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: concentrated media power, government pressure on speech, tax and debt systems that treat people as revenue streams, and a political class that answers more to donors and agencies 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 ignored colonial petitions against those taxes. Modern Americans technically have representation, but a similar dynamic exists in how rules are written. The U.S. tax system is a dense maze shaped heavily by lobbyists and special interests. Treasury's own distributional analyses show that the top slice of households captures a disproportionate share of income and wealth, while the long term federal budget remains on an unsustainable path that will require either higher taxes on the broad middle, reduced benefits, or both. Voters can pick candidates, but they do not write line items. For most people, tax policy arrives as a bill, not a choice, and the feeling that decisions are made somewhere else for someone else is not irrational. It is backed by the way the machinery actually operates.
The colonists also attacked the British government for using economic power to control their lives. The Navigation Acts forced colonial trade through British ports, and the Tea Act handed a monopoly to the East India Company so it could dump surplus tea into the colonies and undercut local merchants. The Declaration of Independence spells this out as grievances about "cutting off our trade with all parts of the world" and manipulating markets. The analogy today is not one foreign company, but a domestic system where a handful of corporations dominate information, finance, and consumption.
Media is the most obvious case. Harvard's Future of Media index shows that most of the large mainstream outlets in the United States are owned by a small cluster of conglomerates or powerful individuals, with cross holdings that tie television, film, and digital platforms together. Analyses of media concentration routinely conclude that roughly 90 percent of U.S. media is controlled by about six corporations, names like Comcast, Disney, Paramount, Fox, and AT and T. That does not mean every journalist is corrupt, but it does mean that what most people see and hear flows through a narrow set of gatekeepers with intertwined commercial and political interests. When the same corporate structures own the channels that carry news, entertainment, and advertising, truly independent mass media barely exists at scale.
People have noticed. Gallup's 2025 polling reports that only 31 percent of Americans have a "great deal" or "fair amount" of trust in newspapers, television, and radio to report news fully and fairly, tied with the lowest levels ever recorded. Republicans' trust has dropped into single digits. Independents are barely above a quarter. Even among Democrats, barely half say they trust the media. A YouGov survey on specific outlets finds that Americans are more likely to distrust than trust many major sources, and that trust splits almost perfectly along partisan lines for channels like CNN and Fox News. In practical terms, the mass media has become a set of aligned echo systems, not a neutral landscape. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is what the ownership structures and trust numbers show.
The colonists also rebelled over speech and suppression. The Declaration accused the Crown of "abolishing our most valuable laws" and using courts to punish dissenters. The modern equivalent is not a royal censor walking into a print shop, but a complex partnership between government agencies, large platforms, and quasi private "fact checking" operations that influence what people can say and see online. This is no longer speculation. It is documented in court cases and congressional testimony.
In 2023, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reviewed evidence that the White House, the Centers for Disease Control, and other agencies had repeatedly pressured Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms to take down or downgrade posts on topics such as COVID vaccines and elections. The court concluded that the administration's actions amounted to "significant encouragement" of censorship, enough to justify an injunction limiting future interference. Internal communications showed officials sending lists of posts they wanted removed or labeled, and platforms modifying their policies in response.
During hearings before the House, journalists and lawyers presented internal emails and coordination documents describing federal officials "flagging" content for removal, recommending account suspensions, and helping shape moderation rules. One witness called it "censorship laundering," where agencies used outside research partnerships to route takedown requests back into platforms, claiming to fight "disinformation" while effectively outsourcing censorship. The Cato Institute's analysis of these practices warns that such arrangements create an informal censorship regime that skirts the First Amendment by blurring the line between government request and corporate decision.
Alongside this, law enforcement and intelligence bodies have expanded social media surveillance, often with thin evidence that it improves security. The Brennan Center documents a pattern of federal and local authorities monitoring online speech, including political activity and protest organization, with very little public transparency. Freedom House research finds that at least 78 countries have engaged in some form of social media censorship, and the United States is not immune to that trend. In the colonial era, the threat was a king shutting down a pamphlet. In the digital era, the threat is a system that can throttle or erase entire conversations in near real time, often at the direct prompting of the state.
In 1776 colonists also protested the presence of a "standing army" in their midst and the quartering of troops among civilians. Their point was not just about soldiers; it was about being treated as a population to be managed rather than a community to be served. Today the United States does not quarter regular army units in private homes, but it does maintain a massive internal security and surveillance apparatus, and it has built up heavily militarised policing in many cities. Federal, state, and local agencies all have access to surveillance tools that would have looked like science fiction in the eighteenth century. The question is not whether this exists, but how it is used and against whom.
The pattern across all of this looks disturbingly familiar. The Crown used laws, soldiers, and licensed trade companies. Modern authorities use regulations, code, and contracts. The medium has changed; the basic dynamic has not. A narrow set of power centres shapes the information environment, extracts revenue, and decides which voices matter. The average citizen is told they are sovereign, then discovers that most of the important decisions happen in rooms and feeds they do not control.
When the colonists finally issued the Declaration, they did not base it on vague feelings. They itemised twenty seven specific grievances that charted a line from minor abuses to systemic injustice. Modern Americans who feel something is fundamentally wrong are in a similar position. The case is not "it feels bad." The case is that ownership data, trust surveys, court rulings, and budget reports all point in the same direction. Media has been concentrated into a few corporate hands. Government agencies have crossed into the business of labeling and suppressing lawful speech. Tax and fiscal policy have protected the powerful while leaving the broad middle to absorb stagnation, inflation, and debt. None of that is speculation. It is on the record.
A call to arms now cannot be a call to muskets. The United States today is not a colony. It is a republic that has allowed imperial habits to grow inside it. The realistic call is to cold, focused resistance using the tools that still exist: refusing to accept captured media as neutral, building and supporting channels that are not owned by the same handful of conglomerates, demanding full transparency on government contact with platforms, and putting pressure on lawmakers until they draw bright legal lines around state involvement in speech. It means treating tax and budget fights as moral questions, not accounting exercises, because the way a government raises and spends money tells you what it thinks its people are for.
The colonists were very clear. When a government becomes destructive of the ends for which it was instituted, "it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it." That line has been abused by extremists, but the underlying principle is not optional. Legitimacy is conditional. A government that uses concentrated media, back channel censorship, 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 colonists answered that kind of pattern once already. The question facing people now is whether they are willing to do the slow, disciplined work of answering it again with the tools of their time instead of waiting for someone else to do it for them.