And of course before they set out for America they spent ten years in Leiden, where they were free to worship as they wanted. In fact the culture was so free and accepting that the kids were basically ‘going native’ in a culture the elders found to be too permissive. That, plus ongoing language issues and the inability to do missionary work when you’re already living in a strongly Protestant community, drove them back to England and, eventually, to the New World.
Nothing supports the idea that “the original America was made of Europeans who wanted Freedom from their governments”, which is a nonsense. It was made of Europeans who wanted (or got) a new life elsewhere for a wide variety of reasons including religion, money, adventure, escape from social stagnation, and forced relocation. I suppose one could argue that those that chose transportation over hanging as a criminal penalty wanted “freedom from their government” but that’d be a very generous interpretation indeed.
Let me repeat my comments in a larger font:
I’ve already conceded that I disapprove of forcing cake makers to make cakes, let alone forcing them to write a homophilic inscription on such a cake.
Now: Can you reciprocate and tell us which of the freedoms in my list you consider less important than the cake-maker freedom?
That’s also a simplistic view. There were other people who immigrated at least in part for religious reasons. For instance, lots of Catholics went to Maryland and Quakers to Pennsylvania because the propriators were of those faiths and tended favor others of those faiths. (Didn’t last though; a later Penn was not a Quaker and had a fair amount of conflict with the leaders in Philadelphia.)
And later, there were a number of other immigrants who came mostly because of religion: Amish, Mennonites, and other anabaptists, for example. And sometimes Catholics and mainline Protestants had a religious conflict with the rulers in whatever part of Europe they were in and moved at least in part because of that.
But you’re right for most immigrants. The big draw for most immigrants can be summed up in two words: free land. And that includes the religious refugees. They didn’t have to come to the US; they could have gone to Latin America, Canada, or Australia.
If by “productive” you mean “we all take this incredibly stupid tweet seriously”, then the answer is probably no. The tweet takes an ignorant misrepresentation of history and pairs it with a grossly bad misrepresentation of liberal goals in an attempt to trap progressives with stupid wordplay based on a name for their group.
You want an assessment of the tweet’s substance and you’re getting a remarkably charitable one - one that focuses primarily on the relatively understandable-if-ignorant misunderstanding of history as opposed to the gigantic pile of stupidity to be found in the latter half of the tweet. Take what you can get - a lot of interesting history!