evr-more:

fouriest:

bella-dva:

hpdspooker:

i just saw an ad about how the founding fathers wouldn’t foster safe spaces or trigger warnings and all i can think about is when john adams made it illegal to make fun of him

Wait what?

Alien and Sedition Acts

Technically they didn’t make it illegal to mock John Adams specifically, but they outlawed criticism of the federal government and the president, which at the time was our boy Johnny Adams.

A few years prior there was a big hullabaloo in congress over the proper title for the chief executive. As veep, Adams thought that Washington should be referred to as “His Highness the President of the United States of America and Protector of the Rights of the Same,” because I guess otherwise all the fancy European kings wouldn’t take him seriously.

Many saner people thought this was stupid, with Thomas Jefferson calling it “the most superlatively ridiculous thing I ever heard of.” In response, many members of congress took to calling Adams “His Rotundity.”

One congressman from Virginia, John Page, also took the time to write a poem: 

I’ll tell in a trice-

‘Tis old Daddy Vice

Who carries of pride an ass-load;

Who turns up his nose,

Wherever he goes,

With vanity swelled like a toad. 

Which is awesome both because it drags on a pompous asshole, and also because it is one of the first recorded instances of the term “ass-load”

Bringing this back because Four I stg I love how many random facts you know and how you still manage to find sources.