Piker Is Right

Wrong. The single most significant event since Christ has been the American Revolution. We are by no means a perfect country. But the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence were radical for their time and still are today. https://t.co/0xJ9q8vE1u

— Congressman Brendan Boyle (@RepBrendanBoyle) May 3, 2026

The "ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence” were not so radical as to apply to all persons, at the time. Slaves, native Americans, and women need not consider themselves “created equal.”

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.

You could look it up.

White supremacy was asserted against many European nationalities who immigrated here, until those nations were accepted as “white” (some only within the mid-20th century), and racism against those not considered “white” continues to this day. It’s being celebrated in political circles right now. This isn’t sui generis. It began with the slave trade and continues despite the end of that “peculiar institution” with a bloody civil war less than a century into the “experiment in democracy.” And that “institution” was based entirely on skin color. It left us with the legacy of the “paper bag test” and terms of law (once) like “mulatto” and “octaroon” and the phrase among the most rabid white supremacists, “blood in the face.”

This idea wasn’t imposed upon us by foreign invaders, or dropped upon us by aliens from outer space, or whispered in our ears by demons from Pandemonium. We built our country on it. Which is why we needed a 13th Amendment less than 90 years after the adoption of the Constitution.

And why we still refuse to give the 15th the full force of law, to this day. We have yet to rise above the basest parts of ideas and ideals that truly founded this nation. 250 years later, we are still clinging to them, if only because we refuse to see the log in our own eye.