Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered: The Battered Spirit of ‘76
Part 2 of "Truths and Lies About The Declaration of Independence"
This year marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in what is now the United States. With it came the launch of an armed revolution against distant fascist leaders and a struggle between true reformers and reactionaries who would ultimately lead the budding nation further down the path of imperialism, slavery, land theft, and elite domination.
Today, the U.S. government is using the 250th anniversary as an opportunity to peddle facile propaganda in service of nationalistic fascism. As a law firm which has been educating communities about the truth of U.S. “freedoms” for thirty years, we’re here to set the record straight.
Welcome to CELDF’s America 250: A Revolutionary Perspective, an ongoing series this year.
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In the first part of this essay we reviewed the political circumstances in the air prior to the American colonies announcing their independence from Britain and their intent to achieve that separation in order to correct the injustices foisted upon the colonies by the Crown government. We focused on the more famous lines from the Declaration of Independence, which come at the beginning, and we saw that, although inspirational to the undiscerning ear, they were lacking in the depth of commitment to applying certain “self-evident truths” to “all men,” as the words put it.
Having reviewed the high-minded rhetoric that introduces the Declaration, let’s get down to its purpose, which is simple to discern. The first lines of the document tell you:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
And then 27 of those causes are listed following the inspirational language noted above. These are the offenses of the empire that drove the colonies to revolt. I number and quote most of the grievances below in italic. After each complaint I ask you to ponder whether the current form of American government protects us from these abuses or perpetuates them.
The arguments supporting revolution against the king and his empire begin with this grievance:
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
Note that the very first grievance justifying revolution was that the Crown preempted local laws that the colonists enacted for the public good. It is certain that it was the preemption of local laws (e.g. your town or city or burrough) because there was no state, nor nation in 1776 America. In twenty-first century America, we find ourselves unable to end the industrial ravaging of our air, water, soil, climate, and living environment because municipal and county governments are forbidden to enact laws blocking harmful corporate behavior, every instance of which occurs in a community stripped of the right to say “no!” definitively.
To explain how the principle reason for the American Revolution remains unsolved by the Federalist government in the 21st century we will have to make clear that the historic conflation of the intentions and sentiments of the Declaration and the Constitution are nationalistically motivated and a-historical. A straight causal line for every American town’s disenfranchisement from the federal system can be drawn to the constitution, not the Declaration, because the Federalists’ system pointedly does not recognize a right of local democratic governance nor the right of communities to protect their local environments or the health and safety of the people against state chartered and permitted corporate assaults.
250 years after the Declaration justified revolution based on the Crown’s denial of the right of communities to enact local laws to protect local interests, we see that the Federalists’ eventually cancelled the effect of the Declaration and its grievances with their scheme to replace the decentralized Articles of Confederation with their counter-revolutionary constitution, which perpetuates rather than corrects the sins of empire. Now on to the second rationale offered to justify rebellion.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
Today, state and local representatives are unable to enact laws that affect commerce that crosses state lines or that interfere with judicially created constitutional protections for personified corporate property. As a result, every manner of health and environmentally destructive corporate profit-making scheme is green-lighted, even against the will of tens of thousands of American communities representing hundreds of millions of Americans whose democratic rights have been cancelled. We know this state and federal behavior as preemption, which means local government laws enacted without permission are prohibited. More specifically, typical preemptions place a ceiling on how protective local laws may be, with the state’s standards of protection being the “ceiling” or maximum amount of protection allowed. What this looks like on the ground, in all the communities where Americans live, is that we are just supposed to live with whatever oppression, degradation, and injustices get piled on top of us, for the benefit of “the economy” (another abstraction the U..S. government will go to war over) and to ensure the advantages of wealthy corporate investors (essentially, liability-free landlords). Next up:
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
Although neither corporations nor political parties are mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, they are the two most powerful political forces in the nation today. The political parties draw the voting districts, ignoring community boundaries and destroying the ability of human communities to coherently advocate in the legislature for local interests. Corporations fund the election of candidates they prefer, and the parties choose what candidates will stand for election. The people’s right to representation is relinquished by ignoring their collective community and democratic rights. With that, is there really a functioning representative government for the people, and who is left able to protect our community land-base, let alone the rest of the natural world?
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
That the people do not have automatic access to public records, but are required to file Right to Know or “Freedom of Information” requests, which are often denied or heavily redacted, suggests this issue has not been resolved to reflect the demands of the revolution. Whether by distance or other obstacles to access, government transparency was denied prior to the revolution and is denied as a matter of course in 2026.
It almost goes without mentioning that the regulatory permit hearings and challenges for corporate operations in our communities are routinely scheduled in venues far removed from the affected communities, and at times inconvenient to people working one or more jobs,
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
Dillon’s Rule, which was nationalized by the U.S. Supreme Court during the so-called Progressive Era effectively dissolved the ability of local governments to enact laws protective of their rights if that protection contradicts the priorities of corporate-captured state legislatures. Dillon’s Rule converts municipalities and counties into state resource colonies and the residents within their jurisdiction into mere “tenants,” as Iowa high court judge John Forrest Dillon, the namesake of the rule, wrote in his 1872 Treatise on the Law of Municipal Corporations.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
Challenges to Dillon’s Rule’s eradication of local democratic rights are regularly ruled against by the courts, and state legislatures are deaf to the entreaties of the citizens in every state for a restoration of community rights.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
ICE agents patrol the streets in states that support immigrant populations. They invade work places, civil court hearings, homes, and social gatherings while simultaneously the Federalist government invades and threatens to annex whole nations and territories.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
Judicial appointments are utterly partisan and thus selective in the administration of justice. The refusal of every Congress and administration to demand rules of ethics for the U.S. Supreme Court leaves its monarchical powers over the creation and enforcement of laws and the protection of civil rights open to partisan manipulation. Juryless trials and settlements obstruct the proper role of the people to judge the law or nullify it from the jury box.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
Judicial appointments, which are lifetime seats in the higher courts, come to lawyers and lower court judges who build resumes based on how faithful to certain partisan opinions their briefings and rulings have been. Partisan predictability is incentivized by awarding appointments to higher benches to trusted producers of advantageous judicial precedents.
If by “salaries” we also mean perks and bribes, then it is clear that this grievance remains fully in-effect 250 years later.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
The farcical Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is but the latest incarnation of oppression by bureaucracy that persists 250 years after this justification for revolution was included in the Declaration. The proliferation of ministerial agencies that are answerable to legislatures and not the people grew out of Progressive era capitulation to modeling public government after corporate governance had the effect of surrendering the democratic rights of people and communities to the corporations agencies pretend to regulate.
Boston revolutionary Sam Adams is more remembered for being a beer drinker than for his rage directed at British ministries that imposed rules that communities were compelled to enforce locally, though they opposed them. A true and proud NIMBY who didn’t sit and drink tea while whining about the injustices the empire allowed for the sake of the East India Company. He led a raid on their ships and dumped their tea in Boston Harbor.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
Take a look out your window. Minnesota, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, in fact throughout the country and in a community near you. Illegal immigration is only the latest pretext for military oppression of Americans by their government. At points of conflict between the people and official policy priorities, such as the general strike of workers in 1877 that was met by militarized violence that saw hundreds gunned down to protect industrial corporations from demands for job justice. The Battle of Blair Mountain in 1920 between coal miners and government protected mining corporations was part of a broad-based coal war that saw communities occupied militarily. The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 saw an estimated ten thousand white civilians and armed officials wage war on a minority community, resulting in deaths numbered between 100-300. Airplanes were used to bomb the community to rubble. In January 2025 the U. S. Justice Department issued a report saying the massacre was a “coordinated military-style attack.” Examples abound.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
The persistence of this offense is not confined to the Trump administration. Beginning in 1796, Alexander Hamilton persuaded then President Washington to invade Pennsylvania with Federal troops to crush a revolt against the collection of federal taxes meant to finance the payment of dividends to war bond holders following the revolution. The troops marched across the commonwealth against the protests of then Pennsylvania Governor Mifflin. The military has been used for political aims at points of power inflection throughout American constitutional history, including war time when draftees in opposition to involuntary conscription and homicide on command was severely sanctioned.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
El Salvador: incarcerates and tortures deportees.
Rwanda: Authorized by the U.S. government to accept deportees.
South Sudan: Reached an agreement with the U.S. government.
Eswatini: Also reached an agreement with the U.S. government.
Dominica: Entered into an agreement with the U.S. to accept third-country deportees.
Morocco, Tunisia, Togo, Mauritania, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Libya: Countries approached for potential cooperation in accepting deportees.
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
The United States maintains 750 military installations globally, with at least 128 maintained in other countries. Local and state police forces have been militarized and the Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act of 1981 allows the U.S. military to cooperate with domestic and foreign law enforcement agencies. But mind you, the official statement is the United States is not an empire and our domestic communities are not corporate dominated resource colonies.
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
In the twenty-first century alone, from George Floyd to Renee Nicole Good, courts have not held local, state, and Federal law enforcement officers responsible for the murder of Americans. This is the rule, not the exception.
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
Although neoliberal globalization is not so much about allowing U.S. trade as it is about reducing labor costs to a bare minimum, the U.S. central government still decides with which nations Americans may not trade. The list includes Crimea - Region of Ukraine, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Syria. Trump’s tariffs are succeeding in cutting off trade with many other parts of the world.
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
Let’s just consider two examples of so many: 1. The bank bailouts of 2008 (approximately $498 billion) and 2. The planned taxpayer funded Venezuelan oil and gas infrastructure rebuild (about $100 billion, or $10 billion per year for ten years).
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
The plague of mandatory arbitration as a substitute for jury trial in consumer contracts, and the mockery of plea bargaining in criminal trials has all but eliminated the 6th Amendment guarantee of the right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers. Why is this a big deal? For a host of reasons that maintain the possibility of justice prevailing over wealth, but critically because in the jury box is the only place citizens have power over the law as they would in all matters if we were a self-governing democracy.
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
Guantanamo Cuba, the destination for “enemy combatants” captured during the war against abstractions like drugs and terror. Also, the nations accepting deportees from America’s war against migrants and citizens alike.
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
Gitmo. Enough said.
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.
According to a 2012 article by Michelle Wilde Anderson of Stanford Law School, 40 states allow for disincorporation of local governments; with the passage of H.B. 1773 in October 2014, Pennsylvania became the 41st state to do so. (source). In some cases, financial dictatorships are imposed (e.g. Flint Michigan, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) and in others whole local governing charters are nullified by courts finding those charters violate state preemptions by asserting community rights over corporations (e.g. Grant Township Pennsylvania, Toledo, Ohio). The Supreme Court case that nationalized the anti-democratic Dillon’s Rule pivoted on the question of whether the people of Allegheny City had a right not to be absorbed into the city of Pittsburgh. Business leaders wanted the annexation for the increased tax revenue. The state government ordered the annexation and the high court ruled against the will of the people of Allegheny. Now all municipalities are powerless and rightless to resist dissolution of laws and jurisdictions.
There are other grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence as justifications for armed revolt against tyrannical government. The rest are particular to the circumstances of the times, with some notable exceptions, like the last of them that reads:
27. He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us,
On reading this, January 6th, 2021 might naturally come to mind. More poignantly, the animosity that’s ginned-up between Americans of different cultural, racial, sexual and religious backgrounds by ensconced partisan political factions is fomented with the intent of weakening our solidarity as a community of communities to manipulate our thoughts and beliefs and to deprive us of meaningful resistance to official and systemic injustices.
The import of this grievance reflects the cultural racism of the colonizers, even as they sought justice for themselves:
and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
From the list of affronts to the rights of colonists that we’ve considered it is clear that their justifications for revolution memorialized in the Declaration of Independence remain unreconciled. The aspirations of radical patriots like Tom Paine for the equal rights of all who are born, in fact the right of Diverse people to Equitable treatment and Inclusion in all democratic processes – these form the foundation for any just society and for any subsequent alliance of communities or states as a nation.
In 2026 let’s be clear about what history is worth celebrating and what lies are imperative to expose. The Declaration of Independence identified 27 crimes of the British empire against the people of the American colonies, with the intent and expectation that a bloody war for independence would be fought and won for the express purpose of setting things right by putting an end to these injustices. Clearly, for these corrections to be made there would be much more work to be done once victory on the battlefield was achieved. Also clearly, that did not happen.
Instead, motivated by ambition and impatience with the short-lived democracy for white men that lasted about a decade under the Articles of Confederation, investors in a corporation (The Potomac Company) yet to be chartered by Maryland and Virginia, including Geo. Washington and James Madison, tried once, then twice to amend that first constitution to make corporate chartering for interstate commerce a matter of right. On their third try they succeeded in bringing delegates from 12 of the 13 independent states to Philadelphia, ostensibly to amend the Articles. But they arrived with the framework for a new constitution in-hand, fully intent on overturning the first.
The proposed new frame of government constitutionalized slavery, cancelled community self-governing rights, stripped the states of actual sovereignty, and closely replicated the frame of government deposed by the revolution. It proposed a Hoiuse of Representatives (for white male representation) equivalent to the British House of Commons, a Senate equivalent to the British House of Lords, an Executive with some of the powers of a king, and a Supreme Court with all of the powers of a king.
A competing model constitution proposed by Alexander Hamilton would have made Senators and the president electable to life-long positions. Nowhere in the debates over which way to go were the reasons for revolt against the Crown taken into account. Being surprised by this fact exposes the degree to which the history we’re being fed is bogus.
We will be inundated by a deluge of false stories about how the Declaration of Independence heralded the founding of the United States of America. But the Declaration did not demand the monarchy be replaced with the Federalists’ constitution legalizing slavery, reinforcing misogyny, concentrating power, destroying community and guaranteeing a geographically expansionist plutocracy. That’s not what the Declaration was about, and it’s not what veterans of the revolution referred to when they spoke of the Spirit of ‘76.
That Spirit was about people who found the courage to confront, refuse, and end the reign of tyranny in their time. The justifications for rebellion in 1776 persist in 2026. The aspirations for a just society alluded to in the opening lines of the Declaration are a good starting point for formulating a way forward from where we are today. They aren’t enough to build on, and they were more poetry than actionable plan. In life and in revolutionary documents, pronouns count. If all men are created equal, what about women? And how can “men” later be narrowed down to mean some men, the right men, that is, white men?
We face many of the same challenges as the colonial commoners, hidden as they are in plain sight. And once again we are admonished by Tom Paine’s words from his morale-boosting essay The Crisis, read to the militia at Valley Forge.
December 23, 1776
THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but “to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER” and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth.
The revolution is, most definitely, unfinished. Let us begin, again.
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