In 2003, the activist Julia Butterfly Hill—best known for the 738 days she spent living in an endangered California redwood tree to prevent it from being cut down in the late 1990s—held a press conference in San Francisco announcing that she would refuse to pay $150,000 in federal taxes. Instead, she declared, she planned on rerouting the money to after-school programs, community gardens, and various other ends. “I ‘redirect’ my taxes rather than ‘resisting’ my taxes. I actually take the money that the IRS says goes to them and I give it to the places where our taxes should be going,” Hill explained in a 2005 interview with The Edge. “And in my letter to the IRS I said, ‘I’m not refusing to pay my taxes. I’m actually paying them but I’m paying them where they belong because you refuse to do so.’” 

The IRS must have received many such letters that year. One woman—not a prominent activist like Hill but a mother of two living in Massachusetts—had her letter reprinted in the New England-based pacifist newsletter Peacework. “I am a responsible citizen, earning a salary at a local health clinic,” the letter explains. “I am not an anarchist. I am taking whatever steps I can to prevent the murder and torture of my fellow humans.” The $1,507 she owed the IRS would instead “go to research to stop AIDS and cancer, the construction of a battered women's shelter in Somerville, and programs which empower homeless people in Boston.” 

Perhaps both women had taken a literal page out of War Tax Resistance: A Guide to Withholding Your Support From the Military, which had come out in its fifth edition in early 2003. It was a timely release: “As we go to press, President George W. Bush—promising a global war without end against terrorism—has the U.S. military massing on the borders of Iraq for a possible ground invasion,” the book opens. “Military spending, which had been on a modest decline through the 1990s, is once again rising as sharply as it did during the Reagan years.” On the precipice of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the American left found itself facing a war that would rival Vietnam in duration. Would the tactics that protesters had wielded against American imperialism during the 1960s and 1970s work in a new century—a new millennium?

In practice, war tax resistance is a three-step simpler than any chassé: one stops withholding tax money through work, refuses come tax season to pay the portion of the income tax associated with war-related spending, then personally redirects that money to causes associated with peace. The amount of money in question could be as little as a few symbolic dollars or as much as 45 percent of the estimated lump sum—the amount the War Resisters League estimates will go to past and present war-related spending in the 2025 fiscal year. “There is a degree of tax resistance for every level of risk tolerance,” explained Ed Hedemann, author of War Tax Resistance, to the Village Voice in 2003.

About 8,000 Americans probably participated in war tax resistance during the War on Terror. The folks at the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC, pronounced like new trick) think that number is probably higher now. “Even before the invasion of Gaza, every year we would have 40,000 unique visitors to our website,” explains NWTRCC coordinator Lincoln Rice in an interview with Current Affairs. “Those four or five months after the invasion of Gaza leading up to Tax Day, we were having 20,000 unique visitors to our website every month. Our website crashed three different times… We had to keep expanding the bandwidth because we were having unprecedented traffic.” It is difficult to know how much of that traffic translated into actual tax resistance, but if even 5,000 people refused to pay 45 percent of the average American income tax—about $7,898 in 2022—that’s more than $17 million that would have been redirected from the coffers of American warmongers.

Of course, $17 million is a mere drop in the bucket of the $849.8 billion of the federal budget dedicated to defense spending—but if the IRS’s history of abuse of tax resisters is any indication, then it would seem war tax resistance has an outsized impact on, at very least, the morale of the American war machine. Indeed, the refusal to pay taxes has been a powerful form of resistance against war and imperialism in North America since before the United States even existed. It may provide a potential mode of resistance against American funding for violence in Gaza, too.

In 1755, as the French and Indian War enveloped the colonies of North America in conflict, the Quaker community of Philadelphia found itself in a difficult position: caught between the civil obligation to pay taxes to the war effort and the spiritual demands of pacifism that are a central tenet of Quaker belief to this day. “To refuse the active payment of a Tax which our Society generally paid, was exceedingly disagreeable,” wrote the Quaker preacher John Woolman in his journal, “but to do a thing contrary to my Conscience appeared yet more dreadfull.” On December 16, 1755, Woolman drew up “an epistle of tender love and caution to Friends in Pennsylvania,” in which he (and the twenty-one fellow Friends who signed the document) explained that they “could most cheerfully contribute” to the tax if only military contributions were not part of the lump sum. “Suffering be the consequence of our refusal,” the epistle went on to say—and, indeed, the Philadelphia Meeting for Sufferings began that year a careful tabulation of the many material consequences endured by Friends who refused to fuel the engine of war. Even in the land of supposed religious freedom it would prove difficult to disentangle oneself from the bloodthirsty demands of the emerging American state.

Twenty years later, as the American Revolution raged, the same problem arose again. This time, the Military Association of Philadelphia and the Committee of Safety requested that Quakers make financial contributions in lieu of military service to the would-be American state. "Where the Liberty of all is at stake,” explained the Committee in a petition to the Philadelphia Assembly, “every Man should assist in its support, and… where the Cause is common, and the benefits derived from an Opposition are universal, it is not consonant to justice or Equity that the Burdens should be partial.” The Meeting for Sufferings responded saying that such payments could only be made in breach of religious conscience by “Friends & others Conscientiously Scrupulous of bearing Arms.” But the Assembly soon surrendered to the demands of the Committee, ushering in a new “time of suffering” for the Quakers facing two options—military service or pecuniary compensation for the lack of service—both of which required tacit acceptance of the demands of war. Ultimately, the Meeting for Sufferings threw its moderate weight behind the Loyalist cause, which opposed American independence in favor of “loyalty” to the British crown.

The result was, by colonial standards, a shitstorm of epic proportions. Thomas Paine accused the Friends of “dabbling at matters, which the professed quietude of their principles instructed them not to meddle with,” while Samuel Adams stormed that “if they would not pull down Kings, let them not support tyrants!” Individual Quakers were targeted in the streets for refusing to pay tithes to the Continental Congress or use the currency it had issued to fund the war. The latter was the crime of a Delaware resident named John Cowgill, who was paraded through the streets of Dover with a sign declaring, “On the Circulation of the Continental Currency Depends the Fate of America,” on his back. Countless others were jailed or had their property seized and auctioned.

Already by the early 19th century, American citizenship came with strings attached: complicity in armed conflict. The Mexican War and Civil War both raised complicated questions for those opposed to military violence—the latter especially, as many Quaker pacifists were also stringent abolitionists. Two hundred years after the American Revolution, as the United States embarked upon two decades of war on Vietnam, the Philadelphia Quakers were grappling yet again with the question of war taxes. Two Quaker employees, “a Monthly Meeting secretary and a youth worker for the Peace Committee,” had “asked their employers to cease withholding income tax from their salaries,” and the problem made its way to the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting for discussion in 1966. The Meeting concluded that “Friends, whatever their judgments about a particular action, are sympathetic toward those who engage in it for reasons of conscience,” and so they set about “devis[ing] a formula acceptable to the Internal Revenue Service and to Congress, which would permit persons to withhold that proportion of their income taxes applicable to military purposes and apply it to constructive purposes of government.” 

By then, the long-held Quaker opposition to pecuniary support for war had gone mainstream, in no small part thanks to horrors of the atom bomb—and the fact that, due to the advent of the income tax in 1943, every American had helped pay for it. “You pay the bills of war, you accept war jobs, you bombed Nagasaki,” declares a 1949 leaflet distributed by the War Resisters League-allied pacifist group Peacemakers. “If you keep on doing these routine, but really immoral things, you will soon bomb hundreds of other cities.” Individual Peacemakers, like athlete Eroseanna Robinson—who could have been an international track star had she not declined the opportunity to compete in the 1958 USA–USSR Track and Field Dual Meet to avoid being a political pawn in the Cold War—held the line at enormous personal cost. “If I pay income tax, I am participating in… destruction,” Robinson told Jet Magazine in 1960, amidst a high-profile legal battle. Ultimately, she was sentenced to a year in prison for refusing to pay her taxes and cooperate with either the IRS or the courts but was released after only three months following a successful 22-day hunger strike.

The ranks of secular war tax resisters only grew as the Vietnam War dragged on. In 1966, Robinson and her fellow resisters were joined by a further 370, including Joan Baez, Dorothy Day, and Noam Chomsky, who signed onto an ad in the Washington Post that year declaring that they would not pay the 23 percent of the 1965 income tax that would finance the war in Vietnam. They, in turn, were joined in 1967 by a further 528—these including Gloria Steinem—who rejected the 10 percent war surtax that had just been appended to the income tax. By 1982, an estimated 10,000 Quakers and at least as many fellow travelers across the United States were withholding from the Internal Revenue Service money earmarked for the military, to the tune of as much as 36 percent of their annual income tax. “I hate to be in the position to refuse taxes, because I want to support so many things worth supporting,'' explained one 73-year-old Friend in an interview with The New York Times, a sentiment not so different from that of the Quaker preacher John Woolman two centuries earlier. “'I’m law-abiding, but I think there's a point where civil disobedience is required if the Government is compromising religious freedom and the conscience of the individual.”

There’s a point where civil disobedience is required. It might have been the Quakers who conceptualized war tax resistance during the days of the French and Indian War, but it was Henry David Thoreau who wrote most passionately in defense of the tactic in his 1849 essay Civil Disobedience. “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year,” writes Thoreau, “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. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.” His target was American involvement in the Mexican War, but his words would find receptive audiences among the ranks of Quaker and secular resisters who would come—over the course of the 20th century—to think of their resistance to the war tax as not merely the expression of personal scruple, but a powerful means to protest American warmongering abroad. In the meantime, Civil Disobedience would become required reading in high school classes across the country. The essay has stuck around, but the numbers of war tax protesters have decreased since the 1970s. Where, in the bloody decades since the Vietnam War, has war tax protest gone?

On December 3, 1989, the activist Randy Kehler was arrested for being inside his own home. He had been expecting the arrest—planning for it, even—but it still came as a bit of a shock to Kehler and his wife. “As a result of our refusal to pay war taxes—to pay federal taxes, 50 percent of which are used to pay for past, present, and future wars… the government has auctioned our home, bought it from themselves, and now has taken—they would like to think they have taken—possession,” explained Kehler’s wife Betsy Corner in an oral history interview in early 1990. “They arrested Randy for being in the house. […] The next day, people occupied the house … [and have] taken turns being in the house the last […] six weeks. We’re keeping possession of the house in the sense that our friends and supporters are living in it.” 

The couple had stopped paying their federal income tax in 1977 in opposition to U.S. military action and intervention abroad. They would calculate their owed taxes and then instead send that amount to victims of U.S.-sponsored wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador, as well as women’s shelters, veterans’ outreach programs, the homeless, and other organizations in their town of Colrain, Massachusetts. As a result, the IRS launched a lengthy war on the couple that culminated in their eviction, making the Corner-Kehler family the last one to lose a house to war tax resistance. Reflecting ten years later on the history of war tax resistance, the War Resisters League was circumspect about state-sponsored prosecution. “If war tax resistance were totally ineffective,” reads their 2003 guide, “we wouldn't have to worry about a reaction from the government.”

And yet, the shadow of what happened to the Corner-Kehler family is a long one—despite the fact that such attacks by the IRS on conscientious objectors to the war tax are exceedingly rare, especially now. “I don't think [the IRS is] … that scary on a logical level,” explains Lincoln Rice, “but… it's been enculturated into us to really fear any sort of non-payment of taxes—even though [those taxes are] oftentimes being used for the most terrible things.” Indeed, the taxman is one of the classic bogeymen of American culture: an urban legend about the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) even has its employees branding Americans with the Mark of the Beast in order to receive Social Security checks. “I’m crazy enough to take on Batman,” says the Joker in a 1998 cartoon. “But the IRS? No, thank you.”

Some of the IRS’s frightening reputation was no doubt earned during the late 20th century, when its abuses culminated in a 1998 Senate hearing that exposed a culture of “cowboy agents” who “think that the end of putting away the bad guys justifies […] intrusive, intimidating and oppressive investigations." The hearing drew to a close the most aggressive period of IRS pursuit of war tax resisters. “I don't know that many war tax resisters who had their homes taken [by the IRS] … [but] I know a lot of war tax resisters from the ’70s and ’80s who had their cars taken—and wage garnishments were almost a guaranteed thing,” says Rice. “During that time, the IRS was much better funded, and if you worked a wage job and refused to pay, you basically had a 100 percent chance that […] your wages were going to be garnished.” The fact was, however, that the government was on the defense: “[Tax resistance] definitely concerned the Nixon administration during the Vietnam War, [so] we did see, at that point, an uptick in criminal prosecution of war tax resisters.” But times have changed since the Vietnam War era—and now the IRS would seemingly rather not draw attention to war tax resistance, as the Corner-Kehler affair certainly had, even if it would mean recouping financial loss. “I became a war tax resister in the late ’90s,” muses Rice, “and I've never had my wages garnished ever.” 

Why, if not for fear of the IRS, has war tax resistance faded from popular consciousness? Perhaps it has to do with the changing nature of war. There is its sheer duration, for one thing: the War in Afghanistan dragged on for a whopping 20 years, making it the longest conflict in American history. Then there is its altered state: since 1973, soldiers are no longer draftees but men and women who have—for a variety of reasons—chosen to join the military. Their ranks are far smaller than the legions of Americans sent east during Vietnam, and the wars they fight are far more technologized than the combat of yore. All of this has contributed to a reality of war that is alienating despite its endurance, its immediacy tempered by time. “People have just gotten used to being at war, unfortunately,” theorizes one resister to The New Republic. And the war to which they are accustomed asks less of us than ever—just a little money, relatively speaking, in exchange for the huge cost in human lives abroad. 

Of course, that money adds up. According to NWTRCC, the average American pays as much as 45 percent of their taxes to the military, which translates to a massive annual Department of Defense budget. The further breakdown of taxation is chilling: in 2018, the average taxpayer worked 63 days to fund the military—and 31 of those days were for the sake of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and other private military contractors alone. The financialization of war (the process by which banks, hedge funds, private equity, and private companies have tethered profit to conflict) poses a particular challenge to those seeking to resist war-making, as does the fact that recent wars have been funded almost entirely by debt—in no small part because explicit war taxes are unpopular, capable of dragging down support for a given war by as much as 15 percent.

At the same time, war tax resistance might seem to lack the symbolic urgency that never-ending wars demand. It is a mode of resistance that, by nature, stops no traffic and draws no attention. To know your neighbor is a war tax resister, they would need to have told you—or you would need to work for the IRS. The sheer horror of American support for and perpetration of violence in the Middle East, meanwhile, seems to demand the sort of protest that makes the news: demonstrations, occupations, immolations. There is a quietness to war tax resistance that would seem to render it almost too amiable in the face of American war crimes abroad.

Finally, from an ideological perspective, there is the following: socialists have hitched themselves to the payment of taxes, with “tax the rich” becoming a popular slogan, and the opposition to taxes has come to be a stance typically associated with right-wing beliefs. Despite the long shadow of Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols, today most committed “sovereign citizens” spend their time neither building bombs nor storming buildings but rather weaponizing the banal. They engage in ceaseless traffic law violations, acts of tax evasion, and, above all, paper terrorism—i.e., the production of enormous quantities of false liens, frivolous lawsuits, fraudulent letters of credit, and other pseudolegal filings that seek to jam up local courts, governments, and businesses like malfunctioning printers. This is the extreme end of right-wing opposition to taxation, but even the most middle-of-the-road Republican wants their taxes cut. It is perhaps in a kind of symbolic opposition to this that the Left has become the political face of paying one’s taxes, though only programs like Social Security and entities like the embattled Department of Education represent anything like what socialist taxation would theoretically fund at the federal level. 

So, is there a place for war tax resistance in our troubled present, as the U.S. uses tax dollars to fund Israeli war-making to the tune of billions? The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee thinks so—though not necessarily because they believe we’ll ever succeed in defunding war from below. “War tax resistance is an act of empowerment against empire,” explains NWTRCC outreach coordinator Chrissy Kirchhoefer in an interview with Current Affairs. It is not merely about the amount of money one withholds, but the feeling it produces: one of agency in the face of the war machine. “[And] it's not [just about] withholding from something that we don't believe in […] but it's also [about] giving to what we do believe in.” She explains that war tax resistance is an opportunity for things like mutual aid—the collaborative pooling of resources at the local level—and other programs and projects that cannot or do not receive support from the government. It is, in short, a way to put our money where our mouths are in the here and now.

American war tax resisters maintain that their protest is at least as effective as demonstrations in the street—perhaps even more so. There is a quote popular among their ranks: “Let them march all they want, as long as they pay their taxes.” Like an American spin on Let them eat cake, it was supposedly said by President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State Alexander Haig in response to a 1982 march for peace—although today no one can find a sure source for its origin. But perhaps it is equally powerful as an apocryphal quote, one conceivably said by any member of the establishment—for Republicans and Democrats are united, ultimately, in their vilification of protest and their deification of wealth. And it makes sense as a sentiment: marches might make headlines, but money is the true engine of war. Perhaps war tax resistance is the only form of protest capable of hitting the government where it really hurts.