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Americans are awake at the wheel and ready to learn the truth about the tax...
February 17- In 1621, Myles Standish is
appointed commander of the Plymouth Colony. In 1801, Thomas Jefferson is
elected President of the United States. In 1819, the U.S. House passes the
Missouri Compromise. In 1865, the Union army burns Columbia, South Carolina to
the ground. In 1867, the first ship passes through the newly-opened Suez
Canal. In 1996, after losing to the machine a week earlier, Garry Kasparov
beats Deep Blue at chess.
Anniversaries of interest for
each day of this week will be found throughout the newsletter
below.
Please don't just
read what I post here (or anywhere), and nod your head sagely or
approvingly and then move on to other things. I don't post in order
to affirm your sense of things. I post in order to equip you with
perspectives and arguments with which to
educate others, and in the
expectation that you will forward my posts to other people (or
direct them to those posts). PLEASE do those things,
especially in recognition of the fact
that my posts are heavily suppressed. They will NOT get out
if you don't get them out.
Remember, we won't win by only YOU knowing what I
present. We will win by LOTS OF OTHERS knowing what I present.
***
BTW, join me on The Shields Report
the first Saturday of every month at 5PM EDT!!
The Iron Is Hot Right Now,
Friends. Let's Not Waste This Opportunity!
American consciousness of government deceptions on
a massive scale has never been more acute. God forbid that the
oldest and most significant of such deceptions-- the lies about
the legal meaning of "income" in tax law and the limited scope
of the income tax-- should go unremarked in this rare moment of
clarity.
I WAS ASKED TO SAY A FEW WORDS to a
CtC
class organized by an educated activist in Texas
this past Saturday, and after welcoming the students
to the community and giving them a little insight
into what was in store for them I took a couple of
questions. The first of these was a bit surprising:
"Aren't those getting refunds just "falling through
the cracks"-- not victories for the rule of law, but
just fortunate mistakes by the tax agencies?"
Now it may be that the history of CtC
simply hadn't made it to the person asking this
question. Perhaps this person didn't know that the
CtC-educated community is now in its 22nd year of
complete recoveries of everything withheld from
earnings the government tax agencies would like to
treat as taxable but which really are not. Perhaps
this person didn't know that these recoveries total
in the $billions and involve hundreds of thousands
of properly filed declarations of no taxable
activity, which are answered--
after strict vetting-- with completely
straightforward tax agency acknowledgements, such as
this variety:
...or this variety:
...and even the variety which makes the
lesson more clear than any other, for coming after
rare but occasional tax agency efforts to turn back
the tide by one corrupt ploy or another.
Such an exceptional case was just
shared with me last week, and I will now share it
with you as an example of this third and most
telling variety of tax agency acknowledgement of
CtC's correctness about the tax.
10 DAYS AGO, Chad Steffens & Bre'
Cruger secured a complete refund of everything
withheld from them as federal taxes, FICA included,
during 2023-- plus interest. But this was
accomplished only after having to sternly address a
little bad behavior by the IRS. Here's what
happened:
After having first filed an original
return for 2023 in the darkness imposed by the
decades-long government campaign of disinformation
and deception about what is tax-relevant "income"
(and what is not), Chad and Bre' learned the
liberating truth about the income tax from study of
CtC. Accordingly, this past September the couple
filed
a
1040X amending that original return in the
bright light of their now accurate understanding of
the tax.
As can be easily seen by an examination
of
that amending return, Chad and Bre' were crystal
clear in the reasons for the amendment and the
meaning and purpose of every entry in their return
package.
Despite the scrupulous care taken in
their 1040X package-- and its plain claim for the
return of the $48,077.89 that had been withheld from
them during 2023, the IRS took a shot at pretending
that Chad & Bre's refund claim was somehow
inoperative (or at intimidating them into abandoning
the claim).
Here is the response Chad & Bre' received to
their amended return, telling them that their 1040X
had been received, and that the IRS had adjusted
their account as requested, but that the
adjustment didn't change their tax or credits!
Chad & Bre' didn't miss a beat. On what
was probably the same day as the dark fog in an
envelope had arrived in their mailbox, the confident
and capable couple shot off
this uncompromising, well-educated reply,
standing tall on their rights and the law. That was
all it took.
No more than two weeks after the IRS
got that hard slap-back, the agency's
acknowledgement of the truth about the law was in
Chad & Bre's mailbox, with interest included, as
demanded:
Well done, Chad & Bre'!
SO, WHAT'S THE POINT of this lengthy
observation, you might ask. Just this:
Right now America is rocked on a daily
basis by one after another revelation of a decades-long
scam being run by some element of the state at the
expense of the public, while hedged-about the whole
time by lies or strategic silence from every
conceivable corner, including the judiciary, the media and private
professionals in affected industries. Think, for
instance, of the freshly-revealed lies about the
activities of USAID, and about the sobriety and good
character of the NIH and NIAID, and about the US
proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.
These new revelations come on top of the years of COVID
disinformation and suppression of accurate
information on that front-- still continuing to this
day. Think, too, of the lies about (past and ongoing)
widespread-- indeed, universal-- warrantless
government surveillance of Americans since 9/11.
Indeed, think about the lies incessantly (and still)
told about 9/11 itself. Think about the nonsense and
long debunked fictions about the Kennedy
assassination.
Think of the endless, absurd and
insulting assertions and mythology told on behalf of
Israel over the last 77 years, and continuing to
this day.
Think about Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, even
the sinking of the Maine and the Lusitania. All
of these are now widely recognized by Americans as
having been false stories conceived and deployed by
government officials to accomplish massive
expropriations of the American people-- not merely
of their treasure in many cases, but even of their
lives.
IN LIGHT OF ALL THESE revelatory
fireworks setting the sky aglow, with the American people freshly awakened
to deep and wide government misbehavior on an epic
scale, is this not a good time to vigorously share the news that the
longest-running of such scams, and the one most diligently
concealed and defended, has been the pretense that
the income tax reaches every economic activity?
Isn't this a good time to explain to
people the simple,
infinitely-well-supported-in-the-law fact that
really, the tax is limited to gains from specialized
activities to which the federal government is
effectively connected, and that all their lives,
Americans have been tricked into declaring their
earnings to be of this specialized kind, when the
vast majority of them are not?
Isn't this an especially good time in light of the Supreme
Court having transparently weighed-in on the side of the
truth just this past June-- not for the first time,
of course, but for the first time in 87 years? 87
years during which corrupt and voracious government
officials, aided and abetted by private sector
clients and a cowed lower court judiciary, had
instigated and nurtured the exploitative scam, which
sucked up $trillions without interruption until CtC
appeared 22 years ago and the scam began to crumble?
The answer to all those questions is
"YES!" It IS a good time.
In fact, it is the best possible time.
I hope all of you seize this moment in
our national life to get loud, proud and uncowed--
indeed, to get incessant!
If everyone reading these words were to
begin and continue a campaign to direct all
followers and friends with a simple message along
these lines:
"You've been lied to your
whole life about the income tax, and the truth is
amazing and wonderful. Go to
losthorizons.com/The16th.htm and start learning
that truth.
Efforts have been made to
dissuade you with disinformation from officialdom
and other things that will appear on Google and
Wikipedia (and from AI). Smears and attacks and even
ugly lawfare have been used against the person who
first
revealed this truth in 2003.
You must ignore all that
and take my word for it-- the proof of the pudding
is in the eating, and this is a tasty treat when you
just dig in. Hundreds of thousands of others have
done so, recovering $billions in property taken from
them as taxes which never should have been.
Trust me long enough to do
just a few hours of reading and viewing. You'll
thank me for cajoling you into doing so by the time
you've finished."
The iron is white-hot right now,
friends, and to top it off, we are in the middle of
the 2025 season of lies when millions of erroneous
W-2s and 1099s and such are flooding mailboxes
nationwide, making the truth about the tax a matter
of acutely-felt significance to the entire American
population.
Strike, and strike hard, and together
we can restore the republic.
"In a time of
universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary
act."
-George Orwell
Now, do you want this
article to make a difference? It only will
do so if YOU PASS IT ON TO OTHERS.
Please do that.
Use the permalink address
given above or below to post on social media. Or use the
"e-mail this article" link to send it to
someone else by that method.
Share these all, everywhere you can. Be your most
creative self in sending and "selling" these links. Do memes; make
gifs; respond to everything in the news that would be or have been
better had the state been small, or if Americans kept their money
for their own uses.
If you pay attention to the news and train yourself to
apply these perspectives, you will see a dozen things of which you
can make use in awakening other Americans to the virtues of having
the income tax correctly administered. Please, for my sake, for your
own sake, for the sake of your children and their future, make that
use.
IF YOU'RE NOT ALREADY GETTING THE NEWSLETTER delivered to your
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If you choose the social media option (or use it in
addition to other means, as I wish you would), PLEASE get the full value out of
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significantly improve their
visibility to others, and very much help the cause!!
My RSS feed:
(Members of the
state CtC Warrior forums
in AZ, CA, CO, FL, GA, IL, MI, MN, MO, NE, NY, NC, OH, OR, PA, SC,
TX, UT, VA, WA or WI, will continue to get the regular announcements
if the membership is set to receive email updates.)
NOTE: I will still not be engaging in
correspondence by
any of these alternative means-- those wishing to correspond with me should
continue to use direct email, as
specified here, for this purpose.
NOTE II: PLEASE help ensure that others in the
CtC community know about this change in newsletter delivery!!
*****
Not Letting This "Crisis" Go To Waste...
...an important action item opportunity.
FRIENDS, THE SPORADIC EASINGS of the despotic measures to
which most of the country has been subjected under
since the onset of the
COVID-19 hobgoblin narrative should not be
allowed to bleed off the head of steam you probably had been developing.
The offenses happened, and they're far from over. Stay hot.
And while you are all warmed up, and while others, if
they're smart, are just as hot, I'd like you to send an email (and
Facebook post, or whatever) with the following content to everyone you
can (with a request that they pass it along, in turn):
[Name], since March of 2020 you've
watched as over-fed state power has been used to literally destroy
classical Western civilization and impose a new despotic paradigm. No
dissent or debate permitted-- no permission or agreement sought.
YOU KNOW where this will end up if the arrogant
state power being used to make this happen isn't radically diminished in
size, influence, resources and popular support, and exposed as an
opportunistic exploiter of legal ignorance (an ignorance which it has
been nurturing in the average mind for decades).
Those things having not yet happened, you
should be quaking in your boots-- and you probably are.
Isn't it time-- and past time-- for you to
begin helping to make those desperately-needed defensive changes take
place? There is only one way these things can happen short of a
who-knows-what we'll-end-up-with explosion of violence. I'm going to
show it to you.
When you're done with that reading, you'll know
what to do next.
BTW, REMEMBER, ALSO, THAT EVERY AMERICAN has lately been given a stark lesson in the fact
that government officials at all levels will lie to you and violate the
law without batting an eye. They will do so any time it serves their agenda, and
you don't call them out for it.
If you know anyone who has been persisting in denial on the
truth about the income tax, you know such nonsense is usually be
grounded in some version or another of, "That can't be true..." or "They
would never do something like that...". Now's the time to put a pin in
that delusional bubble.
As the C19 hoax has starkly shown, "that" certainly CAN be true, and they
certainly WOULD do something
like that.
Use this evidence in all your
outreach efforts.
"It is not the function of our Government to keep the
citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to
keep the Government from falling into error."
-United States Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson
(Deceitful efforts to discourage Americans from
learning the truth about the "income tax")
FOR ALL THE YEARS SINCE 2003 when
CtC was first published, the government has engaged in a
concerted effort to frighten people away from its truths. This
effort involves official government websites and press releases
touting an occasional court ruling that appears to be at odds
with some
CtC-revelation (but without details sufficient to expose the
real substance of the ruling)--
and sometimes even more mendacious behavior.
Are the presentations and
resources offered on this site and in my other work of any value to you?
Tim Kendrick has posted
a video
on YouTube regarding donations. I didn't know what to do about
it to begin with; I don't do what I do intending for anyone to
feel obligated in any way.
But of course, no one IS obligated. I will continue
to make my work freely-available here, and in my books for only
the cost of a cheap paperback.
Thus, even though I post it here below, Tim's very
thoughtful personal resolution and encouragement to others is
just an invitation for consideration by those who may not be
conscious of the fact that I can't do what I do without support.
No one is to feel any pressure from it; if it moves anyone to
act let it be solely because it seems right.
All-in-all, just be the sort of person for others
that you would go to yourself for trustworthy leadership.
Leadership is a challenge. But it's not
complicated, and you can do it.
*****
Are You Having Trouble Spreading The
Word?
SKEPTICISM (SOMETIMES INVOKED BY FEAR) IS TO BE
EXPECTED when you're trying to explain to someone that
everything they've been encouraged their whole lives to
believe about something as entrenched and significant as the
income tax is basically nonsense. So here's a way to help
cut through the resistance:
Ask your listener how he or she would react if
you were to show an announcement from the Commissioner of
Internal Revenue admitting that the tax doesn't apply to the
earnings of most Americans and is misapplied most of the
time because people don't understand how it works? Or how
about if you showed a ruling from the Supreme Court saying
the same?
Now you just have to explain that
you're going to show exactly those things-- but because
the state really doesn't want people to know this, these
things haven't been said quite as forthrightly as we would
all wish. It's going to take a bit more work to take these
admissions in than is sufficient for just reading a press
release. But it'll be worth the effort...
IF YOU'RE NOT SPREADING THIS LINK with every bit of
energy you can, to school libraries, homeschool
families and community groups, your neighbors, your
family members, your pastors and
co-congregationalists, journalists, lawyers, CPAs,
members of congress, tax-agency workers, Wikipedia,
Anonymous, WikiLeaks, the Tax Foundation, everyone
in the "tax honesty" movement, the 9/11 truth
movement, other activist movements and everyone
else,
you have only yourself to blame for your
troubles with the tax, and a whole lot else of which
you might complain. It's on you.
WRITE A NICE, FRIENDLY AND BRIEF introductory note
explaining what will be seen at the link-- cryptic
is bad; excited is good-- and then send this WMI
(weapon of mass instruction) far and wide.
Remember: Real Americans don't accommodate fog, lies and a sliding scale of
adherence to the rule of law. Real American men and women stand up for the
truth and the law, come what may, knowing that it is only by setting the bar
at the top and enforcing it, come what may, that liberties are secured.
"Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be
strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be
highly rated."
-Thomas Paine
OUTREACH!!!
JOB ONE, PEOPLE!!! SPREAD. THE. WORD.
ONLY ONE THING WILL WIN YOU YOUR LIBERTY:
Spreading the truth. Accordingly, I've assembled
outreach resources into a new, dedicated page. Find it
here, and please, USE THESE TOOLS!! I can't
do this all by myself.
"In a time of
universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary
act."
The following is adapted from the
keynote speech George F. Will delivered at the Coolidge
Foundation’s Winter Gala at New York City’s Union League Club on
December 4, 2024.
I am in the company
tonight, as we all are, of the Coolidge Scholars and
Senators. One of the reasons I go to a baseball park
is to be around people who can do things I can’t do,
and there’s no way I could ever have been a Coolidge
Scholar. I salute them all for giving us a wonderful
bit of excellence.
I want to talk a bit about the man
we’re here to honor, but before I talk about the man, I want to
talk about a woman.
We live in a
president-centric country. Alas, that’s not what
Calvin Coolidge wanted, and it’s not what we had
when we had Coolidge. But today we define everything
by the president at the center of the solar system
around which everything else revolves. Therefore, it
is extraordinarily important how we understand our
presidents, and we have seen
biographers—non-academics usually, which is
interesting—change the way we think about presidents
and hence the way we think about our future. As
George Orwell
wrote, “Who controls the past controls the
future: who controls the present controls the past.”
We’ve seen this with David McCullough rehabilitating
John Adams. We’ve seen it with Ron Chernow
rehabilitating President Grant. But, most
importantly, we’ve seen it with Amity Shlaes
bringing back Calvin Coolidge.
He was, as she said, our Great
Refrainer, with an aptitude for brevity, as when he
said, “Inflation is repudiation.” Three words, that’s all
you need to say. His sixty-seven months at the helm of this
country were something that will never be repeated again. That
is, he left the government smaller than when he entered it. He
famously became vice president and then president because of
fifteen words: “There is no right to strike against the
public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” I think a more
telling and beautiful sample of the Coolidge spirit were the
thirteen words he spoke about his younger son, who suffered
a lingering, agonizing death in the White House: “When he was
suffering he begged me to help him. I could not.”
This is an antidote to the confessional
culture in which we live, the absolute eloquence of reticence. A
song by Alison Krauss and Union Station includes the lyric
“You say it best when you say nothing at all.” That’s the
Coolidge approach. Hilary Mantel, who has written wonderful
historical novels,
says the following, and it’s relevant to what Amity has
accomplished: “History is what people are trying to hide from
you, not what they are trying to show you. You search for it in
the same way you sift through a landfill: for evidence of what
people want to bury.”
Amity disinterred a buried reputation.
She is an intellectual archaeologist. She conducted a heroic
excavation of part of American history that the great and the
good wanted to be buried. Her biography of Coolidge is, of
course, a work of history, but it is also a historic act,
because it changed the way we think about an important moment in
our history.
LEARNING FROM COOLIDGE
Now, I have two points I want to make
tonight about Calvin Coolidge that are very germane to our
current conditions. First, he is the opposite of what we’ve come
to accept as normal: the rhetorical presidency. And second, this
man known for his reticence gave one of the half dozen best
speeches ever given by an American president, a speech that, if
adhered to, if taken seriously, would be the decisive antidote
to wokeness.
First, about the rhetorical presidency.
Somewhere in this club where we are tonight, there is a portrait
of Theodore Roosevelt. The club is very proud of the fact that
he used to do some of his political planning and plotting here.
I’m not sure I’d advertise that, but that’s just me.
Roosevelt was the first
president regularly filmed, the harbinger of the age
of mass communication. Prior to him, and most
especially prior to the root of all evil—I refer, of
course, to Woodrow Wilson—most presidential
communication was written and addressed to the
legislative branch. It was in writing, where you do
deliberative reasoning, that presidents addressed
those who exist to give us mediated democracy, “to
refine and enlarge the public views,” in
James Madison’s words.
Consider the average number
of public speeches given by the first seven
presidents to audiences other than Congress:
Washington annually gave three; Adams, one; the
loquacious Jefferson, five; the sainted Madison,
zero; Monroe, five; John Quincy Adams, one; and
Andrew Jackson, the so-called populist, the man of
people, gave one a year. When Andrew Johnson was
impeached after the Civil War, one of the articles
of impeachment
said that the president did “make and deliver
with a loud voice certain intemperate, inflammatory,
and scandalous harangues…unbecoming the Chief
Magistrate of the United States.”
Yes, those were the days.
Half of the unofficial public speeches to general
audiences given in the nineteenth century were given
by Rutherford Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, and William
McKinley. That’s because a technology, railroads,
had come along, and presidents could move around the
country making themselves ubiquitous. But even when
they did, they went out to be seen and to see; they
said that it would be improper to talk about
divisive issues. McKinley gave no speech that
mentioned the sinking, the blowing up, the whatever
did happen to the USS Maine in Havana Harbor.
All this began to change
with Woodrow Wilson, acting under the theory that
there could be no such thing as too much Woodrow
Wilson. He decided to deliver the State of the Union
address in person. Thomas Jefferson had stopped
that. He thought it was monarchical to stand above
the legislature and declaim. Besides, he did not
like the sound of his voice, which made him an
unusual politician.
Wilson started the
spectacle that has now become the grotesque State of
the Union circus that we see every year. That is
because the modern rhetorical presidency wants to
lead and shape and mold public opinion. I will
remind you that the word leader or leaders appears
fourteen times in the Federalist Papers, thirteen
times as a disparagement and once as referring to
the leaders of the Revolution.
The change accelerated with
radio and then with television, which is a slave to
a superficial news-gathering instrument, the camera,
and therefore much adored by politicians, who
benefit from superficiality. But before television,
there was radio, and on election night 1920, the
night that Calvin Coolidge was elected vice
president and put on the path to the presidency,
people in western Pennsylvania heard
the following, crackling through the ether,
barely discernible: “This is KDKA of the
Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in
East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We shall now
broadcast the election returns…. We’d appreciate it
if anyone hearing this broadcast would communicate
with us, as we are very anxious to know how far the
broadcast is reaching and how it is being received.”
Something new had happened.
Before the internet, and more than television, radio
is what changed the presidency and changed American
history. Radio offered a kind of intimacy when
Franklin Roosevelt, only a week into his presidency,
gave his
first fireside chat. He began with two words:
“My friends.” Try to imagine George Washington
saying to a hundred million strangers, “My friends.”
It’s preposterous. Americans didn’t want presidents
to be our friends. They wanted them to take care
that the laws be faithfully executed. A novel idea,
a humble but essential mission.
THE COOLIDGE ATTITUDE
Fortunately, Calvin
Coolidge was not always silent. He husbanded his
wisdom and his rhetoric and gave one of the
great speeches in presidential history in 1926
on the sesquicentennial of the Declaration of
Independence.
The most neglected word in
the Declaration is secure. “We hold these truths to
be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights…that to secure these rights,
governments are instituted…” Not to give us our
rights, but to secure our preexisting rights. First
come rights, then comes government.
The most important word in
what Coolidge said was restful. Politics has become
the opposite of restful in our country. The American
people are not angry with one another; the American
people are exhausted and embarrassed by our public
life. They have been severed from the finality that
Coolidge detected in the Declaration. “If all men
are created equal, that is final,” he said. “If they
are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final….
No advance, no progress can be made beyond these
propositions.” And he said, “About the Declaration
there is a finality that is exceedingly restful.”
Here is why this matters,
and why it is the key to ending the nonsense about
wokeness and the culture wars that have convulsed
our country.
If there is a fixed human
nature, then there are natural rights, rights
essential to the flourishing of people with this
nature. But if, as the progressives tell us, human
nature is a fiction, a premodern superstition; if
human beings are infinitely malleable; if they are
merely creatures that take the impress of whatever
culture they find themselves situated in—if that is
the case, then control of the culture is everything.
Politics suddenly acquires an illimitable
jurisdiction. Politics must be everything and
everywhere because it is shaping the malleable human
creatures.
The stakes of politics then
could not be higher. It is incumbent upon politics
and government to control everything that is said,
heard, read, thought, or taught, and that is why
things become like either Cambodia under the Khmer
Rouge or the average American campus today. This is
why Woodrow Wilson
said, “I am perfectly sure that the state has
got to control everything that everybody needs and
uses.” That is why Wilson said during his wartime
semi-fascism—there’s no other polite way to say
it—that his aim was to “mobilize
the mind of America.”
This is the progressive
consciousness project. This is why free speech now
has become something to be feared, because it
interferes with the mobilization of the American
mind. This is what gives us uncircumscribed
politics, unlimited coercion, because being on the
right side of history requires that malleable human
beings take the impress of a culture that the right
political forces shape and dictate. Curating
consciousness is never finished, and it requires
existential threats to justify the constant curating
of consciousness. The threat can be systemic racism,
it can be climate apocalypse, it can be anything.
When Silicon Valley Bank, the
seventeenth-largest bank in the United States,
got into trouble from its own mistakes, a United
States senator
urged regulators to silence on social media any
criticism of the banking system because that would
destabilize banks and bring an existential crisis in
the financial system.
In 1981, I gave the
Godkin Lectures at Harvard, and these became the
book
Statecraft as Soulcraft, read by dozens. The
subtitle of the book was What Government Does—not
what government should do, not what government ought
to do, but what government cannot help but do.
Government necessarily shapes the soul of its
citizens by what it encourages, subsidizes,
criminalizes, discourages. It communicates values
all the time. It is unavoidable. Any regime does
this. A great example in my lifetime is the 1964
Civil Rights Act. The government said if people will
just sit at a lunch counter together, go swimming
together, go to school together, it is going to be
good for their souls. They may not like it, but it
is good. We need to do this. That was soulcraft, and
it worked. But soulcraft has to be limited.
We saw how unlimited this
can be when the Biden administration, using the CDC,
the FBI, and other federal agencies, pressured
social media to curate the nation’s consciousness.
The Biden administration’s consciousness project
aimed to protect the American people from
inconvenient thoughts, many of them about the
pandemic, many of them true, as we now know. This is
what happens when, as progressives believe, history
is a proper noun like France—capital-H History, with
the arc of History bending toward this or that. We
can blame Marx for that, or we can blame Hegel for
Marx. But the real winner in all this is Lenin,
Wilson’s contemporary almost exactly, and I daresay
Wilson’s soulmate. I will paraphrase what Lenin
said: We need in politics a vanguard of the
enlightened that will drag people along, however
reluctant they are, to a higher consciousness. We
will purge them of false consciousness.
So far as I can tell, that
is exactly what progressives are doing in their woke
campaigns—purging us of what they consider false
consciousness. The result in national politics is
the surveillance state of China. On a smaller scale,
it is the average American campus these days, and
this is driven by the vaulting ambition that you
have in politics when you cut yourself off from the
finalities that Coolidge talked about. When you cut
yourself off from the restful understanding that
human nature is a given, you get the sort of claim
Trotsky made in the 1924 book Literature and
Revolution. After the revolution,
said Trotsky, “man will become immeasurably
stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become
more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his
voice more musical. The average human type will rise
to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a
Marx.”
That’s laughable, but it’s
not funny, because hundreds of millions of people
have died at the hands of those who would drag them
to a higher consciousness. This goal begets
fanaticism, because it is beyond refutation. If you
have the unrestful idea that human beings take the
impress of the culture that surrounds them, then
conquest and control of the culture is a political
duty. That is not restful, and it can’t be refuted,
because there are no standards left to refute it
with.
In 1964, when I was a
graduate student at Oxford, Oxford University Press
published the third and final volume of
Isaac Deutscher’s worshipful biography of Trotsky.
Oxford’s student Marxist club decided to have a tea
to celebrate Deutscher, and I trotted round. In the
course of his remarks, Deutscher said, “Proof of
Trotsky’s farsightedness is that none of his
predictions have come true yet.”
Think about that. This is
the kind of fanaticism insulated from refutation and
evidence that you get when you have the unrestful
politics of the consciousness project. Such
fanaticism results when people, to protect their own
consciousness and fight other people’s
consciousness, hunker down in their intellectual
silos, embracing their confirmation bias, listening
only to what makes them feel good. This makes us
stupid, because as Kipling
said, “What do they know of England who only
England know?” If you know only your own arguments,
you do not know your own arguments. Now, what
Coolidge understood and what all wise people
understand is that the ultimate conservative message
reduced to two words is: Nothing lasts. History is,
after all, the study of ruins.
“Taxes are not raised to carry on wars,
wars are raised to carry on taxes.”
– Thomas Paine
GEORGE WILL, whether you like his politics or not,
should be seen by all as a real national treasure-- the very
epitome of erudition. I have always found myself thoroughly
enjoying his writing even when he is arguing on behalf of
wrong-headed policies.
Here, I am able to enjoy Will's writing
while he shares deep wisdom-- some, his own, but
most, that of his subject Calvin Coolidge, a
president unfortunately little-remembered, but one
who had offered an excellent example of the office
properly demeanored at a time when America really
needed the reminder.
Coolidge's proper presidential demeanor
was, of course, not the central point of Will's
piece. Rather, the point was Coolidge's respectful
and insightful understanding of the specific
declarations of our founding document as a being a
settled and dispositive matter.
The
purpose of government is to secure our rights,
the existence and significance of which precede and
supersede those of the state, and it has none
other-- indeed, anything done not in faithful
service to this one duty, mandate and authority is
an unlawful, despotic usurpation.
It falls to us, the inheritors of those
principles and the proper understanding thereof to
take and hold and enforce that perspective,
tolerating no challenge or dispute of the finality
to which Coolidge refers, no matter the quarter from
which such might emerge, especially not from any
organ of the state. This taking, holding and
enforcing is our civic duty as well as our
wisest course, beset as we perpetually are by
sappers in government chafing at the restraints laid
upon their ambitions by the limits imposed upon them
by that finality, integrated as it is into the
Constitution by which their offices are authorized
and energized.
I need hardly say that chief among the
means by which the American people can and should
accomplish their duty in restraining the state to
its proper and lawful objects is through strict
control over the resources in the hands of the
ambitious state and its operators, the excessive
accumulation of which is by itself a violation of
Americans' rights as well as the fuel for every
other such offense.
Those who laid down the final
principles of the Declaration of Independence and
produced the Constitution by which those principles
are to be actualized (the proper understanding of
which can only be seen in the light of those
principles, disregarding misunderstandings and
misconstructions of the document urged upon us every
moment since its adoption) recognized these facts.
They equipped
the American people with the power to exercise that
strict control over the state's resources even in the face of
inevitable official resistance.
All the people need to do is
learn how and why to say "NO!" to improper
applications of the income tax, in a
practically-meaningful manner and context.
Those of us who have already received that
liberating and empowering lesson need to help the rest of the
American population quickly understand
the
truth about the tax, such that even though Washington remains in
the hands of immoral establishment hacks and self-servers, it
finds its ability to just carry on with chronic irresponsibility severely curtailed.
Such an effort is easier than ever now, with the US Supreme Court
having just reaffirmed its 108-year-old ruling
in Brushaber v. Union Pacific RR. Co.,
acknowledging the truth about the income tax
revealed in
CtC.
Remember, the arising and sustenance of
the Leviathan state monster is a direct result of
the successful mis-administration
of the US income tax laws.
Shrinking that
Leviathan state monster merely involves the
reversing of that misadministration-- something that
can be done by individual Americans, acting
one-by-one, with no help or approval of any
government official. Each such act makes use of
state-restraining tools baked into the
Constitutional cake by the Founders and Framers, and
each such act WILL make a difference, however small.
Most important, each such act will absolve the actor
from the dishonor of participation in the heinous
crimes their resources would otherwise finance.
You can find all of this
explained
here, along with links to some additional
relevant resources.
Read that material, and then become an
agent of change. Urge everyone you know to do both
of these things, as well.
Seriously, people. It's time to stop
whistling past the graveyard and start using the
powerful and important tools with which our wise
ancestors equipped us.
P.S. DO YOU WANT THIS
ARTICLE to make a difference? It only will
do so if YOU PASS IT ON TO OTHERS.
Please do that.
Use the permalink address
below to post on social media. Or use the
"e-mail this article" link to send it to
someone else by that method.
EVEN AS ARDENT A STATIST as Abraham
Lincoln, in announcing his willingness to burn the Southern states to the ground in order to
keep them paying the tariff for the benefit of Northern interests in
his first inaugural address on March 4, 1861, paid at least lip
service to the Founders design of leaving control over the fuel
available to feed the fires Washington wants to light in the hands
of the individual citizenry when he said, "Doing this I deem to
be only a simple duty on my part; and I shall perform it, unless my
rightful masters, the American people, shall withhold the requisite
means..."
Lawyers:
It's Way Past Time For You All To Queue Up!
"[Y]ou really need to familiarize yourself with Pete
Hendrickson's absolutely magnificent work at his website and in
his book(s). He has, brilliantly and lucidly, "cracked the
code" regarding the federal income EXCISE tax(es)."
-Mark C. Phillips, JD
"...I find your work fascinatingly simple to understand."
-Jerry Arnowitz, JD
"Your book is a masterpiece!"
-Michael Carver, JD
"Received your book yesterday. Started reading at 11
PM, finished at 4 AM." "I have 16 feet (literally 16'
4.5") of documents supporting just about everything in your
book." "Your book should be required reading for every lawyer
before being admitted to any Bar." "I hope you sell a
million of them."
-John O'Neil Green, JD
"Thanks again for your efforts, Pete. They mean an awful lot
to a lot of people." "As an attorney, I am humbled by your knowledge and ability
in navigating the law. THANK YOU for your hard work and sacrifice."
-Eric Smithers, JD
"I am an attorney and want to give a testimonial to your
book, which I find to be compelling. I am exercising these
rights for myself and my adult children. I'm even considering
making this my new avenue of law practice."
-Nancy "Ana" Garner, JD
Learn what these colleagues already know, then step forward and
become part of a coordinated, mutually-supportive squadron
focused on developing strategy and deploying the law in
courtrooms across the country. There's a lot of suing that
needs doing right now.
Are you ready for a challenge that'll put some real meaning
behind all the effort you went through to get your credentials?
Send me an email.
*****
Are You Ready For More Power?
"Peter Hendrickson has done it again! 'Upholding The
Law' does for individual liberties what 'Cracking the Code' did
for tax law compliance: exposes the reader to the unalienable
truth!"
-Jesse Herron, Bill Of Rights Press, Fort Collins, Colorado
Do you
know someone truly steeped in the Kool-Aid?
I mean
someone who finds it easier to believe that the far-better-educated,
far-more-suspicious-of-government Americans of a hundred years ago were
complete morons who granted authority to the state to take whatever it
wished from themselves and their posterity than to imagine that they
themselves simply misunderstand the true nature of the income tax? Even
while knowing that their beliefs about the tax are derived entirely from
the representations of those who profit from those beliefs (like tax
bureaucrats and "tax professionals")?
Do you
know someone like that? Shake them awake with the latest (sixteenth)
edition of
CtC!
If
CtC were actually
right, it would mean the government's been concealing and
denying and suppressing the truth for years
on end, and everybody knows THAT would never happen...
(Edward Snowden, come home! It was all just a bad dream; there really is
No Such Agency!)
Btw, a copy of
CtC from anywhere except the link above may not
be a current edition. CHECK. It matters. Also, there ARE no
e-book, Kindle or .pdf versions of
CtC.
Don't get taken in by efforts to sell you-- or even give you for
free-- any such thing.
February 18- In 1841, the first
filibuster begins in the United States Senate. It will last until March 11. In
1885, 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' is published. In 1930, Pluto is
discovered. In 1930, a cow named Elm Farm Ollie makes the first bovine flight
in a fixed-wing aircraft. In 1943, the members of the White Rose anti-Nazi
movement are arrested in Germany. In 1979, snow falls in the Southern Algerian
portion of the Sahara Desert. In 1991, the IRA explodes bombs in Paddington
Station and Victoria Station in London. In 2014, the US-instigated coup by
neo-Nazi factions in Ukraine against the existing elected government, which was
balking at following a US-charted foreign-policy course calling for distancing
itself from Russia, began to boil into its final days. Mysterious sniper fire
indiscriminately killed both police officers defending the government and
rioters whipped up by the plotters of the coup amidst steady, increasingly
violent clashes between the two sides. Scores are killed and hundreds wounded.
*****
A Few Words About "Climate Change" Fraud
You NEED to defend yourself and your kids against this
now-high-inertia effort to destroy liberty.
H/T to Jonesy for circulating this fun little meme and video link.
*****
Hey! If you're not getting the newsletter delivered
to your email inbox every Monday, go to
this link
and subscribe to the group-- leave all options in their default states.
February 19- In 1674, England and the Netherlands make peace in
their third war, a provision of which hands New Amsterdam over to the British,
who rename it "New York". In 1807, former vice-president Aaron Burr is arrested
for treason. In 1846, the Republic of Texas government relinquishes power in
favor of the new government of the state of Texas. In 1878, Edison patents the
phonograph. In 1881, Kansas goes "dry". In 1942, FDR asserts the authority to
confine Americans of Japanese descent to prison camps.
*****
A Two-Minute Review Of CtC
David Bindel reminds us that there's either the rule of law, or
there isn't.
HEY! SAYING IT AGAIN!! DON'T YOU WISH YOUR INSPIRING
BEING-THE-STORM VIDEO was posted? This is easy to do, and very important
(plus it can get you some great LHC swag!). See
(and carefully read)
these guidelines and encouragements.
Every victim of the "ignorance tax", 'cause it's all
just statist consent-engineering propaganda.
*****
Hey, Gamers!
WAKEN TO THE REAL-LIFE ADVENTURE IN WHICH YOU
ARE UNKNOWINGLY IMMERSED! Put down your controller and
listen!
You are surrounded by an actual battle between
villains, monsters and true heroes, all simply concealed
from you by
sophisticated spells which also keep you from
engaging in the fight.
There are real great deeds to be done,
and real treasures to be had for your efforts, and
frankly, your real future
is at stake. You just have to gain "the sight" in order to
penetrate the illusions.
Visit
losthorizons.com to get the counter-spells and get onto
the real field of battle!
*****
PRO TIP: If I were the IRS and I wanted to
discourage people from rebutting allegations that
they had done things I can tax, and wanted to keep them from
successfully reclaiming withheld or paid-in money, I
would salt the "tax honesty" community with
passionate-seeming "legal researchers" who would
warn anyone whose ear they captured that filing a
1040 is a bad idea for one reason or another...
*****
Illuminating Anniversaries of this week:
February 20- In 1792, the United States Post Office is
established. In 1872, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art opens its doors.
In 1933, Congress proposes the Twenty-first Amendment, which will undo
prohibition. In 1962, John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit the
Earth. In 1976, SEATO-- the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization-- disbands.
If you're not talking this one up everywhere and
helping generate a buzz, you don't really want liberty and the
rule of law...
*****
In light of
the actual evidence, those
who doubt or
deny the accuracy and correctness of
CtC just because some government officials
denounce it are like the 16th-century Europeans who
were mystified by
Copernicus getting all those
astronomical predictions right even though the
church had said he was wrong.
*****
Did you miss the 'Set Your Church Free'
commentaries?
Ignorance of the true nature of the "income" tax
has gagged, gutted and seduced-into-disgrace America's
ministerial community. This must change.
*****
You're a
passenger on a riverboat that relies on regular
contributions of fuel from the passengers to
keep moving forward. You see an unsurvivable
waterfall ahead, and note a
soon-to-be-irresistible current growing stronger
each day. What does common sense suggest?
*****
Test Your
"Income" Tax IQ!
CtC Warrior
SanDiegoScott has put together a great little 20-question quiz
to test your knowledge of the law regarding the United States
"income" tax. Test yourself, test your friends and family!
Test your accountant and tax attorney, and help them learn the
liberating truth!!
February 21- In 1804, the first functional steam
locomotive hits the rails in Wales. In 1848, the 'Communist Manifesto'
is published. In 1878, the first telephone directory is published (in
New Haven, Connecticut). In 1885, the Washington Monument is
dedicated. In 1952, the British government abandons its wartime policy
of compulsory "identity cards" as an affront to the liberties of a free
people. In 1960, Fidel Castro nationalizes all businesses in Cuba. In
1975, former Attorney General John Mitchell, and White House aides H. R.
Haldeman and John Ehrlichman are sentenced to prison for their parts in
the Watergate affair.
*****
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a
people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power
which knowledge gives."
"It is not the function of our Government to keep
the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the
citizen to keep the Government from falling into error."
-United States Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson
February 22- In 1732, George Washington is born. In 1819,
Spain sells Florida to the United States for $5 million. In 1856, the
Republican Party opens its first national convention. In 1879, the first
Woolworth's 5-and-Dime opens. In 1943, captured members of the Nazi
resistance movement in Germany-- the White Rose-- are executed after a
show-trial in Hitler's "People's Court". In 1997, a team of Scottish
scientists announce the successful cloning of an adult sheep. In 2022,
Russian forces move into the culturally Russian portions of eastern Ukraine
(the Donbas) which faced imminent and catastrophic invasion by the
US-supported neo-Nazi regime that had seized control in Kiev in February,
2014, and had been shelling the Donbas region ever since (all
as laid out in much greater depth here).
*****
*****
'The BOSTONIAN'S Paying the EXCISE-MAN, or
TARRING & FEATHERING' (1774) (How our forefathers responded to arrogant
"Rule of Law defiers"...)
*****
The willingness of some people to trade liberty for
convenience is without limit...
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed,
second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
-Arthur
Schopenhauer
*****
Illuminating Anniversaries of this week:
February 23- In 1836, the Battle of the
Alamo begins. In 1903, the puppet-government installed by the U.S. Marines in
Cuba agrees to lease Guantanamo Bay to the United States "in perpetuity". In
1904, the United States buys the Panama Canal Zone for $10 million. In 1954,
mass inoculations of children with the Salk Polio vaccine begin. In 1955, SEATO
meets for the first time.
*****
Last Word
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude
greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We
seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that
feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget
that ye were our countrymen."
-Samuel
Adams, Architect of the first American Revolution
OK, Now Back To Your Regularly Scheduled Programming:
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Hendrickson is also a widely-read essayist on
matters of politics, public policy and law; many of these works
are collected in his second book, �Upholding
the Law And Other Observations�. He is a member of Mensa;
an
award-winning artist; and has paid his dues as a youth
soccer coach. He is a long-time political activist as well, and
has served as co-chair and platform convention delegate of
Michigan�s largest county Libertarian Party organization; as a
consultant to the National Right to Work Foundation and Citizens
for a Sound Economy; as a member of the Heartland Institute; and
as a member of the International Society for Individual
Liberty. He is a frequent radio-show guest on stations across
the country.
Hendrickson's business career has included nearly a
decade-and-a-half at the leading edge of the renewable-energy
industry, both as Director of Purchasing and Materials
Management and member of the R&D board at Starpak Energy
Systems, the mid-west's then-largest solar heating and
energy-recovery-and re-utilization company; and as founder and
president of AFJ Inc., a high-efficiency lighting design,
manufacture and installation firm.
Beginning in the mid-1990s and continuing for the
twelve years before his present full-time focus on the
restoration of the rule of law in America, Hendrickson directed
purchasing activities for the $84 million-a-year
multi-family-housing division of the Farmington Hills, Michigan
branch of Edward Rose and Sons, with responsibility for 18,000+
apartments, direct supervision of 35 technicians and agents, and
incidental authority over several hundred divisional workers.
He also ran the division's 10 cable television earth-station and
distribution systems in four states, and designed and
administered the company's website.
On rather the other end of the spectrum, amidst
these more mundane pursuits Hendrickson co-founded and was the
primary creative force behind a small
board- and
card-game company that enjoyed a modest success for several
years.
Hendrickson makes his home in southeast Michigan,
with his wife and two children. He is currently working on his
next book.
� All written and graphic material on this page and
website are copyrighted by Peter E. Hendrickson, unless otherwise attributed.
