Well, that’s interesting. Why is my response in a screenshot?
Because Teddy wasn’t a conservative, but @matt-ruins-feminisms-shit blocked me and wanted to make a cheap, bitch point without actually showing anyone the source I linked. Which blatantly says the quote is fake, but let’s keep going.
Teddy fundamentally changing the Union/Employer relationship and forcing coal companies to bargain with coal workers instead of just killing them.
Creation of the EPA, the thing Conservatives are still trying to kill.
"Spring would not be spring without bird songs, any more than it would be spring without buds and flowers, and I only wish that besides protecting the songsters, the birds of the grove, the orchard, the garden and the meadow, we could also protect the birds of the sea-shore and of the wilderness."
“The United States at this moment occupies a lamentable position as being perhaps the chief offender among civilized nations in permitting the destruction and pollution of nature. Our whole modern civilization is at fault in the matter. But we in America are probably most at fault … Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests and exterminate fishes, birds and mammals’not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements.”
That the Heritage Foundation labeled Teddy as a progressive liberal that tied us closer and closer to European politics and economics.
I mean...I could keep going.
His split with Taft was because he felt personally betrayed by Taft for corroborating with Roosevelt’s conservative GOP enemies
He spoke out significantly and regularly against the political interests and power of corporations and the rich, viewing them as among the gravest threats to the country
“It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.”
Set hard and stringent restrictions on interstate trade. Actually, let’s segway this into just the fact that he was well known as a “trustbuster” and invented the fucking phrase.
He’s one of the origins of the phrase “the greatest good for the greatest number”, which is intrinsically an communal and anti-individualist sentiment (granted he’s mixed on this, but holy shit).
That’s one of Teddy’s books. In his own words.
He was among the most race-forward politicians of his time. Even today Republicans and Conservatives don’t fucking agree with this all the way. Your fucking President is one of them.
“ "I cannot consent to take the position that the door of hope — the door of opportunity — is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of race or color. Such an attitude would, according to my convictions, be fundamentally wrong."
Pay your fucking taxes. Your entire god-damned job as an American is to sacrifice in blood, sweat, and tears for the next generation.
"Much has been given us, and much will rightfully be expected from us. We have duties to others and duties to ourselves; and we can shirk neither. We have become a great nation, forced by the fact of its greatness into relations with the other nations of the earth, and we must behave as be seen as a people with such responsibilities."
Capitalism isn’t the fucking point. A life in pursuit of material wealth is wasted.
"It is a bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire a false standard of success; and there can be no falser standard than that set by the deification of material well-being in and for itself."
Or I could call them a fucking coward. Who should fucking fight me or shut the fuck up and continue being weak, pathetic, and dishonest. Three things Teddy guaran-fucking-teed would have no patience for.
But your historical revisionist bullshit is suitably responded to, amusingly enough, with another Teddy Roosevelt Quote.
"It is of little use for us to pay lip-loyalty to the mighty men of the past unless we sincerely endeavor to apply to the problems of the present precisely the qualities which in other crises enabled the men of that day to meet those crises."
