America’s Southwest was conquered fair and square



The most striking images from the recent anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement riots in Los Angeles depicted protesters defiantly waving the Mexican flag. Some commentators noted the irony: Why carry the flag of the very country you don’t want to be deported to? Others offered a darker interpretation — the flag wasn’t just a symbol of heritage but a claim. The message: California rightfully belongs to Mexico.

That sentiment echoes the increasingly common ritual of “land acknowledgements” on college campuses. Event organizers now routinely recite statements recognizing that a school sits on land once claimed by this or that Indian tribe. But such cheap virtue signaling skips over a key point: Tribes seized land from each other long before Europeans arrived.

The United States had offered to purchase the disputed territories. Mexico treated the offer as an insult and indignantly refused. And the war came.

Do the descendants of the Aztecs have a claim to California and the rest of the American Southwest? The answer is a simple and emphatic no. The United States holds that territory by treaty, by financial compensation, and, yes, by conquest. But the full story is worth examining — because it explains why Spain and later Mexico failed to hold what the United States would eventually claim.

The rise and fall of the Spanish empire

Spain launched its exploration and conquest of the Americas in the 15th century and eventually defeated the Aztec empire in Mexico. But by the 18th century, Spanish control began to wane. The empire’s model of rule — exploitative, inefficient, and layered with class resentment — proved unsustainable.

At the top were the peninsulares, Spaniards born in Europe who ran colonial affairs from Havana and Mexico City. They had little connection to the land or the people they governed — and often returned to Spain when their service ended.

Below them stood the creoles, locally born Spaniards who could rise in power but never fully displace the peninsulares.

Then came the mestizos — mixed-race descendants of Spaniards and natives — and, finally, the native peoples themselves, descendants of the once-dominant Aztecs, who lived in state of peonage.

Inspired by the American Revolution, Mexico declared itself a republic in 1824. But it lacked the civic traditions and institutional structure to sustain self-government. Political chaos followed. Factionalism gave way to the dictatorship of Antonio López de Santa Anna, who brutally suppressed a rebellion in Coahuila y Tejas.

Texas had long been a trouble spot. Even before independence from Spain, Mexican officials encouraged American settlement to create a buffer against Comanche raids. The Comanche — superb horsemen — dominated the Southern Plains, displacing rival tribes and launching deep raids into Mexican territory. During the “Comanche moon,” their war parties could cover 70 miles in a day. They were a geopolitical power unto themselves.

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Anglo settlers in Texas brought their own ideas of decentralized government. When tensions escalated, they declared independence. Santa Anna responded with massacres at Goliad and the Alamo. But after his defeat and capture at San Jacinto, he granted Texas independence in exchange for his life. Mexico’s government refused to honor the deal — and continued to claim Texas, insisting that the border lay at the Nueces River, not the Rio Grande.

How the Southwest was won

After the United States annexed Texas in 1845, conflict became inevitable. Mexican forces crossed the Rio Grande and clashed with U.S. troops. President James Polk requested a declaration of war in 1846.

The Mexican-American War remains one of the most decisive — and underappreciated — conflicts in U.S. history. The small but capable U.S. Army, bolstered by state volunteers, outclassed Mexican forces at every turn. American troops seized Santa Fe and Los Angeles.

General Zachary Taylor pushed south, winning battles at Resaca de la Palma and Monterrey. General Winfield Scott launched a bold amphibious assault at Veracruz, then cut inland — without supply lines — to capture Mexico City. The Duke of Wellington called the campaign “unsurpassed in military annals.”

The war served as a proving ground for a generation of officers who would later lead armies in the Civil War.

Diplomatically, the war might have been avoided. The United States had offered to purchase the disputed territories. Mexico treated the offer as an insult and indignantly refused. And the war came.

Territory bought and paid for

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, ended the conflict. Mexico ceded California and a vast swath of land that now includes Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Wyoming. Mexico also gave up its claim to Texas and accepted the Rio Grande as the southern border.

In return, the United States paid Mexico $15 million “in consideration of the extension acquired by the boundaries of the United States” and assumed certain debts owed to American citizens. Mexicans living in the newly acquired territory could either relocate within Mexico’s new borders or become U.S. citizens with full civil rights. The Gadsden Purchase added even more land.

The United States gained enormously from the war at the expense of Mexico. Critics of the expansionist policy known as “manifest destiny,” including the Whigs and Ulysses S. Grant, called the result unjust. Some Southerners wanted to annex all of Mexico to expand slavery. That plan was wisely rejected, though the “law of conquest” made it a possibility.

Still, the U.S. paid for the land, offered citizenship to the inhabitants, and declined to claim more than necessary. In the rough world of 19th-century geopolitics, that counted as a just outcome.

Flipping cars for ‘justice’ — then back to poli-sci class



Some images linger like bad philosophy. One such image: a masked individual standing triumphantly on a vandalized car, waving a giant Mexican flag, at a protest against mass deportations. It’s not a political cartoon. It’s the radical left’s icon. And it perfectly captures the confused moral universe behind the Los Angeles riots and the so-called “indigenous land” movement.

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As a professor at a secular university, I can assure you this isn’t fringe lunacy. It’s the tip of the philosophical iceberg. Beneath that smoldering car is a massive ideological structure that has been meticulously constructed over decades — paid for, ironically, by federal and state tax dollars.

These rioters don’t actually want to return the land. They want the luxury of moral superiority minus the inconvenience of coherent thought.

If it were possible, I’d love to survey the people flipping cars and heaving concrete blocks at police cruisers. I strongly suspect many of the ringleaders hold degrees in the liberal arts — more specifically, degrees in identity activism. You know the type: gender studies, black studies, Latinx studies, queer theory, or some intersectional combination thereof.

Don’t worry — they went to college

If you visit the department websites of these programs at any given university, you’ll often find “activist” listed as the No. 1 career path. No need to wonder what you can do with a $120,000 degree — you can become the ideological arsonist who trains the next generation to believe the United States is irredeemably Christian, unjust, and colonial — and maybe even get in some looting of the capitalist luxury stores.

So when you see a rioter in Los Angeles shouting on CNN about how the land was “stolen from Mexico,” just know: That’s the university curriculum talking. In one now-viral clip, a young woman (yes, I just assumed her gender) yells at a police officer, “As long as you feel OK with capitalism, racist, imperialist state.” Asked if she even knows what she’s saying, her reply is priceless: “Yes, b***h, I'm in college.”

Exactly.

These students have never been taught about the establishment of land ownership in world history or even the basic historical facts of the American Southwest. They don’t know that Mexico owned it for only 27 years, yet they think it is their ancestral homeland. If anything, Spain should be in the mix, asking for it back from Mexico.

And remember: We’re all paying for that education through state funding — drawn from taxes paid by ... wait for it ... capitalists. No gratitude. No irony. Just tuition-funded tantrums.

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  Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

A modest glance at history will remind you that the United States conquered large parts of Mexico in 1848. But here’s the twist: The U.S. didn’t just grab the land and walk away whistling. No, it gave back a substantial portion, paid Mexico $15 million (a princely sum at the time) for the remaining territory — including what is now California — and forgave the Mexican government’s outstanding debts.

But the student activists aren’t interested in political history. And they don’t really want to live in Mexico. Even if they did, Mexico's immigration laws are strict, its economy is difficult, and it most certainly doesn’t tolerate foreigners burning down public property in the name of “revolution against the government.”

Marxism underwritten by capitalists

These rioters don't actually want to return the land. They want the luxury of moral superiority minus the inconvenience of coherent thought. They want their air conditioning, DoorDash, TikTok, and virtue signaling ... on stolen land. Any one of them could sell the assets they acquired within the capitalist system and donate the proceeds to an indigenous cause. But they want to make other people do this with their money.

At their campus protests and university-sponsored events, they perform ritualized “land acknowledgments,” reciting that their college stands on “unceded indigenous territory,” as if confessing to a metaphysical sin. But the penance never includes selling their house and giving it to a tribe. And why?

Because the first tribes are lost to history — conquered by later tribes, who were themselves conquered, until eventually the Spanish brought law and order to warring tribes. The cycle of conquest is not new; it is one of the oldest stories in human civilization. What’s different now is the selective outrage.

Here lies the real problem: Modern activist ideology seeks to appeal to justice but lacks a standard by which to define it. This is why all of this activist nonsense we are paying gender studies professors to teach is so empty. It appeals to justice without any standard by which to adjudicate the question.

If the land was stolen, then: Who stole it? From whom? And what court now has jurisdiction?

Even if you could answer the first two — and in most cases, you can’t — the third is impossible under their belief system. If you begin playing “we were here firsties,” you have to go all the way back.

Theirs is a godless appeal to justice, and godless justice is just another word for mob rule. It is ultimately just mob rule stirred up by malcontents to motivate masses of discontents — which is why they are simply called Marxists. Not because they’ve read “Das Kapital” but because they’re looking for a framework that legitimizes their rage and offers power without accountability. And in Marx, they find a convenient excuse to tear down everything that came before — especially anything remotely Christian.

All of their disappointment in life is aimed at the outward object called “the United States.” No reflection on their own condition — just rage against the machine.

God has the last word

But for those who believe that God is the final judge, the phrase "Let God judge between us” is not a cliché. It’s a fearful thing. It means a moral order lies beyond human manipulation. It means that even if we don’t see civil justice now, true justice is ontological, everlasting, and inescapable.

Marxist rioters cannot make this appeal. They live in a world of only immanent causes and material grievances. No final judge and no moral standard above power awaits to hold their actions accountable — therefore, no peace. They rage because they must. Their rage is at existence itself. And when they finish one protest, they must invent another. Their revolution has no eschaton — only exhaustion.

So they flip over cars and set fires. Some loot — not just because they're angry at injustice or need a new pair of shoes, but because they have no vision of the good, only a fixation on the bad. And in seeking a purely material form of justice, they have lost their souls.

They complained about the one who supposedly stole land while forgetting about the one who can cast their soul into hell. The prospect of God’s justice should make all of us repent.

It is time to stop funding this madness. It is time to restore an education grounded in truth — not truth as a tool of power but truth that judges us all.

Until then, don’t be surprised when your car is flipped by someone with a $100,000 degree in “decolonial eco-poetics.” And don’t be shocked when they scream “justice!” without the ability to define what it is.

After all, they went to college.

Kristi Noem’s bombshell letter hits Harvard where it hurts



Picture a Harvard University faculty lounge: a ring of professors clustered around Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s letter, one of them furrowing his brow and murmuring, “Wait, are we the baddies?” Such moments of self-awareness, alas, remain forever just beyond the reach of our academic elite. The very institutions that lecture us daily about our original sin — racism — have, with impressive irony, perfected the art of racial discrimination.

We are now at the far end of a 75-year arc that began with William F. Buckley Jr.’s “God and Man at Yale” and ends, aptly, with Harvard losing federal funds over the consequences of its own institutional neglect. The problems Buckley identified — contempt for Christianity and American ideals chief among them — have not only remained; they have metastasized.

The very professors who made a career of moral hectoring have, predictably, become the thing they claimed to hate.

How did we get here?

On Thursday, Noem sent a letter to Harvard informing the school that it had lost its certification for the Student and Exchange Visitor Program. This came after Harvard repeatedly ignored federal requests to disclose statistics related to anti-Semitic activity on campus. According to the letter, Harvard fosters a hostile environment for Jewish students, tolerates pro-Hamas sympathies, and sustains racially discriminatory diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.

Funds with strings attached

Harvard is now learning the lesson that Christian colleges grasped nearly half a century ago: Government money comes with government strings. But why did it take Harvard so long to recognize this? The answer is disarmingly simple — until now, those strings were always in harmony with Harvard’s ideological tune.

Federal dollars came bundled with leftist priorities, and thus the elite saw no need to question them. Christian colleges, in contrast, often declined the money to preserve their mission of faithfulness to Scripture.

What’s astonishing is that Harvard — the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere, chartered in 1650 — still behaves as though it needs government money. Its endowment, by the latest count, stands at more than $53 billion. Yet judging from the panic issuing from the president’s office, one might think bankruptcy was imminent. The reason? DEI is embedded so deeply into Harvard’s research infrastructure — even in the sciences — that stripping funding from DEI-tainted grants strikes at the university’s financial core.

In academic circles, panic now masquerades as prophecy. Professors speak as though the world is ending — though, given their long record of failed doomsday predictions about climate catastrophe, one might be forgiven for tuning them out. I remember, early in my career, being told by an administrator that Al Gore’s book was a “road map to the future.” It turned out to be more of a road map to irrelevance. Global warming’s great success was posting more failed predictions than Hal Lindsey.

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  Photo by JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images

But now the panic is personal. It’s not the planet they fear losing. It’s their world — their imagined utopia of managed speech, redefined morality, and subsidized ideology. That world is slipping through their fingers, and they have nothing left but their performances of alarm, such as reading an indigenous land acknowledgement, confessing their privilege, employee training about infinite genders, and giving a voice to the voiceless.

Yes, you are the baddies

This explains the despair among leftist academics. Even as the broader world shows signs of improvement, economically, culturally, and even morally, they howl louder. Why? Because the improvement is happening without them — or worse, despite them.

They believed they were changing the world by sermonizing about “whiteness” and “heteronormativity.” Instead, they became a punch line. They trained a generation of DEI advocates with the promise that there would always be government work, but those jobs disappeared faster than the edibles at a faculty party.

This is why Noem’s letter cuts so deeply. It documents, officially and unambiguously, the discriminatory policies of Harvard University. The very professors who made a career of moral hectoring have, predictably, become the thing they claimed to hate.

Yes, you are the baddies.

As we turn the page on this chapter of the failed American university, we should remember that Buckley, despite his critique, was ultimately optimistic. He knew that donors, parents, and students were no longer represented by Ivy League ideology, even as those schools embraced collectivism in his day. He believed they would reject the communitarian ideologies of these universities. And they have!

Now, as the last gasps of those failed philosophies echo through Harvard Yard, we too have reason to be hopeful. Parents, donors, and students are awakening, and they’re asking for something better. American ideals and Christianity are back on the menu at the schools that matter. Perhaps, at long last, we are remembering what once made Harvard great in the first place: Veritas.

'Territories we stand upon across Turtle Island': Toronto Blue Jays open MLB season with land acknowledgement
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'Territories we stand upon across Turtle Island': Toronto Blue Jays open MLB season with land acknowledgement



For the third straight year, Major League Baseball's Toronto Blue Jays opened its season at home with an acknowledgement that the team is actually playing on Indigenous land.

It is also the fourth season the team has included land acknowledgements at home games. Since late September 2021, the Blue Jays organization — along with pro teams the Toronto Raptors and Toronto Maple Leafs — has declared before games that Rogers Centre is actually on the "traditional territory" of native people.

This declaration was made around the time Canada recognized National Day for Truth and Reconciliation as a holiday in the country, which was previously known as Orange Shirt Day, and was celebrated as such by the Toronto sports teams, per the National Post.

The Blue Jays has recognized that its organization is "based on Treaty 13 lands – traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit," its website has described. It also recognizes that the team is "located on the traditional home of many other nations including the Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Chippewa, and Wendat Peoples."

Anishinaabeg, for example, is not a specific tribe, rather it is a series of tribes grouped seemingly for the purpose of referring to the region around the Great Lakes in the United States and Canada, typically for political activism.

"We are honored to work with and learn from communities all across this country now referred to as Canada," the official acknowledgement continued. "Therefore, we want to acknowledge all First Nations, Inuit, and Metis peoples whose original and treaty territories we stand upon across Turtle Island (aka, North America)."

In honour of Orange Shirt Day, a land acknowledgement and artwork by Philip Cote – an artist and Ancestral Knowledge Keeper from Moose Deer Point First Nation – has been installed at Rogers Centre outside at Gate 15 and inside at Section 102. pic.twitter.com/em2NFA6O5k
— Toronto Blue Jays (@BlueJays) September 30, 2021
 

The more recent iteration of the land acknowledgment varies greatly from that of 2021, which was authored by a Canadian "artist and Ancestral Knowledge Keeper."

This rendition included acknowledgement of "our Mother the Earth" and the "Seven Grandfather teachings: Wisdom, Bravery, Respect, Honesty, Truth, Humility, and Love."

It also made sure to acknowledge the "medicine wheel and its teachings," in addition to the four cardinal directions and all four seasons.

The Blue Jays organization has certainly worked in a series of political dedications as part of its ongoing reconciliation project.

This has included providing "anti-racism awareness and training programs" and adhering to the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

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