol. 3, Cases 63 and 64: The Boston Massacre Trials, ed. L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965, pp. 242–270.]

[31] Jefferson, Thomas. Legal Commonplace Book, 1762-1767. https://www.loc.gov/item/mtjbib026466/

[32] “History of the Death Penalty: The Abolitionist Movement”. Death Penalty Information Center https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/history-of-the-death-penalty/the-abolitionist-movement Accessed January 22, 2023

[33] Wood, Gordon S. The American Revolution: A History. Modern Library, 2003, p. 125

In a now well-established pattern of derailing film launches through self-inflicted controversies, Hollywood has again elevated political posturing over storytelling in its latest major project — Christopher Nolan’s screen adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, releasing in theaters on July 17 — and in doing so is undermining a classic of Western civilization.

With the film’s trailer now out, significant pre-release buzz and backlash are growing palpable, with early critics decrying the movie’s assaults on historical accuracy with creative liberties and adaptation choices, as well as some questionable casting decisions that have spurred popular animosity over wokeness run amok.

A number of fans were surprised to hear American accents, for one thing, as well as colloquial terms like “dad” being used in the dialogue, which would have been utterly out of place in Bronze Age Mycenaean Greece (1600–1100 BCE) when the story is set. In one scene, Matt Damon’s Odysseus character shouts “Let’s go!” before charging into battle, which some commentators have likened to the dialogue of a superhero movie rather than a historical epic.

History buffs and ancient Greece enthusiasts have also pointed to visuals that don’t match the time period of The Odyssey, with costumes and armor such as polished steel swords, gladiatorial-style leather, and medieval-looking elements — noting that real Trojan-era gear would lean toward bronze, linen or leather, and specific shield styles.

The loudest complaints, though, are related to the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the “most beautiful woman in the world” according to Homer, with a “face that launched a thousand ships,” as poet Christopher Marlowe put it in his 1604 tragedy Doctor Faustus.

While Nyong’o is certainly a beautiful woman, she also happens to be a dark-skinned Kenyan, which has ruffled some feathers among those who prefer some degree of historical accuracy in period pieces such as The Odyssey. With thousands of depictions of Helen over the centuries in art and film, she has traditionally been portrayed as fair-skinned and light-haired, in keeping with how she is described in the epic poem.

Specifically, Homer portrayed Helen as “golden-haired” (xanthê in ancient Greek), as well as “white-armed” (leukōlenos), which signified both her physical attributes and her high social status. As noblewomen stayed indoors away from the harsh sun while the lower classes toiled in the fields, the term “white-armed” was an expression of ancient conceptions of ideal beauty, with fair, untanned skin considered the ultimate standard of femininity, grace, and class.

‘Respect our Ancestors’

With these clues in mind, there is no doubt that Homer intended Helen to be understood as a fair-skinned Greek beauty rather than a dark-skinned Kenyan beauty, and therefore the casting choice is a clear signal that historical accuracy was not a primary concern in making this film. An unambiguous departure from the source material, done for unspecified reasons that can only be speculated about, the casting choice calls into question the film’s entire approach to both history and culture.

Some of the most prominent complaints have come, naturally, from Greece. Sounding off on social media, many individual Greeks are complaining that their cultural heritage is being appropriated or misrepresented in the name of American identity politics, with comments like “As a Greek, I am offended” and pleas to “respect Greeks and our ancestors.”

Greek Reporter, a major English-language Greek news site, described a “tsunami” of backlash in the country, linking it to broader concerns about historical and literary fidelity and challenging the Greek government for assisting a project that has effectively erased an icon of Greek culture in the promotion of “Hollywood’s diversity mandates.”

Similarly, Ilias Papanikolaou, editor-in-chief of Greece’s Star Channel, has strongly criticized the project, calling it a “falsification” of a global literary treasure and questioned the Greek state’s approval of filming in locations like Acrocorinth, Pylos, and Methoni.

Race-Swapping and Virtue-Signalling

While defenders of the choice might counter that Helen of Troy is considered a mythological character rather than a documented historical person — the demigod daughter of Zeus, the king of the gods, and the mortal Spartan Queen Leda — and therefore race-neutral casting is a justifiable creative liberty, the reality is that historians and classicists have long considered Helen to be a literary creation that represents the personification of ancient Greece.

Therefore, this casting choice is widely seen as little more than a gratuitous, unnecessary and polarizing attempt at virtue signalling and gaslighting — simultaneously elevating people of color and suppressing the visibility of white people on the silver screen, while also forcing audiences to accept a new normal and embrace the ideology of wokism whether we like it or not.

According to this ideology, race is paradoxically unimportant and the centrally defining characteristic of modern society — it simultaneously “doesn’t matter” and clearly matters very much. As individuals in a woke society — much like the citizens of Oceania in Orwell’s 1984, who were expected to internalize the process of doublethink when confronted with facts that contradicted the state’s version of reality — we must be both colorblind and hyper-aware at all times of racial sensitivities.

In the name of fighting white supremacy, moreover, we must correct the sins of our ancestors through forced representation and diversity while at the same time feigning not to notice or care when European culture is appropriated or erased.

Those who object to race-swapping in movies are dismissed as racist, even if the objections are rooted in a commitment to historical accuracy and cultural sensitivity, rather than any animosity towards a racial group or objections to ethnic diversity. In the name of wokism, alas, it is necessary to put those reservations aside and express support for the “progress” that is racial diversity in Hollywood.

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Picking Sides and Rewriting History

This, some commentators have pointed out, appears to be the point of the casting choice. Intended to elicit strong reactions from the public and force everyone to pick sides in the culture war, Nyong’o as Helen of Troy serves as a litmus test to determine whether you are a good person or a bad person.

On one side are the “white supremacists” like Elon Musk and Matt Walsh, who accused Christopher Nolan of denying the “most beautiful woman” role to a white woman out of pandering and cowardice. On the other side are the “good progressives” like Alec Baldwin who clapped back at Musk with the statement, “but she IS the most beautiful woman in the world.”

“How you reacted was like whether or not you wore a mask outside in 2020,” wrote cultural critic Sasha Stone. “It was a test. You’re on one side, or you’re on the other. Notice it, comment on it, object to it, criticize it, and you’re one of the bad people to be purged.”

But the casting choice does more than single out those who suffer from wrongthink for purging or to drive a wedge further into an already highly polarized society — ultimately, it seeks to uproot foundational myths of Western civilization, and in doing so, it tramples over historical accuracy and shared cultural memories. It replaces a Greek woman with an African woman, implying that it would have been common in Mycenaean Greece for a princess — the stepdaughter of a Spartan king — to be of Sub-Saharan African extraction.

In fact, this would not have been common — it would have been extremely rare to non-existent. Ancient DNA from Mycenaean Greece shows their ancestry was overwhelmingly from Neolithic Anatolian farmers, with smaller components from Caucasus-related populations. Sub-Saharan African genetic ancestry in these samples is essentially zero, and therefore the existence of an African in such a high position is unthinkable.

The myth of Helen, moreover, describes her as exceptionally beautiful by local standards, not as a striking foreigner from distant Africa. And while The Odyssey is not actually based on real events in a literal sense, it does draw on real historical contexts, events and places, and therefore some respect should be shown to the source material.

Foundational Story of Western Civilization

Composed around the late 8th century BCE, The Odyssey tells of Odysseus’s decade-long journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. One of the foundational epics of Western civilization and a cornerstone of Greek literature, The Odyssey has profoundly shaped storytelling, mythology, and cultural values for over 2,700 years — directly influencing, for example, modern epics like the original Star Wars trilogy, with George Lucas drawing heavily from Homer’s framework of the hero’s long journey home (nostos).

With its main themes including loyalty and perseverance, the power of cunning intelligence over brute strength, the importance of hospitality (xenia), temptation and self-control, revenge, and the complex relationship between fate and human agency, it has had a profound impact on shaping Western cultural values for nearly three millennia.

While it is clearly intended as mythological fiction, not history — featuring gods intervening directly in human affairs, monsters, enchantresses, and other supernatural elements — it is rooted in a real historical and cultural background, for example the Trojan War, which most likely took place around 1180 BCE. Citing archaeological evidence and Hittite texts, most experts believe the Trojan War stories grew from one or more real Late Bronze Age conflicts or raids in the region during a period of upheaval, but perhaps not a single siege as described by Homer.

Nevertheless, The Odyssey and its prequel The Iliad are important historical clues to the ancient world of Mycenaean Greece, with its palace societies, warfare, seafaring, and the geopolitical competition of the Aegean and Ionian islands.

In particular, Odysseus’s fantastical voyages mix geography and heavy myth, incorporating folktales, sailor stories, and symbolic elements. The epics blend memories of the heroic past with Bronze Age values, making them valuable for understanding ancient Greek culture, similar to how other epics such as the Arthurian legends amplify kernels of historical truth into grand narratives.

A Growing Trend

This function of The Odyssey as a vital bridge to a distant past is severely undermined by placing woke identity politics over historical accuracy. Considering the fact that most people don’t take time to study history or read classical literature and instead get their historical “knowledge” directly from movies, what Christopher Nolan — and Hollywood more broadly — are doing is rewriting history to fit a misguided “inclusivity” agenda. They are constructing a version of the past that simply didn’t exist and in doing so are undermining our shared historical understanding.

This, of course, is not a one-off event. The debacle of The Odyssey follows a number of other clumsy Hollywood attempts to elevate “inclusivity” over reality with high-profile race swaps.

Disney has been one of the greatest offenders in this regard, taking beloved European fairy tales such as The Little Mermaid and Snow White and giving the leading parts to African Americans and Hispanics. Just last year, Disney’s live-action adaptation of Snow White bombed at the box office, which may have had something to do with the casting of Rachel Zegler, a Latina, to play the title role.

Liberals, of course, pointed to the American people’s bigotry as being primarily responsible for Snow White’s poor performance, with culture reporter Elizabeth Grenier blaming “racist commentators [who] were outraged by the choice of a Latina to portray the title character,” and an article at Time magazine referring to a “racist backlash.”

Netflix has also been at the forefront of the race-swapping trend, casting Adele James — a British actress who has a black Jamaican father and a white English mother — to play Cleopatra in a 2023 series, despite the Egyptian queen almost certainly being primarily of Macedonian Greek descent. This sparked an international outcry and a debate over the true ethnicity of Cleopatra, with Netflix being accused of “blackwashing” history.

Even more egregious was the casting of Queen Charlotte in the 2023 Netflix miniseries Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story. To promote racial diversity and inclusivity in its fictionalized Regency universe, Netflix cast a black actress named India Amarteifio to play Queen Charlotte (1744-1818), a white German noblewoman of European ancestry. Netflix defended the choice as a “color-conscious” approach to inclusivity, stressing that the series is not intended as a history lesson but “fiction inspired by fact.”

The problem is, in our society, which is largely historically illiterate, many people will actually take these depictions at face value. Others will be genuinely confused, wondering if these historical figures ever actually existed, and what the role of Africans may have been in British royal families. Filmgoers might start to wonder if other casting choices are historically accurate, or whether every person of color in a historical drama is simply a “DEI hire.”

Many criticized the casting of Denzel Washington as Roman emperor Marcus Opellius Macrinus in the 2024 film Gladiator II, for example, believing it was just another misguided attempt at race-swapping. In this case, however, the casting of a third-century black Roman emperor may have been more closely in line with historical reality.

Born in the modern-day region of Algeria and Morocco in North Africa, Macrinus was likely of Berber or Moorish origin, which might not be a perfect match for Denzel Washington’s complexion, but was relatively close. In this sense, Washington’s role may have been a slight stretch, but not a blatant attempt at woke “color-conscious” casting.

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Real Diversity

The reality is that there are any number of reasons to object to race-swapping in films, including the desire to lose oneself in a historical drama, which becomes more challenging with unrealistic casting choices. One of the reasons that audiences enjoy these sorts of films is to get a feel of what life was really like in the past, not some woke director’s “reimagining” of what things could have been like if history had been different or if geography and ethnicity didn’t exist.

In today’s politicized and polarized cultural climate, however, any objections to these decisions are generally dismissed as the bigoted grievances of MAGA conservatives and white supremacists who simply can’t accept change.

But while Hollywood liberals and progressives in general will continue to sneer at anyone who objects to this trend as an unenlightened reactionary or a racist, the reality is that it is Hollywood that may be engaging in racism. Not only are these casting choices ahistorical and in a perverse way even discriminatory against those of a lighter complexion who would be more appropriate choices, but the very act of “race-swapping” implies that only through giving people of color certain roles that are not historically accurate can they be “visible.”

This reflects a bias in Hollywood that simultaneously prioritizes “white” stories but also seeks to replace whites with people of color. It implies that only white stories are worth telling, but that they would be more politically correct if they just didn’t have so many white people.

The practice of swapping established white characters for black actors offers superficial representation, but it is a shallow and derivative approach to diversity. Instead of inserting black performers into traditionally white European roles, Hollywood could instead focus on authentic storytelling that utilizes, for example, Africa’s own rich cultural traditions. This would provide genuine creative originality while offering black talent meaningful, organic roles rooted in their ancestral heritage.

West Africa, in particular, contains compelling source material capable of rivalling the mythologies Hollywood has long adapted. The Epic of Sundiata, for example, recounts the inspiring hero’s journey of a disabled prince who overcomes exile and betrayal to master sorcery and warfare, ultimately founding the Mali Empire. This historical legend blends political intrigue, prophecy, massive battles, and redemption, offering the epic scale of The Odyssey combined with cultural depth.

For more light-hearted fare, why not adapt the story of Anansi the Spider, the clever trickster of Akan and Ashanti folklore? This legend lends itself perfectly to fast-paced animated adventures or humorous treasure hunts filled with wit, shape-shifting, and valuable life lessons. His tales, which have influenced Caribbean and African-American folklore for centuries, carry strong global appeal and franchise potential.

Similarly, Mami Wata, the seductive water spirit, could inspire visually stunning horror-fantasy or romantic thrillers exploring temptation, power, and consequence. Trickster tales featuring the tortoise and various animals offer light-hearted animated comedies rich in slapstick humor and moral lessons. Meanwhile, southern and eastern African stories of spirit brides and shape-shifting entities open doors to psychological thrillers and dark fantasy with strong social commentary.

By prioritizing these original African narratives over race-swapped adaptations, Hollywood could move beyond tokenism toward true diversity. Such an approach would expand the cinematic landscape with fresh stories, create new franchises with broad international appeal, and deliver substantive representation.

So, the question is, why doesn’t it do this? Why does Hollywood instead insist on rehashing traditional European stories and swapping the races? Is it that Hollywood executives believe that the African stories with African actors would not do well financially? Do they fear that white audiences would not be interested in going to see a movie full of black actors?

If that’s the case, then perhaps it is Hollywood that is truly racist.

Nathaniel Parry is the author of Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era and How Christmas Became Christmas. He is the co-author of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush and editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. Follow him on Substack and X.

If you enjoyed the above article, please restack it and click the like button. It would also be greatly appreciated if you recommend this newsletter in your Substack recommendations, and, finally, be sure you are subscribed to receive future articles from Essential History.

In recent remarks, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) made a stunning claim about the motivations for the American Revolution, stressing how those motivations are just as applicable to the United States today as they were 250 years ago.

“The American Revolution was against the billionaires of their time,” she stated. “And we are declaring independence from such an extreme marriage of wealth and power and the state.”

Although it’s nothing new for activists and politicians to draw inspiration from the past and particularly from the American Revolution — with social movements such as the abolitionist movement of the 19^th century, the women’s suffrage movement of the 19^th century to early 20^th century and the civil rights movement of the late 20^th century all borrowing rhetoric from the Revolutionary War and Declaration of Independence, sometimes by playing fast and loose with historical facts — AOC has taken this trend to another level.

Her claim that the American Revolution was fought against “the billionaires of their time” is beyond historically misleading — and in fact should be understood as blatantly false. The revolution was primarily a struggle for self-government, “no taxation without representation,” and colonial rights against British parliamentary overreach — not a class war against wealth.

In fact, several of the wealthiest men in the colonies actively supported the cause — the most famous of whom was General George Washington. A prosperous Virginia planter, Washington served as commander-in-chief without a salary for the war’s duration and personally covered extensive expenses — an in-kind contribution totaling some $450,000 at the time.

Another famous wealthy American who made notable personal and diplomatic financial contributions to the American Revolution was Benjamin Franklin. Rising from modest origins as the son of a soap maker to become one of the wealthiest Americans by his early 40s through printing, publishing, real estate, and land speculation, Franklin contributed more than £3,000 from his personal funds directly to the Continental Congress to help prosecute the war.

Even more generous was John Hancock, one of the wealthiest men in the colonies, who used his fortune to support the patriot cause, essentially bankrolling the movement for independence. Other noteworthy contributors to the revolution were Robert Morris, a successful Philadelphia merchant and shipowner involved in international trade, and Haym Salomon, a Polish-born Jewish merchant and broker in Philadelphia who became one of the primary individual financiers of the cause.

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Class Consciousness

Although there were class differences in the colonies, this was not really the motivating factor of the revolution. In fact, while inequality existed, so too did opportunity, with abundant land providing the means for prosperity to anyone willing to work and effectively capping the accumulation of wealth among the upper classes. Because land was so cheap, white Americans typically would not work for others except for brief periods, which tended to keep wages high.

Therefore, the prosperity of economic growth was spread relatively evenly, and the view of a typical farmer was that of gratitude for their blessings, not of envy. As J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur explained in a collection of essays published in the early 1780s, American life was one of equal opportunity and self-determination, where ingenuity, hard work and grit paid off with economic success. With plentiful land and opportunity, there was no reason to covet the wealth of others, according to Crèvecoeur:

I bless God for all the good He has given me; I envy no man’s prosperity, and with no other portion of happiness than that I may live to teach the same philosophy to my children and give each of them a farm, show them how to cultivate it, and be like their father, good, substantial, independent American farmers — an appellation which will be the most fortunate one a man of my class can possess so long as our civil government continues to shed blessings on our husbandry.

Crèvecoeur’s words reflect the reality that America in the 1770s had a far greater standard of living than any country in the world, with many living on their own land and enjoying material wealth that others could only dream of.

The patriots were therefore not rebelling against an economic system of free enterprise, but against a system of monarchical and hereditary power that increasingly encroached on their rights. They were resisting infringements on their liberty and in doing so hoped to topple a system in which rank and position were bestowed artificially from above, not necessarily based on merit or competence but from hereditary or personal connections that originated, ultimately, from the Crown.

The position or rank of an individual in a republican society, in contrast, would come naturally from talent and ability.

America’s Semiquincentennial

Although more or less completely divorced from reality, it should be expected that the sentiments behind AOC’s comments will become more prominent as America’s 250^th birthday approaches. Hijacking the revolution’s legacy in the name of political expediency should come as no surprise in our hyper-polarized climate, and to be fair, it is not only Democrats who could be considered guilty of twisting historical reality to advance a favorable narrative.

With America’s Semiquincentennial coinciding with this year’s pivotal midterm elections, both the right and the left, in fact, are treating the nation’s 250th birthday as narrative warfare with high political stakes: Republicans embracing renewal and exceptionalism in the hopes to hold or gain seats in Congress, and Democrats trumpeting inclusivity and historical reckoning in order to flip chambers.

Although the official U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission — known as America250, established by Congress in 2016 — strives for a broadly bipartisan, inclusive approach that engages all Americans, parallel efforts, notably the Trump administration’s Freedom 250 and a leftist school-based initiative to “teach truthfully about the American Revolution,” highlight drastically different perspectives.

On one hand, conservatives tend to emphasize grand patriotic displays and push back against recent “rewriting” of history, while progressive voices criticize what they call efforts to “whitewash” history and promote an “alternate reality.” Liberals seek instead to acknowledge founding ideals and progress while confronting uncomfortable topics such as slavery and conquest, as well as emphasize ongoing work toward fuller equality.

So, while conservatives are focused on restoring “truth and sanity” to history through initiatives that audit federal sites and counter perceived anti-American narratives — including by removing or contextualizing certain slavery references or “divisive” content at national parks — liberals are working to amplify the voices of slaves, Native Americans, workers, women, and marginalized groups over elite founders’ stories, prioritizing America’s “complex history” over a simplified version of American exceptionalism.

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Hearts and Minds

Coupled with the left’s burgeoning “No Kings” movement, which seeks to portray Donald Trump as a tyrannical monarch à la King George III, the Democrats’ approach also seeks to exploit the moment to mobilize their base by depicting Republican plans as MAGA-driven revisionism that excludes large parts of the American story, contrasting it with the “inclusive” approach of liberals. This ties into broader 2026 midterm themes like protecting democracy, civil rights, and diversity.

But while the immediate prize might be control of Congress, the ongoing narrative war mirrors longer-term trends where history has become an ideological battleground, anniversaries become proxies for debates over national identity, and the left and right compete for control over the American story.

When taken to its logical conclusion, this all-or-nothing battle for control over the American narrative threatens to further radicalize individuals who have already decided that their political opponents are irredeemable villains. Although regrettable, it should be said that this, in many ways, is in keeping with the American Revolution itself.

A struggle for hearts and minds as much as it was a military conflict, the Revolutionary War relied heavily on propaganda and on clearly defining categories of friend and foe. Narrative control, in fact, was seen as essential for both sides, rendering common ground impossible as each side demonized the other and employed horrific violence to achieve their goals.

This in turn served to establish clear sides and to foster a new national identity. Although at the beginning, most patriots were standing up for their rights and liberties as Englishmen, a national awareness would eventually emerge from the conflict and its resulting republican form of government.

Identity and Belonging in the Revolution

During the American Revolution, simple categories such as “American vs. British” were problematic due to the fact that few people even identified as American at that stage of national development. Establishing individuals as clear enemies or allies, though, served to unify the revolutionary movement and laid the groundwork for later concepts of what it meant to be American.

Few in the early stages could conceive of forging a unified continental republic, with many continuing to reject violence and advocating for reconciliation with the Crown as the best way forward — but as the conflict dragged on this view became politically untenable.

In this context of varied allegiances and sometimes lukewarm support from the populace, the patriots would resort to coercion to isolate loyalists and convert fence-sitters. Throughout the revolutionary era, patriots used draconian methods of punishment and street justice to enforce allegiance to the revolutionary cause.

Mobs routinely utilized tar-and-featherings, expanding the punishment’s earlier use against customs officials and increasingly applied it to Tories and alleged sympathizers. From the northern colonies to the southern colonies, townspeople were quick to tar and feather anyone deemed an “enemy to the rights of America.” In Charleston, South Carolina, for example, two men were tarred and feathered just for showing disrespect towards the local revolutionary committee.

Even those who provided material support to the patriots could find themselves targeted for harassment if they also maintained friendly relations with the British. This is a lesson that a Boston merchant named Henry Howell Williams would learn in the early phase of the 1775-1776 Siege of Boston, in which New England militias blocked the British Army’s land access to Boston after the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

Williams had friends and associates on both sides of the conflict, having provided vital assistance to William Burbeck, a leading member of Sons of Liberty and later second-in-command of an American artillery regiment, but was also suspected of selling provisions to the British. So, despite his connections with dyed-in-the-wool patriots like Burbeck, Williams was targeted by the rebels in late May and early June 1775 when American troops confiscated his livestock, then burned his house and property to prevent them from being taken by the British Army.

Another American who would find out the price of maintaining neutrality was Peter Van Schaack, an American lawyer based in New York. Although he had joined the first committees of protest following the closing of the Boston port in 1774, Van Schaack expressed hope that “some middle way should be found out.”

As a scholar who had studied the Roman civil wars, Van Schaak was well-versed in the devastation that they caused and dreaded armed conflict in the colonies, calling civil war “the epitome of human wretchedness.” Despite having many friends who were deeply involved in the revolutionary struggle, men such as John Jay and Robert Livingston, Van Schaack refused to swear allegiance to the patriot cause and in 1778 was banished as a loyalist to England.

Other loyalists simply fled for their personal safety, including Boston’s top surgeon, Sylvester Gardiner. In a letter to his son-in-law dated May 9, 1776, he explained that due to his loyalist views, he had to leave town. “I found I could not stay in Boston and trust my person with a set of lawless rebels whose actions have disgraced human nature and who have treated all the King’s Loyal Subjects that have fallen into their hands with great cruelty and for no other crime than for their Loyalty to the best of Kings and a peaceable Submission to the best constituted Government on Earth,” Gardiner wrote.

Changed Views

While Gardiner was a confirmed loyalist from the beginning, there were others who started off on the side of the patriots but then defected to the enemy due to the harsh conditions and poor provisions that were provided by the Continental Army, or the heavy-handed tactics of the revolutionaries. Embroiled in a bloody and bitter conflict with former friends and sometimes family members, both sides increasingly engaged in rampant theft, wholesale looting, and vicious retaliation against their perceived enemies.

But this sometimes had the unintended effect of pushing people to the other side. As historian John Shy has documented, throughout the colonies, common people “grew weary of being bullied by local committees of safety, by corrupt deputy assistant commissaries of supply, and by bands of ragged strangers with guns in their hands calling themselves soldiers of the Revolution.”

In one case, an English immigrant in Georgia, Thomas Brown, was tortured and left for dead by a patriot mob because he declined to join an association that had been formed to support the revolutionary cause. On August 2, 1775, about 130 Georgian Sons of Liberty came to his front door and demanded he pledge himself to the patriots. Brown, who served as a local magistrate and owed his land and status to the patronage of the royal governor of Georgia, replied that he could “never enter into an Engagement to take up arms against the Country which gave him being.”

Brown “had no wish to fight his own neighbors,” he said, but after the patriots threatened to drag him to Augusta, he went inside his house and returned with pistols in his hands. “It would be at the peril of that man who should attempt it,” he warned. Ignoring this threat, six men seized him and struck his head with the butt of a musket, fracturing his skull. He was then dragged to Augusta, tied to a tree and set on fire before being scalped. Then he was tarred and feathered and carted through a number of nearby settlements — forced to verbally pledge allegiance to the patriot cause before being released.

Remarkably, Brown survived the ordeal and after he recovered, renounced his allegiance to the patriots and became a loyalist leader devoted to exacting revenge against the fanatics who nearly killed him. He rallied hundreds of backcountry loyalists to form the King’s Rangers militia, which developed over time into a uniformed and highly disciplined unit. Living with the Creeks in 1776 and 1777, Brown developed a support network for Augusta-area Tories with Indian support. Essentially, Brown’s torture at the hands of the patriots forced him from neutrality into a militant adversary of the patriot cause.

Animals and Miscreants

Patriots, however, often failed to recognize these nuances or to appreciate their own role in pushing lukewarm supporters and potential allies into the loyalist camp. Instead, they tended to target those deemed insufficiently supportive, dehumanizing them as “animals” and “miscreants.” These are the words used to describe the loyalists who remained in Boston following the evacuation of British forces from the town in the early stages of the conflict.

After the retreat of the British in the spring of 1776, Lieutenant Isaac Bangs wrote in his journal that “[t]he Inhabitants that were friendly to America still continued in Boston” but “those Miscreants whose complicated offences against the Liberties of their Country denied them the Boon of continueing any longer as Freemen in this Land of Liberty ... chose to tarry & rely upon the Mercy of their offended Countrymen.”

As Bangs saw it, “by their Behaviour they had forfeited all right to Freedom, & were driven to the Alternitude of Slavery,” so “these obnoxious animals ... left the Town & hauled of to Nantascet.” The Tories who chose to remain in Boston were “soon apprehended, & what fate they will receive at the hands of their injured Countrymen (for I can’t call them Brethren) may be left by me undetermin’d as yet.”

In this context, many people buried their true sentiments and purported to believe things that they in fact did not.

For example, Benjamin Thompson, a prominent New Hampshire colonist, held staunch loyalist views but pretended to be a patriot for years to protect his property from destruction. Leading this double life, he would come to play an important role as a spy, assisting another fake patriot, Benjamin Church, in passing intelligence to the British. Church headed the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, part of the colony’s shadow government that took control away from royal officials during the revolution, and served as chief medical officer for the Continental Army.

Church had been sending messages to General Thomas Gage in Boston prior to Lexington and Concord, which had been facilitated in some cases by Thompson. Later, Church attempted to send a letter to the British describing the troop numbers of the Continental Army and its munitions, as well as details about a planned attack on Canada and events at the Continental Congress. His letter was discovered and Church was placed under arrest under the orders of General Washington. Following Church’s arrest, Thompson worried that he would be next. He hopped on a ship to London and received a commission in the British Army, returning to fight against the patriots in New York later in the war.

Even those who fought on the patriot side were sometimes less than fully committed to the cause. As a sign of the often tepid support that many patriots held for the revolution, Congress curbed the practice of exchanging prisoners of war with the enemy, due to the Continentals’ calculation that prisoner exchanges heavily favored the British.

While exchanged British soldiers would typically end up back on the frontlines, the freed American POWs would often just go home, and so, by 1780, Washington came to firmly oppose prisoner exchanges because they so clearly favored the enemy. In other words, he would rather allow Americans to remain in British custody (typically in horrendous conditions) because he knew that most of them would likely not return to the fight if they were set free — a rather poor reflection of American commitment to the cause.

Recruitment Quotas

Ultimately, to meet their needs for fighters, the patriots would come to rely on conscription, with Continental regiments sometimes augmented with state militia drafts. Connecticut passed a statute in 1777 that would set recruiting quotas for selected towns that would be met by drafting men from the local militia to serve ten months as Continental soldiers.

In October 1777, Virginia adopted a requirement for counties to provide an allotment of one-year militia levies to supplement Continental regiments. To fulfill their requirements, in turn, militias would resort to drafting conscripts, with soldiers compelled to service ranging from weeks to months. States continued to rely on conscription throughout the duration of the conflict, and in February 1778, Congress authorized the first comprehensive Continental Army draft recruiting act, which called for the enactment of a nine-month levy to fill recruiting quotas.

Conscription efforts met widespread opposition among the people, with entire counties refusing to respond to militia callouts in Virginia, for example, often culminating in violence. Every time the state tried to compel men into service, resistance was the result. Violent riots broke out across Virginia in 1781, with one county seeing as many as 700 men standing in opposition to conscription, and in another town, hundreds of armed men gathered at the courthouse to prevent the draft from taking place. Sometimes the anti-draft efforts were assisted by the very militia officers in charge of implementing the laws.

In Connecticut, one captain refused to comply with draft orders because he felt that the Assembly had set an unfair quota for his town. In another incident in Connecticut, a sergeant, after being instructed to draft a man in 1780, told his captain that his “orders are not worthy of my notice.” In Braintree, Massachusetts, civilian officials voted to compensate its militia officers who were fined for failing to meet conscription quotas.

The recruitment challenges of the Continental Army reflect the reality that support among the people for the revolution was not always as strong as patriots would have liked. With the outcome of the conflict very much uncertain, common working people often declined to take a stand in the struggle, while others remained opposed to it.

Although the patriot cause clearly had a broad base of support, receiving active backing from perhaps 40 to 45 percent of the white populace, so too did the loyalist cause, with an estimated 15 to 20 percent of the adult white male population remaining actively loyal to the Crown — and as many as 100,000 loyalists seeking refuge in England, Canada, Bermuda and Jamaica.

In order to succeed, therefore, patriots often employed draconian measures — some of which we might call “war crimes” today — which in some respects rendered the conflict morally ambiguous and called into question the goodness of the cause.

But of course, they were not the only ones guilty of atrocities. With the animosity between patriots and loyalists reaching truly malevolent and vicious levels as the conflict dragged on, Tories were at times guilty of some of the most notorious incidents of the Revolutionary War — one of which took place in South Carolina. Although the facts of the incident continue to be debated by historians, the evidence strongly suggests that loyalists committed a massacre of patriots at the Battle of Waxhaws on May 29, 1780.

As loyalist and participant in the battle Charles Stedman later described it, “the virtue of humanity was totally forgot” in the fighting, with patriots denied the ability to surrender as Lt. Colonel Banastre Tarleton and his British Legion handily defeated Colonel Abraham Buford’s Virginia regiment. Tarleton himself later recalled that his men were so devoted to him that they responded with fury when a rumor of his death circulated on the battlefield, and acted with “a vindictive asperity not easily restrained.”

With the rebels given no quarter despite attempts to surrender, Tarleton’s legion allegedly hacked at them with swords and bayonets. In 1785, David Ramsay wrote an account of the incident describing a grisly scene in which “unresisting Americans, praying for quarter, were chopped to pieces.” He also noted that the term “Tarleton’s quarters” became a common expression meaning that no quarter would be given.

Counter-Narratives

While these incidents provide important context for the reality of warfare during the American Revolution, they also recall the dangers of polarization and serve as a reminder today against simplifying or romanticizing this conflict. The reality is that the Revolutionary War was a gruesome affair that many at the time objected to for various reasons, and while we can certainly celebrate the outcome — the triumph of American independence and republicanism — there is also a danger in presenting it as a simple narrative of good vs. evil.

As America gears up to celebrate a quarter-millennium of independence while counter-narratives and protests challenge perceived “revisionism,” the reality is that the nuances of the American Revolution — including its contemporary detractors — is what makes the history so rich. While we can appreciate them in hindsight, however, at the time, the ambiguities led to violent coercion and repression of loyalists, fence-sitters and war deserters.

Likewise, today, instead of embracing the historical complexities, we too often see efforts to simplify the revolution to advance one narrative or another, or to benefit one political party or the other. Meanwhile, with lawsuits over exhibit changes and academic conferences critiquing triumphalism while advocating inclusive storytelling, chances of the 250^th anniversary serving to unite the country appear increasingly slim.

But even as both sides compete for the mantle of legitimate heirs to the nation’s founding, today’s polarized political climate underscores the need to remember key lessons from the American Revolution — particularly those concerning political identity and tribalism.

Current trends suggest that the wrong lessons are being internalized, risking further fragmentation rather than greater national unity. The different approaches to the anniversary of America’s independence underline fundamentally divergent worldviews, recalling that the violence of the revolution was the inevitable outcome of entrenched polarization.

Nathaniel Parry is the author of Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era and How Christmas Became Christmas. He is the co-author of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush and editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. Follow him on Substack and X.

If you enjoyed the above article, please restack it and click the like button. It would also be greatly appreciated if you recommend this newsletter in your Substack recommendations, and, finally, be sure you are subscribed to receive future articles from Essential History.

In recent years, we’ve all grown increasingly familiar with the term “helicopter parents,” describing parents who “hover” over their children like a helicopter to monitor and control every aspect of their lives, as well as “snowplow” and “bulldozer” parents, who clear every obstacle in advance, and even “lawnmower parents,” who mow down problems before the child encounters them. While some of these parenting styles have been observed since the 1960s, they have become significantly more pronounced since the 1980s–1990s, with a notable acceleration in the 2000s and 2010s.

The sharp spike in overprotective, hyper-involved parenting styles has been especially pronounced for Millennials and subsequent generations, especially among middle- and upper-class families. Parents in recent decades spend substantially more time with and on their children than previous generations, with data showing a roughly 50 percent increase in parent-child interaction time since the 1970s and education-focused activities rising even more sharply — up to 3.5 times since the mid-1970s.

With notable exceptions — such as tragic cases of child neglect and abuse, which remain all too common — these megatrends have generally established intensive parenting as the norm today. Child-centered, time-intensive parenting has become a widespread cultural expectation, especially among the more well-to-do.

While this might be considered by some standards to be a marked improvement over the more detached style of parenting that was the norm in earlier decades — underscored for example by nightly public service announcements on television back in the 1970s and 80s reminding parents that their feral kids were out there roaming the streets somewhere — the data indicates that helicopter, snowplow and lawnmower parenting styles have resulted in increased mental health issues in youth.

Trends such as perfectionism, anxiety, and depression have been linked to overparenting and its tendency to reduce autonomy, self-reliance, and resilience. Moreover, the high level of anxiety about safety and success has resulted in limited opportunities for independent play and decision-making, leading to intellectually and emotionally stunted adults who are unsure of how to handle challenging situations without constant supervision and help.

The mental health issues linked to overparenting could also be related to the fact that this style of parenting is a stark aberration from the norm throughout human history. Although in most respects, the advancement in nurturing children and respecting their human rights has been a most welcome development, it is worth reflecting — for the sake of reference at least — on what it used to be like.

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The Way it Was

While the focus on children and their happiness has become so ingrained in the popular psyche that people might actually believe that this has been a constant throughout history, this besotted approach to child-rearing is a relatively new phenomenon, with children throughout history often enduring unspeakable hardship and tragedy and finding little comfort in the consolation and tenderness that would be expected of loving parents and other caring adults.

Far from being viewed as vulnerable little people who require special treatment and constant attention, with their needs and desires tended to by parents who were concerned above all else with their children’s happiness, in fact there was a time when children may have actually been sacrificed to please pagan deities. Child sacrifice was performed for any number of reasons, including something as simple as an offering in exchange for, say, the gods’ help in ensuring the safe voyage of a ship, but also at times held an explicitly symbolic and religious meaning. This was particularly the case when it came to the worship of Kronos and Saturn during their festivals of Kronia and Saturnalia.

The Greek and Roman myths of Kronos and Saturn included prophecies that one of his sons would depose him. Acting out of an abundance of caution, Kronos/Saturn ate his first two children moments after each was born, but to prevent this from happening again, Saturn’s wife Ops hid his third son, Jupiter, on the island of Crete. Eventually the prophecy was fulfilled and Jupiter overthrew his father, bringing an end to the Golden Age, which was recalled every year during the celebration of Kronia and later Saturnalia.

This appears to be why child sacrifices may have been offered to the god, at least in his earlier Greek iteration, to restore the peace, stability and prosperity of the Golden Age when Kronos was king, and to win favor with him by appeasing his desires.

As Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero describes it in his work On the Nature of the Gods, published in 45 BCE,

By Saturn … they meant him who controlled the course and revolution of periods and times, the god who in Greek bears that actual name, for he is called [Kronos], that is, a period of time. And he was named Saturn because, it was supposed, he was ‘made full’ (saturo) with years, for it is because time swallows up the periods of time, and is loaded, without being satisfied, with the years of the past, that Saturn is represented as having been accustomed to devour his own offspring, and it was in order that he might not have an unrestricted course, and that Jupiter might fetter him with the yoke of the stars.

So, Saturn, like his Greek precursor Kronos, had to be saturated with offerings, and what better offering than a child? After all, it was his own child — the one he had failed to eliminate — who came to displace him and brought an end to the Golden Age.

Numerous historical accounts suggest, sadly, that this is precisely what they did in the ancient world.

Greek and Latin sources recount the offering of children to Kronos by fire in the Punic city of Carthage, which was a Phoenician colony. As historian Paul Mosca describes the horrific practice, “There stands in their midst a bronze statue of Kronos, its hands extended over a bronze brazier, the flames of which engulf the child. When the flames fall upon the body, the limbs contract and the open mouth seems almost to be laughing until the contracted body slips quietly into the brazier.”

The use of child sacrifice to honor Kronos appears to have disappeared when he became worshipped as Saturn by the Romans, as the Romans came to generally view human sacrifice as distasteful and banned the practice in 97 BCE. In later celebrations of Saturnalia, in fact, children were gifted little dolls, which some have speculated may have been a token reminder of the time that kids were sacrificed to the god.

Ritual Killings

Despite the formal ban on sacrifices, however, “ritual killings” continued to take place, including practices such as disposing of unwanted infants by placing them in boxes and casting them out to sea or abandoning babies in the wild — practices that may have held symbolic meaning in terms of the Romans’ relationship with the gods.

The Romans believed that their success and power were attributable to the gods’ beneficence, and therefore strove to maintain this bond by continuing the practices that they believed pleased their deities, even after human sacrifice had been prohibited. Historians believe that these ritual killings were done partially to help preserve Roman dominance, but at the same time, by differentiating between ritual killings and human sacrifice, Romans were able to claim moral superiority over other societies.

This is despite the fact that under Roman law, the paterfamilias (the oldest living male) held virtually absolute authority over his children, including the legal right to beat, sell into slavery, or kill them — including by starvation. This power allowed for severe abuse of society’s most vulnerable people. It wasn’t until the fourth century when Emperor Constantine — following his conversion to Christianity — passed several laws aimed at addressing the welfare of children, particularly those at risk due to poverty or abandonment.

Yet, although for centuries Roman law allowed the murder of children by their fathers — and indeed even required the death of deformed newborns — the Romans eagerly seized on the issue of child sacrifice as propaganda against their ancient rivals the Carthaginians and, consequently, for a long period accounts of child sacrifice by the Carthaginians were dismissed as baseless Roman smears. Recent scholarship has determined however that the practice most likely did take place.

“Children – both male and female, and mostly a few weeks old – were sacrificed by the Carthaginians at locations known as tophets,” according to an academic paper published in 2014. Methodically countering the view that claims of child sacrifices were nothing but propaganda used against ancient Carthaginians by their enemies, the academics determined that the practice was indeed carried out at least in Carthage, Sicily, Sardinia and Malta. “Dedications from the children’s parents to the gods are inscribed on slabs of stone above their cremated remains,” according to the study.

Trying to make sense of this practice and to understand how a parent could do such a thing to his or her own child, Josephine Quinn, an author of the 2014 paper, noted that the high death rate among children meant that their lives may not have been valued quite as highly as they are today. “We have to remember the high level of mortality among children – it would have been sensible for parents not to get too attached to a child that might well not make its first birthday,” Quinn said.

Paradoxically, while perhaps not wanting to grow too attached to a child who could very well die anyway, parents may have also believed that offering what was most valuable to them was more indicative of their devout beliefs, more pleasing to the gods, and therefore more likely to result in them bestowing favors. According to Quinn, the practice was likely performed “out of profound religious piety, or a sense that the good the sacrifice could bring the family or community as a whole outweighed the life of the child.”

This profound sense of piety is alluded to by Cicero:

And the worship of the gods which is best, and also purest, and holiest, and most full of piety, is that we should always reverence them with a mind and voice that are without stain, and guiltless, and uncorrupt; for religion has been dissociated from superstition not only by philosophers but by our own ancestors as well. I may mention as to these two terms that men who used to spend whole days in prayer and sacrifice in order that their children might survive them.

Even if it was done out of a deep religious belief, history has generally not been kind to societies that practiced human sacrifice, and the treatment of children in particular has long served as a powerful indictment of the moral depravity of pagans, a point that Christians have made throughout the ages.

What Scripture Says

The Bible strongly condemns such practices, with the Old Testament specifically referring to the human sacrifices offered to Moloch and Baal — the Phoenician and Canaanite predecessors of both Kronos and Saturn. A passage in the Book of Ezekiel demonstrates how reprehensible the practice was seen in the eyes of the Lord: “When you present your gifts and offer up your children in fire, you defile yourselves with all your idols to this day. And shall I be inquired of by you, O house of Israel? As I live, declares the Lord God, I will not be inquired of by you.”

Psalm 106 had these strong words for the pagans:

They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons; they poured out innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan, and the land was polluted with blood. Thus they became unclean by their acts, and played the whore in their deeds. Then the anger of the Lord was kindled against his people, and he abhorred his heritage; he gave them into the hand of the nations, so that those who hated them ruled over them.

Leviticus 18:21 specifically warns against sacrifices to Moloch: “You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Molech, and so profane the name of your God.”

In total there are some 100 references to human sacrifice in the Bible, with about a dozen specific references to sacrificing children. This indicates not only how heinous the practice was considered by contemporaries but also, regrettably, how common it must have been.

Saving the Children and Converting the Heathens

In later years, the practice of child sacrifice served as a powerful tool of conversion, offering a potent reminder of the moral superiority of Christianity. During the Christianization of Europe in the first millennium, tales were told of Christian missionaries rescuing children from being offered to heathen gods, demonstrating the power of Christian virtue and mercy, including the famous story of St. Boniface converting heathens who were preparing to make a sacrifice of a small child at the base of their sacred oak tree.

More on Europe's Christianization

Boniface reached the village just as the pagans were preparing to offer the child to Thor, and using his staff, blocked the executioner’s blow. Although these tales were long thought to be exaggerated or fabricated as instances of anti-pagan Christian propaganda, archaeology has since confirmed their grim truth. A dig at Trelleborg, Sweden, discovered five wells where skeletons of humans and animals were found together with tools and jewelry. Four of the human sacrifice victims were children between the ages of four and seven.

Although sacrifice obviously is an extreme example of the different approaches between paganism and Christianity to what today may be called human rights — and specifically the rights of the child — the emphasis on children’s general wellbeing is something that has long been stressed as one of the advantages of following the Christian faith.

A 19^th-century theologian named Richard Joseph Cooke, writing about Christianity’s impact on the lives of children, describes the dreadful condition of childhood in heathenism before “Christianity began its mission of mercy and beneficence,” ultimately blaming pagans’ lack of belief in the Christian God as the reason for kids’ maltreatment. The decay of family life, he explains, and the neglect of children and the cruelty that they endured, “in utter disregard of the natural feelings of the heart,” were all the result of the heathens’ lack of faith in God, leading them “to an abandonment of hope in a future life” and “terrible cruelty, or at least indifference, toward helpless childhood.”

He argues that indifference towards the child was not only due “to the universal corruption of the age or the extreme poverty of the lower classes,” but due to paganism itself. “Heathenism could produce nothing better,” he wrote. “Whenever and wherever heathenism came to the flower, it tended to repress the better instincts of humanity.”

Christians, on the other hand, through their atonement with God for man’s Original Sin, are uniquely positioned to raise children properly, according to Cooke. As he explains, “the child possesses tendencies – strong bias toward evil which drives it deeper and deeper into sin without any power of deliverance.”

But through Christian guidance, benefits may be accrued through the grace of God, offering the child an opportunity to resist the power of evil and strive towards the good. “The child will,” he writes, “yield to evil, since through this same atonement the Spirit of God is not a mere Spectator of human life and history, but a helping dynamic power to aid every one coming into the world.” Cooke credits this focus on the child not only with promoting children’s wellbeing, but also helping to establish Christianity as the dominant faith of Western civilization.

“A religion which stood in no vital relation to childhood could not have wielded other than a limited influence on society or the family,” he concludes.

Notwithstanding Cooke’s biases in favor of Christianity (he would become a bishop some 20 years after writing his tract on Christianity and childhood), he certainly had a point about the pagans, who were known for many objectionable practices, with child sacrifice being perhaps the most egregious.

But it should also be pointed out that even following the widespread adoption of Christianity in Europe, children continued to suffer hardship and were often considered expendable, particularly during hard times. Young people were expected to help out with household tasks such as caring for animals and cooking, and expulsion from the household was a common punishment for idle children. Sometimes children were simply abandoned, but luckier boys and girls might be sent to monastic schools or convents.

In some cases this may have been done to get rid of children who parents couldn’t afford, but it was more often seen as a religious commitment — an offering to God of the most precious things parents had to give. In this sense, the motivation may not have been entirely different than the child sacrifices as practiced by pagans of an earlier era, expressing their piety and devotion to the gods by offering to them what they considered most valuable.

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Enduring Hardship

One of the most difficult realities of life in earlier eras prior to modern medicine and basic healthcare standards was that many infants did not live to see their first birthday. It is estimated that in the Middle Ages as many as one-third of babies perished during their first year, while many others were claimed by diseases and accidents before the age of ten. This harsh reality could lead to rather detached parenting styles, with mothers and fathers not wanting to get too attached to children who could die at any time.

Also, since birth control was not reliable and was frowned upon by the Church, families tended to be large, which meant that less attention would be focused on individual children and that there was little tolerance for laziness and insolence. Young ones quickly learned the importance of being useful.

Peasant children, who made up the vast majority of young people at this time, started at a young age contributing to farm work, chores, and household labor — tending animals, fetching water, and helping with harvests. By age 7-12, responsibilities increased significantly. Noble or urban children might have more structured education or apprenticeships, but idleness was rare. There was no extended period of protected, obligation-free development like modern schooling and adolescence.

At the same time, however, childhood was recognized as a distinct phase with play including toys such as wooden knights and hobby horses and games like hide-and-seek and mock battles, and special treatment by age. While historian Philippe Ariès had popularized the notion in the 1960s that medieval children were treated like “little adults” with no concept of childhood, this idea has been largely debunked, with modern historians pointing to sources such as coroners’ records that show kids sometimes died while playing, proving that they had leisure time.

But this doesn’t change the fact that play was secondary to survival and pervasive hardship largely defined existence, with famine, war, epidemic disease and physical danger characterizing childhood for rich and poor alike. And the fact that families tended to be large meant that each child received far less attention than the average child of a middle-class family today. With historically low birth rates characterizing the modern West, coupled with less need for children to help with daily chores, the typical family has far fewer and more idle children, as well as more doting parents.

While it could hardly be argued that medieval children were broadly happier — considering the hardship that they often endured — they were certainly more self-reliant and although they endured unspeakable tragedy, they suffered less from modern mental health strains introduced by excessive screentime, academic pressure, and social isolation.

In this way, at least, modern parents might have a thing or two to learn from their ancestors of earlier ages.

Nathaniel Parry is the author of Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era and How Christmas Became Christmas. He is the co-author of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush and editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. Follow him on Substack and X.

If you enjoyed the above article, please restack it and click the like button. It would also be greatly appreciated if you recommend this newsletter in your Substack recommendations, and, finally, be sure you are subscribed to receive future articles from Essential History.

When pop singer Billie Eilish took the stage at the Grammys earlier this year and declared that “no one is illegal on stolen land,” she was not just joining a popular chorus of criticizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement or pandering to the music industry’s elite for cheap accolades.

More than just than a one-off applause line to pampered celebrities, the sentiment behind the remark in fact represented the zenith of a well-developed ideology that has been nurtured for decades at American schools, Hollywood, and in popular history.

But there are a number of indications pointing to a cultural shift, suggesting a possible return to a more balanced and complete telling of American history. While America’s culture wars are nothing new, the pendulum has clearly gone quite far in one direction for an extended period of time, and judging from a number of recent developments it may be time for a course correction.

The most obvious development, of course, is the fact that Donald J. Trump was elected president in 2024 running on an explicitly nationalist platform that embraced a celebratory — rather than apologetic — view of American history, while also promising to deport illegal aliens, secure the border, and “make America great again.”

“Our American ancestors turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic of the most extraordinary citizens on Earth,” Trump said triumphantly at his inaugural address in 2025. “Americans pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness. They crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West, ended slavery, rescued millions from tyranny, lifted billions from poverty, harnessed electricity, split the atom, launched mankind into the heavens, and put the universe of human knowledge into the palm of the human hand.”

Although Hollywood elites and pop stars may cringe hearing this version of American history, it was clear during Election 2024 that their opinions no longer resonate widely with American voters — if they ever did. Efforts to rally popular support for Kamala Harris by mobilizing celebrity endorsements clearly had little effect, while millions of Americans embraced the unapologetically patriotic “America first” approach offered by the MAGA movement.

Recognizing this cultural shift, some celebrities have come to realize on some level their waning influence and are wisely — if belatedly — choosing to refrain from joining the political fray. Hunger Games actor Jennifer Lawrence, for one, has conceded that celebrity opinions and endorsements have little impact and only serve to exacerbate national divisions. Arguing that criticizing MAGA only “add[s] fuel to a fire,” she expressed a clear desire to avoid alienating audiences.

“I don’t want to start turning people off to films and to art,” Lawrence said, “because they don’t like my political opinions.”

Lawrence, however, appears to be a distinct minority in Hollywood — especially judging by recent political displays at events like this year’s Oscars and Grammys. The attitudes expressed by figures like Jonathan Glazer, Ramy Youssef, and of course Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell were all brazenly political.

Policy Implications and Broader Trends

The policy implications of Eilish’s “stolen land” statement — underlined by her subsequent “fuck ICE” remark — were neither subtle nor nuanced.

The slogan “no one is illegal on stolen land,” indeed, suggests that as a nation established on territory acquired through conquest, the United States cannot legitimately prevent new arrivals from entering, because the original settlement itself was an illegitimate act of dispossession.

In the context of the Trump administration’s efforts to enforce immigration law and carry out mass deportations, it asserts that the nation’s imperfect origins render efforts to control its borders morally invalid. But the claim that past conquest of indigenous peoples permanently undermines a nation’s right to sovereignty simply does not hold up.

Not only is human history filled with examples of migration, conflict, and territorial displacement — and therefore most nations’ borders would be illegitimate if the principle were applied universally — more fundamentally, national sovereignty is not based on the moral purity of a nation’s founding or the “righteousness” of past wars. It rests instead on effective control of territory, negotiated agreements, and widespread international recognition — not on the ability to perpetually revisit and undo the alleged wrongs of centuries-old conquests.

While all of this is so obvious that it should go without saying, the mantra that “no one is illegal on stolen land” has nevertheless become ubiquitous — not just in Hollywood but also at left-wing anti-ICE protests and in merchandise available online — indicating in fact something much deeper than the erosion of critical thinking skills or appreciation for basic concepts of sovereignty and international relations.

What it reveals is a widely held disdain for and even shame over the history of America’s founding. It embraces a narrative of collective guilt rather than collective pride, prompting white people — in particular — to disavow the actions of their ancestors, who, according to the new conventional wisdom, are increasingly viewed as villains if not genocidal monsters.

At the same time, it prompts people of color to largely see themselves as aggrieved victims, fundamentally undermining national cohesion and fueling a divisive identity politics driven by animosity against the founders and white settlers of the country.

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People’s History

Much of this sentiment is a direct result of a campaign that has been carried out for decades in America’s educational institutions, and in particular the outsized influence of revisionist historians such as James Loewen, Eric Foner, and Howard Zinn. Their radical perspectives substantially contributed to broader shifts in historiography and teaching, helping to popularize “history from below” and greater inclusion of topics like labor struggles, civil rights movements, and critiques of imperialism.

Zinn’s seminal work A People’s History of the United States, published in 1980, found an exceptionally wide readership, selling well over two million copies over the years and influencing generations of historians and educators. Remaining in print for nearly five decades, it has been adapted into various formats including a young people’s version, graphic editions, and companion volumes like Voices of a People’s History. It also gained notoriety through references in films like Good Will Hunting, TV shows such as The Sopranos and The Simpsons, and celebrity endorsements.

The book is frequently assigned as supplemental reading in high schools and colleges to introduce multiple perspectives and encourage critical thinking about power, inequality, and resistance. Beyond that, its influence has extended through the Zinn Education Project, which provides supplementary teaching materials to schools around the country. Tens of thousands of teachers have reportedly accessed its resources.

To educators and students alike, Zinn’s approach has widely been seen as a welcome alternative to the top-down version of history that had traditionally been presented in America’s schools. Rather than focusing solely on how “great men” shaped the world, Zinn told America’s story from the point of view of Native Americans, African Americans, women, and industrial workers, highlighting the powerful role they played.

At its best, A People’s History has made history come alive with stories of common people struggling for their rights and wielding the power of collective action.

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Undermining National Cohesion

But while it may have been seen by many as an attempt to reclaim a rich historical narrative that had been overly simplified for generations, the book also served to radically deconstruct shared assumptions about the goodness of the nation, or whether the nation even exists as such.

Zinn questioned the very idea that “there really is such a thing as ‘the United States,’” challenging the notion that it is “a community of people with common interests.” In a chapter entitled “Tyranny is Tyranny,” he argued that the American Revolution was not a revolution at all but a cynical attempt by elites to establish “popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.” By “creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British Empire.”

He also criticized the historical treatment of heroes such as Christopher Columbus and instead sought to amplify the stories of victims such as the Arawak Indians, turning the table on the perspective by which history is presented. He strongly rejected the “quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress ... in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders.”

According to Zinn, it was time to tell history from the point of view of the oppressed, the conquered, working people, victims.

New Conventional Wisdom

While perhaps at the time, coming on the heels of the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 70s, this radical new approach to understanding history may have been seen as a badly needed and long overdue revision of traditional historiography, the irony is that it has now become more or less the conventional wisdom. It is no longer radical to see the Native Americans as the dispossessed victims of American history or explorers like Columbus as the villains — and indeed this is now such standard fare that a pop star can declare the United States “stolen land” on national television and expect to be greeted with praise rather than derision.

In fact, the term “settler-colonial” is now widely seen as a pejorative, used as shorthand for Europeans who illegitimately stole land from indigenous people of color, while of course simultaneously introducing Africans to the continent as slave labor. The problem is that this version of history is just as simplified and as problematic as the one that it sought to supplant decades ago — and perhaps more so.

While there might be more than a kernel of truth in the perspective offered by Zinn, it is nevertheless a completely one-sided approach that omits key details and context. The reality is that the founding of the United States was incredibly nuanced and the indigenous populations that were eventually displaced often benefited from contact with whites but repeatedly chose conflict over peaceful coexistence.

The revisionist approach to American history also overlooks the fact that white settlers were highly vulnerable, vastly outnumbered in an unknown and hostile land, and at the beginning, at least, were largely on the losing end of the conflict.

The tragic reality is that while both Indians and whites benefited to some degree from cooperation, they ultimately could not overcome their deep-seated differences and mutual suspicions, succumbing to an ever-escalating series of tit-for-tat violence that came to define the relationship. Native Americans, while sometimes welcoming and seeing benefits of developing trading partnerships, also fiercely defended what they considered their territories and could be exceptionally brutal and cruel to those they perceived as threats.

Early Contact

Whites’ first-hand experiences with these cruelties date all the way back to the first English settlement in the Americas, when the Jamestown colony was established and was promptly met with hostility and violence. On May 26, 1607, just a month after settlers had arrived in Virginia, they were attacked by 200 Powhatan Indians, who continued to launch sporadic raids on the colony in subsequent years.

On March 2, 1622, a group of Powhatans came to the Virginia colony “with deer, turkeys, fish, fruits, and other provisions to sell us,” English explorer John Smith recalled in his History of Virginia. The Indians came unarmed, signalling their friendly intent, but this was a ruse. As soon as they entered the settlement, they grabbed any tools or weapons available and killed all the settlers they could — men, women, and children.

“In this attack 347 of the English of both sexes and all ages were killed,” explained Captain Anthony Chester, who was in Virginia at the time of the attack. “Simply killing our people did not satisfy their inhuman nature, they dragged the dead bodies all over the country, tearing them limb from limb, and carrying the pieces in triumph around.”

Early missionaries, too, would feel the wrath of inimical Indians. In 1636, a French Jesuit priest named Isaac Jogues traveled to the New World to bring Christianity to the indigenous peoples, committing himself to the “conversion and welfare of the natives.” It wouldn’t quite work out that way, however, mainly because the missionaries brought not only the Bible but also diseases such as smallpox.

Tribes such as the Huron, Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca were hit hard with sickness and crop failures, and came to believe the missionaries, known as “Black Coats” because of their robes, were using magic to kill them. The Mohawks decided to eliminate the threat and went into Huron territory to take the Christians captive.

The captives were tortured, with Father Jogues experiencing some of the worst abuse. The Mohawks ripped out his fingernails, gnawed his fingers until the bones were visible, and a woman cut off his thumb. He and his fellow Christians were placed on a platform where Indians pelted them with objects, including hot coals thrown by children.

Over several days, they were marched from village to village, where they were flogged and beaten by sticks and rods. Jogues was hung from a wooden plank and left to die but an observer took pity on him and cut him down. He was then banished and spent the next few years wandering alone in the woods, starving and cold, until finally managing to escape back to France in autumn of 1643.

A History of Violence

A few decades later, in 1675, King Philip’s War would break out in New England, leading to unprecedented violence in the colonies and souring white-Indian relations for generations. A devastating uprising led by Wampanoag sachem Metacom, known to the English as King Philip, this conflict was marked by exceptional brutality and introduced many white settlers to the Indian practice of scalping.

In an attack on February 10, 1676, a large force of Nipmuc, Wampanoag, and allied warriors attacked the frontier town of Lancaster, Massachusetts, killed around a dozen settlers in the initial assault and took 24 captives, including Mary Rowlandson, wife of the local minister. Rowlandson’s widely published captivity narrative describes the warriors returning to camp with English scalps, which they displayed and triumphed over in a ritualistic manner. “Oh, the hideous insulting and triumphing that there was over some English men’s scalps that they had taken,” Rowlandson wrote.

King Philip’s War finally ended on August 12, 1676, when a mixed force led by Captain Benjamin Church tracked Metacom down and killed him as he attempted to flee. Metacom’s body was beheaded and quartered, with his head displayed on a pike in Plymouth for a quarter-century as a trophy and warning.

With their leader dead and forces shattered, organized resistance in southern New England subsided, but despite a tenuous peace being established, some tribes continued to resist, leading to King William’s War in the 1690s and one of the most notorious incidents in colonial New England history — in which a group attacked the town of Haverhill on March 15, 1697, and captured 40-year-old Hannah Duston, her newborn baby and her neighbor Mary Neff.

According to the account Duston later gave to Cotton Mather, the Indians took the women captive and killed the baby. “They dash’d out the brains of the infant against a tree,” Mather wrote, “and several of the other captives, as they began to tire in the sad journey, were soon sent unto their long home.”

The two women were told that they would be stripped and made to run the gauntlet — an exceptionally horrific punishment in which prisoners were forced to run between two parallel lines of armed Native American warriors who beat, clubbed, and struck them with weapons as they passed, often leaving captives severely injured or dead — but Duston managed to arouse the other captives in the middle of the night and slayed their captors. Duston and the other escaped captives made their way down the Merrimac River to an outlying settlement, where they were welcomed as heroes.

Dark Symbolism

To the Indians, targeting children and women, or ripping fetuses from their wombs, was considered justified because it symbolized the destruction of a people that posed a threat to their way of life.

The practice of scalping, moreover, which appears to have been prevalent among a number of tribes at the time of European arrival in North America, held an important cultural significance to Indian warriors, who considered collecting as many enemy scalps as possible a status symbol and proof of their bravery. As an 18th-century French soldier, known only by his initials J.C.B., described the practice:

When a war party has captured one or more prisoners that cannot be taken away, it is the usual custom to kill them by breaking their heads with the blows of a tomahawk ... When he has struck two or three blows, the savage quickly seizes his knife, and makes an incision around the hair from the upper part of the forehead to the back of the neck. Then he puts his foot on the shoulder of the victim, whom he has turned over face down, and pulls the hair off with both hands, from back to front ... This hasty operation is no sooner finished than the savage fastens the scalp to his belt and goes on his way. ... When prepared, the scalp is fastened to the end of a long stick, and carried on his shoulder in triumph to the village or place where he wants to put it. But as he nears each place on his way, he gives as many cries as he has scalps to announce his arrival and show his bravery. Sometimes as many as 15 scalps are fastened on the same stick. When there are too many for one stick, they decorate several sticks with the scalps.

Besides being a demonstration of a warrior’s prowess in battle and an effective intimidation tactic, scalping was also an important tribal bonding custom, used to comfort those who were mourning the loss of a loved one. In a narrative published by an Irish immigrant named Mary Jemison, who was abducted and sold to the Seneca tribe after her family was murdered in a Shawnee raid in 1755, the function of scalping in easing the pain of the bereaved is described in detail:

It is a custom of the Indians, when one of their number is slain or taken prisoner in battle, to give to the nearest relative to the dead or absent, a prisoner, if they have chanced to take one, and if not, to give him the scalp of an enemy. On the return of the Indians from conquest, which is always announced by peculiar shoutings, demonstrations of joy, and the exhibition of some trophy of victory, the mourners come forward and make their claims.

Torture, likewise, was considered an important component of tribal life. Jemison explains that in her time living with the Seneca, she witnessed many cruel acts performed on captives, often justified as a method to comfort the bereaved:

All the prisoners that are taken in battle and carried to the encampment or town by the Indians, are given to the bereaved families, till their number is made good. And unless the mourners have but just received the news of their bereavement, and are under the operation of a paroxysm of grief, anger and revenge; or, unless the prisoner is very old, sickly, or homely, they generally save him, and treat him kindly. But if their mental wound is fresh, their loss so great that they deem it irreparable, or if their prisoner or prisoners do not meet their approbation, no torture, let it be ever so cruel, seems sufficient to make them satisfaction.

Besides its function as a tool in the mourning process, torture also appears to have a religious component. Torture’s conventions were well understood by Indians, who viewed it as central to their spiritual identity and in defining masculinity, with the victim of the torment expected to demonstrate fortitude and bravery while he suffered.

Manly ideals were represented by the ability to stoically endure physical pain, which they believed also brought them closer to supernatural entities like Maushop — a giant who, it was believed, created the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard from sand emptied out of his moccasins. For Indian men, maintaining these spiritual associations was essential to success in life, particularly in masculine endeavors like hunting, warfare, governance, and marriage. In order to cultivate spiritual identity, it was important to demonstrate courage in the face of torture.

Not all Indians agreed with the practice, however. In 1783, the year the newly formed United States signed the Treaty of Paris with Great Britain, a young Shawnee warrior named Tecumseh strongly objected to the torture of captives, arguing that the burning of prisoners was cruel and cowardly. Accounts from adopted white Shawnee Stephen Ruddell and later historians confirm he often intervened to stop mistreatment of white captives. Ruddell noted that Tecumseh “was always averse to taking prisoners in his warfare, but when prisoners fell into his hands, he always treated them with as much humanity as if they had been in the hands of civilized people.”

But Tecumseh was largely the exception to the rule of Indian cruelty, and to the white Christian settlers, naturally, the torture and wanton violence that they used routinely against men, women and children appeared to be nothing more than heinous brutality — solidifying their reputation as “merciless savages” as Native Americans were described in the Declaration of Independence.

This reputation would plague the indigenous tribes for the rest of early American history, with raids against settlements and stories of atrocities coloring whites’ views of Indians, who for their part also experienced cruelty at the hands of enraged whites. Often, this cruelty was retribution for an earlier incident, leading to a never-ending escalation of violence.

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Trail of Tears

This, of course, is the historical backdrop to controversial policies such as the U.S. government’s removal of certain tribes — and the woke left’s current claims about “stolen land.”

The reality is that the frontier in the early 19th century was a violent borderland where raids, livestock theft, ambushes, and retaliatory killings occurred on a regular basis. Far from a peaceful coexistence zone, it was a dangerous area where white settlers faced constant attacks from organized Indian resistance. Policymakers like President Andrew Jackson, who had previous military experience, viewed removal as a practical step to separate the white and Indian populations, end the cycle of violence, and secure the frontier for American expansion.

The southeast region, in particular, had a long record of Indian raids on white settlements. These were far from isolated incidents, with frontier families living under a constant threat of hit-and-run violence. Creeks and some Cherokee factions, for instance, ruthlessly hit frontier farms and outposts in Tennessee and Georgia, burning cabins and killing civilians on a regular basis.

Jackson had fought defensively against these raids as a young man in Tennessee before leading larger campaigns. The Creek War of 1813-14 escalated this tension, with Red Stick Creeks launching repeated attacks on American settlements and prompting Jackson’s decisive campaign that crushed their military power at Horseshoe Bend. While this conflict involved mass killings on both sides, it left settlers with a justified fear that unchecked tribes could spark renewed warfare.

Seminoles in Florida posed an even more direct threat. They sheltered runaway slaves, conducted raids on white plantations and forts, and later ignited the Second Seminole War in 1835. Warriors attacked U.S. troops and settlements, killing more than 100 soldiers in one early ambush alone.

Even the more “civilized” tribes like the Chickasaw had factions that violently resisted encroachment, confirming in the minds of many whites that assimilation experiments such as the introduction of farming and Christianity could not resolve the core issue: competing claims to the same land.

By the 1820s, illegal white squatters poured into Native lands, and Indians responded with force. Georgia and Alabama explicitly complained that the Indian presence invited disorder and danger, and settlers petitioned for protection because they feared more violence. With past conflicts proving that coexistence often meant bloodshed, Jackson and southern states concluded that leaving powerful tribes as semi-sovereign enclaves invited perpetual low-level war or worse.

In his December 1830 message to Congress, therefore, Jackson proposed removal as a necessary action to end “all possible danger of collision” between tribes and white settlements while strengthening the southwest frontier. Jackson, drawing from his Creek and Seminole campaigns, saw proximity as the root problem: mixed populations guaranteed friction, raids, and escalation. Removal west of the Mississippi, he argued, would create a buffer, protect settlers, and let states develop without internal threats.

This, of course, was the genesis of the Trail of Tears, which proved to be a brutal and deadly policy for the Natives, with many dying from disease, exposure, and hardship. It is important to remember, however, that the policy did not emerge in a vacuum, but originated from real threats that had already produced countless wars and raids.

What They Don’t Teach You

Conservative commentator Matt Walsh explored this topic in a recent documentary called “What Schools Don’t Teach You About American Indians,” which is the second instalment of his Real History series airing on multiple platforms including Spotify and YouTube. Challenging the mainstream narrative of Native Americans as peaceful noble savages victimized by genocidal white settlers, Walsh does a deep dive into the 1830s removals, noting that the “Trail of Tears” label did not exist until it was popularized during the heyday of 1960s-70s activism.

Walsh also points out that the Indian Removal Act involved negotiated treaties, not purely forced marches, and that the Cherokee received millions of dollars for compensation. Moreover, many Indians relocated voluntarily, and popular death toll estimates in the thousands are almost certainly exaggerated, relying on unreliable hearsay figures.

Portraying it as a flawed but understandable relocation policy amid conflict, not an exceptionally cruel atrocity, Walsh contrasts the policy with what Indians typically did to each other when they conquered land — slaughtering all the men and enslaving the women and children and even engaging in heinous practices such as cannibalism.

More broadly, he argues that the popular approach to teaching this aspect of American history fits a pattern of schools and popular culture promoting myths designed to instill guilt, while ignoring pre-colonial intertribal warfare, scalping, raids, torture, and property conflicts among tribes. U.S. victory, Walsh argues, came through numbers, logistics, and disease rather than a deliberate extermination policy.

Although critics might point out that Walsh is largely unqualified to engage in serious historical research as he is not a trained historian and therefore lacks the skills needed to weigh evidence and assess sources, there is also an advantage to lacking formal education in that it provides the intellectual freedom necessary to explore controversial topics without the constraints of institutional indoctrination. With academia widely tarnished by woke ideology and politically correct “groupthink,” it may sometimes require outsiders to effectively challenge the conventional wisdom, shift the cultural narrative, and establish a more nuanced historiography.

This approach also fits within a broader trend of re-examining early American history and in particular the truth about white-Indian relations, with popular YouTube channels such as Elephants in Rooms tackling the topic with a more critical eye. In a video with more than two million views called “What they don’t teach you about Native Americans,” journalist-turned-YouTuber Ken LaCorte challenges the common narrative taught in schools and portrayed in Hollywood: that Native Americans were peaceful victims of greedy European colonizers who committed genocide in a systematic campaign of displacement and land theft.

LaCorte argues this “kinder, gentler” version of Native Americans whitewashes history, noting that many tribes routinely engaged in raiding, scalping, torture, and warfare, highlighting the Comanche, in particular, as a dominant and fearsome example of Native power and violence.

The Comanche have gained notoriety in recent years for their extreme brutality, with S.C. Gwynne’s book Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History enjoying widespread commercial success — selling as many as a million copies and being featured in numerous documentaries and podcasts, including the Joe Rogan Experience.

Gwynne’s sweeping narrative of the Comanche documents their long conflict with white settlers in Texas, highlighting the brutality of Comanche raids where those who weren’t killed outright were often taken captive and subjected to exquisite torments.

As described in detail in the book, captured women faced immediate gang rape sometimes involving dozens of warriors, followed by mutilation, torture, or death, while men were often subjected to prolonged torture for entertainment, revenge, or ritual purposes. Among the more creative methods of torture developed by the Comanche were placing hot coals or burning embers on the abdomen or inside wounds, roasting victims alive over fires, staking victims out and applying fire to hands and feet until nerves were destroyed, burying people with eyelids cut off so eyes would burn in the sun, sewing multiple captives into a shrinking rawhide bag that suffocated them as it dried in the sun, and placing victims over ant nests after mutilation.

Towards a New Historiography

With these sorts of accounts of Indian brutality becoming more widely understood and appreciated, a notable shift in historiography appears to be taking place. This is being seen both in historical literature and in popular culture.

For example, Jeff Fynn-Paul’s Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World, published in 2023, argues that many prevailing narratives — particularly those emphasizing theft of land, widespread genocide, deliberate mass murder, rape, or intentional spread of disease like smallpox — are exaggerated and based on shoddy scholarship, misinformation, or ideological distortion. Reception of the book, naturally, has been polarized along ideological lines, but many reviewers have praised it as a well-researched, engaging corrective that restores badly needed balance to the historiography of “white settler-colonialism.”

Hollywood, too, appears to be changing its approach to the topic. While earlier portrayals of white-Indian relations such as 1990’s Dances with Wolves were unabashedly sympathetic to Native Americans — depicting whites as destructive invaders while idealizing the Lakota as noble and peaceable — recent films don’t shy away from depicting Native brutality, with the 2025 Netflix series American Primeval, for example, exploring the underbelly of westward expansion.

A gritty depiction of life on the frontier, American Primeval graphically portrays Indians’ brutality against pioneers, with scenes depicting raids, scalping, throat-slitting, torture, and attacks on wagon trains and individuals.

Hostiles, another relatively recent Hollywood Western, is a somber drama set in 1892, during the waning days of the American Indian Wars. Opening with a brutal depiction of frontier violence, an attack by a Comanche war party against a white homesteading family, the film portrays marauding Indians as a constant threat on the frontier.

It is this context that has been missing for some time from the historiography of white-Indian relations. While students at American universities have been consistently taught about episodes like the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, in which a peaceful encampment of Cheyenne and Arapaho was attacked by a Colorado volunteer militia in a surprise dawn attack, or the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, in which the U.S. 7th Cavalry killed hundreds of Lakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, what is often omitted is the context that these atrocities took place.

Without excusing atrocities committed by whites, the broader history is essential to understand the underlying dynamics — otherwise, a one-sided and inaccurate image would prevail. It is therefore a positive development to see a more comprehensive approach taking place with amateur historians challenging conventional wisdom and Hollywood tackling the issues with far more nuance than earlier generations of filmmakers.

Still though, there is clearly a long way to go, as Billie Eilish’s outburst at the Grammys made clear. The persistent claims of the left that “no one is illegal on stolen land,” while both ahistorical and illogical, continue to reflect a deep-seated bias among broad sectors of the American public against what is disparagingly called “white settler colonialism,” and in favor of the perceived victims of American history such as Native Americans.

At the same time, however, the popular backlash to Eilish’s remarks have been palpable. She faced sharp criticism and widespread accusations of hypocrisy for owning a multimillion-dollar mansion on ancestral Tongva tribal land. Critics demanded that she “return” her home to the tribe or open it up to illegal immigrants, highlighting the gap between her rhetoric and personal action. The Tongva tribe even issued a statement criticizing her for grandstanding while ignoring their specific claims of land ownership.

“As the First People of the greater Los Angeles basin, we do understand that her home is situated in our ancestral land,” the tribe said. “It is our hope that in future discussions, the tribe can explicitly be referenced to ensure the public understands that the greater Los Angeles Basin remains Gabrieleno Tongva territory.”

The Billie Eilish episode is a reminder that while virtue signaling and grandstanding might win some quick accolades from likeminded liberals, ultimately, the woke ideology is doomed due to its hypocrisies and internal contradictions. Multi-millionaire celebrities who have profited handsomely from the American way of life are ultimately in no position to lecture the rest of the country on their failures to rectify what the left considers historical injustices — often based on incomplete and biased understandings of the past.

More fundamentally, though, it underlines the need for a more nuanced approach to American history, recalling that the perceived injustices that have long been presented as the basis of America’s founding are not quite as simple or one-sided as woke ideology would have us believe.

Nathaniel Parry is the author of Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era and How Christmas Became Christmas. He is the co-author of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush and editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. Follow him on Substack and X.

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A little more than a decade and a half ago, during the first term of the Obama administration, prominent liberals, progressive commentators, academics, and mainstream media outlets relentlessly mocked the participants of the anti-tax Tea Party movement for what they portrayed as a lack of historical understanding, particularly how the movement invoked the American Revolution and misused terms like “tyranny” to advance a right-wing political agenda.

Scores of articles and commentaries appeared at the time, accusing Tea Party supporters of misappropriating the Founding Fathers’ principles in ways that ignored historical context and lacked nuance. One Slate piece described this as “flagrant abuse” of history, suggesting many participants were “utterly uneducated” and framing such views as both laughable and dangerous.

Historians and pundits argued that the movement “assaulted” honest history by simplifying or sanitizing the revolution into a self-righteous narrative to oppose big government, including Obama-era initiatives such as the Affordable Care Act. Jill Lepore’s book The Whites of Their Eyes critiqued how Tea Partiers treated elementary-school-level understandings of 1776 as profound insight, with “comic-booky” associations.

Coverage often portrayed participants as “know-nothings” and “buffoons” engaging in “paranoid style” politics with conspiratorial fantasies.

Essentially, through its widespread influence in the media, the left was able to successfully discredit the Tea Partiers as unserious and intellectually incapable of appreciating the revolution’s complexities, establishing a widely agreed upon narrative that conservatives are ignorant, intolerant and dumb, while liberals are educated, nuanced and cerebral.

The Left’s Tea Party Movement

Fast-forward to 2026 and what we see in the so-called “No Kings” movement is the complete inversion of this narrative.

In the third installment of the movement’s nationwide – and even international – mobilization efforts, Saturday’s large-scale protests took a page from the Tea Party playbook in appropriating themes and images from the American Revolution in a general assault on logic and historical accuracy. Protesters dressed up in Revolutionary War garb, waved signs likening Donald Trump to King George III, and even read out grievances in a recreation of the Declaration of Independence’s 27 grievances against the British monarch.

In Princeton, New Jersey, Governor Mikie Sherrill spoke beside the Princeton Battle Monument, which commemorates George Washington’s 1777 victory over the armies of King George III, tying the location’s history to the protest’s anti-Trump message. In Michigan and elsewhere, organizers and participants described the protests as drawing on “American Revolutionary ideals of the Declaration of Independence, which rejected the rule of King George III,” portraying Trump as “acting more like a king than a president.”

At a demonstration in Philadelphia, where the Second Continental Congress formally severed ties with Great Britain nearly 250 years ago, a speaker directly tied grievances from the Declaration of Independence against King George III to Trump administration policies, including the deportation efforts of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Deploring “the inhumanity of immigration” enforcement, activists placed federal law enforcement in the same rhetorical category as monarchical abuses.

The problem is that these messages fail in all the same ways that progressives ridiculed the Tea Party for during the Obama era – and possibly many more. Not only does the No Kings movement misrepresent history for a political agenda and fail to appreciate the nuances of the American Revolution, it draws parallels where in fact none exist.

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Ahistorical Parallels

While the Tea Party could rightly be criticized for getting some details wrong – such as portraying the Boston Tea Party as a reaction to a tax hike when in reality it was a protest against a targeted tax break to support a British monopoly – the liberals today are pretending that the enforcement of federal immigration law is in some way reminiscent of monarchical tyranny a quarter-millennium ago, which is a blatantly disingenuous and ahistorical portrayal of the 18th century revolutionary movement.

Immigration policies did not feature prominently in colonial debates, but the reality is that the patriots’ understanding of the purpose of government would have probably aligned their sympathies more closely with the mission of ICE than with open-borders advocates. Understanding government’s primary role as the protection of its citizens, there is ample reason to believe that their views on immigration would have been diametrically opposed to today’s No Kings activists.

While colonists didn’t oppose immigration per se and indeed considered it vital to encourage population growth to support economic expansion, they only wanted it to take place on certain terms and tended to favor settlement by Protestants from likeminded countries such as Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and France.

Through incentives like land grants, debt relief, and rapid local naturalization processes that granted rights such as voting and property ownership, the colonies sought to rapidly build their populations and fill labor needs, but they were careful to ensure that only “desirable” individuals relocated to the New World. Local measures, for example, sometimes barred paupers and the 1740 Plantation Act expressly discriminated against Catholics, requiring oaths and religious tests (with exemptions for Jews and Quakers).

They also strongly objected to British policies that dumped “malcontents” into the American colonies as convict labor. Particularly when immigration undermined safety and homogeneity, colonists tended to reject policies imposed on them by Britain.

Yet, starting in earnest with the adoption of the Transportation Act in 1718, the British began transporting shiploads of undesirables to America, and for the next six decades – until the revolution broke out in the mid-1770s – more than 52,000 criminals found themselves working essentially as slaves in the colonies.

So many were sent to the New World that it led to growing anger among the colonial elite, with Benjamin Franklin complaining that England was forcing these convict transfers against their wishes.

“The Government at home will not suffer our mistaken Assemblies to make any Law for preventing or discouraging the Importation of Convicts from Great Britain,” Franklin wrote in the Pennsylvania Gazette, “for this kind Reason, ‘That such Laws are against the Publick Utility, as they tend to prevent the Improvement and Well Peopling of the Colonies.’”

Franklin likened the British convicted criminals to rattlesnakes and suggested that if England kept sending these rogues and vagabonds, America should respond by rounding up actual rattlesnakes and sending them to England.

Although this issue did not feature prominently in the expressed grievances against the Crown, it was indeed a source of friction, with colonial assemblies, for example in Virginia and Maryland, repeatedly trying to restrict convict imports through legislation, citing moral corruption, increased crime, security risks, and the “infamy” it brought to the colonies. London often overruled or disallowed these laws, viewing convict resettlement useful for relieving English jails and populating the colonies.

So, while supporting a restricted form of immigration, the colonial elite also balked at uncontrolled mass immigration, which would arguably align them more closely with today’s conservatives than with liberals.

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What King?

More generally, it should be noted that it’s inaccurate to portray America’s constitutional system as an unaccountable monarchy. Although some of the Trump administration’s actions may be pushing the limits on executive power, the fact is that America’s constitutional system has provided ample checks and balances on his rule – to the point of angering conservatives who allege that democracy is being hijacked by “activist judges” overstepping their constitutional authority.

While Trump’s policies as president have certainly been controversial, in some cases court challenges have led to injunctions blocking his policy agenda.

Indeed, as demonstrated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling against President Trump’s sweeping tariffs, the independence of the judiciary is alive and well. Over Trump’s strong objections, on February 20 the court ruled that these tariffs, imposed via executive orders under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, exceeded presidential authority.

A number of Trump appointees joined Chief Justice John Roberts in holding that IEEPA’s language allowing the president to “regulate importation” during declared national emergencies does not authorize imposing tariffs, a core congressional power under Article I to lay duties and imposts.

In terms of immigration policy, courts have halted fast-track deportations, ruling they risk 5th Amendment due process violations for migrants potentially eligible to stay, blocked the deportation of some migrant children who crossed the border alone, and stopped the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport suspected gang members with limited due process. U.S. courts have also reversed Trump’s birthright citizenship restrictions.

All in all, the Trump administration has faced more than 700 lawsuits challenging its policies, primarily executive orders and actions on immigration, tariffs, federal spending, government efficiency, DEI initiatives, elections, and agency overhauls. In more than 150 cases, federal courts have at least partially blocked or temporarily halted the administration’s policies through temporary restraining orders, preliminary injunctions, or other relief.

On the state level, Democratic leaders in sanctuary jurisdictions across the United States have defiantly prohibited local cooperation with ICE operations, with California Governor Gavin Newsom signing laws restricting data sharing with ICE, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker refusing National Guard deployment for raids, and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz – who has referred to ICE as the “gestapo” – encouraging citizens “not just to resist, but to help people who are in danger” of being deported.

Mayors have also defied the Trump administration, with Brandon Johnson of Chicago reaffirming that his city will continue to shield illegal immigrants, Michelle Wu of Boston hosting anti-enforcement rallies, Karen Bass of Los Angeles blaming law enforcement for riots in her city, and Mike Johnston of Denver preparing lawsuits against the administration.

And of course, it should not be lost on anyone that the United States is currently experiencing widespread disruption at airports because Democrats in Congress have refused to fund the Department of Homeland Security until Trump bows to their demands over ICE reform.

This, obviously, is not how it works in an absolute monarchy or a dictatorship, where the ruler wields total power and the judiciary and legislative branches – such as they exist – are wholly subservient to the executive. It is also a far cry from the pre-revolutionary situation in America, where power ultimately resided not in colonial bodies but was wielded by a monarch and faraway parliament.

To many observers, therefore, the No Kings activists seem painfully detached from reality.

Some Kings

The lack of the No Kings movement’s self-awareness was underscored by the messaging discrepancies in the international solidarity events this weekend, which served as a stark reminder of how silly the movement really is.

While the domestic “No Kings” message targeted what organizers described as authoritarian or monarchical tendencies in the Trump administration, internationally, the literal “kings” phrasing risked being misinterpreted in constitutional monarchies like the United Kingdom, Canada, Spain, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and others where a monarch serves as head of state.

In these countries, solidarity demonstrations were often renamed to avoid confusion with anti-monarchist, republican opposition.

Organizers, including Democrats Abroad and Indivisible Abroad chapters, explicitly adjusted the branding to avoid giving the impression that the movement is actually opposed to monarchy. Internal notes and public statements mentioned changing “No Kings” to “No Tyrants,” as well as “No Crowns” to “No Clowns” in order to keep the focus strictly on opposing Donald Trump rather than local political systems.

So, to be clear, in countries with actual kings, the protesters didn’t dare to demand an end to monarchy – as that might have offended the kings. Only in America, a country that hasn’t had a king for 250 years, did activists demand an end to the rule of kings.

Indivisible?

The unintended irony of this movement was also on display in the name of the organization primarily spearheading it. The Indivisible organization touts itself as promoting unity but eschews any messaging that could actually serve to unite the American people.

For example, despite recent polling showing that 62 percent of Americans believe that the Republican and Democratic parties do such a poor job that a third major party is needed, there is not a word on Indivisible’s website about reforming the electoral system to allow multiparty competition. While Indivisible insists Americans must unite to “stop the rise of authoritarianism in the United States and to demand a real democracy,” its prescription to do so is simply to “break MAGA’s political strength, and build a winning majority coalition of our own.”

In other words, elect Democrats.

With a record 45 percent of U.S. adults identifying today as political independents, and Democrats and Republicans each at about 27 percent, Indivisible clearly doesn’t represent a majority of Americans, or even a plurality.

If it were serious about fighting the threats to democracy, you might expect some emphasis on issues like campaign finance reform or election integrity. But that is clearly not on the agenda.

There is also a good deal of blatant hypocrisy on display in the messaging on “oligarchy.” Despite being funded by billionaires – including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, real estate heiress Patricia Bauman, and oil heiress Leah Hunt-Hendrix, as well as billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations – the website of No Kings rails against “billionaire cronies.”

Also, according to No Kings, Trump is “threatening to overtake elections” and is “rigging maps to silence voters,” but there is curiously nothing about similar efforts by Democrats.

In complaining about “rigging maps,” the No Kings movement conveniently overlooks the many examples of electoral gerrymandering by the Democratic Party. There’s no mention of Maryland’s 3rd Congressional District, for instance, which is often referred to as the “praying mantis” or “broken-winged pterodactyl” due to its convoluted shape and which a judge denounced as an “extreme gerrymander.” Maryland’s overall map gives Democrats seven out of eight seats, for a total of 87.5 percent of the state’s congressional representation, despite winning just 62 percent of the statewide vote in 2024.

There is also nothing on the No Kings website about Illinois’s 4th Congressional District, which is nicknamed the “earmuffs” district because it connects two distant Latino-majority neighborhoods. Illinois’s full map yields Democrats 14 out of 17 seats (82 percent) despite receiving only 54 percent of the vote.

This year, Democrats are urging voters to overturn an anti-gerrymandering measure in Virginia so that the party can engage in partisan redistricting, but there is nothing on the No Kings website about that either.

Essentially, what the No Kings movement represents is elitist Democratic Party activism dressed up as grassroots populism. While invoking the legacy of the American Revolution – in the 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence no less – the movement is simply offering a partisan message that divides the country rather than unites it.

Although the historical comparison of Donald Trump to King George III is severely lacking, in some ways, the No Kings movement is indeed following this legacy. Just as the war for independence drove a wedge in the nation between patriots and loyalists, and accentuated the sharply divergent opinions on the way forward for the nation, so too does the current political rhetoric serve to further divide the United States.

Nathaniel Parry is the author of Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era and How Christmas Became Christmas. He is the co-author of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush and editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. Follow him on Substack and X.

If you enjoyed the above article, please restack it and click the like button. It would also be greatly appreciated if you recommend this newsletter in your Substack recommendations, and, finally, be sure you are subscribed to receive future articles from Essential History.

In January 2020, just before the world locked down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I was on a family vacation in eastern Africa. One day, towards the end of our holiday, we visited an old slave-trading hub in Zanzibar – known as Stone Town – where Africans were held in dark and dank holding cells before being packed into ships to be dispatched to a lifetime of unpaid labor and misery as chattel slaves.

Listening to our local guide explain the horrific conditions under which these poor souls were held before being shipped off to another round of horrors in a far-off foreign land, I started to wonder why slave traders would be operating in eastern Africa when the enslaved Africans were presumably destined for the Americas. Wouldn’t it be easier, logistically, to use a port on the other side of the continent?

I raised this point with the guide, asking why they would be shipping slaves from eastern Africa instead of western Africa, and he responded – a bit perplexed, it seemed – that these slaves were destined for Arab countries, not the Americas. This slave-trading hub was part of the east African slave trade, he explained, not the transatlantic slave trade.

I must admit, as someone who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history and political science, I was somewhat ashamed that I was unaware of the existence of this iteration of the slave trade. In my 12 years of primary education and eight years of higher education, I had only ever heard of the transatlantic slave trade and never learned that slavery was actually a global phenomenon – with slaves being dispatched from west to east as well as from east to west.

I began to realize that the version of history that I was presented with in school was highly selective and may have been geared more towards eliciting feelings of guilt than providing the full context of difficult subjects. It occurred to me that there is much work to be done in developing a fuller understanding of human history than the version that we are commonly taught.

It was with some amount of dismay, then, that I read the news this week that the United Nations is perpetuating this deeply biased and woefully incomplete version of history. The General Assembly on Wednesday adopted a resolution focused solely on the transatlantic slave trade, condemning the European and American powers for their role in four centuries of stealing people from Africa and shipping them to the New World “to toil in cotton fields and sugar and coffee plantations under scorching heat and the crack of the whip.”

These unfortunate individuals were “denied their basic humanity and even their own names, they were forced to endure generations of exploitation with repercussions that reverberate today including persistent anti-Black racism and discrimination,” according to the UN. Due to this traumatic past of injustice and cruelty, the world body insists that financial reparations are in order as “a concrete step towards remedy.”   

Historical Ignorance

While completely ignoring and thereby suppressing knowledge of other historical variations of the global system of slavery, the resolution unironically claims that “little is known about the 400-year-long transatlantic slave trade and its lasting consequences,” and therefore more “education and awareness-raising” is needed.

If anyone needs more education and awareness, however, it is clearly the UN. The global body’s historical ignorance was on display not only in the myopic focus of its resolution but also in the graphics that it chose for the resolution’s press release, using a photo from Stone Town in Zanzibar even though this eastern port had nothing to do with the subject matter of the resolution. The Stone Town hub was a distinct network from the transatlantic slave trade, with most its slaves shipped to the Arabian Peninsula, the Persian Gulf, and other parts of the Middle East.

Unintentionally, this photo choice perfectly illustrated the UN’s bias and ignorance, which was also evident by specifically singling out the transatlantic trade while downplaying other slave-trading networks. Based on this limited and selective approach to history, the trafficking of enslaved Africans via the transatlantic route, according to the UN, was the world’s “gravest crime against humanity” due to its unprecedented scale, duration, brutality, systemic nature, and enduring consequences.

But is this accurate? Can history’s many crimes against humanity even be categorized in this way? Doesn’t qualifying one particular injustice as history’s “gravest crime” diminish the many other crimes against humanity that aren’t deemed worthy of even mentioning as runners up? What is the point, anyway, of elevating one particular historical injustice over all others?

Especially when it comes to issues like human trafficking and slavery, highlighting just one case as the only one worthy of attention is deeply problematic.

Hierarchy of Injustice

While there are of course a number of aspects about the transatlantic slave trade that make it unique in world history – particularly in terms of the volume of slaves captured and transported, with approximately 12.5 million Africans shipped across the Atlantic, making it the largest forced migration by sea in history – in other respects the horrors of the east African slave trade were even worse.

Spanning many hundreds of years, the east African trade – also known as the Arab trade or the trans-Saharan slave trade – intensified in the 18th-19th centuries, and while estimates of the numbers of victims vary widely due to poorer documentation, the estimates over longer timeframes are typically at 10-18 million. So, while the transatlantic trade involved a larger volume within a more concentrated period, the east African trade may have involved larger numbers overall.

Both systems caused immense suffering and demographic disruption in Africa and were extremely brutal, involving capture through raids, forced marches to ports (with high mortality from exhaustion, violence, and disease), and horrific transport conditions. While the transatlantic Middle Passage had a mortality rate of 10-15 percent, the east African trade involved brutal overland marches, sometimes across deserts, with a mortality rate reaching 50 percent in transit.

Also, while the transatlantic trade placed high value on able-bodied males for hard labor, the Arab trade had a greater emphasis on females and children for domestic service and sex slavery. The male slaves were often castrated, with up to 60-90 percent dying during the procedure.

If the United Nations is to be believed though, only the transatlantic trade is worthy of condemnation, despite the fact that both systems caused immense suffering and demographic disruption in Africa, and in some ways the east African trade was just as horrific, if not more so.

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The U.S. Vote

Explicitly recognizing these hypocrisies and glaring omissions, the United States emphatically voted “no” on the UN resolution this week – joining just two other countries in doing so, plus 52 abstentions.

In a statement, Dan Negrea, the U.S. ambassador, explained America’s objections, specifically regarding the resolution’s “attempt to rank crimes against humanity in any type of hierarchy.”

“The assertion that some crimes against humanity are less severe than others objectively diminishes the suffering of countless victims and survivors of other atrocities throughout history,” Negrea explained. “This is not a competition. This attempted ranking is also simply incorrect as a matter of law.”

Continuing this badly needed history lesson for the other member states, the ambassador expressed the U.S. government’s disappointment in the “arbitrarily historical perspective of the text,” noting that “trafficking of African slaves began long before the 15th century and sadly continued even after the 19th.”

By highlighting these dates, the resolution’s proponents were doing so for reasons of political expediency rather than historical accuracy, Negrea noted, apparently because they believe that their countries should receive financial reparations. In this regard, Negrea reminded UN members that the United States “does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred.”

While this was a solidly logical rebuttal based on common-sense approaches to legal rights and international law, perhaps Negrea should have added that if African countries feel entitled to reparations for their historical trauma, then surely these same countries should pay reparations to those they have traumatized. If countries such as the United States are financially liable for their historical role in the slave trade, the same logic could be applied to African countries that enslaved Americans.

Particularly relevant in this regard is the Barbary trade, which enslaved countless Europeans and a good number of Americans for about a quarter of a millennium.

From the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th century, whites living in coastal towns in countries ranging from Italy to Ireland to Iceland suffered raids by Barbary pirates from Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli, who captured Europeans and sold them at slave markets in the Barbary states.

Robert Davis, author of Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, estimates that at least one million Europeans were enslaved by slave traders in North Africa over a period of more than 200 years. During colonial times, Americans enjoyed some degree of protection as a result of tributes paid by Britain to the Barbary states, but following America’s independence in 1776, privateers known as corsairs began preying on American ships and capturing their crews.

For nearly two decades, a dozen American ships would be captured and their crews enslaved. This led to the creation of the United States Navy and two wars fought in the early 1800s to stop the enslavement of white Americans by the Barbary states.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government prohibited the importation of African slaves to America and the British invested substantially in ending the transatlantic slave trade through aggressive enforcement efforts.

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A Grave Disservice

With these complexities in mind, the political posturing on display in the UN this week recalls a disturbing tendency of simplifying historical realities to fit into a rigid victim-oppressor narrative in which the West – and more specifically white people – are portrayed as the initiators of all the world’s injustices while the Global South – and more specifically people of color – are invariably seen as the victims.

This portrayal does a grave disservice to the world’s ability to overcome past injustices, inhibiting both historical understanding and the reconciliation that is needed to unite and move forward. Instead of perpetuating the narrative that whites are always the oppressors and blacks are always the victims, the UN could instead offer a more honest and complete picture, which could emphasize, for instance, how the races once worked together to eliminate slavery.

America’s abolitionist movement, for example, included the participation of both whites and blacks, who over the years adopted increasingly uncompromising stances on the issue of human bondage. As the United States expanded westward, the question of whether to admit new states as free or slave states became one of the main political issues in the nation, leading to militant action and armed resistance, most notably during the “Bleeding Kansas” campaign of violence in the late 1850s, as well as untenable compromises that led directly to the Civil War.

Meanwhile, it would have to be acknowledged that Africans themselves were the ones who captured their fellow people and sold them into slavery, making the transatlantic slave trade possible. With Africans enslaving other Africans long before European contact, many African rulers and merchants eagerly supplied war captives and raided neighbors to meet surging European demand for plantation labor in the Americas, exchanging them for guns, cloth, alcohol, and other goods.

When Portuguese and later European traders arrived on the West and Central African coast from the 15th century, they were wary of venturing inland to capture slaves themselves, instead relying on African intermediaries who controlled supply routes and negotiated terms at coastal forts. This partnership fueled the transatlantic trade, enriching some African elites while devastating societies through intensified conflict and demographic displacement.

On the other side of the Atlantic, while many free blacks worked for abolition, other blacks actually participated in the system of slavery by owning other African Americans. Thousands of free people of color in the antebellum South owned slaves, and while some of these black slave-owners may have been benevolent emancipators who purchased their spouses, children, parents, siblings, or friends to prevent them from being sold into a worse situation, others had apparently embraced a culture and economic system based on human bondage.

As African-American historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. has explained, “the percentage of free black slave owners as the total number of free black heads of families was quite high in several states, namely 43 percent in South Carolina, 40 percent in Louisiana, 26 percent in Mississippi, 25 percent in Alabama and 20 percent in Georgia.” Adopting the methods of coercion employed by white slave masters, they sometimes harshly disciplined their fellow blacks and sold them on the market as punishment or for profit.

This underscores the reality that slavery, for better or worse, was a widely accepted fact of life in America, as well as around the world.

The historical fact of blacks owning other blacks also underlines the complexities of a system of human bondage that has been around as long as mankind has existed. The real task today should not be assigning blame for past wrongs while downplaying other historical injustices, but on promoting a full and unbiased understanding of this history while working to ensure that present-day injustices are redressed.

In this regard, Africa would do well to look at its own problems, including pockets of the continent where slavery still exists. Sadly, despite being eliminated in most of the world, human bondage persists throughout Africa primarily as forced labor and forced marriage, but also, in limited areas, as hereditary chattel slavery.

The highest prevalence is in Eritrea, which utilizes state-imposed forced labor, and Mauritania, where descent-based hereditary slavery of Haratin people by Arab-Berber elites persists despite official bans. It also continues in Libya, which has open-air migrant slave markets, as well as Sudan, Mali, Niger, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nigeria.

All in all, according to the Walk Free Global Slavery Index, an estimated 7 million Africans live in modern slavery today, which in terms of raw numbers, is more than half of the amount of total Africans who were shipped across the Atlantic in the Middle Passage over a period of some 400 years.

So, rather than passing biased and politically motivated resolutions selectively condemning one specific iteration of the global slave trade that ended centuries ago, perhaps the UN – and particularly its African member states – should focus instead on the grave injustices that continue to plague this planet in the present day.

Nathaniel Parry is the author of Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era and How Christmas Became Christmas. He is the co-author of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush and editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. Follow him on Substack and X.

If you enjoyed the above article, please restack it and click the like button. It would also be greatly appreciated if you recommend this newsletter in your Substack recommendations, and, finally, be sure you are subscribed to receive future articles from Essential History.

Although modern-day feminists often rail against the “patriarchy” as if it is a self-evident fact of life, the reality is that what exists in the United States today is far from being a patriarchy, classically understood as a system in which men – and only men –hold absolute control over society through legal authority, a rigid division of labor, and patrilineal inheritance customs. This system hasn’t existed in America since the War for Independence a quarter-millennium ago.

Considered before the American Revolution as completely dependent on their husbands or fathers, women were not allowed to enter into contracts or exercise legal rights. The patriarchal system was maintained through an emphasis on obedience, hierarchy, and control – over not just women, but also children, younger males, and often lower-status men. In colonial America, this included institutionalized mechanisms to limit women’s access to independent economic resources, education, legal rights, or public roles.

With documents referring to them as “wife of” or “daughter of” some male, they could not sue or be sued, make contracts or buy and sell property, much less expect to have equal opportunity in educational institutions or professional careers. They had few opportunities for higher learning, which was considered beyond their mental capacity and unnecessary since they had few prospects for professional employment besides school teaching.

During the revolutionary era, however, the commitment and contribution of women to the patriot cause won them widespread respect from men, and transformed the general perception of what a woman should be. Women published plays and poems proclaiming their patriotic sentiments, and a good number took to the streets during riots in the lead-up to the revolution.

In the war, women supported the cause by managing farms and businesses and otherwise assuming the burdens of absent husbands. In addition, they went door to door in cities across the colonies collecting money for the Continental Army, and many worked as “camp followers” who played a critical role in the daily functions of the revolutionary cause, marching with the troops and serving as seamstresses, nurses, and cooks at their camps.

There were thousands of women who served in this function, many of whom were widows, runaway servants, or the destitute. A British intelligence report estimated in 1778 that of the 20,000 rebels who mustered at White Plains, “near the half” were comprised of “Women and Waggoners.” Farther away from the battlefield, there were also groups of women who strongarmed Tories or shopkeepers who hoarded scarce supplies.

Some brave women even directly participated in combat. During the Battle of Fort Washington, for instance, on November 16, 1776, husband and wife John and Margaret Corbin of Virginia both participated in the fighting on the patriot side. When John was killed, Margaret took over his cannon, loading and firing the gun several times until she too was badly wounded. She survived the battle, but lost the use of her left arm.

Having served the revolution in these vital functions, following independence many women sought a more expansive role for themselves, and men who had welcomed their support for the war effort continued to seek their guidance and help. The “ideal” woman was no longer just a submissive homemaker who lived to obey her husband, but a competent conversationalist who could engage with men in serious discussions on complex political and social issues. There was a widespread recognition, however, that women’s general lack of knowledge had left them ill-prepared for their new roles, and that they would have to be suitably educated if they were to live up to such high expectations.

A watershed moment was the publication of the essay “On the Equality of the Sexes” by Judith Sargent Murray in 1790. Originally published in The Massachusetts Magazine, Murray’s essay argued for improved educational opportunities for women, insisting that the success of the new nation required intelligent and virtuous citizens — both men and women.

Since the education of children largely rested with mothers, Murray pointed out, women should be properly educated in order to raise virtuous republican citizens. She challenged pseudoscientific notions that the female brain was somehow inferior, arguing that women were not held back by biological limitations but by lack of access to schooling. The widely read essay helped lay the foundation for the figure of the “Republican Mother.” According to this concept, women needed to be educated so they could raise the kind of informed and virtuous citizens that were needed for the success of the new republic.

With many Americans coming to agree with this view, schools and academies sprang up throughout the newly independent United States that began accepting female students. Institutions like the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia were founded to provide formal education to women, and the curriculum for girls was expanded to include not just reading, writing, and religion, but also history, mathematics, and philosophy.

Women’s increased access to education had instant effects, with literacy rising rapidly throughout the country. Between 1784 and 1860, more than 100 periodicals geared toward women appeared, and in the same time frame, white women achieved parity in literacy with men. With more girls learning to read and write, their participation in civic discussions and social reform movements like abolitionism, temperance, and women’s rights exponentially increased.

Women also started pushing back on more subtle forms of domination by their male counterparts, rejecting language in marriage vows, for example, that compelled them to “obey” their husbands. A greater awareness would take hold of women’s oppression and under growing pressure for equality, ever greater parity would eventually prevail between the two genders, making the collapse of patriarchy one of the revolution’s most enduring achievements.

Nathaniel Parry is the author of Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era and How Christmas Became Christmas. He is the co-author of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush and editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. Follow him on Substack and X.

If you enjoyed the above article, please restack it and click the like button. It would also be greatly appreciated if you recommend this newsletter in your Substack recommendations, and, finally, be sure you are subscribed to receive future articles from Essential History.

In recent years, anniversaries of the U.S. invasion of Iraq have largely come and gone without notice or commentary. This year, however, the occasion has found a new relevance, coinciding with the ongoing military operation against Iraq’s neighbor Iran and highlighting parallels that President Donald Trump might rather ignore.

While there are significant differences between the Iraq and Iran conflicts’ rationales, methods, objectives, and – if our leaders are to be believed – projected durations, there are also a number of similarities. Both, for example, have centered on pre-war justifications focused on eliminating weapons of mass destruction and nuclear threats, alongside broader claims of humanitarian benefits and potential improvements to regional security once completed.

Notably, both have also involved U.S.-led military campaigns aimed at regime change or severe weakening of a perceived threat in the Middle East, starting with massive air assaults and decapitation strikes, and each directly targeted the regimes’ leadership, with Saddam Hussein’s regime toppled and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei killed early on in the current operation.

They also both share similar risks, triggering regional escalations and broader instability, as well as spawning proxy attacks and possible retaliation in the form of terrorism and other forms of asymmetric warfare.

It is therefore worth taking a moment to recall the momentous decision to launch that war of choice 23 years ago today and its enormous costs in blood and treasure. Whether one supports Operation Epic Fury or not, these costs should be at least considered as the war in the Middle East progresses.

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Blood and Treasure

Estimates of the Iraq War’s ultimate financial price tag vary, but commonly cited figures put the financial cost for U.S. taxpayers at upwards of a trillion dollars. The cost in Iraqi lives are in the hundreds of thousands, with U.S. soldier deaths at nearly 5,000. Another 100,000 Americans were wounded and four million Iraqis driven from their homes as refugees.

But as staggering as those numbers may be, they don’t come close to describing the true cost of the war, or the magnitude of its impacts. Besides the cost in blood and treasure, the costs to basic principles of international law and geopolitical stability are also substantial.

Ironically, one of the key long-term effects of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was that it strengthened Iran geopolitically. By eliminating Saddam Hussein, Iran’s primary regional rival and the main Sunni Arab bulwark against Iranian influence, Tehran’s power was left unchecked. Iraq’s Shia majority cultivated deep ties with the regime in Tehran, and Iran was able to exploit the post-invasion power vacuum to expand influence through proxies, creating a “Shia Crescent” extending to Syria and Lebanon.

The impacts on the U.S. political system were equally profound.

Democrats benefited from growing antiwar sentiment, taking control of Congress in the midterm elections of 2006 largely due to anger over Bush’s handling of the war, and Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries based largely on the two candidates’ opposing views on the Iraq War. For a time, at least, it seemed that everyone learned important lessons from the experience and that the electorate had grown far more war-wise.

One of those lessons was that proclamations of the intelligence community should be treated with huge grain of salt. In the build-up to war with Iraq a quarter-century ago, there were those who pushed back on the politicized and “cherry-picked” intelligence that the Bush administration was using to convince the American people of the need to go to war, but for the most part, the media and political establishment parroted these claims without showing the due diligence of independently confirming the claims or even applying basic principles of logic.

For example, even as United Nations weapons inspectors, led by Swedish diplomat Hans Blix, were coming up empty-handed when acting on tips from the U.S. intelligence community, few within the mainstream media were willing to draw the logical conclusion that the intelligence was wrong (or that the Bush administration was lying). Instead, they assumed that the UN inspectors were simply inept or that Saddam Hussein was just really good at hiding his weapons of mass destruction.

This episode underscored both how easy it is to dupe the American people and also how quickly they forget lessons learned and repeat past mistakes. Both liberals and conservatives can be a fickle bunch.

Despite historically low approval ratings at the end of his presidency – due largely to the Iraq War – George W. Bush has enjoyed a revival of his image in recent years thanks largely to his public criticisms of Trump, with a majority of Democrats viewing the 43rd president favorably. Many Democrats also embraced aggressive war as their preferred option to deal with foreign policy challenges.

When the Democratic Party chose Clinton as its nominee in 2016, it appeared that Democrats had also embraced her willingness to use military force to achieve “regime change” in countries that were seen as a threat to U.S. interests – whether Iraq, Iran or Syria.

As a senator from New York during the build-up for military action against Iraq, Clinton not only voted to authorize the U.S. invasion, but fervently supported the war – which she backed with or without UN Security Council authorization. Her speech on the floor of the Senate on Oct. 10, 2002, arguing for military action promoted the same falsehoods that were being used by the Bush administration to build support for the war, claiming for example that Saddam Hussein had “given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.”

“If left unchecked,” she said, “Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too well affects American security.”

Clinton maintained support for the war even as it became obvious that Iraq in fact had no weapons of mass destruction – the primary casus belli for the war – only cooling her enthusiasm in 2006 when it became clear that the Democratic base had turned decisively against the war and her hawkish position endangered her chances for the 2008 presidential nomination. But eight years later, the Democrats had apparently moved on, and her support for the war was no longer considered a disqualification for the presidency.

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Threats and Bluster

Another lesson that should be recalled today is how effectively fear can be manipulated, critics sidelined, and dissent overcome. It was remarkably easy in 2002-2003 for the Bush administration to convince Americans that they were under threat from the regime of Saddam Hussein some 7,000 miles away, despite a complete lack of evidence.

The claims about Iraq’s WMDs were untrue, with many debunking the falsehoods in real time, but even if the claims about Iraq’s alleged stockpiles were true, there was still no reason to assume that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of launching a surprise attack against the United States. Indeed, while Americans were all but convinced that Iraq threatened their safety and security, it was actually the U.S. government that was threatening Iraqis.

Far from posing an imminent threat to the United States, in 2003, Iraq was a country that had already been devastated by a U.S.-led war a decade earlier and crippling economic sanctions that caused the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqis (leading to the resignation of two UN humanitarian coordinators who called the sanctions genocidal).

Although the invasion didn’t officially begin until March 20, 2003 (still the 19th in Washington), the United States had been explicitly threatening to attack the country as early as January 2003, with the Pentagon publicizing plans for a so-called “shock and awe” bombing campaign.

“If the Pentagon sticks to its current war plan,” CBS News reported on January 24, “one day in March the Air Force and Navy will launch between 300 and 400 cruise missiles at targets in Iraq. … [T]his is more than the number that were launched during the entire 40 days of the first Gulf War. On the second day, the plan calls for launching another 300 to 400 cruise missiles.”

A Pentagon official warned: “There will not be a safe place in Baghdad.”

These public threats appeared to be a form of intimidation and psychological warfare, and were likely in violation of the UN Charter, which states: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

The Pentagon’s vaunted “shock and awe” attack began with limited bombing on March 19-20, as U.S. forces unsuccessfully attempted to kill Hussein. Attacks continued against a small number of targets until March 21, when the main bombing campaign began. U.S.-led forces launched approximately 1,700 air sorties, with 504 using cruise missiles.

During the invasion, the U.S. also dropped some 10,800 cluster bombs on Iraq despite claiming that only a fraction of that number had been used. The cluster bombs killed hundreds of Iraqi civilians and left behind thousands of unexploded bomblets that continued to kill and injure civilians weeks after the fighting stopped.

Attempting to kill Hussein, Bush ordered the bombing of an Iraqi residential restaurant on April 7. A single B-1B bomber dropped four precision-guided 2,000-pound bombs. The four bunker-penetrating bombs destroyed the target building, the al Saa restaurant block and several surrounding structures, leaving a 60-foot crater and unknown casualties.

Diners, including children, were ripped apart by the bombs. One mother found her daughter’s torso and then her severed head. U.S. intelligence later confirmed that Hussein wasn’t there.

Resistance and Torture

It was evident within weeks of the initial invasion that the Bush administration had misjudged the critical question of whether Iraqis would fight. They put up stiffer than expected resistance even in southern Iraqi cities such as Umm Qasr, Basra and Nasiriya where Hussein’s support was considered weak, and soon after the fall of the regime on April 9, when the Bush administration decided to disband the Iraqi army, it helped spark an anti-U.S. insurgency led by many former Iraqi military figures.

Despite Bush’s triumphant May 1 landing on an aircraft carrier and his speech in front of a giant “Mission Accomplished” banner, it looked as though the collapse of the Baathist government had been just the first stage in what would become a long-running war of attrition. After the Iraqi conventional forces had been disbanded, the U.S. military began to notice in May 2003 a steadily increasing flurry of attacks on U.S. occupiers in various regions of the so-called “Sunni Triangle.”

These included groups of insurgents firing assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades at U.S. occupation troops, as well as increasing use of improvised explosive devices on U.S. convoys.

Possibly anticipating a long, drawn-out occupation and counter-insurgency campaign, in a March 2003 memorandum Bush administration lawyers devised legal doctrines to justify certain torture techniques.

Over the course of the next year, disclosures emerged that torture had been used extensively in Iraq for “intelligence gathering.” Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh disclosed in The New Yorker in May 2004 that a 53-page classified Army report written by Gen. Antonio Taguba concluded that Abu Ghraib prison’s military police were urged on by intelligence officers seeking to break down the Iraqis before interrogation.

“Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees,” wrote Taguba.

These actions, authorized at the highest levels, constituted serious breaches of international and domestic law, including the Convention Against Torture, the Geneva Convention relative to the treatment of Prisoners of War, as well as the U.S. War Crimes Act and the Torture Statute.

They also may have played a role in the rise of the ISIS terror group, the origins of which were subsequently traced to an American prison in Iraq dubbed Camp Bucca. This camp was the site of rampant abuse of prisoners, one of whom, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, later became the leader of ISIS. Al-Baghdadi spent four years as a prisoner at Bucca, where he started recruiting others to his cause.

America’s Weapons of Mass Destruction

Besides torture and the use of cluster bombs, the crimes against the Iraqi people over the years included wholesale massacres, long-term poisoning and the destruction of cities.

There was the 2004 assault on Fallujah in which white phosphorus – banned under international law – was used against civilians. There was the 2005 Haditha massacre, in which 24 unarmed civilians were systematically murdered by U.S. marines. There was the 2007 “Collateral Murder” massacre revealed by WikiLeaks in 2010, depicting the indiscriminate killing of more than a dozen civilians in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad – including two Reuters news staff.

There is also the tragic legacy of cancer and birth defects caused by the U.S. military’s extensive use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus. In Fallujah the use of depleted uranium led to birth defects in infants 14 times higher than in the Japanese cities targeted by U.S. atomic bombs at close of World War II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A report sent to the UN General Assembly by Dr. Nawal Majeed Al-Sammarai, Iraq’s Minister of Women’s Affairs, stated that in September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital had 170 babies born, 75 percent of whom were deformed. A quarter of them died within their first week of life.

The military’s use of depleted uranium also caused a sharp increase in Leukemia and birth defects in the city of Najaf, which saw one of the most severe military actions during the 2003 invasion, with cancer becoming more common than the flu according to local doctors.

By the end of the war, a number of Iraq’s major cities, including Fallujah, Ramadi, and Mosul, had been reduced to rubble and by 2014, a former CIA director conceded that the nation of Iraq had basically been destroyed.

“I think Iraq has pretty much ceased to exist,” said Michael Hayden, noting that it was fragmented into multiple parts which he didn’t see “getting back together.” In other words, the United States, using its own extensive arsenal of actual weapons of mass destruction, had completely destroyed a sovereign nation.

Predictable Consequences

The effects of these policies included the predictable growth of Islamic extremism, with a National Intelligence Estimate – representing the consensus view of the 16 spy services inside the U.S. government – warning in 2006 that a whole new generation of Islamic radicalism was being spawned by the U.S. occupation of Iraq. According to one American intelligence official, the consensus was that “the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse.”

The assessment noted that several underlying factors were “fueling the spread of the jihadist movement,” including “entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation, and a sense of powerlessness,” and “pervasive anti-U.S. sentiment among most Muslims all of which jihadists exploit.”

But rather than leading to substantive changes or reversals in U.S. policies, the strategy agreed upon in Washington seemed to be to double down on the failed policies that had given rise to radical jihadist groups. In fact, instead of withdrawing from Iraq, the U.S. decided to send a surge of 20,000 troops in 2007. This is despite the fact that public opinion was decidedly against the war.

A Newsweek poll in early 2007 found that 68 percent of Americans opposed the surge, and in another poll conducted just after Bush’s 2007 State of the Union Address, 64 percent said Congress was not being assertive enough in challenging the Bush administration over its conduct of the war.

An estimated half-million people marched on Washington on Jan. 27, 2007, with messages for the newly sworn in 110th Congress to “Stand up to Bush,” urging Congress to cut the war funding with the slogan, “Not one more dollar, not one more death.” A growing combativeness was also on display in the antiwar movement with this demonstration marked by hundreds of protesters breaking through police lines and charging Capitol Hill.

Although there were additional large-scale protests a couple months later to mark the sixth anniversary of the invasion, including a march on the Pentagon led by Iraq War veterans, over the next year the antiwar movement’s activities steadily declined. While fatigue might explain some of the waning support for mass mobilizations, much of the decline can also surely be explained by the rise of Barack Obama’s candidacy. Millions of people channeled their energies into his campaign, including many motivated by a hope that he represented real change from the Bush years.

One of Obama’s advantages over Clinton in the Democratic primary was that he had been an early opponent of the Iraq War while she had been one of its most vocal supporters. This led many American voters to believe in 2008 that they had elected someone who might rein in some of the U.S. military adventurism and quickly end U.S. involvement in Iraq. But this wasn’t to be the case. The combat mission dragged on well into President Obama’s first term.

War, War and More War

After its well-publicized failures in Iraq, the U.S. turned its attention to Libya, overthrowing the government of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 utilizing armed militias implicated in war crimes and backed with NATO air power. Following Gaddafi’s ouster, his caches of weapons ended up being shuttled to rebels in Syria, fueling the civil war there. The Obama administration also took a keen interest in destabilizing the Syrian government and to do so began providing arms that often fell into the hands of extremists.

The CIA trained and armed so-called “moderate” rebel units in Syria, only to watch these groups switch sides by joining forces with Islamist brigades such as ISIS and Al Qaeda’s affiliate the Nusra Front. Others surrendered to Sunni extremist groups with the U.S.-provided weapons presumably ending up in the arsenals of jihadists or sometimes just quit or went missing altogether.

Beyond Syria and Libya, Obama also expanded U.S. military engagements in countries including Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and sent a surge of troops to Afghanistan in 2009. And despite belatedly withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq, with the last U.S. troops finally leaving on December 18, 2011, Obama also presided over a major increase in the use of drone strikes and conventional air wars.

In his first term, Obama dropped 20,000 bombs and missiles, a number that shot up to over 100,000 bombs and missiles dropped in his second term. In 2016, the final year of Obama’s presidency, the U.S. dropped nearly three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day.

Obama also had the distinction of becoming the fourth U.S. president in a row to bomb the nation of Iraq. Under criticism for allowing the rise of ISIS in the country, Obama decided to reverse his earlier decision to disengage with Iraq, and in 2014 started bombing the country again. Addressing the American people on Sept. 10, 2014, President Obama said that “ISIL poses a threat to the people of Iraq and Syria, and the broader Middle East including American citizens, personnel and facilities.”

“If left unchecked,” he continued, “these terrorists could pose a growing threat beyond that region, including to the United States. While we have not yet detected specific plotting against our homeland, ISIL leaders have threatened America and our allies.”

Of course, this is precisely the result that many voices of caution had warned about back in 2002 and 2003, when millions of Americans were taking to the streets in protest of the looming invasion of Iraq. And, to be clear, it wasn’t just the antiwar left urging restraint – establishment figures and paleoconservatives were also voicing concern.

Retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, for example, who served as a Middle East envoy for George W. Bush, warned in October 2002 that by invading Iraq, “we are about to do something that will ignite a fuse in this region that we will rue the day we ever started.” Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser in the first Bush administration, said a strike on Iraq “could unleash an Armageddon in the Middle East.”

No matter, Bush was a gut player who had made up his mind, so those warnings were brushed aside and the invasion proceeded.

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Campaign 2016

When presidential candidate Donald Trump began slamming Bush for the Iraq War during the Republican primary campaign in 2015 and 2016, calling the decision to invade Iraq a “big fat mistake,” he not only won over some of the antiwar libertarian vote, but also helped solidify his image as a political outsider who “tells it like it is.”

And after Hillary Clinton emerged as the Democratic nominee, with her track record as an enthusiastic backer of virtually all U.S. interventions and an advocate of deeper involvement in countries such as Syria, voters could have been forgiven for getting the impression that the Republican Party was now the antiwar party and the Democrats were the hawks.

The antiwar faction within the Democratic Party was increasingly marginalized, most visibly during the 2016 Democratic National Convention when chants of “No More War” broke out during former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s speech. The Democratic establishment responded with chants of “USA!” to drown out the voices for peace and they even turned the lights out on the antiwar section of the crowd. The message was clear: there is no room for the antiwar movement inside the Democratic Party.

While there were numerous factors that played a role in Trump’s stunning victory over Clinton in November 2016, it is no stretch of the imagination to speculate that one of those factors was lingering antiwar sentiment from the Iraq debacle and other engagements of the U.S. military. Many of those fed up with U.S. military adventurism welcomed Trump’s anti-interventionist rhetoric while others may have opted to vote for an alternative party such as the Libertarians or the Greens, both of which took strong stances against U.S. interventionism.

But despite Trump’s occasional statements questioning the wisdom of committing the military to far-off lands such as Iraq or Afghanistan, he was also an advocate for war crimes such as “taking out [the] families” of suspected terrorists. He urged that the U.S. stop being “politically correct” in its waging of war.

Following the election it turned out that Trump was a man of his word when it came to killing children. In one of his first military actions as president, Trump ordered an attack on a village in Yemen on Jan. 29, 2017, which claimed the lives of as many as 23 civilians, including a newborn baby and an eight-year-old girl, Nawar al-Awlaki.

Nawar was the daughter of the al-Qaeda propagandist and American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a September 2011 U.S. drone strike in Yemen.

Broken Promises

2017, Trump’s first year in office, turned out to be the deadliest year for civilians in Iraq and Syria since U.S. airstrikes began on the two countries in 2014. The U.S. killed between 3,923 and 6,102 civilians during the year, according to a tally by the monitoring group Airwars. “Non-combatant deaths from Coalition air and artillery strikes rose by more than 200 per cent compared to 2016,” Airwars noted.

While this spike in civilian deaths did make some headlines, including in the Washington Post, for the most part, the thousands of innocents killed by U.S. airstrikes were dismissed as “collateral damage.” The bloodshed was considered perfectly normal, barely even eliciting a comment from the pundit class.

This is arguably one of the most enduring legacies of the 2003 invasion of Iraq – an act of military aggression that was based on false pretenses, which brushed aside warnings of caution, and blatantly violated international law. With no one in the media or the Bush administration ever held accountable for promoting this war or for launching it, what we have seen is the normalization of military aggression to a level that would have been unimaginable in earlier decades.

Meanwhile, the humanitarian justifications for the 2003 invasion continue to be undermined year after year, as the ultimate results of toppling the Saddam Hussein dictatorship come more clearly into focus. Iraq, with its constitution that the Bush White House once hailed as “one of the most progressive … in the Arab world,” has recently amended its legal code to allow Muslim couples to choose whether family matters – including marriage – are governed by the existing civil law or by religious codes based on Islamic jurisprudence.

The effect of this new law is that girls as young as nine are subjected to forced marriages. The move follows more than a decade of efforts by Shia Muslims who dominate the Iraqi political system to erode women’s rights in the country, and essentially legalizes an already widespread practice of unregistered child marriages.

As many as 28 percent of girls in Iraq are illicitly married before the age of 18, according to UNICEF, and 22 percent of unregistered marriages are with girls below the age of 14. These marriages evade legal restrictions and prevent women and girls from obtaining government services, registering their children’s birth, and claiming their rights.

The recent amendments were heavily promoted by a coalition of fundamentalist Shiite parties that form the largest bloc in parliament. Some religious figures point out that historically Islam has allowed the marriage of pubescent girls from the age of nine, noting that the prophet Mohammed is believed to have consummated the marriage of one of his wives, Aisha, at that age.

Secular forces and human rights advocates, on the other hand, have called it “a catastrophe” for women and girls. Raya Faiq, the coordinator of a coalition that opposes the law, points out that it would strip families from having a say in whether their children are forced into marriage.

“My husband and my family oppose child marriage,” Faiq said. “But imagine if my daughter gets married and my daughter’s husband wants to marry off my granddaughter as a child. The new law would allow him to do so. I would not be allowed to object. This law legalizes child rape.”

This backsliding on human rights – mirrored in other countries that were once “liberated” by U.S. forces such as Afghanistan – should be kept in mind today, along with all the other lessons learned, when considering whether to support or oppose the current military operation against Iran.

Despite what might be the best of intentions, it must be recalled, these wars tend to spiral out of control and often have unintended consequences.

Nathaniel Parry is the author of Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era and How Christmas Became Christmas. He is the co-author of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush and editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. Follow him on Substack and X.

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In remarks explaining the rationale for the United States’ military action against Iran last week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth pointedly noted that “we didn’t start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it.”

His assertion was that the war began 47 years ago when “the ayatollah and his death cult” took power and began waging “a savage, one-sided war against America.” As part of this asymmetric war, the Iranians have conducted “rocket attacks on our ships, murders at our embassies, [and] roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

While it’s hard to deny the fact that the past 47 years have been marked by a constant threat from Tehran and its radical mullahs, with deafening – and rather disconcerting – chants of “Death to America” ringing out since the late 1970s, the question of who started the war is actually up for debate. As is often the case with these matters, it very much depends on when the timeline is started.

If, of course, the timeline is started in 1979, Hegseth’s statement would largely be true – it was, after all, the Iranians who seized the U.S. embassy and held 52 diplomats hostage for 444 days. It was also Iran that directed and supported the October 23, 1983, bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 U.S. service members.

But if we wind the clock back a little bit further, the question becomes a little murkier, with a hidden history of covert activity and shady dealings that date back at least to the early 1950s. When examined more closely, this history could explain why the 1979 Islamic Revolution happened in the first place and set Washington and Tehran on a collision course that has finally come to a head.

Operation Ajax

Rather than the revolution of 1979, the 1953 coup to overthrow the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadegh might be a more appropriate place to begin.

Triggered by Mosaddegh’s nationalization of Iran’s oil industry in 1951, which threatened Western oil interests, the CIA conducted Operation Ajax with British MI6 support through a subversion campaign that included paid protesters, disinformation campaigns, bribes to politicians and military officers, and staged unrest.

After initial setbacks on August 15-16, the coup succeeded on August 19, 1953. Mosaddegh was arrested, tried, imprisoned for three years, and then placed under house arrest until his death in 1967. General Fazlollah Zahedi became prime minister, and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was restored with greatly enhanced powers, ruling for decades as a pro-Western strongman.

The fallout and long-term consequences of this operation were profound. Historians such as Ervand Abrahamian and Stephen Kinzer have argued the coup interrupted Iran’s potential democratic path, sowed distrust, and created an “incubator” for radicalism.

The coup also deeply damaged Washington’s credibility in Iran, fostering long-term anti-American sentiment and bolstering the view of the U.S. as a meddling imperial power. The Shah’s regime became increasingly authoritarian, relying on U.S. support and repression through the SAVAK secret police, which bred resentment among Iranians and also fueled the rise of political Islam.

With key segments of society alienated – including the clergy, bazaar merchants, and students – and with the political opposition largely driven underground or into exile, secular and leftist groups were weakened or co-opted, leaving religious networks and mosques some of the few remaining spaces for organized resistance. Clerics like Ruhollah Khomeini capitalized on this, portraying the Shah as corrupt, un-Islamic, and a puppet of foreign powers.

Khomeini explicitly linked the coup to the need for Islamic governance, criticizing secular separation of religion and politics as a historical mistake that enabled foreign interference. The 1953 events became a powerful rallying cry in revolutionary propaganda, symbolizing Western hostility and justifying an Islamic alternative.

This ultimately is what sowed the seeds for the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which overthrew the Shah and established the Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Khomeini. Even today, in Iranian narratives, the 1953 coup remains central to viewing the U.S. as “the Great Satan” and justifying the Islamic Republic’s hardline stance.

Official Denials

The United States government avoided acknowledging its direct role in the 1953 coup for decades. Although internal CIA documents, such as a 1954 internal lessons-learned report on the Mossadegh overthrow, warned of “possibilities of blowback” stemming from the coup, officially, the government denied any involvement. For 60 years – from the event on August 19, 1953, until the CIA’s formal public admission on August 19, 2013 – the U.S. government maintained strict secrecy.

This not only kept the American people in the dark as a virulently anti-U.S. government emerged in the Middle East, but it also enabled false narratives that continue to this day. Meanwhile, as the U.S. government offered spurious and simplistic rationales for this emerging foreign policy crisis, it continued to play double games and mislead its citizens. Covert action and deception would become the norm.

Even while maintaining a public stance of hostility toward the new Islamic regime in Iran – officially designating the government a state sponsor of terrorism and implementing a strict arms embargo – U.S. policymakers were cutting deals with the mullahs for weapons transfers, including the notorious “arms for hostages” deal at the center of the Iran-Contra Affair of the 1980s.

This scheme involved secret, illegal U.S. arms sales to Iran in exchange for efforts to secure the release of seven American hostages held in Lebanon by Iran’s proxy Hezbollah.

As shocking as this scandal was, it pales in comparison to revelations that emerged indicating that prior to coming to power, Ronald Reagan’s team actually conspired to keep 52 American hostages in captivity, undercutting President Jimmy Carter’s diplomatic efforts to free them in 1980.

Determined to deny Carter a possible “October Surprise” before the pivotal election in November, the Reagan campaign team, led by future CIA Director William Casey, met secretly with Iranian representatives to assure them that they would get a better deal from a Reagan White House.

Learn more about this here.

Shady Dealings

These allegations, known as the “October Surprise mystery,” were long dismissed as the unsubstantiated accusations of conspiracy theorists and shady characters such as international arms dealers, but over the years they have been bolstered by increasingly credible sources.

Among those who have gone on the record with insider information about the plot include former Texas Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes, former President of Iran Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, former Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, former head of French external intelligence Alexandre de Marenches, and the Russian government.

A 1992 secret report from Russian intelligence, for instance, asserted that “William Casey, in 1980, met three times with representatives of the Iranian leadership” to hatch a secret deal. “In Madrid and Paris,” the Russians explained, “the representatives of Ronald Reagan and the Iranian leadership discussed the question of possibly delaying the release of 52 hostages from the staff of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran.”

Similarly, in his 1991 memoir, My Turn to Speak, Bani-Sadr wrote that “in late October 1980, everyone was openly discussing the agreement with the Americans on the Reagan team.” He claimed that “Carter was no longer in control of U.S. foreign policy and had yielded the real power to those who … had negotiated with the mullahs on the hostage affair.”

These shady dealings characterized a more complex relationship with Iran than Americans were led to believe. Even while negotiating and cutting deals behind the scenes, the U.S. and Iran maintained a very public stance of hostility and aggression. This tense, adversarial relationship was marked by proxy conflicts, naval clashes, assassinations, and threats, as well as a few direct military encounters.

In the Tanker War and Gulf Clashes of the 1980s, Iran laid mines and attacked shipping in the Persian Gulf, and the U.S. responded with military strikes. In April 1988, during a large-scale naval surface engagement called Operation Praying Mantis, U.S. forces destroyed Iranian oil platforms, sank a frigate, and damaged other vessels.

In this context of mutual hostility and mistrust, tragedies were bound to happen. A major incident that continues to be a source of dispute was the 1988 U.S. downing of Iran Air Flight 655 over the Gulf, killing all 290 aboard. The U.S. called it an error, saying it thought the plane was a fighter jet, but Iran viewed it as intentional aggression, and the incident remains a major point of Iranian grievance.

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Proxy Wars

From the 1990s to the 2010s, the conflict was mostly proxy in nature, with no major direct military clashes occurring, but tensions simmered through sanctions, nuclear disputes, and Iranian support for militias attacking U.S. forces in Iraq and elsewhere. Sabre-rattling included U.S. threats of strikes on Iranian nuclear sites and Iranian warnings of closing the Strait of Hormuz.

In the early 2000s, the U.S. under George W. Bush took a hardline stance on “rogue states” and weapons of mass destruction, labeling Iran – along with Iraq and North Korea – as part of the “Axis of Evil” in his 2002 State of the Union address.

Later that year, it was revealed that there were secret Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz and Arak, and it appeared that the U.S. was determined to go to war. “Real men go to Tehran” became the mantra in Washington after the U.S. invaded Iraq and toppled the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003. This rhetoric alarmed the Europeans and prompted them to attempt to forge a diplomatic alternative to the neocons’ doctrine of endless war.

In October 2003 – as 130,000 U.S. troops were fighting an increasingly deadly insurgency in Iraq – Britain, France, and Germany launched the EU-3 diplomatic initiative to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. The strategy relied on engagement and negotiation, offering political and economic incentives in exchange for Iran suspending uranium enrichment.

In November 2004, Iran reiterated its intention to cooperate and again agreed to voluntarily suspend uranium enrichment while negotiations continued. In 2005, however, after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president, Iran resumed enrichment. The strategic threat posed by the United States was cited as the primary justification for this reversal.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran is presented with threats by certain powers, particularly the United States, which seek to impose their will on our nation,” Ahmadinejad said at the time.

The EU-3 responded by offering new incentives, but Iran rejected the proposals as insufficient, calling them “an insult.” By 2006, it was clear that diplomatic efforts had failed to produce a lasting suspension of enrichment, and the EU-3 efforts were folded into a broader initiative that included the United States, China, and Russia, known as the P5+1.

It was also referred to the UN Security Council, leading to sanctions and a hardened international stance.

Obama Era

In January 2010, President Barack Obama used his State of the Union address to accuse Tehran of shirking its international obligations and hinted that military action might be employed to counter the Iranian threat.

“Let there be no doubt,” Obama said, “America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal.”

The international community reacted with alarm, with the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference reminding states parties that only diplomatic means should be pursued in ensuring compliance, and that “attacks or threats of attacks” must be avoided.

“The Conference considers that attacks or threats of attack on nuclear facilities devoted to peaceful purposes jeopardize nuclear safety, have dangerous political, economic and environmental implications and raise serious concerns regarding the application of international law on the use of force in such cases,” its 2010 report noted.

While diplomacy continued over the nuclear program, Washington also accused Iran of threatening to strike within the United States. According to a Washington Post report in 2012, “An assessment by U.S. spy agencies concludes that Iran is prepared to launch terrorist attacks inside the United States, highlighting new risks as the Obama administration escalates pressure on Tehran to halt its alleged pursuit of an atomic bomb.”

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. testified to Congress that an alleged Iranian plot “shows that some Iranian officials — probably including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime.”

Despite these concerns, the Obama administration refrained from engaging in direct military conflict and instead continued to pursue diplomacy. The U.S. largely took Iranian threats in stride while it focused on a carrot-and-stick approach with Tehran.

On March 20, 2013, speaking in Jerusalem, President Obama reiterated that U.S. policy was to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, which Obama called “the world’s worst weapons,” at virtually any cost. Israel and the United States, he said, “agree that a nuclear-armed Iran would be a threat to the region, a threat to the world, and potentially an existential threat to Israel.”

Deal or No Deal

Years of diplomacy resulted in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal – one of Obama’s signature foreign policy achievements of his presidency.

A multilateral agreement finalized on July 14, 2015, in Vienna between Iran and the P5+1, the JCPOA’s primary goal was to ensure Iran’s nuclear program remains exclusively peaceful, preventing it from developing nuclear weapons, in exchange for lifting economic sanctions that had severely impacted Iran’s economy.

But although it capped uranium enrichment at 3.67 percent, far below weapons-grade levels of 90 percent, Israel considered it an unwelcome concession, warning that it allowed Iran to continue pursuing a path toward nuclear weapons. President Donald J. Trump agreed, and in May 2018, withdrew the U.S. from the agreement, calling it flawed due to “sunset clauses” and insufficient restrictions on ballistic missiles.

Following this, there was a sharp escalation in U.S.-Iran tensions, with a series of oil tanker attacks, Iranian seizure of tankers, and U.S. accusations of mine attacks. The Trump administration nearly conducted strikes in 2019 but aborted them.

Hopes for restoring peaceful relations were dashed in January 2020 when a U.S. drone strike killed IRGC Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani near Baghdad airport, which marked a major escalation and the highest-profile targeted killing of an Iranian official.

Iran retaliated with ballistic missile strikes on U.S. bases in Iraq, causing no deaths but over 100 traumatic brain injuries among American troops. Both sides stepped back from further direct action amid high tensions.

The early 2020s also saw ongoing Iranian-backed militia attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria, with dozens of rocket and drone incidents.

Shifting Rationales

With such an extensive and multilayered history of hostilities, it is no surprise that the justifications that President Trump has offered for the current conflict are equally extensive and multilayered. The U.S. has relied on shifting rationales for launching Operation Epic Fury, which has been alternately justified as an intervention to protect protesters from a brutal regime crackdown and to prevent Iran from developing ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio also indicated that the U.S. had to take action because Israel was set on attacking Iran, and Washington expected Iran to respond with strikes on U.S. bases. According to this logic, the U.S. attack was preventive in nature.

So far, Trump is touting the operation as a resounding success, but it clearly has the potential for spiraling further out of control. Iran has made good on its threats that if attacked, it would take the fight to U.S. personnel and partners in the region, firing missiles and armed drones at Israel and U.S. bases in Iraq, Jordan, Türkiye, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It also fired at a British base in Cyprus and two of its drones have landed in Azerbaijan.

As International Crisis Group notes, “This retaliation has been broader in scope than many expected, encompassing military and civilian infrastructure belonging to the Gulf Arab states.” It calls “the breadth of its targets ... unprecedented,” pointing out that it “reflect[s] Tehran’s sense that with its back against the wall, its best option is to raise the cost as quickly as possible for Washington’s allies.”

Besides threatening to subsume the entire region in a fiery conflagration, there are also substantial risks to nuclear security.

The Nuclear Threat Initiative put out a statement warning that “the ongoing major combat operations introduce serious nuclear security and proliferation risks,” pointing out that “Iran likely retains hundreds of kilograms of highly enriched uranium that can be used in a bomb, stockpiles of advanced centrifuges, and other sensitive capabilities.”

While regime change would be welcomed by many sectors in Washington, Tel Aviv and other capitals, there is the danger that a power vacuum could lead to Iran’s nuclear material and technology being stolen by non-state actors or simply go missing.

Therefore, NTI insists that it “is imperative that the United States has a comprehensive, actionable plan to prevent this scenario” and “that Iran allow the return of international inspectors immediately after the cessation of military operations to begin the arduous process of accounting for nuclear materials.”

While these technical aspects are important, it is equally important to recognize the process that led to this situation. The long and tangled history of U.S.-Iran relations reveals a cycle of intervention, resentment, proxy violence, and missed opportunities for genuine reconciliation – often fueled by deception and realpolitik calculations that have steadily undermined trust and fueled animosity.

From the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup against Mossadegh that poisoned Iranian perceptions of America as an imperialist power, to the 1979 hostage crisis that ignited open hostility, through covert arms deals like Iran-Contra, the accidental downing of Iran Air Flight 655, nuclear brinkmanship, and repeated proxy clashes, both nations have contributed to a mutual narrative of victimhood and aggression.

Official U.S. denials, shifting rationales – from humanitarian concerns to nuclear prevention – and backchannel dealings have only deepened mistrust, while Iran’s support for militias and chants of “Death to America” have sustained the adversarial status quo. It doesn’t help of course that the Iranian regime subscribes to an apocalyptic, radical version of Islam called Twelver Shi’ism, a messianic theology that shapes the regime’s perception of reality.

Operation Epic Fury marks the culmination of this long and fraught legacy. While Secretary of War Hegseth asserts that “we didn’t start this war,” framing the U.S. as the hapless victim of radical Islamists bent on world domination, the truth is that decades of American actions have helped shape the Islamic Republic’s worldview.

U.S. covert meddling and support for authoritarian rule fueled revolutionary backlash, while Iran’s post-1979 policies perpetuated enmity. As the conflict rages, with no clear endgame beyond destroying threats and perhaps regime collapse, the path forward must include breaking the cycle by countering simplistic narratives, as well as through transparent diplomacy and mutual recognition of grievances.

Only by recalling this forgotten history can we hope to forge a future free from perpetual war, where security is achieved through understanding rather than annihilation.

Nathaniel Parry is the author of Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era and How Christmas Became Christmas. He is the co-author of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush and editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. Follow him on Substack and X.

If you enjoyed the above article, please restack it and click the like button. It would also be greatly appreciated if you recommend this newsletter in your Substack recommendations, and, finally, be sure you are subscribed to receive future articles from Essential History.

In a wickedly funny skit that aired on SNL a little more than year ago, Nate Bargatze, playing General George Washington rallying his troops crossing the Delaware in December 1776, predicted that in the future — i.e., today — Americans would celebrate the birthdays of their presidents simply by “buying a mattress.” While Presidents Day mattress sales have indeed become a beloved American tradition as the fictional Washington foresaw, there was a time when celebrations of the first president’s birthday were far more grandiose, serving in troubled times to unify the country with both somber and festive commemorations.

In the first few decades of the 19th century, commemorations were mostly rather reverent, honoring Washington’s character and leadership through mournful public orations. Later on, parades and processions on city streets often involved military units, marching bands, civic societies, and ordinary citizens demonstrating their national pride. There were also concerts, with communities hosting patriotic addresses and readings that praised Washington’s virtues and legacy.

While these celebrations were primarily intended to honor the nation’s first president and celebrate its unrivalled national hero’s birthday, they also served to unite the country in its early stages — recalling that just like today, the country was deeply polarized.

Indeed, even during Washington’s tenure as Revolutionary War commander and during his presidency, there were many who openly challenged his competency and vehemently disagreed with his policies, as well as some who questioned his morality. The divisions in the nation could not be denied, but the celebrations of his life that took hold after his passing helped to forge a national identity and heal a divided people.

The veneration of Washington, however, started long before that and Americans had actually been celebrating Washington’s birthday for years before he passed away. During the Revolutionary War and throughout his presidency, public observances were held to honor the “Father of His Country.” In 1778 at Valley Forge, soldiers serenaded him on February 22 as a gesture of respect for their commander-in-chief.

Elaborate celebrations were also held when he visited Massachusetts in 1789. Despite being snubbed by Governor John Hancock who famously insulted Washington by refusing to meet with him, Washington was greeted by throngs of New Englanders who marked the occasion with festive celebrations.

As he entered a new town, Washington would disembark from his carriage and ride his horse, conscious of imparting the image of an everyman rather than a monarch. In the same vein, he refused to lodge in private homes and instead insisted on paying for lodging at taverns, demonstrating that he was a man of the people and conveying the new government’s republican spirit.

His New England tour included stops in nearly 60 towns, where he visited factories and farms, met with militias, spoke with local people and participated in festivities marked with fireworks and lavish dinners. He hoped that by visiting the New England states, and later other regions, he would “become better acquainted with the principal Characters & internal Circumstances, as well as to be accessible to number of well-informed persons, who might give him useful information and advices on political subjects.”

The tour was also intended to rally support for the Constitution and promote national unity in the face of enduring regional loyalties and widening factional differences.

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Early Divisions

Yet as the leader of a brand-new nation, one forged in a long and bloody war, there were also many practical challenges Washington had to confront. Washington enjoyed widespread popularity from his fellow Americans, but it was nevertheless clear that some of the luster of the revolution was wearing off, along with the veneer of national unity that accompanied the victory over the British.

Perhaps the most pressing challenge was the economy. When Washington took office in 1789, the states were saddled with heavy debt incurred during the war, with many falling behind in paying their obligations, which negatively impacted the credit of the United States as a whole. This meant that the federal government would not be able to secure future loans, which could create a financial crisis, a prospect exacerbated by the lack of mechanisms to generate internal revenue.

Washington’s newly appointed Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton studied the problem and came up with an elaborate plan for getting the new nation’s economic house in order. Hamilton’s ideas included the federal government assuming all state debt and the generation of revenue through taxes, tariffs and the issuing of bonds.

Although perhaps necessary to achieve financial stability, these proposals made the nation’s farming population anxious, and revived many of the arguments between federalists and anti-federalists that had so divided the country during the constitutional debates years earlier. Farmers, who had a natural tendency towards self-reliance, supported a smaller federal government that respected local autonomy. Many also viewed public debt as a means of enriching northern speculators through unfair taxation.

Hamilton’s proposals, therefore, met stiff resistance in the states, in Congress and even within Washington’s own administration. Representative James Madison, despite earlier being a prominent federalist, argued that the consolidation of power that Hamilton advocated threatened to erode republicanism. Madison organized a cohesive faction in the House of Representatives over assumption of debt, a cause that would be joined by Thomas Jefferson, who was serving as Secretary of State.

In 1792, Jefferson and Madison founded the Democratic-Republican Party, which opposed the programs of Alexander Hamilton and other policies of the Washington administration, and the two-party system was born.

Washington, however, ultimately sided with Hamilton, which forced Jefferson, as a member of Washington’s administration, to drop his objections.

Growing Divides

But despite his best efforts at promoting unity, Washington’s administration was riddled with growing divides on ideological grounds. The federalists and anti-federalists, rather than burying the hatchet after the adoption of the Constitution, continued to squabble over issues such as the rapid growth of the new central government and relations with France, which by the early 1790s was in the grips of its own tumultuous revolution.

One of Washington’s fiercest critics was Thomas Paine, who had been instrumental in the early days of the American Revolution by galvanizing the national consciousness with his pamphlets Common Sense and The Crisis but in later years would be essentially disowned by the new American establishment. “Monopolies of every kind marked your administration almost in the moment of its commencement,” Paine wrote in an open letter to Washington in July 1796. “The lands obtained by the revolution were lavished upon partisans; the interest of the disbanded soldier was sold to the speculator; injustice was acted under the pretense of faith; and the chief of the army became the patron of the fraud.”

Paine wondered what might result from such a corrupt beginning of the republic, speculating that in the future, America “may be what Europe now is.” Lamenting the coming “ruin of that liberty which thousands bled for or struggled to obtain,” Paine predicted that “when the empire of America shall fall, the subject for contemplative sorrow will be infinitely greater than crumbling brass and marble can inspire.” Instead of just leaving behind ruins of palaces and temples, such as those that have survived from ancient Rome, Paine regretted that America would leave behind the “noblest work of human wisdom, the grandest scene of human glory, the fair cause of Freedom [that] rose and fell.”

As an outspoken critic of Washington, Paine would become something of an outcast in his later years. Shunned by his former friends, it is believed that Paine began drinking more heavily. An acquaintance wrote that Paine had “a mind, though strong enough to bear him up and to rise elastic under the heaviest hand of oppression, yet unable to endure the contempt of his former friends ... and unhappily seeks refuge in low company, or looks for consolation in the sordid, solitary bottle.”

Stories endure of him being pulled out of taverns with his beard showing a two weeks’ old growth and his body giving off a “most disagreeable odor.”

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Greatness and Goodness

Another prominent American who castigated Washington for various reasons during his presidency was Benjamin Franklin’s grandson and publisher of the Philadelphia General Advertiser and Aurora newspapers Benjamin Franklin Bache. In his publications, Bache trashed the first president for policies such as supporting the Jay Treaty with Britain which normalized relations with the British, and took a vitriolic tone in attacking his caliber as a military leader and politician. “A Virginia planter by no means the most eminent, a militia-officer ignorant of war both in theory and useful practice, and a politician certainly not of the first magnitude,” Bache said. “He is but a man, and certainly not a great man.”

Other Americans recognized his greatness but questioned his goodness.

Reverend Benjamin Chase had the opportunity to meet with one of Washington’s escaped slaves, Ona Judge, and after hearing her story came to question the moral principles of the nation’s first president. After Judge’s escape in 1796, Washington worked tirelessly for years trying to reclaim his property. He placed an ad in a Philadelphia newspaper offering a $10 reward for the capture of Judge and sent his nephew Burwell Bassett Jr. to retrieve her, with force if necessary. In letters to acquaintances whom Washington hoped could assist in catching the runaway, he called her “simple” but also “handy & useful,” noting his anger that she would exhibit such “ingratitude” and stressing that she “ought not to escape with impunity if it can be avoided.”

Following his discussion with Judge about her ordeal as a runaway slave, Rev. Chase wrote a letter to the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, observing that “[g]reat names bear more weight with the multitude, than the eternal principles of God’s government.” Although Washington was clearly a great man, Chase questioned whether, as a slaveowner who relentlessly pursued a runaway slave, he could properly be considered a good man.

“So good a man as Washington is enough to sanctify war and slavery,” he wrote, “but where is the evidence of his goodness?”

For her part, Ona Judge also questioned Washington’s goodness and pointedly raised doubts about his piety, noting that when she was his slave, she noticed that he often spent his Sundays playing cards and drinking wine, and that she never heard him pray.

But while his morality may have been called into question by his slaves, Washington nevertheless maintained an aura of strong character and integrity to most Americans, which was often more important than his actual capabilities in bringing the country together.

Remaining United

With the nation rocked by factionalism and discord, Washington emphasized the theme of unity in his farewell address, offering his final counsel to the people as a letter to “friends and fellow-citizens.” In these parting words to the nation, the man who had led the revolution and the republic in its early stages cautioned against three intertwined threats to the American experiment in self-government: regionalism, partisanship, and foreign entanglements.

First published as “The Address of Gen. Washington to the People of America on His Declining the Presidency of the United States” in Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser on September 19, 1796, the letter highlighted the importance of the unity that bonded all Americans together and provided for their freedom and prosperity. He reminded Americans that the “independence and liberty” the nation currently enjoyed was the result of the “common dangers, sufferings, and successes” they had experienced together in the revolution. To safeguard their hard-won system of republican government in a federal union, the country had to remain united.

In this regard, he highlighted the importance of morality and religion in the promotion of patriotism and prevention of vice. “Let it simply be asked,” Washington argued,

Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Washington suggested that true patriotism is not possible without religion and morality, which he called the “great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens.” He further counseled Americans on the importance of maintaining strict honesty and a good-faith approach to both public and private life. “I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs,” he wrote, “that honesty is always the best policy.”

One individual who never took Washington’s words about honesty to heart, but who nevertheless recognized his unparalleled value as the nation’s preeminent Founding Father, was the criminal Henry Tufts — a famous New England vagabond who deserted multiple times from the Continental Army and once participated in a British counterfeiting scheme to undermine the American war effort. Tufts had been sentenced to die for stealing six silver spoons but his sentence was commuted by Samuel Adams while he was governor of Massachusetts. Following the commutation, Tufts broke out of jail and returned home to his first wife.

Despite his vagabond ways, even Tufts shared some of the spirit of patriotism that infused the revolutionary generation, and when Washington passed away on December 14, 1799, he was devastated. As Tufts relates in his memoirs, “I received the distressing intelligence of the decease of the illustrious Gen. Washington, that truly magnanimous patriot, who had been the political saviour of his country, and founder of the American empire.”

He maintained that Washington was more worthy of the title of “great” than “any of the Alexanders, Pompeys, or Charlses who ever swayed a sceptre.” His death, he writes, “was universally lamented, though the land of his preservation, by all ranks and orders of men ... for the matchless services he has rendered his country and the world.”

Despite having earlier expressed ambivalence over the cause of American independence and having deserted more than once from Washington’s army, Tufts was so distraught by his death that he commemorated the occasion by writing a poem, which he referred to as “a faint eulogy on his virtues, as a small tribute of praise to his sacred memory.” The following lines were “written on the table of my heart,” Tufts explains:

What dismal sounds invade the ear! What gloom o’erspreads the sky; What solemn tidings do we hear! What piercing, heartfelt cry!

Hark! ’tis the mournful trump of fate, “Great Washington’s no more;” Freed from this fleeting, mortal state, He seeks the heav’nly shore.

His glorious race on earth is run, Immortal lives his fame; Admiring worlds, O, Washington! Shall still exalt thy name.

With liberty, to bless mankind, To fight for freedom’s cause;

For these were form’d thy godlike mind, By fate’s unerring laws.

When heav’n in wisdom plac’d thee here, She thus address’d her son; Go! save America, thice dear, Nor fear, brave Washington.

There found an empire, far and wide, On Freedom’s sacred shore, Where lawless tyranny and pride Shall vex her realm no more.

Immortal Washington obey’d Th’ empyreal decree, And well atchiev’d the glorious deed, And founded liberty.

This done, celestial anthems rise On harps of purest gold, Angels invite him to the skies, The heav’nly gates unfold.

Columbia, mourn, in wees of woe, Your chief, your patriot gone, Let ceaseless tears in concert flow, For Freedom’s fav’rite son.

Yet, while our fond affections glow, With mingled grief and love, While still we mourn his death below, O, sing his birth above.

It is an enduring testament to Washington’s leadership that even an irredeemable criminal like Henry Tufts would be so moved as to write such a touching poem. If this ne’er-do-well could be transformed into a poet by the death of Washington, surely there was hope for the development of a united nation comprised of a virtuous citizenry — the basic prerequisite that the Founding Fathers recognized as necessary for the long-term success of the republic.

Nathaniel Parry is the author of Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era and How Christmas Became Christmas. He is the co-author of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush and editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. Follow him on Substack and X.

If you enjoyed the above article, please restack it and click the like button. It would also be greatly appreciated if you recommend this newsletter in your Substack recommendations, and, finally, be sure you are subscribed to receive future articles from Essential History.

It has become fashionable recently to draw comparisons between the Trump administration’s attempts to enforce federal immigration law in the state of Minnesota to the British occupation of Massachusetts a quarter-millennium ago. Like most historical analogies, however, this one fails in more ways than it succeeds.

Somewhat hyperbolically, liberal commentators have described the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Twin Cities as feeling “a lot like the British tyranny in colonial Boston,” highlighting killings by federal agents and contrasting them with the Boston Massacre. One writer even coined the phrase the “Minneapolis Massacres” to describe the controversial shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti – two activists who were tragically killed after impeding federal law enforcement operations and resisting arrest.

Another commentator, historian Ted Widmer, wrote recently in the Boston Globe that “Minneapolis in 2026” is much like “Boston in the 1770s.” He explicitly compared ICE enforcement actions to the British military occupation of Boston from 1768 to 1770, which included demands for papers, performative cruelty, impunity for agents, and daily tensions that escalated into violence.

Widmer notes how colonists resisted “heavy-handed authority” and “illegal occupation,” quoting Samuel Adams’s wife Elizabeth who described occupied Boston as “a cage for every unclean bird” and referencing Adams’s involvement in broader resistance efforts, such as “Humbling the Tories” through acts of vandalism and violence.

The implication is that the revolutionary spirit of resistance embodied by figures like Samuel Adams closely aligns with modern anti-ICE protests against federal overreach, which, it should be noted, is a dubious claim for more reasons than one.

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Power of Propaganda

While they do little to make sense of the situation on the ground in Minnesota today – or for that matter in Massachusetts two and half centuries ago – what these comparisons recall is that employing emotional rhetoric to influence people is far more effective in advancing a political agenda than it is to present a full set of facts with all of the relevant context and nuance. In other words, while failing on a number of levels – logically, factually and historically – the comparisons do recall the power of propaganda in shaping public opinion.

Much like 18^th century agitators such as Samuel Adams – aptly described by one of his biographers as a “pioneer in propaganda” – modern-day propagandists are working diligently to promote certain narratives that portray the “enemy” as a one-dimensional villain while glossing over the nefarious actions of their preferred protagonists and characterizing their provocations as understandable – even noble – reactions to tyranny.

This is why today’s activists express concern for “the rule of law” and “due process” while actively undermining these concepts by inhibiting the enforcement of federal immigration law. Like Samuel Adams, they understand the need to both downplay their own criminal activity and to portray the actions of law enforcement officers in the worst possible light – using terms like “abducted” and “kidnapped” instead of “detained” and “arrested” when referring to the apprehension of illegal aliens.

While claiming the mantle of the American Revolution, however, many of the actions of the open-borders advocates would surely be disavowed by revolutionaries such as Samuel Adams, who championed the movement against the British monarchy but took a decidedly different tone in the 1780s, when indebted farmers rebelled in western Massachusetts against the constitutional government.

As Adams saw it, to challenge a tyranny such as the British monarchy was not only legitimate but divine. On the other hand, to challenge a democratic government – such as the one that he had helped establish following the revolution – was unconscionable. He therefore took a hard line against Shays’s Rebellion and had little sympathy for the western Massachusetts farmers, whom he considered traitors worthy of the death penalty, despite the fact that many of them were Revolutionary War veterans and were widely recognized as having legitimate grievances.

Another historical problem with the comparison between anti-ICE agitation and the movement for independence is the inconvenient fact that the causes being championed could not be more different.

While liberal commentators awkwardly portray anti-ICE radicals as the natural heirs of the Boston patriots and draw clumsy parallels to the situation that led to the American Revolution all those years ago, the reality is that the nation’s founding was motivated by wildly different circumstances. It was forged, of course, not by the rejection of immigration laws duly adopted by the nation’s democratic institutions but by the rejection of London’s taxes, which were adopted without colonial input, and the Crown’s general exercise of legal authority over the colonies from thousands of miles away.

This resistance translated into violent and sometimes fanatical mob actions on the ground, culminating in a growing escalation of hostilities in 1760s and 1770s. These hostilities included the progressively routine tactic of trashing the homes of customs officials and British ministers, as well as the increasingly popular torture and intimidation method known as tar-and-feathering – leading to a growing perception in London that its colonies, particularly the Massachusetts Bay Colony, were falling to mob rule.

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‘Pest to Society’

The first known victim of tar-and-feathering in the colonies was a ship captain named William Smith in Norfolk, Virginia, who was accused of cooperating with customs officials in 1766. Two years later, the New England Sons of Liberty adopted the technique, with John Row and Robert Wood tarred and feathered in September 1768, in the town of Salem, for allegedly reporting smugglers to the authorities. Two other victims, Joshua Vickery and Francis Magno, were accused the same month of cooperating with customs officials and were tarred and feathered in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

As one contemporary described the assault on Vickery, a mob stripped him naked, covered him with scalding hot tar and feathers, placed him in the village stocks for two hours, then carried him through town in a cart so that people could pelt him with rocks and eggs. His tormentors held him overnight and, in the morning, ripped out his hair. Following this, they forced him to pull a cart through town where he was again subjected to violent attacks. After this public humiliation, he and Magno were taken to jail and prosecuted for breach of the peace.

In 1769, Nathan Smith was subjected to the treatment in New Haven, Connecticut. Smith had allegedly informed customs officials that a prominent merchant had been smuggling rum, and a few weeks later a mob abducted him, put him in a cart, carried him through town and forced him to announce to the public that he was “a liar, an informer, and a pest to society.” After this, they covered him in tar and feathers before allowing him to return home.

There was also a tar-and-feathering that year in New York City, where, in October, several men informed authorities about some smuggled wine. A few days later, a mob caught up with them, applied tar and feathers, and carted them through town.

These actions did not go unnoticed in London. As parliamentary debates raged over how to deal with the growing colonial crisis, one British parliamentarian argued that “instead of making their claim by argument, [Americans] always chose to decide the matter by tarring and feathering.”

With the colonists seen as irrational and dangerous, British soldiers were deployed to Boston in an attempt to restore order. Two regiments, constituting 4,000 troops, were dispatched to Boston in October 1768, which provided some protection to officials implementing customs duties. The contact between British soldiers and colonists, however, also served to increase tensions.

The British troops’ deployment was full of hardship, and with little food, bad water and no cooperation from the townspeople, discipline problems – and desertion – ran rampant. The redcoats were fond of cheap New England rum and their attitudes toward the colonists appeared at times to be a mix of envy and contempt, routinely disrespecting the locals by rudely demanding that they identify themselves on command.

In his written accounts of the occupation, Samuel Adams tended to amplify every altercation between Bostonians and the occupiers, for example highlighting incidents in which the troops attempted to court the wives of the locals.

While many of the sources of friction between the occupiers and occupied were real, Adams frequently embellished episodes, with articles in the Boston Evening Post, for example, telling tawdry tales of girls brutalized after refusing advances of randy redcoats. Governor Hutchinson complained that nine-tenths of the paper’s content was “either absolutely false or grossly misrepresented.”

Rising Tensions

With tensions rising in the town, fueled in some measure by Adams’s exaggerations, a crowd gathered on February 22, 1770, outside the house of customs officer Ebenezer Richardson in the North End. The mob threw stones that shattered Richardson’s windows, with one striking his wife. Fearful of the mob sacking his home, Richardson fired a gun into the crowd and fatally wounded an 11-year-old boy named Christopher Seider who had joined the protest.

This was precisely the sort of incident needed to intensify the struggle. Samuel Adams arranged the funeral, which was attended by more than 2,000 people. In the Boston-Gazette, Seider was hailed as a “little Hero and first Martyr to the noble Cause.”

Following the killing of young Seider, one of the most well-known but also most highly disputed incidents took place in the pre-revolutionary period – the so-called Boston Massacre.

On March 5, 1770, a crowd of some 300 Bostonians, still seething over Seider’s death, confronted a group of nine troops on King Street, and began verbally abusing them and throwing various projectiles, including rocks, ice and snowballs. Some also took swings at the soldiers with clubs. Afraid for his life, one soldier fired, and others followed suit and began discharging their weapons, leading to the deaths of five colonists.

The next day, at a meeting at Faneuil Hall, Samuel Adams was selected to chair a 15-member committee to petition Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson for the immediate removal of the two regiments of troops from Boston.

Backed by thousands of angry Bostonians and farmers who had arrived from the countryside, Adams presented the demand to Hutchinson, who responded that he would agree to removing one regiment but that he lacked the authority to order the removal of all troops. Adams replied that “if the Lieutenant Governor or Colonel Dalrymple, or both together, have the authority to remove one regiment, they have the authority to remove two,” adding that nothing less “will satisfy the public mind or preserve the peace.” Hutchinson relented and withdrew both regiments to Castle William.

Although the withdrawal of the troops, known to posterity as “Sam Adams’s two regiments,” may have served to calm immediate tensions and stave off further violence, the ramifications of the incident on King Street were just beginning to be felt.

Boston firebrands began to publicize the event as an unprovoked “massacre,” using the press to spread their narrative and leverage the incident as a rallying cry for revolution. Paul Revere produced an image that was widely published, depicting an unprovoked act of aggression, and Adams wrote articles in local newspapers calling the incident a senseless act of violence against innocent bystanders.

“It is a glaring mistake to say, the Soldiers were in danger from the inhabitants,” Adams wrote in one paper. “The reverse is true: the inhabitants were in danger from the Soldiers.”

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The Trial

The trial took place seven months after the incident with the soldiers represented by Samuel Adams’s cousin John, who touted the case as an important demonstration of the colonists’ commitment to the rule of law and principles of liberty.

“We talk of liberty and property,” John Adams said in his defense of the accused, “but, if we cut up the law of self-defense, we cut up the foundation of both, and if we give up this, the rest is of very little value.” He raised the prospect of the British soldiers being tarred and feathered by the mob, asserting that anyone facing that threat “would have a good right to have stood upon his defense, the defense of his liberty, and if he could not preserve that without hazard to his own life, he would be warranted, in depriving those of life, who were endeavouring to deprive him of his.”

While the radicals disingenuously portrayed the shooting as a one-sided slaughter of peaceable Bostonians, the reality was far closer to the description that John Adams gave in his closing argument:

[The soldiers] could not defend themselves with their bayonets against so many people; it was in the power of the sailors to kill one half or the whole of the party, if they had been so disposed; what had the soldiers to expect, when twelve persons armed with clubs, (sailors too, between whom and soldiers, there is such an antipathy, that they fight as naturally when they meet, as the elephant and Rhinoceros) were daring enough, even at the time when they were loading their guns, to come up with their clubs, and smite on their guns; what had eight soldiers to expect from such a set of people?

The jury was persuaded by his arguments and convinced by the evidence that the accused had indeed acted in self-defense. They acquitted Captain Thomas Preston of manslaughter, taking Preston’s word that he had not ordered his soldiers to open fire on the angry mob, and also found that six of the eight soldiers were innocent.

Even in the hotbed of revolutionary activity known as Boston, the jurors agreed with John Adams that the British soldiers had no choice but to open fire on the mob, and ultimately, just two of the soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter. Although this was a capital offense, the two appealed to the “benefit of clergy,” which was a common practice of the English legal system in which a first-time offender could read a biblical passage and receive a branding, usually on his thumb, and then be set free.

John Adams’s defense of the soldiers was perhaps a bit too robust for his cousin’s taste. Although Samuel Adams desired the appearance of a fair trial to show that Boston was not run by a lawless mob, he very much wanted the soldiers to be convicted, which would have demonstrated that Bostonians were the victims of an unjust occupation. This reflects the patriots’ understanding that controlling the narrative was essential.

The outcome of the case, however, didn’t stop the patriots from continuing to denounce the “Boston massacre,” and using it to frame the discourse and leveraging it to mobilize popular support, which was ultimately more important than the not-guilty verdicts in the case.

Samuel Adams denounced the outcome as a miscarriage of justice, but although he was disappointed by the acquittals, he continued to publicly agitate on the issue of the Boston Massacre, and the following year, spearheaded the first of several March 5 “Massacre Day” remembrances. These days of mourning would keep the incident fresh in the minds of colonists, laying the groundwork for even more confrontational resistance against the British.

John Adams would later claim that “the foundation of American independence was laid” on March 5, 1770, when five members of a mob were killed in Boston.

Revolutionary Legacy

Ultimately, this is the legacy that modern-day protesters are attempting to claim by reenacting escalatory tactics that inevitably lead to ever-growing tensions, provocations, and violent reprisals. While the strained analogies between ICE operations in Minnesota and the British occupation of Boston reveal more about propaganda’s enduring power than any real historical parallel, there is on the other hand a very real possibility for deepening divisions and escalating violence.

Just as Samuel Adams amplified grievances, exaggerated incidents like the Boston Massacre and recast mob actions as noble resistance, today’s liberal commentators and activists frame federal enforcement as tyrannical “occupation” and the arrests of illegal aliens as “disappearances.” They label the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti the “Minneapolis Massacres,” casting them as unprovoked murders by villainous agents, while downplaying how both occurred amid aggressive resistance and attempts to impede lawful arrests.

They whitewash the radical actions of activists who have engaged in a range of violent, unhinged and felonious activity in recent weeks: mobs threatening an individual for wearing a jacket with an American flag, assaulting independent journalists and influencers, invading a church and terrorizing parishioners, harassing citizens on the street, trashing hotels, vandalizing government vehicles, attacking law enforcement officers, and even biting off fingers.

This mirrors Adams’s playbook: orchestrate highly provocative actions that could elicit disproportionate responses, then portray enforcement as outrageous oppression, and use emotionally charged rhetoric to sanitize provocations as righteous while casting the government’s actions as unbridled tyranny.

Yet it is important to recall that revolutionaries like Adams championed defiance of unrepresentative monarchy, not obstruction of a democratic government’s prerogatives. The patriots sought to defend the right to self-government and establish a republic, and therefore, the means they used toward this end are widely seen as justifiable.

The anti-ICE protests in the Twin Cities, on the other hand, invoke revolutionary heritage while seeking to thwart duly enacted laws for open-borders goals. The tactics – blockades, vandalism and widespread agitation – have proven effective in escalating tensions, but many remain unconvinced that they are justified. Through sophisticated propaganda, however, by prioritizing narrative over facts, they may succeed in transforming legitimate law enforcement efforts into rallying cries for revolution.

But the question remains: toward what end? Precisely what sort of a revolution are today’s activists pushing for? A U.S. government stripped of its authority to enforce immigration law? A world without borders where billions of people can flood into U.S. territory without proper vetting?

These are the questions that today’s left-wing activists consistently fail to answer. While they have proven quite adept at utilizing Adams’s propaganda techniques, they remain incapable of articulating precisely what sort of system should replace the one that they seek to tear down. The only conclusion to be drawn is that the movement is based on a blend of anarchism and nihilism, vehement in its opposition to the government’s authority but unsure of what it supports.

Samuel Adams, as an articulate defender of American rights and liberties who became a respected statesman following his earlier career as a rabble rouser, would surely disapprove.

Nathaniel Parry is the author of Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era and How Christmas Became Christmas. He is the co-author of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush and editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. Follow him on Substack and X.

If you enjoyed the above article, please restack it and click the like button. It would also be greatly appreciated if you recommend this newsletter in your Substack recommendations, and, finally, be sure you are subscribed to receive future articles from Essential History.

Immigration- and law enforcement-related unrest is heating up once again, with demonstrators across the country protesting the shooting of Renee Nicole Good after the activist drove her vehicle towards a federal agent on Wednesday in Minneapolis. Leftists claim that the use of force was unnecessary while conservatives generally consider it to be justified.

Although somewhat open to interpretation, videos of the incident depict Good apparently using her vehicle to block traffic and impede Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s operations in the neighborhood — which was confirmed by a fellow activist as her goal — and then attempting to drive off when confronted by ICE agents who demanded that she exit her vehicle.

It’s not entirely clear whether she intended to harm the officer, who was later identified as Jonathan Ross, or whether his use of deadly force was absolutely necessary, but what is clear is that there is — at the very least — a strong self-defense claim to be made by the ICE agent. She did, after all, accelerate her vehicle toward Ross and lightly strike him, providing ample reason to believe that she posed a danger to his life, regardless of her actual intent.

It is also possible that Ross was hyper-aware of the imminent danger he was in due to a prior encounter with a motorist he was trying to arrest for an immigration violation. In June 2025, Ross was dragged approximately 100 yards by the fleeing suspect’s vehicle during an arrest in Bloomington, Minnesota. In this incident, Ross suffered injuries that required dozens of stitches, and the suspect was later convicted of assaulting a federal officer with a deadly weapon.

Whether Ross was more on edge than usual because of his previous traumatic experience, or whether or not he was entirely justified in using deadly force against Good, at minimum, it was clearly a poor decision on her part to accelerate her vehicle with an armed law enforcement officer in front of her, one that could easily be mistaken for a “suicide by cop” scenario.

Nevertheless, leftists have taken to the streets in protest, shouting slogans that openly call for the murder of ICE agents in retaliation, and are using social media to issue death threats. “We will get justice for a fallen comrade,” said one antifa militant, “whether it be judicial justice or street justice.” They even attacked the Renaissance Hotel in downtown Minneapolis after hearing that ICE agents were staying there, breaching the entrance, damaging the lobby and spray painting the building with “Fuck ICE” slogans.

Beyond ginning up unrest, activists are also exploiting the incident to advance a radical, far-left narrative about the illegitimacy of immigration law, with thousands in Minneapolis this week chanting “Rise up, take a stand! No one’s illegal on stolen land!”

The increasingly confrontational activism is inspired by demonstrators’ convictions that they have the right to impede the enforcement of federal laws duly adopted by Congress in the name of human rights, particularly migratory rights, because America’s institutions are illegitimate to begin with — forged by genocidal colonists who stole the land from its original inhabitants and established a tyrannical government based on white supremacy.

What this radical leftist narrative often comes up against, however, is the cold-hard reality that laws exist in spite of their worldview and that federal officers are authorized to protect themselves when their safety is placed in jeopardy.

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A Growing Trend

For months, government officials such as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Czar Tom Homan have repeatedly warned activists that they must not impede law enforcement or in any way harm — or even touch — ICE agents carrying out their duties. Activists, however, continue to push the limits and adopt increasingly confrontational tactics such as physical obstruction, vandalism, and violence.

Activists have frequently used vehicles as tools to obstruct ICE operations, turning them into improvised barriers or weapons. This tactic has surged over the past year, with DHS reporting more than double the vehicle ramming attacks against officers compared to prior years, with motor vehicles becoming a “tool of choice” for hindering arrests. Just two months ago, DHS warned that “these attacks not only pose a potentially fatal risk to officers but also endanger the public.”

With their lawful missions being impeded and agents coming under threat, ICE and Border Patrol agents are increasingly forced to not only contend with the difficulties of carrying out arrests of illegal aliens but also the challenges of unhinged activists who have no sense of boundaries or even self-preservation.

The violent confrontations between ICE agents and activists over the past year raise fundamental questions of legitimacy when it comes to the federal government’s actions. But while on principle leftists may reject the authority of the federal government to enforce national borders and remove illegal immigrants, they frequently receive reality checks in the form of pepper spray in the face or the cramped confines of a jail cell.

In total, hundreds of activists have been arrested over the past year and now face charges ranging from trespassing and failure to comply with orders to more serious cases of assault on federal officers and throwing incendiary devices, as well as felony arson, assault with a deadly weapon, and material support for terrorism.

Despite these serious legal repercussions, open-borders advocates continue their campaign of chaos, insisting that their actions are righteous and justified, and claiming that they are simply attempting to defend their communities against an overreaching federal government.

Beyond that, they also explicitly challenge the very legitimacy of immigration laws and the government’s authority to enforce them, basing their anarchistic philosophy on a radical interpretation of history and law.

No One is Illegal?

With the slogan “no one is illegal on stolen land” becoming the go-to argument of this movement, the underlying premise of anti-ICE activists is that a nation built on “stolen” land cannot legitimately exclude newcomers seeking entry, as the original act of settlement itself was an illegitimate invasion.

Like many political slogans, however, the assertion that “no one is illegal on stolen land” tends to simplify a complex historical and political reality by appealing to emotionally charged rhetoric, eliciting and exploiting a sense of moral indignation, guilt and sympathy rather than providing a rational argument against the enforcement of federal immigration law.

While there is no denying the tragedies endured by Native American populations, which for generations suffered from disease, displacement, military campaigns, cultural erasure, and ethnic cleansing policies like the Trail of Tears, extending this history to declare all border enforcement illegitimate is absurd. The concept is not only fraught with logical inconsistencies and historical oversimplifications but also applied highly selectively.

If it were applied consistently, of course, the epithet of “stolen land” would cover most countries around the world, as well as some of the Native American populations themselves.

Inter-tribal conflicts involving conquest, territorial expansion, and dispossession were quite common among Native American tribes in North America, often driven by competition for resources like hunting grounds, trade routes, or access to goods. These occurred both before and after European contact, sometimes exacerbated by the introduction of horses, firearms, and shifting alliances.

Throughout the 17th century, for example, the Beaver Wars dominated life in the Great Lakes region. In these conflicts, the Iroquois Confederacy sought to dominate the fur trade by conquering other tribes’ territories through raids that killed warriors, captured thousands for adoption or enslavement, and dispersed survivors. The result was the Iroquois seizing Huron lands in what is now southern Ontario.

A similar dynamic played out in the 18th and early 19th centuries, as the Lakota migrated westward, expanding their territory through conflicts with neighboring tribes, often facilitated by horses and guns acquired via trade with whites. They pushed the Omaha aside during southward migrations, displacing them from parts of the Central Plains, and in the Republican River Valley (now Nebraska and Kansas), the Lakota clashed with the Pawnee over prime hunting lands.

The Lakota also fought for control of the Black Hills and surrounding areas in the Northern Plains, becoming the dominant force in that region by the early 1800s through battles that resulted in territorial gains at the expense of the Crow, Kiowa, and Cheyenne.

The Comanche, after migrating southward from the Rocky Mountains in the 18th century, established dominance over the Southern Plains spanning parts of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Kansas by conquering and dispossessing other tribes. They displaced the Apache from key territories through relentless warfare and raids, pushing them eastward and southward by the mid-1700s and claiming the fertile grasslands for horse herds and bison hunting.

The Comanche, who were known for exceptionally brutal tactics, also raided and pressured Pueblo peoples in the Southwest, dominating trade routes and resources while expanding their nomadic empire at the expense of these groups until U.S. military campaigns in the mid-19th century.

In short, America’s indigenous inhabitants have been stealing the land from each other for centuries. It therefore makes no sense to hold European settlers to a different standard for allegedly “stealing” land from Native Americans or assert that these centuries-old conflicts should have any bearing on current legal matters.

Ultimately, a nation’s founding history is irrelevant to its contemporary authority to establish control over its borders and immigration procedures.

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Founding History and Contemporary Legitimacy

If all nations were held to that standard, in fact, it would mean that most of the world’s peoples have no authority to control their borders. This is because most nations around the world have origins involving some form of conquest, territorial expansion, or dispossession of prior inhabitants at some point in their historical formation.

Rather than being an aberration that undermines the legitimacy of the United States and nullifies its borders, this is actually a near-universal pattern in state-building spanning the epochs of human history, as nation-states typically emerged through warfare, migration, unification of disparate groups, or colonial processes that displaced or subjugated existing populations.

This is not only the case in so-called settler-colonial states such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but can also be seen across Europe, Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. Examples include Roman, Ottoman, Mongol, and Arab expansions, as well as European unifications and ancient migrations such as Bantu expansions in Africa.

Indeed, pick any place on a world map and chances are you will find a state formed through internal or external conquests, dynastic wars, or migrations that dispossessed earlier groups.

Leftists and open-borders advocates in the United States, however, not only ignore this broader context but also tend to highlight the supposedly unique evil of America’s founding. To do so, they readily point to America’s founding documents, such as the Declaration of Independence, which they claim contains language that provides evidence of genocidal intent, thereby rendering illegitimate the U.S. government and its authority to enforce immigration law.

A focal point for critics has long been the Declaration’s final grievance against King George III: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

The phrase “merciless Indian Savages” has not aged well, to say the least, and advocacy groups like the Center for Native American Youth argue that it reflects a worldview that enabled “degrading, looting, enslaving and committing mass cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples.” Some go further than that, arguing that the language confirms that borders are fundamentally illegitimate.

An Instagram user states: “Oh, you didn’t know the Declaration of Independence called us ‘the merciless Indian savages’? ... NO ONE IS ILLEGAL ON STOLEN LAND!!!” Another Instagram post directly excerpts the grievance’s wording to challenge the moral authority of U.S. borders: “The Declaration of Independence was adopted on the ... merciless Indian Savages ... Dear America: No One Is Illegal on Stolen Land.”

In the “Native American Warriors” group on Facebook, a post notes that “before there were borders, there were nations and they’re still here,” urging America to “acknowledg[e] Indigenous history” and “respect Native sovereignty.”

While perhaps sincerely held, these widespread sentiments reflect a deeply imperfect understanding of the past colored by historical grievances and a bias known as presentism, or the interpretation of past events, people, or ideas solely by modern values, standards, and knowledge, without considering the historical context in which they occurred.

To be sure, by contemporary standards, the term “merciless Indian savages” is offensive and dehumanizing, but the reality is that applying modern sensibilities to this historical phrase detaches it from its actual meaning.

Rather than being indicative of inherent racism or genocidal foreshadowing, the language reflects the reality of frontier warfare, the politics of the American Revolution, and deep-seated cultural differences between whites and Indians.

Native customs, for instance, clashed violently with European norms. Practices like ambush warfare, gauntlets, slow burning, or targeting non-combatants horrified settlers, reinforcing their stereotypes of “savages.” This mutual incomprehension fueled cycles of retribution and violence, ultimately leading to the Natives’ defeat and displacement.

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Brutal Frontier Reality

Pre-revolutionary conflicts had set the tone for Thomas Jefferson’s choice of words in the Declaration of Independence, events such as the 1622 Powhatan attack on Jamestown which killed 347 through deception and mutilation and King Philip’s War (1675–1676) that set new precedents for atrocities.

In this conflict, Wampanoag and allies raided New England towns, burning homes, slaughtering livestock, and subjecting captives to prolonged torment. Accounts describe rape, mutilation, and trophy-taking, with fingers prized for necklaces and human skin for belts. Around 2,500 to 3,000 colonists died, making it the deadliest conflict per capita in American history, with potentially 30 percent of New England’s English population affected.

With colonists subjected to “exquisite Torments” by the Natives, many were left with lasting fear and hatred, with survivors viewing Native warriors as “devils inspired by Satan.”

Similar patterns persisted into the American Revolution. Lord Dunmore’s War (1774) stemmed from atrocities like the Yellow Creek Massacre and subsequent Native retaliations. Cherokee attacks in 1776 killed and mutilated dozens; settlers responded with scorched-earth campaigns burning towns and crops.

The Declaration’s 27th grievance, in particular, directly accused the British Crown of inciting indigenous attacks on colonial frontiers, which was not rhetorical exaggeration but an explicit response to British policy. The 1763 Royal Proclamation had prohibited settlement west of the Appalachians to appease indigenous allies after the French and Indian War — a restriction deeply resented by land-hungry colonists.

As tensions escalated into open rebellion, British officials actively armed and encouraged tribes to raid American settlements, aiming to divert rebel resources and punish independence supporters.

Most Native nations aligned with the British, perceiving them as a buffer against unchecked American expansion. The Iroquois Confederacy divided, with the Oneida and Tuscarora siding with patriots, but the majority (Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga) fighting for the Crown. In the South, Cherokee leaders like Dragging Canoe launched offensives in 1776, assured by British agents they could enforce the Proclamation line and seize settler property.

These alliances produced brutal frontier warfare. Raids targeted civilian settlements, involving scalping, torture, and killings without regard for age or sex — practices embedded in some tribal traditions as rituals of mourning, revenge, and warrior status. To settlers, this appeared as indiscriminate terror and recalled a long history of Indian atrocities endured by their forefathers.

Founders’ Nuanced Views on Native Americans

Jefferson’s words, drafted amid these events, reflected frontier settlers’ lived experiences. The phrase accused the King of “exciting” such violence, serving as propaganda to unify colonists against Britain, but it was not used lightly. Indeed, the phrase was approved by a committee including Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, and ratified by Congress — indicating a widely shared perception of an actual threat, not casual racism.

The founders, moreover, were not uniformly hostile to their indigenous neighbors. Jefferson, despite the Declaration’s language, expressed some admiration in fact. Native Americans, he wrote, were “in body and mind equal to the white man,” with cultural merits like intricate pipe carvings. He drew from early travelers’ accounts and personal interactions, fostering “attachment & commiseration” to his Indian acquaintances.

Franklin, for his part, proposed the Pine Tree Flag inspired by Iroquois symbolism and incorporated elements of their confederacy into early U.S. governance models, valuing their unity mechanisms.

Yet, pragmatism tempered admiration. Expansion was seen as inevitable for security — “securing women & children... from the tomahawk & scalping knife,” Jefferson emphasized. He therefore became a vocal advocate for assimilation for some of the friendly tribes but also removal for those who resisted, a “carrot and stick” approach that foreshadowed harsher policies to come.

Implications for Borders and State Authority

Completely ignoring this nuanced and complex history, activists today continue to shriek that America’s checkered past renders its current attempts to control its borders illegitimate with the slogan “no one is illegal on stolen land.” But the core assertion — that historical conquest of native populations somehow invalidates a nation’s sovereignty — fails on a number of levels.

Not only is human history broadly characterized by migration, conflict and displacement — and therefore no nation from Mexico to Australia to modern Indian reservations in the United States could legitimately enforce their borders — but more importantly the basis of sovereignty is simply not tied to the righteousness or legitimacy of historical events such as wars of conquest. Sovereignty arises from effective control, negotiated treaties, and international recognition, not perpetual reversion to pre-conquest claims.

It would be impractical to try to apply these standards, in fact, because people today have a limited understanding of history and tend to simplify all human events to fit a racialized victim-oppressor model that has no real bearing to reality. Therefore, relitigating events like the centuries of relations between European settlers and indigenous peoples would be utterly distorted and biased, likely leading to a new round of dispossession against the perceived heirs and beneficiaries of the alleged historical injustice.

Furthermore, modern immigration enforcement — laws, deportations, walls — differs fundamentally from colonial-era violence. Restricting entry upholds the rights of citizens — including those of modern-day indigenous peoples, as well as legal immigrants — and protects their resources and property.

To achieve this, the state ultimately relies on what political scientists call “the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.” This is a foundational concept in political theory, emphasizing that the state is the sole entity authorized to employ or sanction physical force within its territory to maintain order and authority. This idea underscores the state’s role as the ultimate arbiter of coercion, distinguishing it from other social institutions or individuals.

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Max Weber, a German sociologist and political economist, is credited with formally articulating this concept in his 1919 lecture “Politics as a Vocation” and further elaborating it in his posthumously published work Economy and Society. He defined the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”

But while Weber popularized the phrase, the idea has deeper roots in early modern political thought. French jurist Jean Bodin, in his 1576 treatise Les Six livres de la République, argued that sovereignty requires the state’s exclusive right to wield force, including the power to make war and administer justice.

English philosopher Thomas Hobbes built on this in his 1651 work Leviathan, portraying the state as a “leviathan,” or a massive sea monster from Hebrew mythology which is portrayed in the Bible as a powerful symbol of God’s might, created via social contract to end the “war of all against all” in the state of nature. For Hobbes, individuals surrender their natural right to violence to the sovereign, who then holds a monopoly on force to ensure peace and security.

Although widely accepted as a cornerstone of civilization, anarchist thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin have rejected the idea of a monopoly of violence outright, viewing the state as an inherently coercive and hierarchical institution that perpetuates injustice rather than legitimacy. Rather than submitting to the authority of the state, anarchists advocate for voluntary associations without centralized force.

It is this ideology, ultimately, that is playing out in America, fueling the attacks on ICE and inspiring the broader resistance to federal authority. Like the notion that “no one is illegal on stolen land,” however, it is a fundamentally problematic argument because it will inevitably come up against harsh real-world realities — just as Renee Good found out this week in Minnesota.

Nathaniel Parry is the author of Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era and How Christmas Became Christmas. He is the co-author of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush and editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. Follow him on Substack and X.

If you enjoyed the above article, please restack it and click the like button. It would also be greatly appreciated if you recommend this newsletter in your Substack recommendations, and, finally, be sure you are subscribed to receive future articles from Essential History.

In a dramatic military operation on Saturday, U.S. forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in Caracas and swiftly removed them from the country. President Donald Trump announced the success of the “large-scale strike,” proudly stating that no U.S. lives were lost in the operation while downplaying the fact that at least 40 Venezuelans were killed, including both military personnel and civilians.

Maduro is now being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn and faces four counts, including narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation, and illegal possession of machine guns and destructive devices.

With Maduro gone, Trump has promised to temporarily put Venezuela under U.S. control, asserting that “we will run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.” Although the primary justification for the operation was Maduro’s status as a fugitive of U.S. justice, Trump has also openly spoken of controlling Venezuela’s natural resources.

Multiple reports quote him framing the operation as enabling access to the country’s oil, with the New York Times and Fortune noting that “oil emerged as central” and that the regime change was “largely about its vast oil reserves.” Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves, with approximately 303 billion barrels.

Trump described U.S. involvement in rebuilding and exploiting Venezuela’s oil industry as a central objective, stating that American oil companies would “go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”

Echoes of 1989 and 1954

The weekend’s operation drew immediate comparisons to a similar intervention three and a half decades ago. Alan McPherson, a history professor at Temple University and author of A Short History of US Interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean, said that the Venezuela operation is “shocking because nothing like this has happened since 1989.”

That year, President George HW Bush ordered Panama’s invasion by about 27,000 U.S. troops to capture the dictator Manuel Noriega – a former CIA asset who had been indicted on drug-trafficking charges in U.S. courts.

Hours after the strikes, in which hundreds of Panamanian civilians and soldiers were killed, the U.S. installed Guillermo Endara – widely believed to have won the annulled 1989 election – as president. The intervention caused significant destruction in Panama City followed by widespread looting in the immediate aftermath as the Panamanian Defense Forces collapsed and U.S. forces focused on military objectives.

Ultimately though, the post-invasion period led to a relatively quick transition to stability and democracy, and the operation was generally hailed as a success. The Panamanian Defense Forces were disbanded and replaced with a civilian-controlled police force. Panama held free elections in 1994 and has maintained regular, peaceful transfers of power since.

Other U.S. interventions in Latin America, however, haven’t always gone as smoothly. Indeed, as McPherson pointed out, it is “very rare” for such military operations and coups in the region to be followed by “peace, tranquility, stability and democracy.”

“U.S. interventions almost always create long-term problems of succession,” he noted.

In this regard, an instructive case is the regime change operation in 1954 that overthrew the Guatemalan president, Jacobo Arbenz. Similar to the intervention in Venezuela, the 1954 operation was motivated by a mixture of ideological and economic motives and was generally justified as necessary to “protect democracy” in the hemisphere, although the “threat” posed by the target regime was largely overblown.

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Anti-Communism and Land Reform

According to the CIA’s official history of the 1954 coup, “officers in the Directorate of Plans believed … [that] Communists had targeted a country in ‘America’s backyard.” This, however, was an exaggeration.

While it is true that Arbenz had used Guatemala’s communist party, the PGT, to mobilize political support for his programs from 1945-54, in fact, the revolution that brought an end to Guatemala’s dictatorship was explicitly anti-communist.

The first president following the revolution of 1945, Dr. Juan Jose Arevalo, made clear his view that “Communism is contrary to human nature,” and instead of a dictatorship of the proletariat, he emphasized “the superiority of the doctrine of democracy.”

Indeed, Guatemala appeared committed to a fair, honest democracy, with elections, term limits and a prohibition on military men running for office. Press censorship was forbidden, the right to organize was codified and suffrage was expanded to everyone but illiterate women.

Also central to the revolution was redistributing land to the peasants. This, however, required breaking free from the domination of United Fruit Company in Guatemala, a Boston-based company that had come to be known in Central America as the “octopus,” because it had its proverbial tentacles in so many aspects of the economy, controlling the vast majority of land, as well as the railroads and telecommunications infrastructure.

To many Guatemalans, the name “United Fruit” was synonymous with “United States,” which was not far off the mark. United Fruit’s business interests were intimately intertwined with the United States’ strategic interests, with several Eisenhower administration officials directly connected to the company.

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, for instance, had served as an attorney for United Fruit, as did his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles. America’s UN ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, was a stockholder and the company’s public relations director’s wife was the personal secretary of President Eisenhower.

A major point of contention between the U.S. and Guatemala was Arbenz’s land reform program, specifically, the seizure of land owned by United Fruit and the compensation package the government had offered to the company. Arbenz based the compensation on the value that the company had placed on the land, which was set artificially low by United Fruit for tax purposes.

As a result of the impasse over the compensation proposal, United Fruit launched an all-out public relations offensive in the United States, intended to exaggerate Arbenz’s ties to communists, and foment a climate of fear among Americans. This in turn contributed to the exacerbated security concerns of the U.S. government and provided a justification for intervention.

United Fruit’s involvement in policymaking continued in the preparations for the invasion through the coup, with a company official meeting with CIA Director Allen Dulles to discuss the status of United Fruit properties following Arbenz’s ouster. Dulles assured United Fruit that whoever the CIA selected as the next Guatemalan leader would not be permitted to nationalize or disrupt the company’s operations.

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Operation PBSUCCESS

The facts of the CIA effort to overthrow the Guatemalan president, dubbed Operation PBSUCCESS, are well-documented and are not seriously in dispute.

According to the CIA’s official history, the Agency employed “propaganda, sabotage, aircraft, an army of insurrectionists, and the implicit threat of U.S. military power” to “place maximum pressure on the Arbenz regime,” ultimately causing it to collapse.

Central to the success of the CIA operation was the broadcast of La Voz de la Liberacion on Guatemala radio. Originating in Miami, the radio program claimed to be broadcast from “deep in the jungle,” and exhorted the Guatemalan people to resist the Arbenz government and support the paramilitary forces of Col. Carlos Castillo Armas.

When Armas’s invasion commenced, on June 18, 1954, it was backed up by U.S. aircraft, which dropped fragmentation bombs on Guatemala City and machine-gunned the National Palace. The air bombardment intensified over the following days, as the ground invasion advanced.

Little more than a week after the U.S.-backed invasion and destabilization campaign began, a friend of Arbenz, Carlos Enrique Díaz, convinced him to resign the presidency at the behest of the CIA and U.S. Ambassador John Peurifoy. A military junta led by Elfegio Monzón took over the following day, and soon afterwards was replaced by Carlos Castillo Armas.

After the CIA installed Castillo Armas, hundreds of Guatemalans were rounded up and killed, kicking off decades of civil strife and repression. This was exacerbated when the CIA-backed government reversed the land reform program after consolidating power, paving the way to armed conflict.

As journalist Eduardo Galeano described it in 1968, “The Guatemalan peasants still feel a combative nostalgia for the revolution which they knew for a decade, and of which the imperialist aggression robbed them in 1954.”

The agrarian reform, as Galeano saw it, was the cause of conflict with United Fruit and when the CIA-installed government tore from tens of thousands of peasant families the lands they had just received, it ensured widespread support for a guerrilla insurgency.

Rather than dealing with these underlying issues, though, the Guatemalan authorities responded with brute force. Between 1954 and 1990, the repressive operatives of successive military regimes murdered more than 200,000 Guatemalan civilians.

Even with internal government knowledge of Guatemala’s human rights record, U.S. support for the regime continued. President Jimmy Carter placed an embargo on Guatemala for a brief period in the late 1970s, but this was lifted when Ronald Reagan came to power in 1981, ushering in an era of unprecedented atrocities in Guatemala.

Through the decades of U.S. support, there was clear evidence of war crimes committed by the Guatemalan government. Viron Vaky, the U.S. embassy’s deputy chief of mission in Guatemala, wrote in a March, 29, 1968, memo, “The official squads are guilty of atrocities. … In the minds of many in Latin America … we are believed to have condoned these tactics, if not actually encouraged them.”

He went on to lament what he saw as the degradation of American values in the name of fighting communism: “Have our values been so twisted by our adversary’s concept of politics in the hemisphere?”

U.S. Regret

In 1996, peace accords were signed that officially marked an end to the country’s 36-year civil war, the longest and bloodiest of the twentieth century’s Latin American conflicts.

Three years later, on March 10, 1999, President Bill Clinton expressed regret for the U.S. role, acknowledging that Washington “was wrong” to have supported Guatemalan security forces in its brutal counterinsurgency campaign. “It is important that I state clearly that support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression … was wrong,” Clinton said, “and the United States must not repeat that mistake.”

When Clinton offered his apology, he promised that the U.S. would “continue to support the peace and reconciliation process in Guatemala.” His primary method for doing so was by spreading the supposed success of free trade and democracy by lifting trade barriers and opening markets across the world, a theme that he revisited repeatedly throughout his presidency.

“Just as democracy helps make the world safe for commerce,” he wrote in his book Between Hope and History, “commerce helps make the world safe for democracy.”

But the reality was that for decades, U.S. policy had been undermining democracy. Its coup against Guatemala, in fact, had set in motion decades of U.S. foreign policy characterized by covert action, assassination plots and overt military intervention.

Despite the gruesome human toll, the intervention in Guatemala was generally considered an unqualified success by U.S. government leaders, who then used it as a model for subsequent interventions, including the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and support for the Nicaraguan Contras.

According to the CIA’s official study of the intervention, “its triumph confirmed the belief of many in the Eisenhower administration that covert operations offered a safe, inexpensive substitute for armed force” in dealing with leftist governments.

International Law a La Carte

What was becoming clear, also, was that principles of international law did not necessarily apply to the United States in its conduct of foreign policy — particularly in what it considers its “backyard” of Latin America. This was the case even when the International Court of Justice specifically ruled against the United States, as in the case of Nicaragua v. United States.

In 1984, Nicaragua brought suit against the U.S. in the World Court in relation to U.S. policies of arming, training and financing of the Contra rebels who were fighting to overthrow the Nicaraguan government, as well as mining the harbors of the small Central American nation.

The United States, in justifying its policies, claimed that it was acting in Nicaragua only in “collective self-defense,” a justification that the court rejected by a vote of 12-3.

The court further overwhelmingly ruled that the United States, “by training, arming, equipping, financing and supplying the contra forces … has acted, against the Republic of Nicaragua, in breach of its obligation under customary international law not to intervene in the affairs of another State.”

It determined that the United States had been involved in the “unlawful use of force,” with violations including attacks on Nicaraguan facilities and naval vessels, the invasion of Nicaraguan air space, and the training and arming of the Contras.

The court also found that President Reagan had authorized the CIA “to lay mines in Nicaraguan ports” and “that neither before the laying of the mines, nor subsequently, did the United States Government issue any public and official warning to international shipping of the existence and location of the mines; and that personal and material injury was caused by the explosion of the mines.”

The U.S. was ordered to cease its activities and pay reparations.

The response of the United States to this ruling was revealing. The U.S. essentially dismissed the ICJ judgment on the grounds that the United States must “reserve to ourselves the power to determine whether the Court has jurisdiction over us in a particular case” and what lies “essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of the United States.”

In other words, the Reagan administration considered armed attacks against the sovereign state of Nicaragua within its “domestic jurisdiction.”

Undeterred, Nicaragua then brought the matter to the UN Security Council, where the Nicaraguan representative argued that recourse at the ICJ was one of the fundamental means of peaceful solution of disputes established by the UN Charter. He further emphasized that it was essential for the Security Council and the international community to remind the United States of its obligation to abide by the court’s ruling and cease its war against Nicaragua.

The United States responded that the jurisdiction of the ICJ was a matter of consent and that the U.S. had not consented to the jurisdiction of the ICJ in this case. The ambassador asserted that U.S. policy towards Nicaragua would be determined solely by the national security interests of the United States, noting that Nicaragua maintained close security ties to Cuba and the Soviet Union.

On October 28, 1986, the U.S. vetoed the resolution calling for full and immediate compliance with the ICJ’s judgment, with France, Thailand, and the United Kingdom abstaining.

Following this decision, Nicaragua turned to the General Assembly, which passed a resolution 94 to 3 calling for compliance with the World Court ruling. Only two states, Israel and El Salvador, joined the U.S. in opposition. A year later, on November 12, 1987, the General Assembly again called for “full and immediate compliance” with the ICJ decision. This time only Israel joined the United States in opposing adherence to the ruling.

Needless to say, the United States never recognized its obligation to comply with the ruling, continuing to assert that it did not consent to the ICJ’s jurisdiction.

‘Law Would Collapse’

The case led to a flurry of criticism from international law experts, with Noreen M. Tama writing at the Penn State International Law Review that “the International Court of Justice is the final authority on the issue of its own jurisdiction.” She pointed out that “the Court was clearly seized of the requisite incidental jurisdiction necessary to indicate interim measures in the case of Nicaragua v. United States.”

Anthony D’Amato, writing for the American Journal of International Law, argued that “law would collapse if defendants could only be sued when they agreed to be sued, and the proper measurement of that collapse would be not just the drastically diminished number of cases but also the necessary restructuring of a vast system of legal transactions and relations predicated on the availability of courts as a last resort.” This, he said, would be “a return to the law of the jungle.”

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Fast-forward four decades, and it is clear that this is what now exists — the law of the jungle. Regardless of the specific rationale that the Trump administration has used for apprehending Maduro in Venezuela, whether it was primarily motivated by securing access to the country’s vast oil reserves or to eliminate a troublesome dictator in the hemisphere, the legality of the operation is very much in doubt.

Critics have argued that the military intervention in Venezuela flagrantly violates Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits the use of force against a state’s territorial integrity or political independence without UN Security Council authorization. Legal scholars contend it lacks justification under self-defense or humanitarian intervention doctrines and therefore undermines Venezuela’s sovereignty and the principle of non-intervention.

What it confirms, ultimately, is that might — not international law or diplomacy — makes right, setting a potentially dangerous precedent for hegemonic behavior by powerful nations.

Whether the ultimate outcome of the intervention more resembles the relatively smooth transition to democracy that was seen in Panama or the brutal conflict that characterized life in Guatemala for three and a half decades remains to be seen, but what is clear is that the post-World War II international rules-based order is largely a thing of the past.

Nathaniel Parry is the author of Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era and How Christmas Became Christmas. He is the co-author of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush and editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. Follow him on Substack and X.

If you enjoyed the above article, please restack it and click the like button. It would also be greatly appreciated if you recommend this newsletter in your Substack recommendations, and, finally, be sure you are subscribed to receive future articles from Essential History.

Marking the 252nd anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, activists in Boston earlier this week threw ice into the Boston harbor in opposition to what they call a “terror campaign” of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency – or what less hyperbolically might be called “government efforts to enforce federal immigration laws.”

Attempting to draw direct connections to the revolutionaries of the 1770s, protesters gathered near the original tea party starting point at the Old South Meeting House and proceeded to dump “clean ice,” per guidance from the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and Boston Conservation Commission, into the harbor next to the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum. The idea was to highlight the supposed tyranny of ICE while of course fully complying with state and local regulations.

According to the organizers, the protest aimed to shed light on the “Trump Administration’s corruption, authoritarianism, and destruction of our democratic norms.” Featuring themes from the American Revolution as well as slogans from the so-called “No Kings” movement, activists explicitly attempted to draw parallels with the patriots who rose up in opposition to the British monarch, laying claim to the legacy of resistance to the British Crown’s tyranny in the 18th century while delegitimizing the Trump administration’s attempts to enforce immigration law.

“The crisis we’re having has a lot of similarities to the crisis that was happening over 250 years ago,” said Katy Dirks, a member of Boston Indivisible, which organized the demonstration. “Families are afraid to go out of their homes. We’re outraged right now, and we’re standing up for our neighbors.”

Of course, protest movements throughout history have often drawn parallels with the American Revolution, and while there is nothing inherently wrong with looking to the past for inspiration, there is always the risk of sacrificing historical understanding for the sake of propaganda and narrative control.

In this specific case, it is more than a stretch to liken the current left-wing agitation against ICE and the Trump administration to the resistance to the British Crown – a historical comparison that fails on a number of levels.

Actual Grievances

First of all, it should be noted that the issue of immigration enforcement was obviously not a major grievance that led to the American Revolution, and therefore the parallels these activists are attempting to draw are tenuous at best.

As all American schoolchildren are taught, the top issues fueling the American Revolution were taxation without representation – particularly British taxes such as the Sugar Act and Stamp Act that were imposed without colonial input in Parliament – the dissolution of colonial assemblies and interference in local affairs, military occupation and events like the Boston Massacre, and restrictions on westward expansion, particularly through the Proclamation of 1763.

These specific grievances existed within a context of a somewhat fanatical devotion to liberty that would strike modern-day Americans as strange. Many colonists devoured the writings of political thinkers like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, who described life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” because individuals are in a “war of all against all.” Locke argued that government is morally obliged to protect life, liberty, and property, and that when government fails to live up to these obligations, people may legitimately rebel.

The great and chief end of government, Locke wrote, is the “preservation of property,” broadly encompassing life, liberty, and material possessions. Government exists solely “for the peace, safety, and public good of the people,” and if it oversteps that purpose, tyranny ensues.

Deeply influenced by these ideas, Samuel Adams would develop a rational and coherent argument for resisting the tyrannical authority of the Crown, explaining eloquently in The Rights of the Colonists, published in 1772 that the natural rights of the colonists include:

First, a right to life. Secondly, to liberty. Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. These are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.

Locke’s and Adams’s assertions of natural rights were tempered by the Hobbesian worldview, which focused on the natural inclination of people to dominate others. This conception of human nature deeply influenced the founders’ approach to grand principles related to “natural rights,” as well as more mundane concerns about public safety and taxes.

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Immigration Debates

Although immigration policies did not feature prominently in colonial debates, the patriots’ understanding of the purpose of government might have actually aligned them closer with the mission of ICE rather than with open-borders advocates. Understanding government’s primary role as the protection of its citizens, there is reason to believe that their views on immigration would have been diametrically opposed to today’s activists dumping ice in the harbor.

While colonists didn’t oppose immigration outright and indeed considered it vital to encourage population growth to support economic expansion, they only wanted it to take place on certain terms and tended to favor only settlement by Protestants from countries such as Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and France.

Through incentives like land grants, debt relief, and rapid local naturalization processes that granted rights such as voting and property ownership, the colonies sought to rapidly build their populations and fill labor needs, but they were careful to ensure that only “desirable” individuals relocated to the New World. Local measures, for example, sometimes barred paupers and the 1740 Plantation Act expressly discriminated against Catholics, requiring oaths and religious tests (with exemptions for Jews and Quakers).

So, while supporting a restricted form of immigration, the colonial elite also balked at uncontrolled mass immigration. When immigration undermined safety and homogeneity, for instance, colonists tended to reject policies imposed on them by Britain. In particular, the forced transportation of convicts was a flashpoint that led to growing consternation between the colonists and London.

Well Peopling of the Colonies

With high crime levels in England, the British authorities in the 18th century pursued innovative approaches to address their public safety issues, including the deportation of “Malcontents in the State” who might disrupt the “body politick.” The American colonies were increasingly considered a suitable place for those of “lower conditions.”

Starting with the adoption of the Transportation Act in 1718, the British began transporting convicts across the Atlantic, and for the next six decades – until the revolution broke out in the mid-1770s – more than 52,000 criminals were transported from the British Isles to America, to be sold as slaves to the highest bidder.

So many were sent to the New World, in fact, that it led to growing anger among the colonial elite, with Benjamin Franklin complaining in 1751 that England was forcing these convict transfers against their wishes.

“The Government at home will not suffer our mistaken Assemblies to make any Law for preventing or discouraging the Importation of Convicts from Great Britain,” Franklin wrote in the Pennsylvania Gazette, “for this kind Reason, ‘That such Laws are against the Publick Utility, as they tend to prevent the Improvement and Well Peopling of the Colonies.’”

Franklin likened the British convicted criminals to rattlesnakes and suggested that if England kept sending these rogues and vagabonds, America should respond by rounding up actual rattlesnakes and sending them to England.

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In spite of these complaints, as late as 1773, even on the brink of war, a London police magistrate continued to advocate for transporting convicts to America as “the wisest, ... most humane and effectual, punishment we have.” Not only did the practice “remove the evil” from England, he reasoned, it “gives [the criminal] a fresh opportunity of being an useful member of society.”

By the time of the revolution, therefore, it is estimated that transported convicts made up a quarter of the British immigrants America, influencing London’s perceptions of the colonies as a haven of unruly and undesirable elements.

At the same time, in 1773, Britain curtailed colonial naturalization authority, fueling resentment over obstructed population growth and land access. Colonies like Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Carolina had used local acts to grant quicker or more flexible citizenship, attracting European immigrants for labor, land settlement, and economic growth.

The Crown, however, aiming to centralize control over imperial policy and align it with restrictions on westward land grants, directed colonial governors not to assent to or approve any naturalization bills passed by colonial assemblies.

This move by the Crown not only obstructed desirable population growth but also hindered access to land ownership, and colonists generally viewed it as yet another interference in self-governance, stoking fears of deliberate efforts to keep colonies weak and dependent.

This later inspired a grievance in the Declaration of Independence against King George III, who was accused of “endeavour[ing] to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”

Combined with other controversial measures such as the Stamp Act, this overreaching by London contributed in the 1760s and 70s to an increasingly audacious rebellion against royal authority.

Merchants and Radicals

In May 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act, intended to bail out the floundering East India Company – Britain’s second largest firm – by giving it a monopoly on the importation and sale of tea in the colonies. Initially there was some confusion over the provisions of the act, with some reports falsely claiming that Parliament had removed all duties, which would have been a great victory for the patriots.

In fact, Parliament left the American import duties in place but granted the East India Company relief from duties on tea landing in Britain and headed to America. Essentially, the monopoly could pay a modest American import duty and deliver its product directly to colonists.

When in early September 1773 the Tea Act’s full text was published, making clear that duties would still apply to tea, merchants in Philadelphia, New York and Boston, who had been making considerable profits smuggling Dutch tea into the colonies, could see that it posed a threat to their illicit business. Smuggling tea and other commodities from Holland and other European nations provided an economic impetus for rejecting the Tea Act, and once the patriots had a clear understanding of the law’s political ramifications, there was also an ideological basis for rejecting it.

Merchants and radicals alike opposed any revenue duties going to England, and more fundamentally rejected the law on the principle of self-governance. The fundamental issue for the patriots was that by deciding how taxes were levied, Parliament was able to decide how to spend the money. Colonists insisted that they were more than capable of taxing and ruling themselves, and spoke in a unified voice against the move by London.

A resolution prepared by Samuel Adams and adopted unanimously at a Boston Town Meeting on November 5, declared “that it is the Duty of every American to oppose this attempt” and designated anyone who “aid[s] or abet[s] in unloading receiving or vending the Tea ... an Enemy to America.”

It was in this climate that the ship Dartmouth arrived in Boston Harbor with 114 chests of East India Company Tea aboard on Sunday November 28. As the first tea ship to reach America since the adoption of the Tea Act, patriots insisted that it be returned to England. But if returned, the government would confiscate the tea and the colonial merchants who were receiving the tea on consignment would be liable for the cost.

As soon as the ship entered the harbor, the clock started ticking, with someone required to pay the duties on the tea within 20 days or officials would seize the tea, pay the duty, and sell it themselves. Two more ships would arrive in the harbor in the subsequent days and Adams and his allies were determined to prevent the tea from being landed.

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The Boston Tea Party

Thousands gathered from Boston and surrounding towns to meet at Faneuil Hall. Under the leadership of Adams, they resolved on November 29 that “as the town of Boston, in a full legal meeting, has resolved to do the utmost in its power to prevent the landing of the tea.” The November 29 meeting was the first of a series of gatherings that would culminate in a meeting of several thousand on December 16 at the Old South Meeting House. The patriots had a simple demand for Governor Thomas Hutchinson to order the tea ships out of Boston.

When Hutchinson, determined to avoid bowing to what he called “a lawless and highly criminal assembly of men,” responded at about 6:00 PM with a firm “no,” Adams stood up and declared, “This meeting can do no more to save this country!” Following this statement, a group broke out of the larger meeting and marched toward the water to begin their task of destroying the ships’ cargo, in what would become known as the Boston Tea Party.

Between 30 and 60 men, many of them dressed as Mohawk Indians, boarded three ships docked at Griffin’s Wharf, and dumped 340 chests of tea into harbor. With Adams communicating with the crew from the wharf, as informers later claimed, for about three hours they went about their work. A crowd of several hundred watched from the pier, while the British Army and Navy, just a few hundred yards away, declined to intervene.

The participants endeavored to ensure that no one stole any of the tea – that it all ended up in the harbor and not in anyone’s pockets. According to an account by one of the participants, “the greatest care [was] taken to prevent the tea from being purloined by the populace.” Through this approach, the radicals hoped to demonstrate their moral rectitude and win the support of sympathetic colonists.

Nevertheless, the Boston Tea Party was controversial among some American patriots for its disrespect toward the principle of property rights. Although the Tea Party participants were fastidious in demonstrating that they respected legitimate property rights – even taking the time to replace a broken lock on one of the ships – and explicitly stated that their acts of violence were in defense of “Liberty and laws,” these gestures were lost on many observers.

Escalating Crisis

Following the Boston Tea Party, rumors swirled that the colonists were focused on reaching compromises, as well as paying reparations for the tea they destroyed. These rumors, however, were a farce, likely initiated by Samuel Adams to conceal the true intention of the meetings taking place in Massachusetts – which was to plot the next steps for what the radicals knew would be a harsh reaction to their actions in Boston harbor.

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And indeed, the Boston Tea Party quickly resulted in a drastic escalation of the crisis with Parliament’s adoption of the Coercive Acts in 1774, dubbed the Intolerable Acts in the colonies. These were a series of four laws that were intended to punish Massachusetts for the attack on the East India Company, as well as to restore some semblance of authority. But their enforcement only hardened the resolve of the people of Massachusetts, leading to the Battle of Lexington and Concord in spring of 1775.

While nothing about these events bears any real resemblance to the situation today – with ICE simply working to enforce laws duly adopted by the people’s representatives in Congress and being carried out by the democratically elected Executive Branch, largely as the founders intended when they designed the federal government – one similarity that does exist is the employment of escalating tactics and the power of propaganda.

Just like today, controlling the narrative was seen as essential in winning the hearts and minds of the colonists, and to do so, the patriots understood that they needed to portray their actions favorably, as well as the actions of their adversaries negatively. While there were undoubtedly a number of legitimate grievances against the Crown, and it was certainly true that the British occupation of Boston was oppressive and humiliating, the truth is that much of this had been brought on by the patriots themselves through their uncompromising militancy.

As a case in point, one need only look at the events that led to the Battle of Lexington and Concord. What precipitated this confrontation is clear: the British had discovered a cache of weapons in Concord and deployed a detachment of soldiers to confiscate the rebels’ munitions and to arrest Whig leaders, with the primary targets being John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who were deemed responsible for the Boston Tea Party and other crimes.

The rebels, however, were prepared and ready for a fight. They had been stockpiling weapons and closely monitoring British activities with a clandestine network of spies and sympathizers, including Paul Revere. When the Brits headed out to Lexington, the alarm was raised, and when the regulars arrived, a band of armed fighters was waiting for them. As the sun rose on Lexington Green, a shot rang out that sparked a day of fighting that left 250 redcoats and 95 patriots dead.

Demonstrating the conscious efforts at narrative management, the earliest versions of events were careful to present a picture that accentuated their spontaneity and minimized the elaborate preparations that the Whigs made to establish a network of informants and fighters who were actively preparing for battle.

Careful to portray themselves as the innocent victims of British aggression, Whig leaders suppressed any information that could cast them in a negative light, including the written account prepared at the time by Paul Revere who offered inconvenient details on the preparations that preceded the event and declined to unequivocally state that the redcoats fired the first shot at Lexington Green.

While other depositions that advanced the patriots’ narrative were rushed to print and circulated widely in the colonies, Revere’s deposition was returned to him and remained unpublished until 1891.

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Historical Parallels

Similarly, the anti-ICE and anti-Trump activists today understand the need to portray the actions of law enforcement officers in the worst possible light – using terms like “abducted” and “kidnapped” instead of “detained” and “arrested” when referring to the apprehension of criminal illegal aliens. They also raise heated objections to the ICE officers wearing masks, portraying this as a symbol of their tyranny rather than an understandable and practical measure to ensure their safety in this era of social media doxxing and political assassinations.

And much like radicals like Samuel Adams, today’s activists feign concern for “the rule of law” and “due process” while actively undermining these concepts by inhibiting the enforcement of federal immigration law.

Like the patriots who were quick to point out “lawless” overreaching by King George and Parliament while committing crimes such as smuggling or the destruction of property, anti-ICE activists are prone to disregard the law themselves in their pursuit of what they consider to be higher principles.

While Democrats and much of the media have portrayed anti-ICE protests this year as “overwhelmingly peaceful,” the reality is that the demonstrations have been marred by sometimes shocking scenes of violence, including rocks and Molotov cocktails being hurled at police officers, mass looting, cars being set on fire, and graffiti calling for the murder of ICE agents.

On the social media site Bluesky – generally seen as a haven for liberals and leftists to share their views in a conservative-free safe space – users are openly calling for an escalation in tactics, with one going so far as to say that “every single ice agent deserves a bullet to the head.” These extreme positions are justified in the minds of liberals by their perception of ICE as being no different than the Third Reich’s Gestapo, as prominent Democrats have claimed.

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Likewise, the escalatory actions and hardening of positions during the revolutionary era were based on the belief that passively accepting the injustices of British rule would only encourage additional abuses. Patriots like Samuel Adams understood that London was exasperated with its colonists in Massachusetts and that the British Ministry would resort to any means at its disposal to enforce the supremacy of Parliament. What they may have exaggerated, however, is that their attempts to rein in smuggling and collect taxes amounted to a plot to enslave America.

Viewing the struggle as an all-or-nothing existential threat to liberty, patriots felt justified in escalating their tactics, with the understanding that they could provoke further drastic actions by the Crown.

A similar dynamic appears to be taking place today. While last week’s action in Boston was largely symbolic and relatively tame, more militant tactics continue to play out in cities from New York to Minneapolis to Los Angeles, including the use of violence and intimidation against ICE officers.

Normalization of Violence

The cumulative result of all this is that political violence is becoming broadly normalized, with rhetoric from political leaders and ordinary citizens amplifying justifications for actions that were considered extreme and unacceptable not long ago. Reminiscent of the colonists’ demonizing of King George III and loyalists, Donald Trump and his supporters are routinely described as a “fascist” or “Nazi.”

While of course Trump’s policies as president have certainly been controversial and have in some ways pushed the envelop on presidential power, in many cases court challenges have led to injunctions blocking his policy agenda, actually leading to complaints from conservatives about “activist judges” overstepping their constitutional authority. All in all, more than 225 judges have issued rulings against Trump’s policies in more than 700 cases as of November 2025.

The left, of course, would cite this as evidence that Trump is abusing his power, but the reality is that it demonstrates that the system of checks and balances is essentially working as the founders intended — or in some cases perhaps too well. Nevertheless, activists today increasingly decry the president as illegitimate and embrace violent tactics to oppose his policies.

This is producing dangerous results in the real world. As the White House has pointed out, “years [of] vilifying ICE as ‘fascists,’ ‘the Gestapo,’ and ‘slave patrols’” have led to “a 1,000% surge in assaults on agents and a wave of Radical Left terror.”

Pointing to an incident last autumn in Dallas, Texas, “where a maniac with ‘ANTI-ICE’ ammo gunned down an ICE field office in an attack clearly targeted at ICE personnel,” the White House claims that Democrats’ “words aren’t just reckless — they’re a battle cry for violence.”

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In this case, the White House may have a valid point. As the Center for Strategic and International Studies recently documented, “the United States has seen an increase in the number of left-wing terrorism attacks and plots,” with “2025 mark[ing] the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing terrorist attacks outnumber those from the violent far right.” Furthermore, according to recent polling, more than a third of Americans on the left believe that violence is sometimes justified to achieve political goals.

Whether Americans realize it or not, this is a historic and deeply significant development, calling into question fundamental assumptions about democratic governance and the very basis for the constitutional republic. The credibility of the government has always been predicated on the popular recognition – whether implicit or explicit – of its right to rule over the people, which is derived from democratic consent and expressed most clearly in John Locke’s social contract.

In this way, the protests against ICE and Trump closely follow the legacy of the American Revolution. Just as patriots found justifications for escalating tactics that put innocent lives at risk, ultimately leading to a bloody war that tore the nation apart, so too does the current political rhetoric threaten to further divide the nation and produce an escalating series of violence.

Furthermore, by trying to claim the American narrative by twisting historical reality, left-wing activists are demonstrating in a round about way that they are in fact the legitimate heirs of the American Revolution.

“The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks,” Samuel Adams wrote in 1771, adding: “If we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom.” This was a testament to their fierce commitment to liberty that intensification of the struggle was seen as their only option, seeing compromise as nothing less than surrender.

But while modern-day activists may share this sense of purpose and passion, the righteousness of their cause remains very much in doubt and it is an open question whether the patriots whose legacy they lay claim to would agree with their views on open borders and uncontrolled mass migration.

Nathaniel Parry is the author of Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era and How Christmas Became Christmas. He is the co-author of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush and editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. Follow him on Substack and X.

If you enjoyed the above article, please restack it and click the like button. It would also be greatly appreciated if you recommend this newsletter in your Substack recommendations, and, finally, be sure you are subscribed to receive future articles from Essential History.

With the historical drama Nuremberg enjoying a steady performance at the box office since its release on November 7 and Democrats in Congress ratcheting up the criticism of the Trump administration’s controversial policy of carrying out U.S. military strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug trafficking vessels, it seems that “war crimes” is shaping up to be a popular theme in the United States this winter.

Reviews of the film have drawn explicit parallels to Donald Trump, arguing that Nuremberg reminds audiences that “evil” isn’t confined to history but thrives in leaders who normalize atrocities such as extrajudicial killings at sea. With headlines like “A War Crimes Tribunal Movie for the Age of Trump,” critics have positioned the film as a stark warning for the current era, tying the tribunal’s focus on “crimes against humanity” to Trump’s directives in the Venezuelan strikes.

Not to be outdone, Democrats in Congress are also increasingly sounding the alarm about war crimes and the urgent need for accountability.

Referring to an alleged “double-tap” strike that occurred in late November, in which an initial strike hit a boat and was followed by a second strike on apparent survivors in distress, Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Committee, noted that he had deep concerns about the strike’s legality.

“It needs a further investigation for a possible war crime,” he stated.

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA), Vice Chair of the House Democratic Caucus and former JAG officer, called for the Department of Justice to investigate, recalling that “there is no statute of limitations for war crimes.”

By and large, Republicans are taking these criticisms in stride, with conservative commentators accusing Democrats of hypocrisy and GOP leaders framing the strikes as necessary counter-narcotics operations to protect the American people from deadly poisons like fentanyl. Officials also claim that the so-called “double tap” had targeted the vessel for destruction, not survivors.

Defenders of the policy point to past U.S. drone strikes under Democratic administrations, such as the 2021 Kabul strike killing 10 civilians under the Biden administration, that drew far less scrutiny. President Barack Obama’s drone assassination program, which targeted not only foreign nationals but in some cases U.S. citizens, has also been widely cited as a legal precedent.

The Trump administration further insists that it is on firm legal ground, arguing that the Venezuelan boat strikes are lawful acts of national self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter and Article II of the U.S. Constitution. With drug trafficker gangs such as Tren de Aragua designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and narco-terrorists seen as waging irregular warfare against the U.S. by flooding it with narcotics, lethal force is considered justified to protect the American people.

Legality and Precedent

Lawyers can debate the lawfulness of the specific actions taken against Venezuelan drug cartels and pundits can rightly point to Democratic Party hypocrisy for largely turning a blind eye when Presidents Obama and Biden carried out similarly legally dubious strikes, but the underlying point that should be appreciated when considering this matter is that this policy did not emerge in a vacuum. It is simply the logical progression of decades of the government pushing the envelope on military power.

While Democrats may now consider it politically expedient to question Trump’s supposedly novel interpretations of executive authority, the reality is that these interpretations are not substantively different than previous administrations asserting their “plenary” powers in pursuit of policy priorities, whether in the war on drugs or the war on terror – two closely linked concepts with precedents stretching back decades.

The reason the U.S. political system is now presented with the dilemma of how to address these strikes on Venezuelan drug gangs is because for many years, Congress and the courts have enabled the steady expansion of military and executive power in pursuit of national security, and have arguably abdicated their responsibilities at key moments.

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Dating back to the 1970s, the U.S. has increasingly framed anti-drug policy with military rhetoric, deployments, and legal expansions, often blurring lines between law enforcement and warfare. In 1971, when President Richard Nixon first declared a “war on drugs,” an “all-out offensive” was launched with increased federal funding, mandatory sentencing, and international efforts to destroy drug sources.

In 1973, the Drug Enforcement Administration was established by executive order as a “super agency” to enforce drug laws domestically and internationally, consolidating prior agencies for global anti-drug operations, and nine years later President Ronald Reagan created a multi-agency task force involving DEA, FBI, and U.S. Armed Forces to combat cocaine smuggling.

In 1986, Operation Blast Furnace deployed 160 U.S. troops to Bolivia for the first major foreign anti-drug operation, and National Security Decision Directive 221 expanded military interdiction support. At the end of the 1980s, the Department of Defense was designated to lead aerial/maritime drug detection, and Special Forces were deployed to the Andes under the Andean Initiative for training in counter-drug warfare.

The 1989 invasion of Panama, known as Operation Just Cause, took the militarization of the war on drugs to a new level, with 25,000 troops deployed to oust dictator Manuel Noriega, justified primarily by his drug trafficking role. This operation resulted in hundreds of casualties but ultimately succeeded in arresting Noriega and convicting him on drug-related charges.

Heading into the 1990s, the National Defense Authorization Act of 1991 amended the Posse Comitatus Act to allow Defense Department counter-drug assistance to law enforcement, expanding military roles in domestic operations.

President Bill Clinton shifted focus to source countries such as Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, increasing military aid and operations in producer zones, with the Counternarcotics Battalion in Colombia established and financed via defense budgets in 1998. Clinton’s Plan Colombia of 2000 approved $1.3 billion in military aid to combat traffickers and guerrillas, involving U.S. contractors in counterinsurgency.

The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, although mainly concerned with toppling the Taliban and eradicating al-Qaeda, also had an anti-narcotics element, with drugs specifically linked to the financing of terrorism. During the 20-year U.S. war in Afghanistan, the military carried out multiple strikes in anti-drug operations, even using B-52s and F-22s to bomb Taliban-linked drug labs.

As drastic as those anti-drug airstrikes may have been, they were largely overshadowed by the far larger revolution in presidential war powers unleashed by 9/11.

War on Terror

When a global war on terror was declared following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, executive power was taken to a whole new level. President George W. Bush asserted a unilateral U.S. right to overthrow any government in the world that was deemed a threat to American security, a position so sweeping that it lacked historical precedent.

“If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long,” Bush said at a speech in June 2002, describing what he called a “new doctrine,” with American military forces authorized to strike pre-emptively at “evil doers” wherever they live. In a domestic corollary to this doctrine, Bush asserted his personal authority to strip even U.S. citizens of due-process rights if he judged them “enemy combatants.”

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At the heart of Bush’s approach was the rejection of any independent court evaluation of its detentions. Without judicial review, the U.S. government didn’t need to present any evidence to show that a person actually had ties to al-Qaeda or was otherwise guilty of a crime. The Bush position also held that once designated as al-Qaeda members, individuals had no legal protections against torture.

He dismissed provisions of the Geneva Conventions as “quaint” and offered legal rationales that justified torture in cases of “military necessity.”

A subsequent Senate investigation found that torture policies instituted by the Bush administration following 9/11 employed gruesome techniques such as near drowning, forcing detainees to stand on broken legs, threatening to kill or rape detainees’ family members, forced “rectal feeding” and “rectal hydration.” It also offered disturbing details on a medieval “black site” prison in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit, where at least one detainee froze to death.

The brutal interrogation sessions lasted in many cases non-stop for days or weeks at a time, leading to effects such as “hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm and self-mutilation,” and produced little to no useful information. CIA agents had illegally detained 26 of the 119 individuals in custody, and the interrogation techniques used on detainees went well beyond the methods that had been approved by the Bush Justice Department or CIA’s headquarters.

When the details of this torture program were made public in late 2014, the disclosures were met with calls for accountability from around the world. The U.S. was reminded that as a matter of international law, it was legally obligated to prosecute the perpetrators of the torture program, not only for the sake of justice but also to ensure that torture could not be repeated in the future by subsequent administrations.

Some of the strongest words came from the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counterterrorism Ben Emmerson, who stated unequivocally that senior officials from the Bush administration who sanctioned crimes, as well as the CIA and U.S. government officials who carried them out, must be brought to justice. “It is now time to take action,” the UN rapporteur said.

Unfortunately, though, no criminal charges were ever brought.

Instead, the U.S. Congress responded with a largely meaningless and toothless “reaffirmation” of the ban on the torture – a rather redundant and unnecessary piece of legislation since torture has long been unambiguously banned under international law, the United States Constitution and U.S. statutory law.

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Obama’s Drones

While declining to prosecute torture, thereby effectively legitimizing the policy and providing retroactive immunity to perpetrators, Obama also drastically expanded presidential powers by developing a drone assassination program that targeted suspected terrorists – including U.S. citizens.

These attacks were carried out with no due process and little transparency, coming under intense international scrutiny for potential violations of international law.

Five years into Obama’s presidency, in a report issued February 28, 2014, the United Nations urged the U.S. to “comply with their obligations under international law, including international humanitarian law and international human rights law, in particular the principles of precaution, distinction and proportionality.”

A subsequent UN report, issued by its Human Rights Committee in late March, expressed grave concern about the U.S.’s practice of targeted killings by drones, particularly “the lack of transparency regarding the criteria for drone strikes, including the legal justification for specific attacks, and the lack of accountability for the loss of life resulting from such attacks.”

According to the Human Rights Committee, the U.S.’s “very broad approach to the definition and geographical scope of ‘armed conflict’” and its “unclear interpretation of what constitutes an ‘imminent threat’” raises concerns over the “use of lethal force and any specific theatre of hostilities, as well as the precautionary measures taken to avoid civilian casualties in practice.”

Due to these concerns, the UN urged the U.S. to “revisit its position regarding legal justifications for the use of deadly force through drone attacks,” in particular by “ensur[ing] that any use of armed drones complies fully with its obligations” and “disclose the criteria for drone strikes, including the legal basis for specific attacks, the process of target identification and the circumstances in which drones are used.”

On the domestic front, the Obama administration came under legal pressure over the assassinations of U.S. citizens, with a court ordering the release of key portions of a classified Justice Department memorandum that provided the legal justification for the targeted killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki.

U.S. intelligence officials contended al-Awlaki had joined al-Qaeda and Obama ordered his assassination without trial in a September 2011 drone strike in Yemen. Two weeks later, his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, another U.S. citizen, was assassinated in a separate strike. The administration resisted calls for transparency regarding its actions, leading to the April 21, 2014, opinion rejecting its claims of secrecy.

After dragging its feet, the Obama administration finally released a heavily redacted version of the 2010 Office of Legal Counsel memo, which outlined the core legal arguments for extrajudicially killing a U.S. citizen. Essentially, the administration asserted that killing al-Awlaki without trial was lawful under the public-authority justification in federal murder statutes, the Due Process Clause, and the Fourth Amendment because certain conditions were met, including imminent threat and infeasibility of capture.

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Presidential Continuity

After Trump moved into the White House in 2017, he continued the drone assassination program that was developed by his predecessor, increasing the frequency and scope of operations, while reducing transparency and oversight. In Trump’s first two years alone, the U.S. launched 2,243 strikes, more than Obama’s entire presidency, with strikes in Yemen and Somalia tripling.

With Trump continuing this Obama era policy and hinting that he might also reinstitute Bush era policies on torture, human rights advocates noted that these “policy options” might have been decisively eliminated had the justice system simply performed its necessary task of holding offenders accountable.

According to Human Rights Watch’s Kenneth Roth, writing at Foreign Policy in early 2017, “Obama took office with great promise, announcing on his second day that he would stop CIA torture immediately and close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, within a year.”

But Obama, Roth notes, “steadfastly refused to prosecute those responsible or even to allow the release of much more than the summary of a comprehensive Senate Intelligence Committee report that documented it,” resulting in an ongoing climate of impunity.

Obama brushed off these concerns and spoke rather dismissively of “activist organizations” that criticized his administration.

“I think right now we probably have the balance about right,” he told The Atlantic, referring to the ratio of killed terrorists and innocent civilians. “Now, you wouldn’t know that if you talked to Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International or some of the international activist organizations.”

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He further asserted that “the internal reforms we put in place had less to do with what the left or Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International or other organizations were saying and had more to do with me looking at sort of the way in which the number of drone strikes was going up and the routineness with which, early in my presidency, you were seeing both DOD and CIA and our intelligence teams think about this.”

It troubled him, he said, because the drone strikes could enable “a president who can carry on perpetual wars all over the world, and a lot of them covert, without any accountability or democratic debate.” Of course, this is exactly what Obama had done, as has been repeatedly pointed out.

As Naureen Shah of Amnesty International told The Intercept at the end of the Obama administration, “What’s so interesting is that President Obama acknowledges this problem – that future presidents will be empowered to kill globally, and in secret. What he doesn’t acknowledge is how much of a role his administration had in making that a bizarre normal.”

What we are now seeing play out with the Trump administration’s attacks on Venezuelan drug boats is simply the logical progression of these policies that have been in the making for 50 years. If Democrats in Congress are truly concerned about the expansion of executive power that is on display, they would have to be honest about the process that has led to this point.

Otherwise, it is nothing but political posturing and virtue signaling.

Nathaniel Parry is the author of Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era and How Christmas Became Christmas. He is the co-author of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush and editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. Follow him on Substack and X.