Stolen Land

Ice Cream company, Ben and Jerry’s, tweeted on July 4th: “Ah, the Fourth of July. Who doesn’t love a good parade, some tasty barbecue, and a stirring fireworks display? The only problem with all that, though, is that it can distract from an essential truth about this nation’s birth: The US was founded on stolen Indigenous land.” The obvious response to this tweet is, if Ben and Jerry truly believe that the United States is stolen land, then they should take the deeds to their property in Waterbury and Burlington, Vermont and turn it over to an Indian Reservation. They should return the stolen land that they inhabit to its rightful owners. They would never do that because they do not actually believe that their two factories were built on land stolen, they just want to virtue signal; they want to show that they are morally better than everyone else even though they became ridiculously wealthy for making ice cream.

When accusing countries of stealing land, why does Mexico get let off the hook? Why does Canada get let off the hook? Why are the countries of Central and South America not vilified in the same way as the United States is? In 1491, North America, South America, and Central America, were inhabited by Native Americans. In 1491, there were no Canadians in Canada; there were no Mexicans in Mexico; there were no Brazilians in Brazil; there are no Dominicans in Dominican Republic; there were no Cubans in Cuba, and there were no Americans in the United States.

But the way the story is told by people like Ben and Jerry, when Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas in 1492, the ancestors of every white United States citizens, proceeded to pull out a sword and slaughter millions and millions of native Americans, but the ancestors of the citizens of Mexico, Brazil, Argentina just magically appeared on those lands peacefully. They didn’t steal anybody’s land, they didn’t kill anybody, they didn’t displace anybody, they didn’t conquer anybody, they didn’t harm anybody, they didn’t give any indigenous people deadly diseases. It is only the ancestors of the white citizens of the United States who did those horrific things.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez loves to champion the cause of the Hispanic people in Central and South America, but the Hispanic people are not indigenous to those lands. They are Hispanic, meaning they have Spanish ancestry which means they are just as much from Europe as the people from England and France and Germany who inhabit North America. In 1519, a man who shares AOC’s surname, Hernando Cortez led the Spanish conquistadors' invasion Central America and conquered the Aztec Empire which was made up of indigenous people. If it was wrong and evil for northern Europeans to take what is now the United States from the indigenous people, then it should be equally as evil for the Spanish to have conquered Central and South America from the indigenous people.

Mexicans often claim that California and most of the Southwest United States was stolen from Mexico by the USA. So, it was wrong for the United States to take that land from Mexico, but somehow it was not wrong for the Spanish to take that land from the indigenous people and create Mexico. Somehow, we are to believe that because the United States took that land from Mexico, they really took it from the Native Americans. Once again, the United States is the evil one, and the only way that we can make it right with the Native Americans would be to give the Native Americans land back to the Mexicans. That makes sense.

But in reality, all of this talk that we are living on stolen land is simply a ploy to guilt the people who live in United States for our overwhelming success and to knock us down a few pegs. And that’s it. If it’s wrong for people from other countries to invade another country, then why is it okay for 5 million illegal immigrants from Central and South America to walk into our country and demand all the social services that they paid nothing into? Why is that their God-given right? It doesn’t work the other way. If United States citizens went to Mexico or Brazil or Argentina, and demanded the same social services that the citizens of those countries received, not only would they be denied, if they entered the country illegally, they would be arrested. Why is it okay for Middle East illegal immigrants to flood into Germany, France, and England, and set up no go zones against the citizens of those countries, yet if anybody from northern Europe went into Middle Eastern countries illegally, they would be thrown in jail or maybe even beheaded.

We are not being benevolent by allowing unfettered illegal immigration into United States or into northern Europe. This mass migration is designed to do one thing and one thing only, take over those countries. At the rate we’re going, in 50 years there will be no United States of America as we know it today. There will be no England and France and Germany as we know them today. The United States will be turned into Central America, with every single one of their problems that the illegal immigrants are fleeing. Northern Europe will look like the Middle East with every single one of the problems that plague Middle Eastern countries. Freedom and human rights will be a thing of the past. As we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan, you cannot impose freedom and human rights onto people who for hundreds or even thousands of years never lived under that type of government. The illegal immigrants who are coming to the United States do not know what freedom and human rights looks like because they never lived in a country with freedom and human rights.

Many of the people who are coming to the United States are not coming for the rights and freedoms insured by the Constitution, but for our prosperity. They believe freedom is getting free stuff from the government which really is communism, totalitarianism. So, these new people who are flooding into America will not object to the erosion of our Constitution, because they don’t believe in our Constitution, they simply want to benefit from our prosperity. But they don’t realize that the freedom and the rights insured to us by our Constitution is the basis of the prosperity. It created the environment for the prosperity to grow. So, these new people coming into the United States are going to wake up one day years down the road, living in pretty much the exact same country that they fled.

This has nothing to do with race. I am just as skeptical of Russian people, Ukrainian people or European people immigrating here, if the motivation for their immigration is American prosperity not American founding principles, not the American Constitution, not the freedom and human rights of America. Every totalitarian regime that is ever seized control of a country has done so on the promise of prosperity. Give me all your rights, give me all of your possessions, give me all of your land, and I promise you prosperity. And the citizens give all their rights, all their land, all the prosperity, and they get nothing in return other than a totalitarianism. So, if the motivation to come to America is its prosperity, and not our founding principles, then totalitarianism is right on their heels.

The proof is in the pudding. Polls show that 70 plus percent of the illegal immigrants who are enter the United States, if enfranchised with the vote, will vote for the Democrats, the more socialist party, the party of government control, and less than 30% will vote for the party of freedom and Constitutional rights. That is why the Democrats want these people to come here, not just for the votes but because they will be instrumental in “fundamentally changing” America into a socialist country they desire. They are bringing with them the disease of socialism, the results of which they are fleeing. So, the immigrants we allow in can be from any nation and of any race, just as long as they believe in America, they believe in the United States Constitution, they believe in our founding principles, and not people who merely want to benefit from America’s prosperity.

Ben and Jerry who became extremely wealthy by selling ice cream, were able to do so because they lived in a country that provides such an unbelievable opportunity to build wealth that two not so smart guys from Vermont can sell average ice cream and become billionaires. They do not realize how fortunate they are to be living in the United States as it is currently constituted. Every penny that Ben and Jerry have ever earned is a result of the very thing that they despise, that they love to trash. Instead of bad-mouthing this country, they should just say, ‘thank you, America’, and go on their way.

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Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.