An amusing exchange on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:
Ordnance Jay Packard Esq. @OrdnancePackard
Hey @LineGoesDown, interesting your little map includes the Comancheria, a vast section of that northern green area that Mexico never set foot in because they’d get their shit pushed in by the Comanche.
It was only after the Mexican-American war that the United States put a stop to the Comanche using Mexico like an ATM.
It’s actually even funnier than that.
The reason Mexicans kept getting their shit pushed in by the Comancheria was gun control.
No, seriously. It was Spanish colonial policy to keep the population disarmed and rely entirely on deployment of the military to keep order and prevent Indian incursions. Mexico inherited this.
This was impossible. The land was vast. State capacity and the military were overstretched. The Comanches were too mobile. Result: misery and massacre.
Americans, inheriting the British colonial policy of everybody bring your own guns and form militias, didn’t suffer as badly. Raiders more often went where the soft targets were, and that meant the disarmed ones in the Mexican zone.
This is also why Alta California was so sparsely settled that Spanish and Mexican control over it was at best nominal. Anglo settlers were culturally and politically much better equipped to hold the territory, making the Mexican session eventually inevitable.
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-25.
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[…] MOST MEXICAN PAST GLORY DAYS ARE IMAGINARY: The US-Mexican border. […]
Pingback by Instapundit » Blog Archive » MOST MEXICAN PAST GLORY DAYS ARE IMAGINARY: The US-Mexican border. — December 28, 2025 @ 01:01
The really funny thing is the Mexican government welcomed the Anglo settlers into what eventually became the Texas Republic to act as a buffer between their settlers and the Comanches.
Comment by ZeroGravitas — December 28, 2025 @ 02:02
The thing about that map is that the portion of that map that is now the United States was Mexican lands for, at the most, 32 years (the Gadsden Purchase). The Native Americans (for centuries), Spain (15?? up to 1821), and the United States (since 1836-1853) all claimed those lands for far longer than Mexico has. And face it, unless you were Native American you were as much of a colonizer as the Americans were.
Comment by Steve — December 28, 2025 @ 09:45
Though the La Raza crowd might make the argument that the US picked a fight with the Mexicans by starting the Mexican-American War, the fact is Winfield Scott & Bobby Lee led 10,000 Americans to victory over a far larger army on their home turf. Boo frickin’ hoo.
Comment by Bill Serra — December 28, 2025 @ 13:56