Kevin McCarthy schooled for false claim about American history

Former Speaker challenged over claim US has never taken land after wars

Graeme Massie
Los Angeles

Kevin McCarthy was given a savage fact-checking for his seemingly poor grasp of American history.

The former Speaker of the House, a Republican from California, claimed at a recent event that “in every single war that America has fought, we have never asked for land afterwards.”

And he added: “Except enough to bury the Americans who gave the ultimate sacrifice for that freedom we went in for.”

Mr McCarthy, who was voted out of his job in October, was so proud of his assertion that he went on to post a video clip on Elon Musk’s X social media platform, with the caption “Think for one moment.”

But social media users were quick to point out a glaring mistake in Mr McCarthy’s understanding of his own country, and state’s, history.

A community note was added to his tweet, clarifying that the US had taken land at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848.

That land made up 55 per cent of Mexico’s territory, around 529,000 square miles, and is now the states of California, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah, as well as parts of Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming.

“Think of all the wisdom from this man we’d be deprived of if his home state of California had never spontaneously risen from the sea and attached itself to the United States,” wrote George Conway.

And gun control activist David Hogg added: “This is why we need to fund public education more. Why the history channel should go back to talking about actual history and why the Department of Education needs to be expanded NOT abolished. This is so ignorant it hurts.”


Other X users pointed out to Mr McCarthy that the US took control of Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines as territories after winning the Spanish-American War in 1898.

And it was also highlighted that the US took control of American Samoa after the second Samoan Civil War.

After the Revolutionary War, the US also took control of territory from Britain that included most of the land east of the Mississippi River, and most of the upper Midwest.