I included the response I would have sent, were the thread not locked. This is how coward libs argue. They're calling the well-known study by Purdue demonstrating that the US is a oligarchy a "far left news source", for context.

  • emizeko [they/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability.

    —James Madison

      • KurtVonnegut [comrade/them]
        ·
        1 year ago

        TRIGGER WARNING, SA:

        Also, not-so-fun fact, President James Madison had a sister. She was half-black. She was the daughter of the president's father (wealthy plantation owner James Madison Sr.) and one of his slaves. I'll let you infer the sexual assault implications there.

        Not-so-fun fact 2: President James Madison had a son. He was one-quarter black. He was the son of the President and his sister-slave. I'll let you infer the incestuous sexual assault implications there.

        Not-so-fun fact 3: Jim Madison, the illegitimate son of President James Madison and his sister, was also a slave (since his mother was a slave). President Madison never freed him. Jim worked in the Madison family kitchen, and during President Madison's presidency, Jim worked in the White House kitchen. He was there when the British burned the White House down, and was even ordered to run back into the burning building to save a flag. Jim fell in love with a white woman, who also loved him back, and for this crime, President Madison, his father-owner, sold him away to a Tennessee plantation. (It was actually Dolly Madison who ordered this to happen.) President Madison never saw his son again.

        Not-so-fun fact 4: To this very day, President James Madison's white descendants refuse to take a DNA test to prove they are related to his black descendants. His black descendants have family legends that are independently verifiable with recently unearthed entries in Dolly Madison's diary, proving their claims.

        I never though I would hate a president more than Andrew Jackson or Thomas Jefferson, but IMO James Madison was the most vile human being ever to be commander-in-chief. At least Jefferson freed all his children when he died. But Madison, the author of the American Constitution, sold his nephew-son away, an act so inhuman I can barely conceive of it.

        For further reading: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/52772978

          • KurtVonnegut [comrade/them]
            ·
            1 year ago

            The Madison story sounds improbable at first, but the overwhelming amount of evidence of slave owners taking advantage of their female slaves (especially part-white slaves) makes it much more believable. I mean, Jefferson's black descendants actually do have solid DNA evidence on their side, so Madison wouldn't be the first president to be a documented r*pist. Sally Hemmings was 15 when that started, BTW.

            • Biggay [he/him, comrade/them]
              ·
              1 year ago

              Jefferson was also really gross in describing black women as ideal too or something right? LIke in his personal diaries I remember hearing there were some weird shit he wrote about it.

              • KurtVonnegut [comrade/them]
                ·
                1 year ago

                Well, Sally Hemmings was only 1/4 black and 3/4 white, and her children were 1/8 black and 7/8 white, but because of America's racist laws and cultural attitudes, they were all seen as "black" and all were enslaved. Jefferson was publicly against slavery, but also did nothing to actively fight against it, unlike Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine, who were both part of the Pennsylvania abolitionist society. (Pennsylvania had a lot of anti-slavery Quakers even before 1776.) Jefferson viewed himself as a progressive liberal, much like the French Jacobins. He even started a nailery at Monticello and pitted slaves against each other in a "free market" competition. Slaves who made more nails there were rewarded with nice clothes, management positions at the plantation, etc. Slaves who made less nails were whipped. By the way, most of the slaves who worked in the nailery were children! Here's a link for more reading: https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/nailery/