Bloomberg: Aside from a few sentences, the Declaration of Independence is 'kinda whiny'

It’s Independence Day, we’re keeping an eye on Twitter, and even we can’t believe what we’re seeing. President Trump’s already broken so many people, and he broke them again Friday night with his dark, dystopian, jaw-dropping, divisive cultural bonfire of a speech. And as we’re learning along with you, what seems to have triggered journalists the most is when Trump singled out the extremists in the social justice movement and their goal of destroying America as we know it. Either they don’t see it or just pretend that there isn’t an extreme element that has hijacked good-faith protests in the name of George Floyd.

Bloomberg Opinion took a different tack than most and rather than focusing on Trump’s speech, it instead took a good look at the Declaration of Independence and aside from a few sentences found it “kinda whiny.”

The Declaration of Independence is essentially a long list of complaints https://t.co/pPs3FTroYN

— Bloomberg Opinion (@bopinion) July 4, 2020

Um, duh. We were sort of demanding to speak to the manager of Great Britain.

We just celebrate the Declaration’s preamble.

Actually, not even the entire preamble. Just part of the second paragraph about truths the founders held to be self-evident:

??Human equality
??Divine endowments
??Life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness https://t.co/kOCGRCqeeG pic.twitter.com/BUnSd5u8zb

— Bloomberg Opinion (@bopinion) July 4, 2020

That exceedingly brief patch of writing has earned centuries of praise, setting a revolutionary standard of human dignity — albeit one not quite in tune with the new nation given the cruelty-tiered classes https://t.co/kOCGRCqeeG pic.twitter.com/kdQzxtmMSm

— Bloomberg Opinion (@bopinion) July 4, 2020

“Albeit one not quite in tune with the new nation given the cruelty-tiered classes.”

After that aspirational sentence or so, comes a big long list of complaints.

The longest section is dedicated to a bitter protest against the “long train of abuses and usurpations” inflicted by a king https://t.co/kOCGRCqeeG pic.twitter.com/pWuZ8Wy27x

— Bloomberg Opinion (@bopinion) July 4, 2020

Whether protesting police brutality and centuries of racial injustice, or whining and venting via Twitter from the Oval Office, contemporary Americans have nothing on the seething colonists. They raged against a foe who “plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.” The Declaration rails against mercenaries dispatched by the king “to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages.”

??—@bopinion just discovered that the Declaration of Independence includes grievances.

— Hunter Hatten (@robertdogg) July 4, 2020

Thanks, @bopinion but 8th graders read this every year in school. We get it. It is a *declaration*of*war*, after all. What’s it supposed to say?

— l munoz (@RedRunnerLea) July 4, 2020

The entire point of this was to slight Thomas Jefferson.

— Roberto (@RobHolz) July 4, 2020

This is not news to anyone who was listening during high school civics class. We still teach civics in American public high school, right?

— ??✨?? (@julepparadox) July 4, 2020

Are there really people who don’t know this?

— Susan (@SPArn77) July 4, 2020

yeah why would a group of people justifying their rebellion feel the need to lay out their grievances

— Conotocarius (@Conotocarius1) July 4, 2020

Anyone who doesn't know this is stupid. This take is awful.

— Nateo (@NateoZero) July 4, 2020

Yeah, it’s a declaration of war. It’s not a love letter. Worst take ever in this absurd time of wokeness and critical theory bullshit pseudoscience

— political agnostic (@Cynikaldoc) July 4, 2020

It's literally a list of grievances. Is this news to you?

— Potus is the Chief Looter of US (@rockomcneill) July 4, 2020

Maybe it's the context that escapes you.

— Will_Work_4XRP (@Will4xrp) July 4, 2020

"Cruelty tiered classes" ? What fresh hallucinatory hell hath the media now concocted?

More Oppressor/oppressed marxist ideology seeping out, gaseously and odiferously from the rotten bowels of the grand narrative shapers?

— Eric Tilton (parler: @cognitiveCarbon) (@ET_mjttech) July 4, 2020

Hmmmmm… seems to me most days here you're kind of whiny…

— Pudge (@artistcaper) July 4, 2020

The only ones whining are you communist clowns
The rest of us will enjoy our freedom
Something we know you clowns would love nothing more than to take pic.twitter.com/sY6izWExa2

— AxraxNV?? (@AxraxNv) July 4, 2020

you fuckwits are seriously arm-chair quarterbacking the declaration of #independence?

"oh well we would have done it more virtuously, with everything we know, hundreds of years after the fighting."

thanks for offering me refuge from the "bitterness and resentment of politics"

— john public (@opdheadshot) July 4, 2020

There's a reason so many shed blood and their last breath for it, while you sit in your ivory tower with your chai latte and politically driven race baiting like spoiled children.

— Rob Reiner is Suffering A Mental Breakdown (@realJamesIrwin) July 4, 2020

We have to confess that we left out a few tweets from Bloomberg Opinion’s thread; of course, it took a detour through Black Lives Matter.

Now all that remains is the heart of the matter: a concise moral vision, and a spur to reimagining the human condition.

The vision laid the basis for a more equal nation, something that isn’t evident at all in modern America https://t.co/kOCGRCqeeG pic.twitter.com/fvJKQqZE3H

— Bloomberg Opinion (@bopinion) July 4, 2020

The vision and spur is what distinguishes modern-day complaints — the protests against injustice and venting via Twitter from the White House.

The former seek to realize the self-evident truth as laid out in the Declaration. The latter, well, doesn’t https://t.co/kOCGRCqeeG pic.twitter.com/pH5yw1fiX9

— Bloomberg Opinion (@bopinion) July 4, 2020

Go f*cking f*ck yourselves.

— Pope Bias VII ⭐️ (@BBPopehat7) July 4, 2020

Related:

Washington Post reminds us that American independence helped further colonialism and white supremacy https://t.co/UMihL75xnx

— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) July 4, 2020