Stolen Land

Aerial view of Billie Eilish's $2.3 million home in Glendale

On Sunday, at the Grammy’s, musician Billie Eilish stated that “no one is illegal on stolen land.” When I heard that, the usual arguments ran through my head. If she actually believes that we are living on stolen land, then she should take the deed to her multi-million dollar home and turn it over to the nearest Native American reservation. She should give the land that she possesses fraudulently back to its rightful owner. Obviously, she would never do that. She would never even think about doing that because in her eyes, she can do no wrong.

If we are really living on stolen land, who did we steal it from? Which tribe? The native tribes had been warring over this land for a thousand years. How many Indians had been killed fighting to protect or conquer this land long before Columbus stepped foot on this continent? Prior to Europeans coming to America, the Comanche had conquered the Apache dominating the Southern Plains; the Iroquois slaughtered the Huron, Erie, and Susquehannock tribes to take control over the Northeast territory; the Cherokee conquered the Southeast through warfare, taking captives and selling them into slavery; the Sioux conquered the Great Plains territory defeating the Crow and Pawnee tribes in bloody warfare.

So, the narrative that the North American native tribes were living in peace and perfect harmony for thousands of years prior to 1492, and that the evil Europeans introduce war and killing fellow human beings to the native population, is completely false. The native Americans knew all about war and killing long before Columbus set sail. Their lives were of war and conquest.

Do we know why Columbus came to America over 500 years ago? He was looking for an alternative trade route to India. That’s why they say Columbus called the native population Indians when he landed in the Americas. He mistakenly thought he had landed in India. But the most relevant question to ask and answer, one that is continually overlooked is, why was he looking for an alternate trade route to India? Why would he embark on such an arduous unknown journey over the seas when Europe could bring its trade goods to India by land?

Starting in the 6th century AD, the Muslims invaded North Africa and all of the Middle East. They conquered with the sword, killing millions of innocent people, forcing many to convert to Islam with a sword against their necks, conquering towns and cities and countries. Then they pushed into Europe, taking over large parts of Spain and Italy. All of the trade routes from Europe to India were blocked by the Muslim conquerors who had stolen that land from the Christians and the Jews. When the European traders would try to bring their goods to India through the conquered lands, their shipments would get seized by Muslims, the goods would be stolen and the traders would be murdered. That’s why Columbus sailed west looking for an alternative trade route to the East because the Middle East and parts of Africa and Europe were stolen and controlled by the Muslims.

Has a Muslim ever given a land acknowledgement about living on land in the Middle East that was stolen from the Christians and the Jews? In fact, they do the exact opposite. They do not disavow their murderous past; they are continuing their murderous past by actively trying to exterminate the Jews from the only sliver of land in the Middle East which is not dominated by Muslims, and by committing genocide against the small minority of  Christians who still live in the Middle East and Africa. And then the Muslims come to the United States and want to turn our country into a Muslim majority country, and accuse us of being bigoted because we do not want our Judeo-Christian nation turned into a Muslim nation while they are murdering the minority Christians in their country. Yet we are painted as the evil ones because we welcome Muslims into our country and kindly ask them to simply respect our culture and religion, and not to commit terrorist attacks against us.

Did Billie Eilish or any of the Grammy award winners bring awareness to the thousands of Christians who are being slaughtered throughout the Middle East by Muslims every year for their religion or the many members of the LGBTQ community in the Middle East who are executed for being one of the letters? Of course not, because these self-ascribed caring humanitarians do not care about innocents being murdered if it does not advance their broader political and social agendas.

If we are going to make land acknowledgements, we need to make all land acknowledgement in the history of the world. It is disingenuous to pick and chose which land acknowledgements need to be made and which ones can be completely ignored. The fact of the matter is that these are not land acknowledgements, they are anti-American statements. That’s why they only demand land acknowledgements from the United States, and not from Mexico and not from South America who stole their land from the native tribes as well. The Grammy’s would have to go on for a week if every stolen piece of land in human history was acknowledged. Every race of people have been the conquered and the conqueror; every race has been a slave and a slaver. And that is the ugly history of the human race that the people at the Grammy’s refuse to acknowledge because you cannot claim moral superiority if everyone has the same immorality in their history.

But they use these types of performative statements to attempt to seize the moral high ground hoping to use their assumed moral superiority to impose their worldview on the rest of us. It is a pure power play. The land that makes up the United States was stolen, so therefore we must have open borders, have unfettered illegal immigration, and allow millions of Muslims into the country so they can turn the United States into a Muslim majority nation. If all stolen land is up for grabs, then the United States can invade Canada if it wants, it can invade Mexico or Greenland or Cuba if it wants. If no one is illegal on stolen land, there should be no borders, no countries, everyone going into whatever land they want and take it over with impunity. MAGA supporters should be able to go into the Capitol whenever they want and not be arrested because the land in which the Capitol sits was stolen. We should be able to walk into Billie Eilish’s multi-million dollar home that sits on stolen land and live there for as long as we want. There should be no private property. We should be able to bootleg everyone of her songs and turn her millions into pennies. That is the end result of what she is advocating.

Billie Eilish and many of the performers at the Grammy’s, may be extremely musically talented, but they are children – both intellectually and emotionally. She lives in a completely unreal world where she is paid millions of dollars for singing shallow pop songs; she is worshipped and fawned over; she has a warped and distorted sense of self, so she must make some disingenuous statements about stolen land to cleanse her underdeveloped conscience while she is living in the lap of luxury on land that native American tribes used to inhabit because she has no self-awareness to see her extreme hypocrisy.

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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.