Leftists are Refusing to Pay Taxes to Protest Iran War, Deportations

Leftists are Refusing to Pay Taxes to Protest Iran War, Deportations

The media has been fawning as of late over leftists who are refusing to pay their taxes in order to protest the war in Iran or the deportations of illegal immigrants.

WBEZ recently ran a highly slanted article comparing a wealthy attorney, Rachel Cohen, to civil rights marchers in the 1960s. Cohen became famous in liberal circles a year ago for criticizing her then-employer, Skadden Law, for working with the Trump administration. She now works part-time for a law firm and posts profanity-laced Instagram videos in her free time.

The news outlet reports:

When Chicago attorney Rachel Cohen sat down to do her taxes earlier this year, she thought about the half-dozen times she had been tear-gassed or struck with pepper pellets at protests against federal deportation tactics.

“I was thinking about my willingness to be hit with chemical weapons,” Cohen said. “And I couldn’t square giving the federal government $10,000 with being willing to get arrested or put my body on the line.”

Still, Cohen says she can get away with refusing to pay her federal taxes because she has white privilege.

She told WBEZ:

I think that, particularly as a Harvard-educated white woman with a social media platform, it’s really important that I do my research before I go and urge people to do something, or in this case tell them about something that I’m doing, because I’ve been very careful not to encourage other people to do tax resistance but to document why I’m doing it and the thought process.

University of Chicago law professor David Weisbach praised Cohen’s actions.

“The whole point of civil disobedience is to change people’s views about the matter,” he said.

“Martin Luther King, that’s what he did. They march on a bridge, they break the law, the law was unjust, and they changed people’s views about race,” Weisbach said. “But did he directly change a law? Not so much. He changed people’s views, which caused laws to change.”

Cohen is not the only attorney advocating that people break the law and refuse to pay taxes.

In late March, a “lawyer and climate advocate” named Clara Vondrich boasted in The Guardian that she was not paying her taxes.

“Refusing to consent to government overreach through civil disobedience is a bedrock value that has kept our democracy intact,” Vondrich wrote on March 26. She is currently the senior counsel at Public Citizen, a left-wing group.

“It is the portal through which civil rights were born for women and Black people, and continues to be used as a shield against injustice to people and the environment,” she said, praising her own actions.

Of course, Vondrich said she generally does support people paying their taxes, even if she is not doing so herself this year.

“I believe in contributing my fair share to the common pot,” she wrote. “But this war has short-circuited our democratic processes and our representatives were not consulted – call it taxation without representation.”

The New York Times likewise ran a highly positive article about tax resistance, noting the practice “has long been woven into America’s fabric, predating even the Boston Tea Party.”

Still, one has to wonder if the same media outlets would be as positive if conservatives were refusing to withhold taxes to protest, say, Planned Parenthood, or money going to DEI initiatives.

 

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