PHIL ITALIANO

Let’s get something straight: the biggest threat to freedom in America isn’t drag queens, immigrants, or college kids using they/them pronouns. It’s not books about gay penguins or Black history month. It’s not even the Catholic Church, although they’ve got their own Vatican-sized pile of sins.

No, the real problem—the rotting root of America’s national delusion—is the Anglo-Saxon Protestant. The white bread, Bible-thumping, blue-blooded descendants of the Mayflower. The original entitlement class. The sanctimonious perverts who came here to escape accountability, not oppression. They weren’t freedom fighters. They were freaks, exiles, and sanctified deviants who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves—especially when it came to women, children, and land that wasn’t theirs.

Let’s kill the myth: these people didn’t flee England because they were too holy. They fled because they were too uptight, too repressed, and too obsessed with controlling everyone else. In Europe, they were the ones getting booted out of churches for being insufferable, obsessed with rules, and—let’s not forget—many were straight-up cult leaders. So they came here like outlaw missionaries, ready to fuck, kill, and colonize under the banner of Jesus and “freedom.”

They landed on Native land with their muskets, their buckled shoes, and their hard-ons for control. And once they claimed the land, they started claiming the bodies. They raped Indigenous women, forced them into servitude, and built their colonies on a foundation of sexual violence and patriarchal rot. And let’s not mince words—behind the curtain of their fire-and-brimstone sermons was a steady stream of incest, child abuse, and predation dressed up as piety.

The same Protestant ethic that said dancing was sinful somehow had no problem marrying off 13-year-old girls to 40-year-old men in the name of “godly order.” Purity culture was just grooming with better branding. Their obsession with suppressing sex made everything sexual. The more they preached abstinence, the more they got off behind the barn. Generations of girls were told their bodies were dangerous while their uncles and pastors crept into their bedrooms at night.

These people built America’s original white power structure—not just through murder and theft—but through repression, hypocrisy, and ritual abuse. They believed God gave them this land, gave them dominion over every womb and every child, and gave them permission to fuck up everyone who didn’t look or act like them. They handed down that mentality like a family Bible—and the pages are soaked in blood and shame.

And that sickness never left. Modern conservatives are just their spiritual grandkids—draped in the flag, hiding their hard drives. The loudest anti-LGBTQ voices are always the ones caught texting 15-year-olds. The school board members banning books are the ones protecting molesters in the church. And let’s not forget the family values politicians with “stepdaughter porn” in their search history.

They scream about Liberal grooming while ignoring that they wrote the fucking handbook. They warn about “degeneracy” while building an empire on incest, slave rape, and child brides. Hell, you can draw a straight line from Plymouth Rock to Epstein Island, the Witch Trials to Project 2025.

These are the same people who call everyone else un-American. The same ones who believe being white, Protestant, and male is the default setting. They think everyone else is a guest in a house they stole and never paid for. Meanwhile, they built the attic to hide skeletons—and the basement to lock up anyone who talks.

Anglo-Saxon Protestants didn’t bring freedom. They brought generational trauma and legal paperwork to make it holy. Their legacy is not liberty. It’s domination. It’s telling you what to do with your body, your kid, your uterus, your books, your damn pronouns—and then screaming “freedom!” while they sign another bill banning drag brunch.

They gave us witch trials, prohibition, televangelists, conversion therapy, and every weird little law that makes America the prudish, violent mess that it is. They set the cultural thermostat to 1950s incestuous fever dream and told the rest of us to “be grateful.”

And yet, they act like you don’t belong here.

They say you are ruining the country. You—the immigrant. You—the queer kid. You—the loud woman. You—the poor people. You, me, us—the niggers, the guineas, the micks, the spicks, the kikes, the dykes, the faggots, the trannies, the outsiders. The rest of us who just want to live honestly. They see the rest of us as a threat to the fake kingdom their great-great-granddaddies molested into existence.

Well, here’s the truth: America’s real perverts didn’t come here in chains. They came here on wooden boats — with names like Mayflower, Speedwell, Anne and Little James — wearing crosses and black hats, calling themselves “the elect.” Rewriting themselves and purifying their history as “pilgrims”. And we’ve been cleaning up after their incestuous, Puritanical bullshit ever since.

So the next time someone tells you to “go back where you came from,” remind them that their ancestors were kicked out of every decent church in Europe for being perverts, creeps, criminals and cult leaders. They didn’t start America—they came here on the lam, and squatted here like moral hoarders, smothering everything with guilt, greed, and lies.

And if that makes you uncomfortable? Good. Because discomfort is the first step to truth. And America’s truth starts with calling out the Anglo-Saxon Protestant myth for what it really is: a whitewashed origin story built on perversion, theft, and centuries of screaming “family values” while locking the basement door.

—P.

Phil Italiano

Publisher, Visionary, Provocateur

See author's posts