Is this supposed to be a surprising secret? I was taught this in American public schools as the core reason.
The real wake-up call isn't learning about the historical importance of expansion itself, but assigning a different moral value to it. It's realizing Manifest Destiny is just Lebensraum that won, that there's nothing morally justified about it.
The real secret cause was that galaxy brain Americans thought that tea was like a hardcore drug and that the Empire was doing a sort of opium wars on them with english breakfast teas
He’s right that the Americans wanted to genocide the indigenous people west of the Appalachians and take their land, and that was a big reason why they declared independence because the British wouldn’t let them.
He’s wrong that the British were restricting expansion out of morals and preserving the land for the indigenous peoples. It was just for the British, that maintaining a military presence in the Ohio Valley was much more expensive than the economic benefits they would get. If the numbers worked out a little differently they would have been just as eager to genocide as the Americans.
I’m not sure, it’s fairly common knowledge nowadays (my teacher in HS covered it). Real estate speculation in lands not yet fully ethnically cleansed was a massive source of wealth for many of the founding fathers.
I swear, as I moved leftward realizing just how much of a fascist Teddy Roosevelt was legit hurt me. It was like finding out the truth about Elon all over again.
But it just goes to show that Malthusianism is simply a core part of Anglo culture. Like every Anglosphere country is in a bare-knuckled fight to be the modern day Sparta.
Teddy is one of the better presidents, too. He was especially good for the labor movement and trust busting. It's sad the best America can come up with are NazBols.