Comic: It's America's Founding Fake News Terrorist, Samuel Adams

Article excerpt

Reason magazine publishes a comic by Peter Bagge that frames Samuel Adams, the colonial agitator and brewer, as America's original purveyor of propaganda and misinformation. The piece uses satire to draw parallels between Adams's inflammatory tactics, his use of sensationalism, coordinated messaging, and emotional appeals to stoke the Boston Tea Party and other acts of resistance, and modern fake news cycles. By treating the Founding Father as a prototype for today's information warfare, the comic invites readers to reconsider the romantic mythology surrounding the American Revolution and question whether effective political activism has always relied on narrative manipulation rather than pure facts.