When considering political violence and its validity, matters of degree, intent, and scope are of vital importance. As we celebrate the Boston Tea Party, it’s worth delineating why the Bostonians’ actions have merit while many other forms of destructive protest do not. As critical theory infects much of our public discourse — a thousand Howard Zinn facsimiles sit ever-typing behind news desks in New York and Washington (next to the monkeys writing Shakespeare, presumably) — it’s crucial for conservatives to have ready responses to critiques of American events that run the gamut from ignorant to mendacious.

A recent and well-intentioned but errant piece on the parallels between left-wing violence and the Boston Tea Party comes courtesy of Theodore R. Johnson. The article written for the Washington Post is a piece titled “Was the Boston Tea Party an Act of Terrorism? It Depends.”:

The story of that night became lore — and the lore evolved into national myth. The Boston Tea Party has come to symbolize the revolutionary spirit that led to independence. It engraved the catchphrase “no taxation without representation” on the country’s cornerstone and signified the embrace of democracy.

Yet there’s another version of the event, one less suitable for national mythology. A horde of White men disguised themselves as Native Americans — coppering their faces and donning headdresses in the same tradition that would lead to blackfaced minstrel shows decades later — to commit seditious conspiracy and destroy private property. The riotous mob trespassed on three ships and destroyed goods worth nearly $2 million in today’s money — all because they didn’t want to obey a duly passed law.

As Jay Cost wrote for National Review in 2018, the Boston Tea Party was a unique reaction to a unique political structure unknowable to enfranchised Americans:

The origins of the Boston Tea Party were in the Tea Act of 1773. In the spring of 1773, North was in a bind, due to the declining fortunes of the British East India Company. The East India Company was suffering under a sizeable surplus of tea and was in financial jeopardy. In a free-market system, that would not have been a problem for His Majesty’s government, but that was not how the East India Company operated. Publicly chartered in 1603, it had a monopoly over English trade with India — which had made many Englishmen, including many members of Parliament, fantastically rich. The government could not afford to let the East India Company go under. So, North’s government exerted more control over the East India Company, but also offered it a quasi-bailout in the form of the Tea Act. The East India Company would be allowed to sell its tea directly to North America, hopefully eliminating the illegal tea trade and cutting out North American tea merchants. The reduced costs for the colonists would, North hoped, make them amenable to paying the Townshend Duties on tea, thereby validating Parliament’s right to tax them.

This maneuver was too clever by half. The Sons of Liberty — the radical vanguard of Bostonian politics — joined with disgruntled tea merchants in an act of protest on Dec. 16, 1773. The rest, they say, is history.

The Tea Party harmed no one but the holdings of a tyrannical government whose affairs Americans had no say in, the tea tippers damaged only goods (unlike Jan. 6 rioters and BLM), and the actions were undertaken expressly to avoid physical confrontation and concluded rapidly. (LISTEN: The Spectator P.M. Podcast Ep. 9: Tap Dance Is Joe Biden’s Fault)

The Boston Tea Party is the bleeding edge of acceptable political violence — the false equivalencies Johnson offers are just that: false. The American Revolution and her rumblings are remarkable because of their legitimate grievances, the proprietary of redress, and their bloodlessness relative to other revolutions of the period. Burke reflected on as much.

Down with the British.