Never forget that Candace Owens collected a cool $300,000 from Andrew Wilson to sit in front of cameras and announce, with a straight face, that she has neither proof nor a single piece of positive evidence for the theories she’s been selling for months.
Remember that every time she opens her mouth.
This footage is absolutely shocking. Watch the man (father??) carrying the small child and then deserting the child to get on the boat. Impossible to comprehend.
That’s historically incoherent. You’re collapsing three separate questions—who inhabited the continent before Europeans, how particular territories changed hands, and who actually founded and developed the United States—into the slogan “stolen land developed by non-whites.”
Indigenous peoples obviously inhabited North America before Europeans and had their own societies, settlements, economies, and political systems. But that is not the same thing as saying they developed the United States. The American colonies that became the United States, their legal and political institutions, governments, towns, commercial systems, and ultimately the constitutional republic were overwhelmingly established by populations of European origin. By 1790, the census recorded 3,172,006 whites out of 3,929,214 inhabitants—about 81% of the population, even though nearly 700,000 of the remainder were enslaved.
Nor did all American territory change hands through one process that can simply be called “theft.” Territory was acquired through a complicated mixture of warfare, treaties, purchases, negotiated and coerced cessions, settlement, annexation, and forced removal. Some of those processes involved obvious coercion and dispossession; others were purchases or treaties. Treating several centuries of territorial history as though every acre had the same history is not serious analysis.
The sheer amount of warfare also gets erased by that slogan. Historical scholarship describes the U.S. military as having fought more than 1,500 wars, battles, and skirmishes against Native peoples, and that does not capture the entire earlier colonial history of fighting involving European settlers, colonial troops, and militias. European-American settlement therefore involved centuries of armed conflict as well as diplomacy, trade and treaties—not Europeans simply appearing one day and taking possession of an already-existing United States.
And even the warfare was not simply “white people versus Indians.” Native nations fought one another and frequently allied with European or American forces against Native rivals. At Horseshoe Bend in 1814, for example, Andrew Jackson’s force included 600 Cherokee and Creek allies fighting the Red Stick Creeks alongside roughly 2,600 European-American troops.
The basic error is treating prior possession of the continent as though it were the same thing as having created the United States. It is not. Native peoples lived on and controlled large parts of North America before European settlement, but the United States itself—its colonies, institutions, legal order, towns, commercial networks, military, government, and national political structure—was overwhelmingly created by European settlers and their descendants. Its territorial growth came through war, treaties, purchases, cessions, settlement, alliances, and at times coercion and forced removal. Those facts can be judged individually, but they cannot honestly be compressed into “whites stole a country built by non-whites.” There was no preexisting United States for Europeans to steal intact, and there was no non-white-built American state that Europeans simply took over. That slogan does not simplify the history; it fundamentally misdescribes it.