The colonial reaction to the Stamp Act of 1764 shocked British government officials, and if you look at the reality of the situation it’s fairly easy to see why.
The Stamp Act was imposed by a British Parliament desperate to avoid bankruptcy after the Seven Years War – the last in a cycle of imperial wars against France dating back to 1689 – ended in 1763. The wars had left the Crown with a national debt of some £137,000,000 sterling at a time when a skilled craftsman (such as a plumber today) made about £50 a year. The annual interest payments alone on that debt would come to nearly £5,000,000 per year, almost 60% of Britain’s peacetime budget during the 1760s, and this situation would only get worse given the expense of maintaining and defending not only the English colonies already on the North American mainland but also the newly conquered French colonies as well, many of which were not happy about being incorporated into the British Empire. This required ten thousand British soldiers to be stationed in the colonial back country, an ongoing expense of some £400,000 per year.
This doesn’t even count the fact that the Native Americans on the western edge of these colonies were also deeply unhappy about the situation and had already tried once to change it – a bloody war the British called Pontiac’s Rebellion which destroyed eight British forts and killed about 2,000 colonists – and were quite likely to do so again.
George Grenville – the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what we would call the Prime Minister today – knew that he needed to take action quickly or the whole North American empire would collapse along with the British government. He got recently coronated King George III to approve the Proclamation of 1763 forbidding white colonists from moving west of the Appalachian Mountains in a move designed to calm down the Native American fear of having their lands taken from them. He authorized the Royal Navy to crack down on colonial smuggling in order to bring much needed customs revenue into the Royal Treasury.
And, among other things, he got Parliament to pass the Stamp Act.
The Stamp Act was a tax on paper. Under the act, colonists would be required to use stamped paper for everything from newspapers, playing cards and almanacs to deeds, wills, and contracts. Any legal document on unstamped paper would be considered void. The money raised would go toward paying the costs of maintaining the ten thousand soldiers out in the back country. Since the Americans were going to benefit most from those soldiers, Grenville reasoned, they could chip in for their expense and take some of the burden off taxpayers in Britain.
The colonists didn’t see it that way.
They argued that the Stamp Act was a new kind of tax – an internal tax on things produced and consumed within the borders of the colonies rather than an external tax on things coming into or leaving the colonies. External taxes were traditionally used to regulate trade, but internal taxes were used to raise money. Only colonial legislatures could levy internal taxes on the colonies, the Americans said. Colonists sent no representatives to Parliament and for Parliament to impose such a tax violated the principle of no taxation without representation. They argued that this tax was a crippling burden on colonists that would bankrupt them in the economic slowdown after the Seven Years War.
When the Stamp Act passed anyway, the colonists resisted. They passed resolutions denouncing it. They held an intercolonial congress to organize resistance. And across the colonies violent grass roots resistance so intimidated British officials that by the time the Stamp Act enforcement date came around in November 1765 only Georgia had anyone willing to enforce the law.
Grenville’s position was that none of the colonial arguments were correct, and objectively speaking he was absolutely right.
The Stamp Act was not an excessively high tax, let alone a crippling burden. None of the taxes imposed by the British government during the Revolutionary Crisis were excessive. The idea that the American Revolution was a revolt against high taxes is a 21st-century political agenda projected backwards onto the Founding Fathers by people who have never studied American history in any serious way. Nobody would have gone broke paying the stamp tax, and few people would have noticed it at all. This was not a society that lived on paper the way we do today.
Nor was the Stamp Act much of an innovation. It had been applied to British taxpayers on the home islands since the 1690s and there was no justification for the colonists – who were, after all, also British taxpayers – to complain that this was somehow new.
Furthermore, under British law, there is no legal distinction between an internal tax and an external tax and if Parliament had the right to impose one on the colonies it had the right to impose the other. And since under British law Parliament has the right to impose any tax anywhere in the Empire, it had the right to do this.
Yes, Grenville admitted, the colonists did not send representatives to Parliament, but then neither did a lot of towns in Britain. They were all “virtually represented.” All members of Parliament were responsible for all of the Empire, so the colonists were just as represented as a lot of people in England itself.
All of this is true.
And none of it mattered.
One of the great truths of human nature is that people do not react to what is going on around them. They react to what they think is going on around them, and these two things may or may not have anything in common.
Grenville was arguing about what was actually happening. The colonists were reacting to what they thought was happening. And to understand why they reacted the way they did, you need to know what they thought was happening.
American colonists in the 1760s overwhelmingly looked at their political world through the lens of classical republicanism, an ideology that disappears so thoroughly after about 1820 that few Americans today are even aware that it existed. This was not how the British generally looked at the political world in the 1760s. It’s a complex bit of machinery, but like most such things it can be boiled down to its essentials fairly quickly.
The fundamental idea behind republicanism was the zero-sum conflict between liberty and power. Power, said classical republicans, must be checked or it would destroy liberty. And the way to check power was to divide it up and then balance the pieces against each other so that no one group or person controlled all of the levers of power.
In the traditional view of republicanism, this meant balancing social orders. Society was divided into three groups – the One, the Few, and the Many – and each group got a branch of government. The One was the monarchy. The Few was the aristocracy. And the Many was the democracy, the legislature. As long as each branch of government stayed on its own turf and didn’t stomp on the others, then the government was balanced, power was checked, and liberty was secure.
This gets translated into the Federal Constitution of 1787 slightly differently, as balancing government functions rather than social orders. Instead of a monarchy we get the Executive Branch. Instead of an aristocracy we got the Judicial Branch. The legislature pretty much translated one to one, though.
The trick, though, was to keep the pieces balanced. If they got out of balance then power would destroy liberty, though they would do it in different ways depending on what piece got out of hand. If the Many, the legislature, got out of control you’d get Anarchy. If the Few, the Judiciary, got out of hand, you’d get oligarchy. And if the One, the Executive, got out of hand, you’d have tyranny.
Of these, the Founding Fathers feared tyranny more than the others because it was efficient, aggressive, and dangerous. Anarchy is pretty self-solving – eventually someone will take over, and while this usually means new problems it’s no longer Anarchy. Oligarchy is dictatorship by committee and really, how effective have any of the committees you’ve ever served on been? But tyranny – dictatorship – is historically the norm in human government, and it can be extremely difficult to fix once entrenched.
The Founding Fathers felt that there were a number of signs of approaching tyranny, but two that mattered most.
First, arbitrary – not necessarily high – taxes, imposed without the consent of the governed, which would weaken the power of the legislature, unbalance the government, destroy liberty, and cause economic harm to the tyrant’s enemies.
And second, a standing army in time of peace, accountable only to the One (or the Executive), which would run lawless through the streets to crush political opposition and impose tyranny.
And what did the colonists see in the Stamp Act? An arbitrary tax designed to pay for a standing army in time of peace.
Grenville did not see the world through republican eyes and was frankly shocked by the American reaction to the Stamp Act. What he designed as a small but necessary tax meant to ease the financial burden of defending the empire, the colonists saw as the leading edge of a dark conspiracy of British power to crush American liberty and introduce tyranny.
This was the origin point from which the American Revolution flowed.
In 2025, in one of the most gutless displays of cowardice and bootlicking ever put on in a public forum, Republicans in Congress passed what Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump insisted on calling The One Big Beautiful Bill.
There were a lot of features of this spectacularly misnamed piece of legislation that have already had catastrophic effect on the American people – it was a pretty good blueprint for how to dismantle a republic, after all – but one of the more obvious ones it that it boosted the budget for ICE to levels far beyond what most nations on this planet spend on their entire military.
ICE, for those of you who live in caves, is Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s private standing army.
It is not a law enforcement agency. They are not police officers, sheriffs, or federal criminal law enforcement. Their scope of legal authority is incredibly limited – they have the power to detain and arrest people suspected of being in the United States without proper documentation, but ONLY if they have clear probable cause or signed judicial warrants. They have no authority whatsoever over American citizens. They cannot arrest legal American citizens. They cannot detain legal American citizens. They have absolutely no authority to force entry into a vehicle. They have no legal right to invade homes without signed judicial warrants or to go door to door in fishing expeditions for people they wish to assault.
And they certainly have no right to execute anyone in cold blood on a public street.
Yet they have done all of these things and continue to do all of these things.
In 2025 they kidnapped American citizens and legal residents off the public streets, charged them with hallucinatory crimes, and trafficked them to foreign countries in defiance of court orders and American law. They murdered 37 people. They faced no legal consequences for these crimes, protected as they are by the Fascist regime in power right now. Their crimes are features, not bugs. They are doing precisely what Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves want them to do – trying to terrorize Americans into obedience through violence, lawlessness, and cruelty.
On Wednesday, January 7, 2026, one of their jackbooted thugs – Jonathan Ross, by name – executed an American citizen in cold blood on a public street.
He had no right to approach Renee Good’s vehicle. She was an American citizen on a public thoroughfare, trained as a legal observer and responsible for recording the crimes of Ross and his colleagues. Her right to be where she was was clear. He and his colleagues had no right to attempt to force their way into her car, despite their violent attempts to do so, or to order her to do anything whatsoever.
And when she attempted to comply with his illegal orders to drive away anyway, he had no right whatsoever to murder her.
There is no legal self-defense strategy here. He shot her three times – once from the front, and twice from the side after she had started to pass him. DHS policy explicitly bans agents from shooting into moving vehicles for any reason. She was unarmed and clearly trying to avoid him. There are multiple videos confirming every part of this, including one that ICE released thinking it would somehow support their version of events, which only goes to show you how twisted those goons really are.
ICE is a private standing army in time of peace, recognizing no authority other than an Executive gleefully stomping on the turf of the Judiciary and the Legislature. A tyrant, in other words, one eagerly and relentlessly destroying your liberty to further his power.
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys, and slaves have been flooding the airwaves with lies since before Renee Good was even extricated from her vehicle. They insist she was the one at fault, that their thug was in the right, and that anyone who suggests otherwise is some kind of terrorist.
They are lying, and anyone who supports them is a bootlicking slave.
They have taken the investigation out of the hands of the State of Minnesota and given it to their own lackeys. They refuse to share information. They plan to cover this up and they’re doing so in broad daylight while you watch. They insist that you swallow their lies rather than follow the plain objective evidence in front of you. They hold you in contempt, and their private army remains out of control, out of order, and in our streets.
The Founding Fathers did not put up with tyranny. They did not put up with standing armies running wild in the public streets, armies who answer not to the law or to the citizens but only to the tyrant and his minions. They started a revolution over this.
What will you put up with, my fellow American?
Be quick about it, because you may not have much time to decide before the decision is taken out of your hands.
As for me, I am a goddamned American patriot and I bow to no tyrant.
