Looking to write about something other than that corrupt fool for a change. History has got plenty of material.

How Smugglers Started a Revolution and Called It Freedom

December 16, 1773. Low tide in Boston Harbor. Men dressed as Mohawk Indians are knee-deep in mud, breaking up tea with oars and paddles. Not the dramatic scene you learned in school—chests splashing into deep water while patriots cheered. Just exhausted smugglers destroying their competition's inventory in the muck.

The Boston Tea Party wasn't about taxation without representation. It was about a government bailout of a corporation deemed too big to fail. Sound familiar? It should. We're still playing the same game, just with different costumes.

The East India Company: Original Sin of Capitalism

The East India Company wasn't just any business. It had its own army. It ruled large sections of India. It controlled trade with China. By 1772, it was also bankrupt.

A drought in Bengal—one the company refused to address while millions died—combined with a European financial crisis had left the company with 18 million pounds of tea rotting in London warehouses. That's over £3 billion worth of inventory in today's money. The British government faced a choice: let the company fail or bail it out.

They chose the bailout. £1.4 million loan, with strings attached. That's £273 million in today's money—nearly $400 million dollars. Not some small merchant rescue. A massive corporate welfare program. The government wanted control over Bengal. The company needed to dump its tea somewhere. Enter the American colonies.

The Tea Act: Corporate Welfare, Colonial Style

Here's what they don't teach you: The Tea Act of 1773 didn't raise taxes. The tax on tea had existed since 1767. What the act did was give the East India Company exclusive rights to sell tea directly to American colonies, bypassing colonial merchants entirely.

The company got a tax break. It could undercut everyone—legitimate merchants and smugglers alike. It was Walmart arriving in colonial Boston, backed by the full power of the British government.

This wasn't about the price of tea. It was about who controlled the market.

Meet the Real Founding Fathers

John Hancock, whose signature you know from the Declaration of Independence, was known throughout the colonies as "The Prince of Smugglers." When British customs seized his ship Liberty in 1768, Boston rioted. The charges were eventually dropped—John Adams defended him—but everyone knew what Hancock was.

Samuel Adams wasn't just a rabble-rouser. He was a tea smuggler whose business model depended on evading British customs. The Tea Act would destroy his operation.

These weren't patriots fighting for abstract principles. They were businessmen protecting their turf.

The Rhode Island Rum Cartel

Want to know how deep the corruption went? Rhode Island controlled 60% of the North American slave trade. The colony ran on the triangle trade: Caribbean molasses to Rhode Island, distilled into rum, shipped to Africa to buy human beings.

By 1764, Rhode Island had thirty rum distilleries. Newport alone had twenty-two. The Brown brothers—who founded what became Brown University—were neck-deep in this trade. John Brown was the first American tried for violating the Slave Trade Act of 1794.

Brown University? Built on slave money. Harvard? Yale? Same story. The bill of lading for the slave ship Sally lists 17,274 gallons of New England rum. That's what built our ivy-covered institutions.

The Molasses Mafia

The Molasses Act of 1733 should have destroyed New England's rum industry. Six pence per gallon tax on foreign molasses. The colonists' response? They just didn't pay it.

Smuggling became so widespread that Massachusetts imported legally less than half as much molasses and rum as it exported. Do the math. It doesn't work unless you're smuggling on an industrial scale.

Colonial governors were in on it. Benjamin Fletcher was business partners with known pirates. They'd provide material support, take their cut, and everyone looked the other way. Until they couldn't.

December 16, 1773: The Real Story

The ships weren't even British. The Beaver, the Dartmouth, and the Eleanor were American-built, American-owned. Two were whaling vessels that had delivered oil to London and were returning with tea cargo.

The tea wasn't the king's. It was private property owned by the East India Company.

The water was at low tide. The tea piled up in the muddy harbor bottom. Men had to jump in and break it up with oars. It was messy, exhausting work. Not heroic. Just destruction of property by people protecting their illegal business.

George Washington condemned it. Benjamin Franklin said the perpetrators should pay for the destroyed tea. They weren't celebrating. They were appalled.

The event wasn't even called the "Boston Tea Party" until 1825. For fifty years, Americans were too embarrassed to celebrate property destruction. They called it "the destruction of tea."

The Intellectual Property Thieves

The founding fathers weren't just smuggling goods. They were stealing ideas.

Samuel Slater, the "father of the American industrial revolution," smuggled himself out of Britain in violation of their emigration laws. He brought stolen textile technology with him.

American publishers pirated British books wholesale. No copyright payments. Just theft.

The entire American industrial revolution was built on stolen intellectual property. Exactly what we condemn China for today. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

The Constitution: A Smuggler's Paradise

The men who wrote the Constitution were smugglers and slave traders protecting their interests. They created a government that would legitimize their wealth while criminalizing the activities that created it.

Alexander Hamilton—yes, the musical hero—created the Coast Guard specifically to stop smuggling. Once the smugglers had won their revolution, they pulled up the ladder behind them.

The Constitution wasn't about democracy. It was about preserving the wealth and power of the smuggling class. Women, slaves, men without property—they weren't invited to the party. They were the ones who would pay for it.

What Really Unified the Colonies

It wasn't the tea destruction that brought the colonies together. It was Britain's overreaction—the Coercive Acts of 1774. Close Boston Harbor. Revoke Massachusetts' charter. Quarter troops.

Britain turned a turf war between smugglers and a monopoly into a revolution. The greatest marketing campaign in history. Criminals became patriots. Smugglers became founding fathers. Tax evasion became liberty.

The American Hustle

Here's what they won't teach your kids: America was founded by criminals who won. Smugglers, tax evaders, and traitors who created a new government that protected their interests while making their crimes legal—for them.

The Boston Tea Party wasn't about liberty. It was about market share.

The Revolution wasn't about freedom. It was about who controlled the smuggling routes.

The Constitution wasn't about democracy. It was about protecting the profits of the one percent.

The Trick They Pulled

The greatest trick the founding fathers ever pulled was convincing the world they were fighting for freedom while they owned slaves. That they were fighting taxation while they were protecting smuggling operations. That they were creating democracy while they excluded everyone but wealthy white men from voting.

They fought a war for their own economic interests and convinced poor farmers to die for it by calling it liberty. They destroyed their competition's property and called it patriotism. They stole an entire continent and called it manifest destiny.

That's the real American story. Not noble patriots fighting tyranny, but smugglers and slavers protecting their rackets. The hustle that built America wasn't legal. It just won.

And we're still living with the consequences. Every time a corporation gets a bailout while people lose their homes. Every time monopolies crush small businesses while politicians talk about the free market. Every time we invade a country for its resources and call it spreading democracy.

The Boston Tea Party set the template: Corporate welfare dressed up as revolution. Wealthy criminals becoming founding fathers. Economic warfare disguised as a fight for freedom.

They pulled it off so well that 250 years later, we're still teaching their propaganda to our children. Still believing that smugglers were patriots. Still thinking that a turf war between criminals was the birth of liberty.

The truth? America was born in a hostile takeover. The management just convinced everyone it was a liberation.

And that, fellow citizens, is the real tea.

Appendix: Why the History Books Lied

The lies weren't accidents. They were architecture.

The Texas Textbook Cartel

Want to know why every American learned the same fairy tale about the Boston Tea Party? Texas.

Texas buys more textbooks than any other state except California. But California splits its orders among multiple publishers. Texas buys in bulk. One order. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Publishers don't write textbooks for America. They write them for the Texas State Board of Education.

Fifteen people in Austin decide what 330 million Americans learn about their history. Fifteen people who need to get reelected in Texas.

You think they're going to approve a textbook that says the founding fathers were smugglers and slavers? That American capitalism was born in criminality? That the Revolution was a hostile takeover by the colonial one percent?

The textbook companies know the game. McGraw-Hill doesn't stay in business by telling the truth. They stay in business by telling Texas what Texas wants to hear. Then they sell that same propaganda to the other forty-nine states. Economics of scale. The lies get cheaper in bulk.

The Daughters of the Confederacy Won

Between 1890 and 1930, the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected more than seven hundred monuments to the Lost Cause. But monuments were just the visible part. The real victory was in the classrooms.

The UDC's "Historical Committee" reviewed and approved textbooks across the South. They made sure the Civil War was about "states' rights." They made sure slaves were "happy." They made sure Reconstruction was a "tragic era of Negro misrule."

They didn't just win the South. Their version became the national version. Why? Because the North needed reconciliation more than it needed truth. White reconciliation. The country was expanding west, fighting imperial wars, becoming a world power. It needed a unified white American identity.

So, they let the South write the history. Let them have their noble Lost Cause. Let them reframe treason as heritage. Let them turn terrorists in white hoods into defenders of civilization.

The same process that turned Confederate generals into heroes turned smugglers into patriots. Different lies, same methodology. Control the textbooks, control the narrative, control the nation.

The Philanthropists' History

Who funded the history departments at Harvard, Yale, Princeton? The same families who made their fortunes from the crimes being whitewashed. Rockefeller money. Carnegie money. Morgan money. Dirty money laundered through philanthropy into respectability.

You don't bite the hand that endows your chair. You don't write histories that implicate your benefactors. You write histories that justify their wealth. That make their fortunes seem inevitable, even noble.

The Robber Barons became Captains of Industry. Monopolists became Innovators. Strikebreakers became Job Creators. The entire field of American history was shaped by men who needed their crimes forgotten.

Academic history wasn't corrupted. It was corrupt from conception. Built to launder reputations, not discover truth.

The Cold War Consensus

After World War II, America needed a story. We were the new empire, facing down the Soviets. We needed founding myths that could compete with Communist propaganda. We needed to be the City on the Hill, not a colony founded by smugglers and slavers.

The State Department funded historians. The CIA funded academics. The entire American Studies movement was part of the Cold War machinery. They weren't studying American history. They were creating it. Manufacturing a usable past for global consumption.

Every embassy had a library full of books about noble Patriots and freedom-loving Founding Fathers. Voice of America broadcast the mythology in forty-six languages. The lies went global because empire needed them to.

You can't sell American hegemony with the truth. You can't justify military bases in seventy countries by admitting your nation was founded on smuggling, slavery, and genocide. You need a better story. So, they wrote one.

The School Board Wars

Every school board in America is a battlefield. Has been since the beginning. Who controls the past controls the future, and everybody knows it.

That's why Texas rewrites textbooks every decade. Why Florida bans books that mention racism. Why Oklahoma outlaws teaching that America ever did anything wrong. It's not education. It's indoctrination. Always has been.

The parents screaming at school board meetings about Critical Race Theory? They're not wrong that schools are teaching propaganda. They're just wrong about which propaganda. They want their propaganda, not someone else's. They want the lies that make them feel good about America. The lies that justify their position in the hierarchy.

Nobody wants the truth. The truth is bad for property values.

The Money Behind the Myths

Follow the money. Always follow the money.

The Heritage Foundation doesn't spend millions on "educational materials" because they love history. The Koch Foundation doesn't fund "free market" curricula out of civic duty. PragerU doesn't produce five-minute propaganda videos for fun.

They're buying the past to own the future. Every lying textbook, every whitewashed curriculum, every feel-good historical fiction is an investment. They're manufacturing consent for the next corporate bailout, the next war, the next tax cut for billionaires.

The Boston Tea Party myth? Worth trillions. Every time someone says "taxation is theft" while driving on public roads, that myth is paying dividends. Every time someone votes against their own interests because "freedom," the founding fathers' con is still working.

Why They'll Keep Lying

The truth would break the spell.

If Americans knew their country was founded by criminals who won, they might start asking uncomfortable questions. Like why we still let criminals run things. Like why corporate crime pays. Like why the same families who owned slaves now own senators.

If Americans knew the Boston Tea Party was a corporate turf war, they might not cheer the next corporate tax cut. If they knew the Founding Fathers were smugglers and tax evaders, they might not worship the Constitution like holy scripture.

The lies are load-bearing walls. Remove them and the whole structure collapses. American exceptionalism. Manifest destiny. The meritocracy. The Dream. All of it rests on a foundation of historical fiction.

That's why the history books lied. That's why they're still lying. That's why they'll keep lying until the empire falls or the truth becomes more profitable than the con.

But the truth has never been profitable. Ask anyone who's tried to tell it.

The real question isn't why the history books lied. It's why no one expected them to tell the truth. In a country built on stolen land with stolen labor using stolen ideas, the one thing that could never be tolerated was honest accounting.

So they gave us mythology instead. Dressed it up as history. Taught it to children who taught it to their children. Until the lies became more real than the truth.

And here we are. Still believing in noble patriots. Still celebrating destruction of property as the birth of freedom. Still thinking we're the good guys.

The history books lied because that's what history books do in empires. They turn crimes into creation myths. They transform thieves into founders. They make the unforgivable seem inevitable.

That's their job. That's what they're paid for.

That's the real tea.

Joe Zeigler
December 2024
Burnt Ground