It’s that time of year again. I prepare tax returns for our family, something I’ve done since I got my first W-2 job after high school. While filling out 1040s and paying taxes is never fun, it seems especially egregious this year. It’s not simply that the government pursues policies I vehemently oppose. It’s the realization of what is happening in this country. We are victims of the greatest smash-and-grab robbery in human history.

Look past the destruction of civil rights, long-standing institutions, and cultural norms, and you’ll see a lawless syndicate funneling the wealth of our nation into their pockets. How else do you explain that the President’s net worth has soared by $3 billion since the start of his second term, along with the $10 billion “brokerage fee” he’s supposed to get for arranging the sale of TikTok. (For a position where he’s supposed to be the servant of the people, he sure does a good job at serving himself.) And there’s the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” which is a big ugly gutting of medical insurance subsidies, education funding, FEMA, and other services working people depend on so his billionaire buddies get massive tax cuts.

I wouldn’t call the President a crime boss, though. Gangsters like Al Capone helped poor people. The convicted felon in the Oval Office has never had a generous impulse in his entire life, unless he personally and massively benefitted from it.

Racism and white Christian nationalism also provide cover for the rampant greed and corruption. It’s as President Lyndon B. Johnson warned, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Same is true with the extreme misogyny presented by the Heritage Foundation and manosphere podcasters. Lonely young men are promised a mythologized 1950s household with a dutiful housewife and obedient children while they’re being stripped of any means of supporting a family with a single income.

The war against Iran? It’s also a part of this theft. As President Eisenhower said in 1953:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

Right-wingers like to describe taxes as theft, but that’s because they’re the ones doing the thieving. I didn’t send a chunk of my hard-earned wages to the US Treasury so Pete Hegseth could spend $5 million on lobster. I didn’t contribute to Social Security for nearly 50 years so Palantir (founded by people who got the wrong lessons from Tolkien) could turn our nation into a digital gulag.

At this point, the keyboard revolutionaries declare, “Why don’t you just refuse to pay your taxes?” Look, I’m taking a big enough risk these days expressing my views. Why make it easier for the jackboots by committing what has long been a felony? An individual is easy to crush. But by standing together, we are powerful.

This coming Saturday, March 28, is the next No Kings Day. If you think protests are useless liberal window dressing, guess again. Pressure works. Look at how many of their worst actions have been curtailed or cancelled because of large and vocal public resistance. It also sends a message to the rest of the world. By showing our rejection of this regime and its horrible actions, our alienated allies will know that they can work with us again when this criminal enterprise comes to its inevitable end.

We are being robbed, but we don’t have to roll over and let them take everything we have. Through unity, we can fight back.

Related topics:

Taxes and the social contract The price we pay Why I’m voting for Kamala Harris for president It’s time to change your mind

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