The United States Teaches History Like It Is Covering Up The Epstein Files

In the modern United States of America, kids are ordered to memorize a sanitized and inaccurate version of history. This is because certain institutions and mythologies have become “too big to fail.” We’re threatened that if we change our perspective on certain subjects, all of our society will collapse.But will it?At some point maybe we should stop and consider that if people of the past were really so great, why can’t we tell the truth about them?The fact is that rich people have historically committed unimaginable atrocities against the poor and marginalized both in this country and in the world. For example, Thomas Jefferson began to rape Sally Hemings when he was 44 and she was only 14. That makes him a child rapist. For all we know, Hemings might have been younger because it was common to deny children knowledge of their birthdays in order to further dehumanize them.George Washington used to pull the teeth out of the heads of the people he owned in order to make dentures for himself. There are famous stories of slaves who escaped from Washington including accounts provided by Oney Judge and Hercules Posey. Their narratives include insight into the true atrocities that took place at Mt. Vernon.Reading these accounts reminds me of the Epstein files. They’ve been buried as part of a large scale cover-up to protect the image of super abusers. Maybe the reason the Epstein atrocities were allowed to go for as long as they did is because the general population of this country has been indoctrinated against seeking out the truth or listening to survivors.Sometimes it feels that the only purpose of the modern world is to cover up the crimes of the privileged. Wealthy people own all the publishing industries. They get to determine what content goes into textbooks. Naturally they would do everything they could to prevent the population from learning the true crimes of history and the present.Instead, we’re taught only reverence. We’re told we must revere Washington, Jefferson, and other presidents that might have been guilty of sex crimes against children. We put their faces on our currency. We carve their likeness into the sacred mountains that used to be worshiped by the people of the First Nations.It’s the same as burning down a church in order to build a monument to wealth. We do it over and over and over.Another enduring fact that history has shown again and again is that wealthy people are not as powerful as they believe themselves to be. Consuming so much ease and luxury over time appears to do something to their brains. There’s a story that in 1492, Pope Innocent decided that he was so important he should live forever so he experimented with a blood transfusion from three boys. The boys and the pope died as a result.There are institutions that deny this story ever happened, but that’s part of the mechanism of scrubbing history. They sow the seeds of doubt to redact the names of the guilty while exposing the innocent. Carl Sagan mentioned Pope Innocent in “The Demon Haunted World,” and if he thinks it’s a valid story, I’m inclined to trust his opinion.The church made its fortune by declaring women to be witches, burning them at the stake, and then seizing all their assets. Apologists might say, “Well, that happened a long time ago.” But the fact is that the church is still sitting on all that wealth.I’m sure that, just like now, they created a system that established distance between the men who made the accusations and the actual moment of torment. A man could get paid for falsely accusing a woman of being a witch, and later on he’d be riding an elliptical next to a cardinal chortling about their good fortune. At the same time, in some distant city, a woman and her children would be feeling the agony of flames peeling the flesh from their bones.Out of sight, out of mind.Just like the Epstein files.Just like all the truth about the transgressions of rich, evil men.But it doesn’t go away. Today it’s rumored that ICE is using the same tactics. They’re finding innocent people who have committed no crimes and arresting them indiscriminately. There are stories of rapes. There are stories of torture. There are stories of ICE agents running off with the money of the people they attack, laughing all the way.What’s true?Who knows? We cover up the crimes of the present and the past in the United States. That’s one of this countries most venerated traditions. That goes double for the crimes of the rich.Have you ever asked yourself why is it that hatred has such easy access to funding while there’s never any money left over for common decency? We spend a trillion dollars on the military, but we can’t provide teachers with a 10% raise? We can’t pay for student lunches?The second a president proposes rounding up human beings and confining them to camps, there’s plenty of money. Nobody dares say, “How are we going to pay for that?” In fact, people don’t even think it. Meanwhile children go hungry. The sick suffer without any treatment. Our fellow citizens curl up beneath cardboard boxes to protect them from the rain.Our perspectives are all screwed up. Maybe it’s because we’ve always covered up the crimes of the rich. We live through periods where atrocities are committed, then we’re ordered to forget. After all, if you told a child in school that the church accumulated its wealth through slavery and burning women at the stake, it might challenge that child’s faith.Where do you think they get all that money to leave Bibles in hotel rooms? I wonder if the pages themselves were made from the ashes of burned, innocent, murdered women. In a way, they are. That’s the body you lift when you pick up that book.But there’s another thing that history has shown again and again. It’s that rich people are not as all-powerful as they like to believe. For as much as they try to censor and sanitize the narrative, they cannot change the truth. The echo of their crimes resonates throughout history.You find it in books like “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” or anything by Frederic Douglass. You also find the truth in the memories of the witnesses who had to endure the atrocities themselves, or who lost a loved one to the overreach of privileged predators.The longer they’re allowed to get away with their crimes, the more emboldened they become. But the fever dream of their self-absorbed perception of the world leads them to overlook the obvious. Sooner or later, their crimes reach a tipping point. Sooner or later, they’ve hurt so many people that their reign of terror becomes impossible to deny.Once again, the human race finds itself in a moment of awakening.But in the next realignment, we have to be resolved to not only hold accountable all the criminals of today. We must enact punishment of all the crimes of the past as well. The time has come for reparations. No pope or priest should be able to live the high life because one of his ancestors burned a woman alive in the middle ages. No businessman of today should be allowed to chortle at us from his private island which was paid for by our collective stolen labor.When we teach our children a sanitized version of the past, we groom them to endure lives of oppression, exploitation, and torture. The crimes won’t end until we make them stop.All we have to do is find our resolve to tell the truth.You all make this newsletter happen! Thanks for your sponsorship! I have payment tiers starting at as little as twenty dollars a year.Upgrade at 30% offUpgrade at 40% offUpgrade at 50% offUpgrade at 60% offI’m so happy you’re here, and I’m looking forward to sharing more thoughts with you tomorrow.My CoSchedule referral linkHere’s my referral link to my preferred headline analyzer tool. If you sign up through this, it’s another way to support this newsletter (thank you).I'd Rather Be Writing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. 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