IRS Whistleblower Says Income Tax Is Illegal

(He's been saying it for more than twenty-five years. Nobody cares.)

There are certain uncomfortable truths we repeat like gospel and then promptly proceed to do absolutely nothing about. “Chemtrails are real.” “Social media is addictive.” “Our phones are spying on us.” “Glyphosate causes cancer.” “Income tax is illegal.”

That last one has been floating around for so long it’s basically a decorative pillow at this point. We don’t even react to it anymore. We’ve heard it. We suspect it’s probably true. But it just sits there, nestled between “you don’t actually need shampoo” and “giants once roamed the earth.” What should I make for dinner? Did I remember to schedule the pest control guy? Who took my—oh wait, never mind. Found it.

And yet. Every once in a while, someone comes along who isn’t a comment-section crusader with a Punisher skull avatar and his own Telegram channel. He’s not a professional tax protester hawking a $399 “Free Yourself from Debt Slavery” online course. He’s not even a TDS-riddled liberal who refuses to pay taxes as a middle finger to Trump. (Why didn’t I know that was a thing when Obiden was president?)

This time, the guy is Joe Banister, a former IRS Criminal Investigation Division Special Agent. Not some dude who “did his own research.” Not a guy who “read a blog.” His job was literally to track down people who didn’t pay their taxes. By his own account, he took that task seriously—legally, morally, and ethically.

One day, Banister was listening to a radio talk show and the guest was explaining how paying income tax is in fact not obligatory. That there is no law on any book, signed by any president, that obligates citizens to pay it. Banister’s response—as a responsible federal employee who took an oath to uphold the Constitution—was, “No, lady, Americans are required to pay this, and I’m here to make sure of it.”

So he set out to prove Radio Lady wrong. He started digging into the tax code—deeply, obsessively, the way people do when they’re either trying to prove a point or ruin Thanksgiving forever. Eventually he came to a conclusion that, depending on your tolerance for chaos, is either incredibly intriguing or patently maddening: There is no law requiring 97% of Americans to file and pay federal income tax. In fact, by filling out a tax return in the first place, Banister says that we’re essentially creating a contract between ourselves and the IRS that actually gives them the authority to assess the tax we claim to owe.

Cute, right?

Hahahahahaha is all I can say.

And here’s the weird part: Banister didn’t just think these things quietly in his own home while filling out his 1040 form like the rest of the dutiful peasants. He said it out loud. To other people. On camera. He put it in writing and gave it to his IRS supervisors. (Bless his heart, he thought he might even get a raise or be crowned Employee of the Month.) He shared it with the top dogs at an aviation company who, based on his presentation, stopped withholding taxes from employees’ paychecks.

The government reacted in the way only the government could when an insider breaks from the script: they forced his resignation, arrested him in front of his colleagues, and indicted him on felony charges. One count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and three counts of assisting in filing false tax returns. The basic “we’re not even a little bit amused” starter pack.

The thing that keeps this from being just another clickbait headline or internet rabbit hole, though, is that the jury acquitted him. Not a plea deal. Not a technicality. The phrase “by reason of temporary insanity” never entered the chat. The jury agreed that Banister had committed no crime.

Which raises what I think is a perfectly reasonable question: If filing and paying income tax is the clear-cut, settled, indisputable fact they’ve promised us it is… how does that happen? Because according to the record, the government didn’t exactly come in swinging with a detailed, line-by-line explanation of the law Banister allegedly violated. They didn’t bring in an expert witness to dismantle his claims in open court. They didn’t walk the jury through the definitive, explicit statutory authority that supposedly makes this whole thing obvious. Their argument basically boiled down to, “Because we said so.”

Literally, the Federal Government.

Meanwhile, the jury sat through hours of Banister explaining, in detail, why the existing code showed that wages were not lawfully taxable income. Twice. And then they agreed with him.

In a sane world, this would be an explosive revelation—up there with vaccine injuries and deaths, VAERS numbers, and the undeniable connection between autism and immunization. Instead, it follows a familiar script: the truth laid bare… followed by the sinking realization that some systems—often, the most fraudulent—are too big, too powerful, too profitable to topple.

Here’s the thing. If income tax were a lone injustice—the single shady way the government tried to extort us all—we might be inclined to let it slide. You know, on account of the military and Medicare and law enforcement and all those other things our taxes allegedly bankroll. (We’ll just put aside the money that goes to terrorist organizations and SWAT raids against raw milk producers and the like. We don’t get to decide how federal funds are allocated, okay?)

But we literally broke up with England over taxes. Like, staged an entire revolution. Remember “no taxation without representation?” We dumped an otherwise perfectly good empire—and an aggressive amount of tea into the harbor—over it!

And yet. Two hundred and fifty years later, we’re getting hit with taxes all day every day like a prizefighter in the twelfth round.

We’re taxed when we earn money.
We’re taxed when we spend it.
We’re taxed when we save it.
We’re taxed when we invest it.
We’re taxed for owning things.
We’re taxed for selling things.
We’re taxed for inheriting things.
We’re taxed for giving things away.
We’re taxed for improving things we already own.
We’re taxed for driving.
We’re taxed for dying.
We’re taxed for temporarily existing somewhere outside of the residence we’ve already paid taxes on.

HOTEL CLERK: “Your room will be $179.”
YOU: “All in?”
HOTEL CLERK: “Depends. Are you planning to stay in it?”
YOU: “Well, yeah.”
HOTEL CLERK: “With the occupancy tax, it’ll be $209.43.”

We didn’t get here overnight. The federal income tax began, as all great American traditions do, as a “temporary” measure. An emergency, if you will. First flirted with during the Civil War, it disappeared, reappeared, got smacked down by the Supreme Court, and then finally came roaring back with the 16th Amendment in 1913—because nothing says “this will be used responsibly” like permanently legalizing a move the government’s been trying to mandate for decades.

It started modestly, of course. A gentle little tax on the wealthy. A light lift. A patriotic contribution. And then, like a cancer, it grew. And grew. And grew some more. Fast forward a century, and we’ve got a system so sprawling that it takes 14 forms, a spreadsheet, and a minor in accounting to figure out who owes whom and how much.

Enter Donald Trump, who has repeatedly floated the idea of dramatically reducing—or outright eliminating—federal income taxes, which is the political equivalent of walking into the DMV and announcing you’re thinking of abolishing lines. He hasn’t said income tax is illegal, mind you—just that it’s an unfair burden that perhaps something like, oh, I don’t know, tariffs could eliminate.

Sort of like they did before the 16th Amendment was ratified.

Joe Banister has been beating this drum for nearly three decades. Alex Jones covered his story last year after Banister called the Internal Revenue Service “the original deep state operation.” (The guy worked for the IRS. Let that statement sink in.) Laura Logan interviewed him this week. So did Dinesh D’Souza. Why now?

Maybe because when a sitting president starts talking about eliminating income tax altogether, people don’t just nod and move on—their little ears prick up. Is that possible? Would it be legal? They get a little… hopeful. They start doing their own research. (And if you do that, you’re going to find Joe Banister.) They start asking questions. The same questions we’ve all heard for years but never really stopped to think about.

Now we’re thinking about them. A lot.

And here’s where your friend Pollyanna thinks this gets good: it’s one thing to scare, indict, or discredit a single guy. It’s quite another when thousands (tens of thousands? millions?) of people start asking the same question at once. That’s not a fringe theory anymore. That’s a pattern. And patterns are a lot harder to sweep under the rug.

Who knows? Maybe nothing changes. Maybe we all keep filing, keep paying, keep assuming someone else has verified the “rules” somewhere along the line. All I know is, the list of things that used to get you banned for saying out loud seems to be shrinking by the day—and I’m here for it.

NOTE: I am still paying my taxes currently. I have not tried either of these “methods” below. I’m just sharing what other people are saying/doing. (But I will be looking into both!)

I know that some of my subs are already… withholding your own taxes indefinitely, ahem. Tell us what you’re doing, what you think about all of this, or where you think it’s going in the comments. :)

Exactly as censored as tax code truths (but way more fun to read). Get your copy before they ban it.