The original American colonists did not revolt because they were emotional or impatient. They revolted because they could list, in detail, how their rulers had turned them into a captive market, a controlled population, and a silenced opposition. When the United States looks at itself honestly in 2025, many of the same patterns are visible in softer, more technical forms. Media power is concentrated, government pressure reaches into speech and platforms, tax and debt systems treat people as revenue streams, and the political class answers more to donors, agencies, and conglomerates than to citizens.
In the 1700s the slogan was “no taxation without representation.” Parliament levied the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Townshend duties, and the Tea Act on colonies that had no voting representatives in Westminster, then brushed off petitions against them. Modern Americans technically have representation, but the same logic of distance and indifference applies to how rules are written. The federal tax code is a dense maze shaped heavily by lobbyists and organized interests. Treasury’s own analysis of proposed reforms notes that wealth and income are increasingly concentrated in the top slice of households even as long term deficits grow, which will translate into more pressure on the working and middle classes through a mix of higher taxes and lower benefits. Citizens are allowed to pick which team manages the extraction. They are not invited into the room where the detailed levers are pulled.
The colonists also attacked the British government for using economic power to control their lives. The Navigation Acts forced colonial trade through British ports so London could skim value. The Tea Act handed a monopoly to the East India Company so it could dump surplus tea in the colonies and undercut local merchants. The Declaration of Independence spells this out as grievances about cutting off trade and manipulating markets to favor imperial interests. A Boston merchant did not need a PhD in economics to understand that someone far away was using law to rig his business against him.
The modern analogy is not a single foreign charter company, but a domestic system where a handful of corporations dominate information, finance, and consumption. Harvard’s Future of Media project documents that most major U.S. broadcast and cable outlets are owned by a small cluster of conglomerates and very wealthy individuals, with cross holdings that tie television, film, and digital platforms together. Analyses of media ownership routinely note that roughly ninety percent of what Americans see and hear flows through about six parent companies, names like Comcast, Disney, Paramount, Fox, and AT and T. That does not turn every journalist into a villain, but it does mean the landscape is narrow. A colonist could look up and see the king’s stamp on the tea chest. A modern viewer looks at six logos that quietly sit behind almost everything.
People feel the result in their bones. Gallup’s 2025 polling finds that only about thirty one percent of Americans say they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in mass media to report the news fully and fairly. That trust figure has been at or near record lows for years. Republicans’ trust is in single digits. Independents hover in the twenties. Even among Democrats, barely half express confidence. A YouGov survey that looks outlet by outlet finds that many big brands are more distrusted than trusted, and that trust splits almost perfectly along party lines for channels such as CNN and Fox News. The idea of “independent media” in the mainstream sense is mostly gone. What exists is a set of rival echo systems owned by overlapping corporate structures. The colonists could point to royal charters and monopolies. Today the evidence sits in ownership charts and long term trust surveys.
The colonists also rebelled over speech and suppression. The Declaration accuses the Crown of abolishing laws, corrupting judges, and using courts and soldiers to punish critics. The digital era equivalent is not a royal censor walking into a print shop, but a web of emails, “partnerships,” and behind the scenes pressure that shapes what people are allowed to say and share online. That is no longer a theory. It is documented.
In 2023 and 2024 federal courts examined evidence that the White House, the Centers for Disease Control, the FBI, and other agencies repeatedly leaned on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to remove or demote lawful content on topics like COVID policies and elections. Internal messages showed officials sending specific posts and accounts they wanted restricted and praising platforms when they complied. The Fifth Circuit described this pattern as “significant encouragement” and “coercive pressure,” enough to justify an injunction limiting that kind of government interference with speech.
In hearings before Congress, journalists and attorneys presented internal documents describing what one witness called “censorship laundering.” Agencies would channel takedown requests through outside research projects or non profits, who in turn would forward them to platforms as supposedly independent recommendations. The Cato Institute’s briefing on this practice concluded that such arrangements create an informal censorship regime that skirts the First Amendment by outsourcing the initial demand, while the government still steers the outcome. The Brennan Center has separately documented how law enforcement and intelligence bodies use social media monitoring tools to track speech and organizing, especially around protests, often with little transparency or oversight.
International research shows the United States is not alone. A 2025 study in the journal Global Media and Communication identifies a broad global trend of states pressuring or compelling platforms to remove content, often in the name of combating extremism or disinformation. The difference is that Americans have a constitutional speech guarantee that is supposed to draw a bright line around government involvement. When officials quietly cross that line, even if they insist that it is for safety, they confirm what the colonists put into words two hundred and fifty years ago. A power that thinks of itself as enlightened will still reach for control when it is handed new tools.
The colonists saw soldiers as the blunt instrument of that control. They complained about a standing army kept among them in peacetime, about military officers immune to local law, and about being forced to quarter troops. The modern United States does not station redcoats in private homes, but it has built a large internal security and surveillance apparatus and has encouraged broad militarisation of local police. Federal agencies possess capabilities to track, store, and analyze data on citizens at a scale no previous regime could dream of. The question today is less whether power exists and more how it is aimed and at whom.
Add to that the economic structure. The Tea Act was a corporate bailout. It gave the East India Company special privileges to dump tea into the colonies and squeeze out competitors. The Boston Tea Party was aimed at this merger of state power and corporate privilege as much as at a small tax. Today, the relationship between government and the largest firms is woven into bailouts, subsidies, and favorable regulation. Big banks and systemically important institutions can count on rescue in crisis. Households cannot. The moral hazard is similar. Risk flows upward and profit flows upward. Cost flows down.
When modern Americans sense that something has gone wrong, they are not simply indulging in nostalgia. They are noticing patterns that would have been obvious to a colonial shopkeeper. Ownership and control are concentrated. Communication channels are choked by a few hands. The state speaks the language of safety and stability while tipping the scales on information, wealth, and law in favor of itself and its favored partners.
The colonists responded by writing everything down. The Declaration of Independence is not poetry first. It is a legal brief. It lays out twenty seven specific grievances against the Crown, from dissolving legislatures to manipulating justice to sending “swarms of officers” to harass the people and eat out their substance. They did not say “we feel bad.” They said “here is what you did, and here is why it breaks the contract.” The data that exist now allow the same kind of inventory to be built for the modern United States, using charts and rulings instead of quills.
A call to arms in this context does not mean picking up rifles. It means refusing to accept that this is normal. It means leaving behind the idea that “independent media” still describes conglomerates whose revenue comes from the same advertisers and distributors as the entertainment channels they sit beside. It means backing channels, platforms, and projects that are genuinely outside the six parent companies, and understanding that they will not have the gloss, budget, or algorithmic boost of corporate news. It means demanding full public logs of every contact between state actors and social platforms that touches speech, and hard legal limits on what those actors are allowed to ask or suggest. It means treating tax and budget fights as moral questions, because a government that plans its survival around taking more from its citizens year after year while delivering less is declaring what it thinks they are for.
The colonists were clear that when a government becomes destructive of the ends for which it was instituted, the people have a right to alter or abolish it and to lay a new foundation on principles that better protect their safety and happiness. That line has been abused by fools and fanatics, but the principle underneath it is not optional. Legitimacy is conditional. A government that uses concentrated media, opaque partnerships with platforms, and skewed taxation to protect its own comfort at the expense of those it claims to serve is writing its own bill of indictment.
The work now is not romantic. It is not a flag, a march, or a single election. It is a long, disciplined refusal to cooperate with lies, backed by a willingness to build and support alternatives that are harder, poorer, and more honest. The colonists did their part with pamphlets, boycotts, assemblies, and, when every other door was closed, open revolt. The people who come after them will be judged on whether they saw the new pattern of grievances clearly, and whether they decided that being treated as a managed population was acceptable, or whether they chose to act as if “consent of the governed” still meant something real.