War Tax Resistance (WTR), the last non-violent off ramp for the United States
The United States is experiencing a kind of atypical civil unrest. While gun violence has always been part of the United States settler colonial history, today it is occurring at an unprecedented level, exemplified most notably by the "mass shooting", a cultural phenomenon notarized by the United States, but which has begun to feature throughout the global west. The Gun Violence Archive (GVA) defines mass shotting as "four or more people shot and/or killed in a single incident, at the same general time/location not including the shooter".
According to figures from GVA there were 504 mass shootings cases in the United States in 2024. The total number of gun violence deaths (all causes) in the United States was 41,038 [1] which is larger than many death tolls from active war zones around the world. It could be argued that many people living in the United States today fail to grasp the seriousness of a nation that has become apathetic to these normalized annual statistics, coupled with a society that is armed to the teeth with military grade weaponry. Amplifying the likelihood of large-scale violence is a largely federalized paramilitary police force being tasked more and more against its own citizenry.
This trajectory points to a steady transition from this unique brand of civil unrest towards civil war. From the blind and unwavering patriotic conservative American flag wavier to the liberal hypocritical virtue signaling "we respect all" yard signer, everything points to more of the same regarding electoral politics in the future. As each consecutive administration, whether Democratic or Republican, has allowed for the continuous continuity of agenda that has always accompanied imperialism we see a hollowing-out domestically, devastating the middle class, and the increasing exploitation of the working class and poor who are seeing their lives reduced to hell through the austerity of capitalism.
The progression towards large-scale violence becomes increasingly obvious when we look at further harms perpetrated by the United States government directed at its own citizenry, tolerated and endorsed by voters of both political party administrations. To understand this, we must take a good look at actions taken by both corporate political parties while in power, sanctioned and cheered on by their followers throughout past election cycles. Within a highly polarized society with the only perceived potential for change originating from one of the two corporate parties, there is increasing fear, animosity, and anger directed towards the "other side". There has been no deviation from this pattern both partisan ideologies held onto with unflinching religious-like fervor, creating the setting for either side to endorse harms against the other enforced by state and federal powers. The obvious potential for increased violence by each side of the U.S. capitalist coin is demonstrated by either’s capacity to endorse large scale harms towards a perceived threat represented by their fellow citizens.
LOCKDOWNS, MANDATES, AND THE COOPTATION OF SCIENCE FOR PROFIT
COVID-19 mandates and lockdowns under a Biden/Harris administration, and the mass firing of people who refused to take the mRNA vaccine is one such example. The capacity for the Liberal Progressive, Democratic Voter to willfully and with full participation endorse harms on their perceived enemy, their conservative/MAGA, "anti-science", fellow Americans is clearly evident. Thousands of medical professionals, staff, nurses, doctors, and surgeons, were terminated from their positions after vaccine mandate deadlines came and passed. Thousands more in various other fields across the country were also abruptly cut off from their source of income and with it their ability to live. Thousands of small businesses across the nation closed never to reopen, specifically harming the working and shrinking middle class less able to absorb and mitigate these disruptions to their lives.
One of the most shocking aspects of these events were the responses of many of those who endorsed and voted for these harms to be visited on their fellow citizens. Emphasized in statements like, "well it was the best option we had at time" exemplify the callous, thoughtless, and dehumanizing views of many in support of a Democratic Biden/Harris administration COVID-19 narrative towards those deemed "anti-science" and a threat. These policies caused untold harms, devastating the lives of those on the receiving end. The reverberations from the increased depression, anxiety, substance use, suicidality, and subsequent death are still being felt today.
The COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates implemented and enforced under a Biden/Harris Democratic administration had nothing to do with science. This cult-like belief in partisan Democratic Party rhetoric, lacking in scientific basis, is illustrated perfectly by a poll taken during the first Trump administrations, Operation Warp Speed mRNA vaccine development program.
"According to a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation published Sept. 10, 2020, a majority of U.S. adults, 62%, said they’re worried that pressure from the White House could lead the FDA to approve a vaccine before it’s determined to be safe and effective." [2]
A few months later after the Biden/Harris administration wins the presidency continuing with the same mRNA vaccine development program under a new name. The Biden/Harris administration then initiates the hijacking of science, "safe and effective" become words from god, and anyone who refused for any reason to accept any aspect of the lockdowns and vaccine mandates became an enemy who must be removed from society. This unbelievable accomplishment initiated through captured regulatory bodies in the United States along with corporate pharmaceutical companies' unquenchable desire to generate profits removed medical freedom from patients' rights by nullifying one of the oldest tenets of the medical profession, the Hippocratic Oath. Juxtapose these two versions of the Hippocratic oath with the COVID-19 response and we can begin to see just how far off base many have allowed the medical model to take us.
“Do no harm” is to avoid exposing people to additional risks through our actions.
“Do no harm” means taking a step back from an intervention to look at the broader context and mitigate potential negative effects on the social fabric, the economy and the environment.
ICE, THE NEW BROWNSHIRTS
The Republican right MAGA voter has always had the same capacity for visiting harms on fellow human beings with a religious fervor. The federally coordinated raids against undocumented peoples by the paramilitary agency ICE has become the avatar for racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant sentiment shared and exalted by Trump-voting Americans. Relying on the ignorant and easy justification presupposing the problems experienced by the conservative MAGA working- and middle-class Republican voter can be remedied simply by closing the boarder and deporting the people who have become the target of their rage now boiling up to the surface under the second Trump administration is preposterous.
The Republican MAGA conservative Trump voters have no pretense about the harms being directed at those they have dehumanized. In the past this open pension for justice through violence separated them from their Blue MAGA counterparts at least in rhetoric, but currently with a voting Democratic constituency that feels perfectly comfortable with a genocide in Gaza and U.S. proxy war with Russia this is no longer the case. The black and brown people originating largely from the global south who have become the ire of the ultranationalist deportation movement are mostly people simply trying to escape the conditions and consequences of the imperialist agenda of the United States exerted on the Americas.
The vile balaclava-adorning ICE state terrorists cover their faces because of the shame of their violent actions directed at the most vulnerable who have been displaced from their countries of origin due to violence and unrest. Requiring dehumanization, these aggressive raids employ only individuals who are true believers within the ranks of these ICE storm troopers. They fail to see the utter hypocrisy in the adornment of United States flag patches while they themselves make up the working and middle classes, only allowed a pass into the capitalist society because they are the acting stick of the United States. Their failure to recognize that their friends, family, and they themselves could all be at the other end of the barrel in a society rapidly becoming fascist is their blind spot. The bloated bureaucracy that is ICE and the tens of thousands of believers that make up their ranks are class traitors and they are our glimpse into the near future.
CAPITALIST THOUGHT LEADERS AND APOLOGISTS FOR HARM
The capacity for widespread violence in the form of civil unrest and civil war in the United States is a constant. There are no movements, actions, or levers within electoral politics steering the ship away from this eventuality. Those who as a collective refuse to dialogue, siloing their contradictions through the all-inclusive ideologies of red and blue MAGA, falling into line under the same banner of American exceptionalism. This is the path to increased domestic confrontation and violence as it offers nothing new.
Whether you are influenced by the liberalism represented best by post 2016 Noam Chomsky or the Christian Conservative rhetoric of Charlie Kirk, endlessly voting either Republican or Democrat you have with full knowledge endorsed harms on the middle, working class, and poor. It is this very same American exceptionalism that creates the impulse to mystify, apologize for, and maintain silence on the aforementioned harms perpetrated on fellow human beings. It is not the vote counted that is important when determining the almost certain outcome of civil war within the United States. It is what that vote means regarding the possibility or impossibility of this country moving away from capitalism through peaceful means.
The intentional amnesia required to blindly follow these two dead ends is so strong that we must revisit again and again the failed and immoral logic that at the time justified the harms visited upon sizable portions of society. Noam Chomsky on October 24, 2021, on the podcast Primo Radical, when asked about the practical application of providing food to communities forcibly separated from society due to their refusal to take the mRNA vaccine stated.
"...well, such people have to be, they should have the decency to remove themselves from the community if they refuse to do that then measures have to be taken to safeguard the community from them then comes the practical question that you ask. How can we get food to them, well that's actually their problem, uh of course if they really become destitute then yes you have to move in with some measures to secure their survival just as you do with people in jail for example..."
From an August 19, 2025, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, his own words of hate couched in non-descriptive patriotic, seemingly benign language, but in which we can see the racism, xenophobia, and violence baked into mass deportation being the fuel required for that engine.
"...I love this country, and I hate to see what mass migration is doing to it. It's not a racial thing. Think it's a thumos thing. And as America goes, the entire civilization goes.
WTR, THE LAST NONVIOLENT PATH AWAY FROM CAPITALISMS INSANITY
Both of these prepackaged political narratives describe different ideologies within the all-encompassing concept of American exceptionalism. They both gloss over the harms and the violence that is required to apply these policies in the real world. The non-violent form of activism that is war tax resistance exists outside of capitalism and has the potential to grind to a halt the endless war, imperialism, and environmental destruction of the planet, that it creates. The concept is as simple as the withholding of taxes that finance war or militarism of any kind. This action does not take a movement, charismatic leader, or fundraising, only the will to do so.
There is at least as much potential for radical activism including WTR in the United States today as at any time in its history. Never before have we seen such a divide between the super-rich and extreme poor, now right outside our doors in full view increasing our collective consciousness as to the class war being waged against the marginalized majority. Mental illness is at an all-time high, impacting every citizen of the United States either indirectly or directly. A society replete with Anomie, characterized in French sociologist Emile Durkheim’s book, On Suicide as,
“A state of hopelessness and despair due to the disintegration of social bonds that drive individuals and societies to personal and collective acts of self-destruction.”
While this destructive phenomenon may not necessarily allow for collective energy to be exerted towards peaceful revolutionary ends, it does allow for a radical paradigm shift for millions away from the red/blue American Exceptionalism that capitalism has seamlessly integrated into our daily life. Through the full expression of the internet age with which we have arrived, there is the potential to reach people around the globe with the peaceful and unifying tactic of WTR. This is terrifying to the state and collective corporate forces of imperialism and endless war because of its simplicity and actionability. The idea of WTR could be unveiled to and utilized by countless Americans who have very different working-class lives, but who could come to recognize the class war that has been visited upon all of us and that which we all must fight by any means necessary. As you think about how impossible it feels, attempting to conceptualize the plunge into this non-violent leftist tactic, remember the words of Mark Fisher in his seminal book, Capitalist Realism - Is There No Alternative?
"It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."
[1] https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/past-tolls
[2] https://www.kff.org/health-information-trust/kff-health-tracking-poll-september-2020/
