On a bright Sunday in February, an active-duty U.S. airman named Aaron Bushnell stood in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. and doused his Air Force uniform in a clear liquid. “I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” Bushnell said into the camera. “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest.” He then lit himself on fire.
Since Israel began its military campaign in Gaza following Hamas’ attack on October 7th, Americans have protested their government’s involvement in the war in increasingly radical—and illegal—ways. Activists have blocked traffic and occupied spaces, often getting arrested and grabbing headlines in the process.
But one tool in this repertoire of contention that has received much less media attention is “war tax resistance”: the practice of refusing to pay some or all federal taxes that contribute to military spending. This old pacifist tactic is finding new adherents, as a generation of activists who cut their teeth in during the George Floyd uprising loses its patience. “Marching and protesting is fantastic,” said Nick Lancelotti, who co-founded a group called “We the People” with June Johnson. “Sharing space with people, being in a crowd, and showing solidarity is incredible. But at the same time, that needs to then translate into tangible action.” The group is eyeing April 15th to stage a national “Tax Blackout,” as they hope to persuade 50 million Americans (a whopping 30 percent of taxpayers) to refuse to pay at least 5 percent of their income taxes and instead redirect it to Gaza-related relief funds and organizations.
The goal may sound lofty, but war tax resistance is having a moment. “Interest in war tax resistance is the highest I have ever seen,” wrote Lincoln Rice, a war tax resister since 1998 and coordinator of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee’s (or NWTRCC, pronounced “new trick”), only a month and a half after October 7. That interest has not abated. NWTRCC members I’ve spoken to report skyrocketing traffic across its social media platforms, packed orientation sessions, long waitlists for tax counseling sessions, and requests for speakers to present to other activist groups.
The history of war tax resistance reveals a protest tactic well suited to the moment. Its resurgence has a compelling logic: because the income tax is so closely tied to the defense budget, withholding the former to protest the latter takes aim at both the state’s ability to wage war and every citizen’s role in it. Though not nearly as extreme as self-immolation, war tax resistance shares a common thread with Bushnell’s act: a reckoning with personal complicity and an attempt at personal absolution.
Where There’s War, There’s War Tax Resistance
In its letter announcing this year’s Tax Blackout, We The People calls for “a revival of the War Tax Resistance movement popularized during the Vietnam Era,” drawing inspiration from folk singer Joan Baez who refused to pay 60 percent of her 1963 income taxes.
Baez undoubtedly raised the movement’s visibility, but today’s war tax resisters claim a much longer lineage. “Where there’s war, you’ll find war tax resisters,” begins a section on NWTRCC’s website called “An International History of War Tax Resistance: From 400 B.C. to 2000 A.D.” In an online workshop, Rice recently put it like this: “If we have enough information about a civilization, we can find evidence of war tax resistance.”
If you look hard enough, that evidence starts to crop up in unexpected places. In Aristophanes’ classical Greek comedy Lysistrata (sometimes translated as “Army Disbander”)—the starting point of NWTRCC’s 400 B.C. timeline—a group of women refuse to have sex with their husbands and lovers until the men agree to lay down their arms and stop the disastrous Peloponnesian War. Eventually, Lysistrata leads a group of women to storm the Acropolis and seize control of the state treasury, over the protests of an incensed (male) magistrate.
“We want to keep the money safe and stop you from waging war,” Lysistrata explains, likening her newfound control of the treasury to her traditional role in managing household finances.
“But that’s not the same thing,” pleads the magistrate. “The money purse is needed for the war!”
“Ah, but the war itself isn’t necessary,” quips Lysistrata.
One can draw a clear line from Lysistrata seizing the state’s purse strings to Baez’s protests. “We spend billions of dollars a year on weapons which scientists, politicians, military men, and even presidents all agree must never be used,” Baez wrote in a statement announcing her resistance. “That is not security. That is stupidity.”
Unified by this ethos, war tax resistance’s long history includes groups as diverse as the Quakers and the Black Panthers, with motivations ranging from the material to the divine. Poets and priests, as well as anarchists and athletes, have all joined their ranks at one point or another. “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Civil Disobedience, which railed against the Mexican-American War. Fifty years later, upon learning of the assassination of Italy’s Umberto I, Leo Tolstoy wrote in “Thou Shalt Not Kill” that “if each private individual understood that the payment of taxes wherewith to hire and equip soldiers . . . are not matters of indifference, but are bad and shameful actions by which he not only permits but participates in murder,” then the “power of Emperors, Kings, and Presidents” to wage war would disappear.
Nevertheless, war continued, and emperors, kings, and presidents continued to levy taxes to fund them. In the United States, withholding income tax as an antiwar protest has specific historical as well as ideological motivations—the history of the income tax is the history of war. Congress established the country’s first income tax with the passage of the Revenue Act of 1861 in order to fund the rising cost of the American Civil War.
Though Congress repealed the 1861 act only eleven years later, the Progressive Era Sixteenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, cleared away previous constitutional challenges to the federal income tax and gave Congress the “power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” President Woodrow Wilson initially took advantage of the new tax revenue for domestic reasons, but tax policy followed the tempo of war thereafter. Tax rates rose and exemptions fell after the U.S. entered into World War I, then again significantly after World War II. The U.S. defense budget rose right along with it, continuing to rise through the Cold War, the post-9/11 wars, and into today.
Tax, What Is It Good For?
Despite the close tie between income tax and war, withholding the former to protest the latter can invite varied interpretations, many of them suspicious. One of the reasons that Aaron Bushnell’s act of protest was so resonant and tragic is that lighting yourself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in a U.S. Air Force uniform while voicing your refusal to be complicit in genocide is immediately legible. Few acts of protest are more legible than self-immolation—no serious person can doubt the intentions behind such an act.
But what about the refusal to pay taxes? After all, wouldn’t an antiwar protest offer convenient moral cover for freeloaders looking to shirk their civic tax paying duty? And how do principled war objectors distinguish themselves from other tax protesters and evaders, like the anti-tax movement?
These questions, often bad faith attempts to discredit or distract from their motives, perennially plague war tax resisters. Nowhere is this murkiness more apparent than in The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest, a slim volume from 1963 by writer and literary critic Edmund Wilson. Though its title suggests a defiant antiwar manifesto, Wilson dedicates the book’s early chapters to kvetching about the tax system in general—more Grover Norquist than Henry David Thoreau—and an accounting of his arrears. Wilson bemoans the bureaucratic labyrinth of the “tax jungle,” complaining that the “question of what ought to be taxed and how much and which deductions ought to be allowed has reached a point of fine-spun complexity that . . . recalls the far-fetched distinctions of medieval theology.” One gets the sense that after the government found him delinquent, he retconned a pacifist motive to excuse his negligence.
This reputation followed Wilson into American letters. In Norman Rush’s novel Mating, the narrator’s love interest is Nelson Denoon, a man so pure that “he had demolished the family vacuum cleaner in a rage after reading in a newsletter that Electrolux was owned by a Nazi collaborator.” Denoon was horrified at America’s actions under Reagan, but he wasn’t complicit. Because of the overseas exclusion, Denoon, who had lived and worked in Botswana and wherever else his sociological research took him abroad, had not paid federal taxes in nineteen years. But even the principled Denoon can’t escape the narrator’s suspicion, who likens her paramour to Wilson: “All I could think of was the semi-immortal Edmund Wilson, distracted by being famous, failing to get around to paying his taxes for years out of pure sloth, then wrapping himself in the antiwar flag when the IRS knocked on his door.”
War tax resisters may never shake this impression, and war hawks will do everything they can to make sure of it. The simple act of withholding taxes, then, is not sufficient—an explanation of motives is required as well. Despite its uneven beginning, The Cold War and the Income Tax eventually turns into the defiant antiwar manifesto promised by its title, with clear-eyed condemnations of all the macabre inventions our tax money funds, including “enough nuclear weapons to disintegrate one another into our constituent atoms.”
Appeals for war tax resistance address both what tax money funds and to what extent. In a recent viral ad from Cenk Uygur’s presidential campaign, for example, a grocery shopping couple agonizes over the cost of items in their basket. “Honey, you’re gonna have to put those eggs back,” the wife says. “We have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians.” But just how much federal tax dollars go to funding defense and war, especially the war in Gaza? It depends who you ask.
Jon Schwarz of The Intercept recently made a rough estimate that his personal 2023 tax contribution to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and its attack on Gaza was around $150. NPR’s Planet Money podcast estimated military aid to Ukraine and Israel came out to $165 and $11.25 per taxpayer every year, respectively. The War Resisters’ League claims that 45 percent of the most recent U.S. federal budget goes to military purposes. More conservative estimates in recent years put that figure closer to 13 percent, but even when defense’s share of the budget falls, total military spending can still rise.
Anyone familiar with the U.S.’s byzantine tax system and complex budgeting and expenditure processes knows that the relationship between tax dollars and bombs is much more complicated than a one to one correspondence. The government doesn’t need to tax people to spend, and military aid draws from many sources other than income tax. But these fine-grained calculations miss the point. Many resisters feel that even a single tax dollar going to such an immoral and wasteful act as war is cause for protest. As writer Robert Wright captioned a recent photo of devastation in Gaza: “My tax dollars at work (and yours, if you’re American).” War tax resistance seems to offer a personal micro-divestment, however small, from this work.
Resisters’ focus on the income tax also arises because it’s the only federal tax within your control, with the exception of excise taxes on tobacco and alcohol (though one war tax resister suggested the option to grow or brew your own as an alternative). The government still levies a 3 percent federal telephone excise tax on landlines, irrelevant to most people with the exception maybe of Ed Hedemann, who has retained his landline all these years for the sole purpose of withholding that 3 percent from the federal government. “I want to be in the face of the government,” Hedemann recently said in a war tax training. “The impact is not from the amount of money—it’s retaining the ability to resist.” For Hedemann, the resistance itself is the means and the ends.
Go “Full Baez” and Don’t Get “Wesley Sniped”
Whether the spike in interest in war tax resistance will translate into mass civil disobedience remains an open question. But for the war tax resistance curious, there is a spectrum of options available. From redirecting 5 percent of income tax to We The People’s Tax Blackout to going the “full Baez”—a reference to the folk singer’s withholding of 60 percent of her income tax—method and risk can vary depending on how one resists and by how much.
“Now, how is one to struggle against this situation?” asks Wilson in The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest. “Go on strike and refuse to pay taxes?” The four strategies Wilson presents in 1963 are largely still relevant today, as are their drawbacks. First, you can employ yourself, and take care never to let your income rise above the taxable level. Wilson quotes war tax resister and clergyman A. J. Muste to illustrate this option’s drawback. “Voluntarily keeping one’s income down does not commend itself to me as a form of tax protest,” Muste writes. “I do not see how one can in effect recognize that a government may determine one’s standard of living or think that permitting the government to do so constitutes a significant protest against war taxation.”
Brooklyn resident and longtime war tax resister Ruth Benn sees it a bit differently. “You learn to adjust your lifestyle to the resistance,” Benn told me. “It helped me to live more simply—to not own seizable property and to live on cash and not keep so much in bank accounts.” Others view these adjustments through a wider lens of prefigurative politics. “I think of some people who live a simple life, but a very rich life in terms of homesteading,” said Chrissy Kirchhoefer, an outreach consultant with NWTRCC. “I think some of these people would identify as war tax resisters, but it’s such a comprehensive lifestyle, incorporating other aspects of wanting to live lives of integrity.” Much like Hedemann’s landline, this option of war tax resistance offers both a means and an ends.
A second option is to refuse to pay only the percentage of one’s tax that equals the proportion of the federal budget devoted to war. But, in addition to the elusiveness of that magic number, Wilson points out that “the same proportion of what you do pay will still go for these.” The pesky thing about taxes is you can’t decide where they go. “Do nothing about filing, refuse to obey summonses, and take the consequences,” writes Wilson, describing the third option. This option, similar to tax fraud, carries the highest risk of getting “Wesley Sniped”—named after the actor who spent 28 months in federal prison on misdemeanor charges of willful failure to file federal income tax returns.
The last option, Wilson advises, would be to file but not pay, and “write to the tax bureau and explain to them what you are doing and why you believe you are justified in doing it,” to which he adds, “Be respectful to the authorities and comply with summonses.” This seems to be the approach of choice for many resisters. “Unlike other tax protesters, who come up with wacky theories about being ‘sovereign citizens’ or writing ‘nunc pro tunc’ [a Latin phrase meaning “now for then, which some tax protesters believe has a legal effect that nullifies the IRS’s tax collecting authority] on their returns, War Tax Resisters might prepare their returns as thoroughly as anybody, but refuse to pay all or part of the tax,” writes Forbes contributor Peter Reilly.
The meticulousness with which resisters file seems to convey the message: this isn’t about taxes, it’s about war.
There are other good reasons for filing. For one, the risks and penalties are lower. But more to the point, the principled war tax resisters I’ve spoken to actually want the attention of the IRS—which is theoretically easier to get when you let them know why you’re not paying. “I actually send in my 1040 every year, along with a letter saying, ‘This is why there’s no payment for federal taxes,’ with whatever war is going on at the time,” Benn told me. “And there’s almost always one.” Benn is not an outlier—NWTRCC has dozens of similar letters on its website, dating back to the 1980s. A couple of those letters came from Larry Bassett, who earned a certain renown among the war tax resistance community after inheriting $1 million in 2016 and refusing to pay the $128,005 tax bill that came with it.
This is a scary prospect for some. As the least liked government agency, the only feeling toward the IRS that rivals repulsion is fear. “People often become panic-stricken, it seems, in the presence of IRS agents, and have sometimes been known to faint,” Wilson writes. “They feel that they are up against an official police which possesses unlimited power and from which there is no appeal.” Decades later, Mating’s narrator has a similar feeling. “Anybody decent has urges against paying taxes when the realpolitik gets too egregious, but in America not paying your taxes is not an option for the average person,” she says. “There is such a life and death thing as a credit rating.” Then, as now, the IRS looms large in the public imagination as an all powerful bureaucratic grim reaper that no one, save the very rich, can escape.
Risks ranging from hefty financial penalties to imprisonment do exist, and war tax resistance workshops rightfully begin with a litany of legal disclaimers. But the IRS’s outsized reputation is largely unearned. Even Bassett’s self-titled “open act of massive resistance” has not elicited more than a series of threatening letters from the IRS. “I am determined to up the ante on a more significant government response,” Bassett wrote in a letter from 2017. “I don’t want to let them quietly ignore me or process me routinely.” The same is true for Benn and many other resisters. Despite their brazen tax resistance and redirection, the IRS has only nibbled at the edges, garnishing a few wages here and there. Overall, it’s a surprising lack of action from a government agency with a post-apocalyptic, step-by-step plan to resume collecting taxes just weeks after a potential nuclear war.
Resisters attribute some of this impunity to risk mitigation: seeking self-employment, using pay apps like Venmo, avoiding credit cards, and the like. A decade of budget cuts has also left the hobbled agency less capable of enforcement in general. But some evidence suggests that the IRS intentionally leaves war tax resisters in particular alone. With more tax delinquents than agents to chase them down, the IRS may be choosing its battles wisely. “I think the IRS feels they’ll have a better image if they’re going after a tax protestor, who they can say has just been [avoiding taxes] for their own selfish needs,” Rice recently told CoinDesk. In another example, one internal policy memo from 2013 reversed a previous IRS position which considered forms with war objections to be “frivolous” submissions worthy of an additional $5,000 penalty. On the other hand, writing “nunc pro tunc” on a return will incur that hefty fine.
Property seizures, another great IRS bogeyman, have dwindled to record low numbers. While some resisters might suggest never accumulating property in the first place, the most principled resisters view this downturn with frustration. As the filmmakers of the 1997 documentary “An Act of Conscience,” which tells the story of the big bad IRS seizing the home of two war tax resisters in 1989, can likely attest, this does wonders for publicizing the cause. “We’re hoping that a war tax resister will get arrested,” Hedemann said half-jokingly at a recent workshop. “We could build a terrific campaign around it.”
For the federal government, there always seems to be money for the defense budget. There’s always another war, a new enemy, and the government refuses to spare a single dime in service of national security, even if that money goes to an ever-ballooning Pentagon that has failed every audit it has ever undergone.
As international relations scholar Bernard Brodie once wrote, describing how a president with a large military power will be tempted to use it, “One way to keep people out of trouble is to deny them the means of getting into it.” War tax resistance seeks to do just that: to deprive the government its ability to get into trouble in the name of the American citizen.♦
