Thread by @gindaanis

The Ingalls', Wilders', and others who swarmed over the plains to farm devastated it. Replacing the dense prairie grasses with thirsty wheat, exposing subterranean insects, animals, and bacteria to hot winds, they changed the climate and the ecosystem for the worse.

Displacing the Indigenous people who knew how to live there. Destroying the buffalo.

The family farm so heavily marketed and promoted was never meant to succeed at farming. But it did clear the west at tremendous cost.

~ Prairie Fires. pp 153-154

America has never cared about the poor. It has created poverty throughout its existence just as it had created wealth. Farmers writing to elected officials "we are starving" only to have those officials dismiss "paternalistic charity" as something people don't want

The callousness towards the poor in the late 1800s is breathtaking. A Chicago newspaper suggests that you put arsenic or strychnine in your handouts to the homeless. Relief bills are defeated in Congress.

Remember that time Ivanka says this:

“I don’t think most Americans, in their heart, want to be given something. I’ve spent a lot of time traveling around this country over the last four years. People want to work for what they get,” Trump said.

“So, I think that this idea of a guaranteed minimum is not something most people want. They want the ability to be able to secure a job. They want the ability to live in a country where’s there’s the potential for upward mobility.”

She's only saying what generations of American politicians have said. Generations of Americans who vote against any kind of government help, even when they're the ones who need it.

Honestly. Read Prairie Fires. Read Masterless Men. Read books by a new generation of historians who are taking the blinders off. Listen to podcasts like mine, like @FarmToTaberPod. Like @mediaINDIGENA

Everything you know is wrong.