Pramila Jayapal Thinks Everyone In The World Built America Except Americans
Brianna Lyman Visit on Twitter @briannalyman2
If we pretend that America was built by people and cultures that quite literally could not have built America, then we aren’t just misremembering our past, we are losing the future that our actual ancestors secured for us.
My eleventh-great grandfather Thomas Rogers arrived in 1620 on the Mayflower. He signed the Mayflower Compact, which affirmed the right of free men to establish a government they would all be subject to.
John Quincy Adams later called it “perhaps the only instance, in human history, of that positive, original social compact, which speculative philosophers have imagined as the only legitimate source of government.”
My tenth great-grandfather Richard Lyman arrived on the Lyon in 1631. Five years later, he and roughly 100 other settlers — including more of my ancestors — would make a trek that would result in the founding of Hartford, Connecticut. It was there in Hartford in 1638 that the General Court “adopted the Fundamental Orders, often described as America’s first written constitution and the reason why Connecticut’s official nickname is the Constitution State.” The Orders were inspired by Rev. Thomas Hooker’s sermon that stated “the foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people.” Hooker led the settlers years prior to Hartford.
My seventh great-grandfather Elias Lyman served in the Third Massachusetts Provincial Congress in 1775 alongside Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Joseph Warren.
When Paul Revere took his famous Midnight Ride that fateful April 19, 1775 night, it was two of my sixth-great granduncles, Capt. Caleb Brooks and John Brooks, who answered the call and served in Captain Isaac Hall’s minutemen company during Lexington and Concord. Notably, Isaac Hall is the first cousin of one of my other sixth-great grandfathers.
In fact, Revere reportedly rode to Hall’s house (which has now been converted into a Mosque) upon which Hall “triggered the town’s alarm system” to rally the Medford minutemen.
But on Thursday, Indian-born Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., informed me that it wasn’t ancestors like mine who built this nation. No, it was Somalians, Indians, and immigrants from Latin America and Africa.
“The majority of Americans across the country, regardless of political party, know that immigrants from all over the world — Somalia, India, wherever they’re from, Latin America, Africa — that immigrants have built this country and make this country what it is today,” Jayapal said on MS Now.
But if Somalians, Indians, or immigrants from “wherever they’re from” “built America,” why didn’t they just “build” their own version of America in their native country?
Because immigrants from Somalia, India, Latin America, Africa or “wherever they’re from” did not and could not have built this country.
To pull from Jayapal, Somalians and Indians quite literally could not have built America because the entire premise of this nation — that all men are created equal — is an inherently Christian claim that requires a Christian faith. Not Islamic, not Hindu, not Buddhist, but Christian.
As The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson wrote in these pages, the very premise of the entire American legal and civic culture emerged from the specifically Christian claim that “All men are created equal,” and such conviction “arrived in America by way of settlers and pioneers who came here specifically to establish a nation where they could practice their Christian faith as they saw fit.”
“The only people who ever took that self-evident truth [that all men are created equal] and used it as a foundation on which to forge a new nation were the English colonists in America,” Davidson pointed out. Not Somalians, not Indians, not people from Latin America, but English colonists who created America and thus became the first Americans.