by Nathan Smith

It seems darkly ironic that a person like Donald Trump will be the President of the United States just as the country marks its 250^th year of independence.

Trump is the quintessential American. He’s not corrupt – not exactly. He’s just doing what every American does when they get a sniff of power. There is no honour amongst criminals, and America was founded by political and religious criminals. Despite what you have heard, every one of the “Founding Fathers” would be wildly happy with the present state of the country 250 years after they illegally broke from the British Empire.

The American Revolution changed everything in this world. Sure, you can’t get the American Revolution without the English Glorious Revolution, and you can’t get the Glorious Revolution without the English Reformation. Once you undermine the “divine right” part of monarchy, it’s inevitable that you’ll see the “of kings” part as no longer necessary either.

In other words, the American Revolution was a criminal left-wing project from the start. Once people start thinking they can interpret god’s words for themselves, they quickly believe they can rule themselves as well. After all, the king is over there, way across the Atlantic. If the king is just a man, then why can’t I be a king? The past is a foreign country, and so are we. We deserve to be kings, and by our example, so too will follow the world!

Today, the world has followed the Americans, and we have been told to admire the men who fought so hard for “freedom” against tyranny. But Peter Oliver was there in 1776. He saw it all. And as a Tory judge based in Massachusetts, he has a unique vantage point that makes his write-up an important primary source for what really happened.

In his short but excellent book, Origin And Progress Of The American Rebellion, written in 1781 (but not published properly until 1961), Oliver says the idea that the Americans were acting for liberty or constitutional principle is a lie. In fact, they were just a bunch of low-life smugglers whose criminal interests were being threatened by Britain’s enforcement of trade laws after 1763. The whole revolution was a sham, said Oliver.

Oliver says the Boston Tea Party was not about the tea being too expensive because of tariffs. It was because the British Tea Act allowed the East India Trading Company to sell tea without a tariff, making it cheaper than the smugglers could sell it for.

These American smugglers had amassed great wealth by evading the trade laws, and the good and loyal people in the colony were losing their businesses because of the undercut prices. During its wars with France, Britain often looked the other way because overall trade with America helped sustain its empire, which Oliver says led to the smugglers believing their activities were a right. Eventually, the King decided to clean up the American economy.

Guess who didn’t like the changes?

You’ve probably heard of Samuel Adams. He’s one of those Founding Fathers we’re expected to admire. Here’s how Wikipedia describes Adams:

“Samuel Adams was an American statesman, political philosopher, and a Founding Father. He was a politician in colonial Massachusetts, a leader of the movement that became the American Revolution, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents and one of the architects of the principles of American republicanism that shaped the political culture of the United States.”

“The principles of American republicanism!” Indeed. We are still enjoying the fruits of these “principles” today. If you smell something fishy about Wikipedia’s suspiciously gushing picture of Adams, congratulations, your brain isn’t broken. Let’s compare that to Oliver’s description of perhaps the most important figure in early American history:

“I shall next give you a Sketch of some of Mr. Samuel Adam’s Features; & I do not know how to delineate them stronger, than by the Observation made by a celebrated Painter in America, ‘That if he wished to draw the Picture of the Devil, that he would get Sam Adams to sit for him:’ & indeed, a very ordinary Physiognomist would, at a transient View of his Countenance, develop the Malignity of his Heart…He was so thorough a Machiavilim, that he divested himself of every worthy Principle, & would stick at no Crime to accomplish his Ends.”

Hmm, quelle difference! Wikipedia’s Adams sounds like a great guy who would surely use all the correct legal and political channels to calmly push back against Britain’s new laws. Of course he didn’t. Adams was a horrible man who would “stick at no Crime to accomplish his Ends.”

For example, Oliver recites what happened in 1765 when Adams and his criminal crew whipped up “the people” to put “political pressure” on a local magistrate:

“In a short Time after, the Mob plundered Mr Hutchinson’s House of its full Contents, destroyed his Papers, unroofed his House, & sought his & his Children’s Lives, which were saved by Flight. One of the Rioters declared, the next morning, that the first Places which they looked into were the Beds, in Order to murder the Children.”

I must remind you that these are the people we have been told to admire as history’s torchbearers of freedom and light. Without the righteous, kind-hearted folk like Sam Adams and Benjamin Franklin (Oliver has some insights into this filthy character as well), the world would still be in the grip of the worst evil imaginable: monarchy. Targeting children? Perfectly acceptable for such a grand project.

Oliver will have none of this nonsense. The American revolutionaries were the furthest thing from admirable, and if there were any reasonable arguments for a break with Britain, then those arguments should stand on merit. Instead, the revolutionaries resorted to vicious terrorism, constant duplicity, rampant mendacity, systemic corruption and outright fraud.

The American Revolution was basically a criminal outrage of the mob, led by leaders who were either unscrupulous, deluded – or both. You have been lied to for a long time.

Speaking of lies, we should briefly talk about the phrase “no taxation without representation.” No doubt you’ve heard it before. The American revolutionaries used this phrase to argue against being taxed without having their own elected representatives in the British Parliament. That sounds reasonable, right?

Well, again, this is a distortion of America in the mid-1770s.

Aside from trying to clean up the mafia-like smugglers in America, a key reason the British Parliament introduced laws to increase taxes was to help defray the costs incurred by its military in protecting the vulnerable colonies.

As mentioned above, the British weren’t the only ones trying to conquer America. The French (and Spanish) were hot on their heels and had already taken large chunks of Canada and the American continent. The French and British fought open warfare many times in the 1700s, but they also fought small-scale guerrilla warfare in the colonies as well. The French were especially good at recruiting the Indian tribes to target and kill American settlers along the frontier. In mid-1754, a Virginia military unit under the command of the 22-year-old George Washington had had enough of this violence and ambushed a French contingent near the headwaters of the Ohio River.

According to Oliver, the French governor of Quebec was proudly displaying hundreds of American settlers’ scalps in his city office, and used to laugh with guests at the macabre display. France was determined to collapse the colonies.

These tit -for-tat killings soon escalated and became such a problem that the British military authorised a major campaign of constructing forts along the American frontier. From these positions of strength, British troops could campaign to push the French and Indians away from the settler towns. These extremely expensive operations lasted for years, but the campaign was extended until the job was done.

Eventually, the French and Indian War in America became the Seven Years’ War in Europe, Asia and Africa. It was this war that determined that English, rather than French, would be the global language. Once that war was over, the British King felt justified in asking the settler colonies (not just the Americans, by the way) to help contribute financially to their own defence.

Yet the American settlers refused. They even invented the phrase “no taxation without representation” to frame the new taxes as a tyrannical imposition when, in reality, the taxes were a reasonable request to contribute financially to their own safety. The Americans knew they were lying at the time. They were not duped. They chose to cut themselves from Britain. They chose to be immoral smugglers. They chose to use terrorism and war to further their criminal enterprise. And they did all this before America was even a sovereign country.

Lies, lies, lies. A full 250 years of lies. The lesson of the American Revolution is that not only can evil win, it will win so completely that everyone will believe it was good.

While there is no such thing as a neutral primary source, and history is written by the victors, I am thankful for eyewitness accounts like Peter Oliver’s. What’s cool about these short books is that they’re all available online. Go read them yourself.

You might find some other lies hiding in plain sight.

Originally published on The Good Oil.