Two days before America’s 250th birthday, Candace Owens sat down with Shawn Ryan. They covered a lot of different topics, some of it strange in my opinion.
But one topic in particular stood out to me.
You’re probably assuming it’s Charlie Kirk, but it’s not. The part I keep replaying in my brain is what they said about our founding fathers.
Admittedly, I noticed it eerily similar to her podcast with Milo Yiannopoulos.
In both conversations she expressed that the origin story of our nation is basically a lie. A myth we were handed as children and should have grown out of.
In Milo’s words, it’s “fake and gay.”
The “fake and gay” version, in Candace’s words, is a war over a beverage tax.
"I was in England studying with some priests and they were just sort of like 'everything that you Americans think, you know, is so foolish. Like America was obviously founded by Freemasons'. And now I'm really understanding like yes, you had these Freemason lodges that came over, you know, the Scottish Rite, and B'nai B'rith, and they they were the reason behind the Civil War. They were reason they were literally fighting for control of America. And the way that they do this is very similar to what we're seeing today. There's is this kind of mainstreamed lie. If you ask Americans, 'oh it was just the tea tax was too high' and this is what we did. We started throwing it out in the harbor and we said we're ready to go to war. Now that I say it, it sounds so stupid."
She’s referring to the Boston Tea party where a group of colonials dumped crates of British tea into a harbor. If that is actually what the Revolution was, she’d be correct to laugh at it. It would be one of the dumbest events in human history.
If that were true, I’d have to agree.
But it wasn’t about tea.
It wasn’t even about taxes.
And the story she reaches for instead, that the whole founding was a Freemasonic, occult project we should be ashamed of, is just as false as the fairy tale.
And definitely more dangerous.
By the end of this, I want you to know three things.
What actually catalyzed the Revolution, and eventually the birth of one of the freest nations in history.
Second, why the exact same fight is happening right now, in 2026.
And why the story a people believes about itself is, quite literally, a matter of life and death for a nation.
At the end I’ll share a personal story that will help you understand why this matters. A story that wasn’t even true, yet I believed, that led me to almost unalive myself.
But we’ll get to that.
I want to be fair to her, because most people responding to Candace aren’t.
Across both conversations, her claim is that America wasn’t founded by farmers and lawyers arguing about rights. It was founded by Freemasons.
“America was obviously founded by Freemasons,” she says, referencing lodges that came over from Europe and to the symbolism on the back of the dollar bill as evidence.
She traces it to the Illuminati, to a man named Adam Weishaupt she calls “an open satanist… using Christianity as a shell.”
She told Shawn Ryan the country was “designed to be anti-Catholic” on purpose, to keep people cut off from the real history.
And Milo takes it further. He says the founding “ripped out the natural system of government that is supposed to obtain over men on earth and pulled God out of the system, too.”
He argued, rather passionately, that what took place in 1776 didn’t free us from a king, but instead hid who really rules us.
So this is no small claim.
This is a claim that the entire Revolution was rotten at the root. Fraudulent at best, nefarious at worst.
That is a serious charge. And it deserves an equally serious response.
So I Read What They Actually Wrote
So this week I did something old school. I sat at my desk with a pen and a notebook and I read what the founders actually wrote.
I started with a man named John Adams.
He was our second president, and honestly, I think he deserves more credit than he gets. The man was a hero.
Let’s go back to 1765.
That’s eight years before a single crate of tea hit Boston Harbor, and eleven years before the Declaration.
Parliament passes something called the Stamp Act.
I’ve had more than one conversation about this, and surprisingly, most people think it was a tax on stamps, but rather it was a tax on paper.
All paper.
Every newspaper, every pamphlet, every almanac, every legal document and license in the colonies now had to be printed on stamped, taxed paper, by order of the Crown.
Maybe in 2026 that doesn’t sound like a big deal. But you have to remember this is 1765. Paper to them was what the internet is to us.
Only a few hundred years earlier, the printing press was invented. For the first time in history, ordinary people could hold a Bible in their own hands and read it for themselves.
Before that, the Bible had been twisted and used to oppress people in the name of God. The printing press changed everything. When ordinary people read it for themselves, they noticed it didn’t say what the elites claimed. That sparked the Reformation, and that was the fire the Puritans carried across the Atlantic.
About a hundred years later, the first Great Awakening swept through the colonies.
You have to grasp the culture that created. These people prized literacy, especially of Scripture and of British law. They were arguably the most literate, most idea hungry population on the planet.
Two of the best selling books from Britain to the colonies were the Bible and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.
Picture that. Common people who worked normal jobs all day like most of us, but then read and studied Scripture and John Locke in their free time. This was not normal.
And the Americans believed this wasn’t just their God given right, but it was their duty. To know the truth, and to guard the liberty they’d just acquired, not long before.
This “accidentally” created a nation of renaissance men and unfortunately for Britain, they grossly misunderstood and underestimated the Americans.
So when Parliament taxed paper, the colonists didn’t hear “a small fee on stationery.” They heard: we are going to control what you can print, read, share, and say.
And one 29 year old lawyer saw exactly what it was.
In August of 1765, John Adams published an essay in the Boston Gazette. He ran it unsigned, in four installments, because what he was about to say about the most powerful empire on earth was dangerous.
Some may consider it treason.
He wrote:
“There seems to be a direct and formal design on foot, to enslave all America.”
Keep in mind this is eleven years before independence, while the colonies were still writing polite petitions to their king. Nobody was even thinking about breaking away, but Adams saw it.
How did he see it when no one else did? He tells us:
“…a design is formed to strip us in a great measure of the means of knowledge, by loading the Press, the Colleges, and even an Almanack and a News-Paper with restraints and duties.”
The means of knowledge.
Adams understood you don’t need chains to enslave a people. You just need to control what they’re allowed to know, say, and share. In other words, if you can tax the flow of ideas and you can rule a continent from three thousand miles away.
Then he wrote the line that should be carved over the door of every school in America:
“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge.”
Read that last part again…
“From the frame of their nature”. Meaning built into you, by God.
Where Candace Gets It Wrong
Now hold that against what Candace and Milo are claiming.
Start with the Freemason charge, because it’s the one that sounds the most damning.
Because John Adams wasn’t a Mason at all and he was the first one to say this and he wanted the Americans, his own people, to hear it.
He ran through a newspaper, in the open, for anyone to read.
Yes, some of the founders were Masons. But only 9 of the 56 men who signed the Declaration, and being a Mason in 1765 was closer to joining a civic club than a satanic order.
Adam Weishaupt, the “satanist” Candace names, didn’t even found his order until 1776, in Bavaria, and it was banned and gone within a decade. There’s no serious trail connecting it to Boston or Philadelphia.
The people who wrote that story, about the masons, were mostly sounding alarms decades after the fact.
She mentions the symbolism on the dollar bill too. The eye and the pyramid weren’t even on it until 1935, and the committee that designed the Great Seal included men who weren’t Masons at all.
Also, what’s very interesting to me is she says “America was designed to be anti-catholic”.
But remember, there was already very common Protestant-Catholic tension at that time due to the issues leading to the puritans coming over from England.
But there’s no evidence of an occult founding.
Not to mention according to Pew, there’s approximately 68 million catholics in the USA including Candace, so they’re doing just fine.
Now let’s talk about what Milo said. He says the founders “pulled God out of the system.”
But Adams, one of those founders, is doing the exact opposite.
He’s grounding your right to know, to speak, to think, not in a king, not in a government, but in your nature as something God made. That is not a godless document at all.
This is one of our founding fathers, rooting human liberty in the Creator, and risking his life to say it out loud.
The documents don’t show a secret occult plot. They show something more ordinary and far more powerful. Imperfect men, some freemasons and plenty not, arguing in the open about whether a people would be allowed to freely know the truth, or whether an elite would decide it for them.
That’s what the Revolution was actually about. The free exchange of truth, understood as a right given by God.
Now Bring It to 2026
Now let’s bring it to 2026.
The equivalent of paper for them, for us is the internet.
They can’t tax the internet, at least not anytime soon. So the tax takes other forms.
You post the wrong opinion and you’re not fined, but you’re banned, or you’re labeled racist or bigot.
It’s a social and reputational tax, and it can cost you far more than money.
The truth is… the truth crisis is a distribution crisis. It always has been.
Whoever controls the exchange of ideas controls what a people can know.
Both about the world we live in and about ourselves.
I know this firsthand.
For years I was obsessed with one idea, and I wrote about it extensively in the past.
It’s this…
A Story I Believed
The story you believe about yourself determines how you feel about yourself, and how you feel determines how you live.
Behavior does not determine identity. It’s the other way around. Identity, who we believe we are, drives behavior.
By the time I was 26 I had achieved more than I ever thought possible. I made more money than I imagined I would. I met some of my heroes. I had every reason to be grateful.
And yet I was miserable.
I was so depressed and felt empty and numb all at the same time. This descended to my rock bottom moment, when one night I ended up lying in broken glass after an episode, texting a suicide note to my best friend Trent.
How is that possible?
Because I believed, despite all of it, that I wasn’t enough.
There’s more to that story, and I’ll share it another time. But here’s the point.
I believed a story. A narrative. And I’d bet almost every one of us has believed some version of it, and been driven to our own rock bottom by it.
Stories are that powerful. I was minutes from ending my life over one that wasn’t even true.
Now here’s what I need you to see. That same law doesn’t just govern people one at a time. It governs us together.
A family runs on a story. A business runs on a story. A city, a church, a nation, every group of people on earth runs on a shared story.
Who we are, how we got here, why we exist, etc…
That shared story becomes shared beliefs, shared beliefs become shared values, which then become shared behavior.
In other words, culture.
Culture is invisible glue that holds a group of people together.
Which means, if you wanted to destroy a nation, you wouldn’t need an army. You’d destroy its culture. And to do that, you’d just change the story the people believe about their group’s origin.
Convince a people their origin was a fraud, uniquely evil, something to be ashamed of, and they’ll dismantle their own house for you.
That’s why a podcast clip mocking the founding matters more than it seems.
And this isn’t coming from one direction. The same season Candace was calling the founding occult from the right, documentaries were teaching millions from the left that American democracy wasn’t even our idea.
Mockery from one side, revision from the other, and both lead to the same destination: a generation ashamed of who they are.
A nation that believes a false story about itself behaves exactly like a person who believes a false story about themselves.
Ashamed, guilty, and ultimately easy to manipulate.
I think what we’re watching in America is identity dysphoria at the scale of a nation.
So What's the Answer?
So what’s the answer? It’s the same one it was in 1765…
Recover the true story. Read the documents for yourself. Refuse to let anyone tax the exchange of truth.
And to be clear, recovering the true story does not mean pretending the founders were saints. They weren’t.
The same men who wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” owned other human beings as slaves.
For the record, John Adams did not.
Were they hypocrites? In that, yes. And it took generations and a civil war to make the country live up to its own words.
But what the cynics miss is that the idea itself wasn’t the hypocrisy. The idea was the standard and it was set so high that the founders’ own descendants would pick it up and use it to tear the hypocrisy down.
“…they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
That sentence, from a people saturated in Scripture and law, with no king, appealing to God for their governing principles, built a nation that, for all its sins, became one of the freest and most prosperous the world has ever seen.
That’s a powerful story. And it’s one worth knowing, and worth protecting.
The truth is… a people who know their true story cannot be enslaved by a false one.
As Jesus said, “…the truth will set you free.”
-Mitchell
You’d really enjoy Voices of Freedom by Eric Forner. I found it super important to read the documentary history considering all the different voices and their respective audiences they were writing to throughout our early history.