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I respect your devotion to the Donald, but if you had read transcripts of his rally speeches as well as interviews on various media (typically conservative outlets) besides watching big media events on video you would see he referred to Jackson several times, both lauding him (even going so far as musing Jackson was upset he couldn't prevent the Civil War even though he was dead long before the crisis). Trump often compared himself to former presidents, but only really held Jackson as comparable to himself. No small feat for Jackson.

I don't especially put down Jackson for his Indian views (he had other faults and a lot of virtues as well). Not many people know even Benjamin Franklin was an Indian Fighter at one time, and in an early conception of Manifest Destiny (not yet branded as such but tied to expected providential expansion of white civilization countrywide) he even mused on several occasions it may be better if they were simply exterminated and put out of their misery.

But then even Theodore Roosevelt echoed Jackson when he stated curtly that "“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are,” Roosevelt said during a January 1886 speech in New York. “And I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”

And in a side note if you saw the recent PBS documentary on the creator of the Wizard of Oz books he called for extermination as well. It is a long and sad tale.

I don't mind civil discussion of views but do your homework first. Otiose questions don't advance anything.

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Hmm, Rick Santorum is right. "There was nothing here" in the sense he immediately explains: "there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture." It is only true. He does not talk of an "empty continent". That is not what he said. He is talking of culture, and the culture of the evolving America did indeed take over almost nothing from the Indians' culture.

And I don't think that "the colonial generation did look to Native groups as examples of alternatives to European-style monarchy in actual living practice." Or, if they looked, they only looked, but did not take over much.

The Federalist Papers always cite ancient Greek and Roman historians to give examples why the constitution should be written this way or that way. Can't remember of any Indian example.

And even if there were one or two examples, it is not enough to debunk Rick Santorum. Rick Santorum did not say, that there is no such influence at all, but he said: "there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture."

It is only true.

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Well, Jackson was Trump's favorite president and role model, so.... .

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Strange how hypocritical we can be, we are the first to yell genocide at the Turks recently. And what we did to the indigenous population of North America is forgotten. We basically killed of an entire race of people. And this MF makes lite of it!

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