Like many Americans, I filed my taxes this month. This time, I only paid some of them.

Just under a year ago, I left my salaried corporate law job and began working as a 1099 employee, making money through contracting, social media, and occasional speaking fees. H&R Block calculated that I owed about $9,000 in federal income tax and $3,000 in state income tax. As I filed, I paid the state of Illinois via direct withdrawal. I did not pay the federal government.

As tax season approached, I thought a lot about whether or not I would pay an outstanding federal balance. The federal government is allocating my tax bill to build out immigration detention and send stormtroopers into our communities to disappear my neighbors. My taxes go to bombs that get dropped on civilians across the globe. The government is not just spending money on things I disagree with politically and morally. It is spending money on these things despite a majority of the country also disagreeing politically and morally.

It didn’t take long to answer the question of whether or not I should pay my federal income tax with a resounding no.

I did some research about what might happen if I refused, and found the information available sorely lacking. While tax resistance has a storied history in the United States and abroad, the high profile examples of tax resistance are at least a few decades old. We live in very different times.

This added an additional consideration: if I decided not to pay my taxes, would I talk about it? Of course, the existence of this article answers that question. After careful consideration, it felt necessary to speak publicly.

Our federal government is run by people who are more than happy to publicly demonstrate their racism. They are building work camps, often run by private companies deeply incentivized to keep beds filled and costs minimal. People are sent to these work camps without due process, and the government keeps losing track of the people detained there. The work camps are overseen by the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement agency, which is full of far-right recruits. Newly-hired members of this gestapo force were offered $50,000 signing bonuses—more than the average yearly salary of a starting teacher. (“I went to high school and I make $200k,” one ICE agent recently bragged on-camera, adding, “I can't believe I get paid for this. I’d do this for free.”) Meanwhile, our enormous military budget is going to illegal wars of aggression in multiple hemispheres.

“How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it,” Henry David Thoreau declared in Civil Disobedience (1849), the most famous tax resistance treatise in history. He was critiquing the institution of slavery, whose existence was enabled not by the comparatively few slaveholders, but by the silence of every American who prioritized the stability of the existing order over human dignity.

Obviously, it is right and just to refuse to hand over thousands of dollars to the federal government in 2026. The federal government itself doesn’t seem to care much about following the laws on funding, given its decision to illegally freeze funding to blue states and programs that make people’s lives better.

Once I laid things out like that, it became clear the real question wasn’t whether I should pay my federal taxes. It was instead whether I would pay my federal taxes, knowing full well that I believe giving money to the federal government right now is morally wrong.

It made little sense why I was conflicted. Over the last year, I’ve protested the federal government over and over, often in ways that have risked—or ended in—bodily harm. I’ve participated in civil disobedience outside of ICE facilities. The decision to withhold federal income tax was arguably lower in risk. Nevertheless, I was unsure, in no small part because I was unfamiliar with the potential consequences.

The U.S. tax system is opaque, intentionally intimidating. It’s built to allow people with lots and lots of resources to find every loophole possible, and that creates a sense that the government will always have a loophole to exploit against you. The certainty of death and taxes looms large. The cognitive dissonance of avoiding one of those things does, too.

After a few hours on the IRS website, I was fairly certain that the potential penalties were much lower than I had anticipated. The financial penalty for failure-to-pay accrued much slower than the penalty for failure-to-file, and both maxed at 25 percent of my unpaid taxes. The interest rate for outstanding payments and penalties was seven percent; my high-yield savings account accrues interest at around four percent. If Donald Trump left office in 2028 and I felt like the federal government might use my tax dollars responsibly and wanted to pay them, it wouldn’t cost me that much extra out of pocket. There was potential criminal liability under 26 U.S.C. § 7203, though it seemed people were rarely prosecuted. The statutory maximum penalties were a year in prison or a $25,000 fine plus court costs.

Obviously, these maximum penalties are untenable for many people. But no one relies on me financially but me, and I am situated such that any targeted enforcement of rarely-enforced laws against me will attract substantial attention, making risks like this worth it. This felt likely worth it.

Friends and family were polled, and they overwhelmingly supported the decision to withhold my taxes, and agreed with my read of the potential consequences. At my request, a few gamely tried to talk me out of it to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

This could have bigger consequences than you think, cautioned a more risk averse pal. Look at what they did to Randy Kehler. They seized his house. I Googled; I’d never heard of Randy Kehler or his wife Betsy Corner, both prominent peace activists and tax resisters. His New York Times obituary is headlined, in part, "Peace Activist Inspired Release of the Pentagon Papers." Daniel Ellsberg was so moved by Kehler’s actions that he decided to take on major risk himself, changing the course of history.

“This is not convincing me, I’d never heard of this guy and he rocks,” I replied.

Reading about Kehler and the impacts of his work filled me with hope. And so, again, the question of whether or not I should talk about withholding my taxes felt obvious.

The brutality and unpopularity of the U.S. government’s actions often make us feel hopeless and disenfranchised. Any reminder that we do, in fact, have agency is quite powerful.

This is true even though one person refusing to give the richest government in the world $9,000 is a purely symbolic action. Civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance broadly are effective in large part because of their symbolism. The government is able to implement violent policies most of us don’t want because people have forgotten that its power depends on the consent of the governed. This consent is necessary not just in terms of moral legitimacy, but also for actual implementation of policy. If people refuse to comply with and facilitate governmental action, eventually, that action will stop.

Civil disobedience is successful far before noncompliance becomes so widespread that the government is literally unable to implement its policies. Governments change course because they are afraid of the idea of true mass mobilization. Governments change course based on symbolic action because they are afraid the actions might become real, which is paradoxically to say that people might realize the very notion of governmental authority is, at its core, also symbolic.

If the true threat of noncompliance is that noncompliance might become widespread, it becomes particularly important that those participating in noncompliance talk about it. Presumably, this is why our legal system strongly discourages discussion of civil disobedience.

Conviction under a criminal statute almost always requires the government to prove an element of intent. You can see why it might be uncommon to speak and write about one’s intentional violation of the law.

Speaking publicly about intent can make it much harder to find legal representation, because lawyers don’t want wild-card clients who ignore their advice. And lawyers will always advise you against speaking publicly about intent, because doing so hands the government the evidence they need to prove part of its case against you.

When I was arrested last summer for sitting in front of an ICE vehicle, a friend offered to represent me for free—until I told her I was going to post and write about my arrest to demystify the experience for people. Her firm had a strict policy barring their clients from speaking about their ongoing cases on social media. To avoid putting an attorney in a difficult position (and because I had received a citation with relatively light maximum penalties), I ultimately represented myself.

It’s also just not a good idea to annoy the government while you have an ongoing criminal case. Prosecutors have a shameful amount of control over the severity of charges and sentences, and many prosecutors are much more likely to max those things out when you’re annoying them by doing things like live-narrating your decision to break the law and why it felt worth it.

But the most far-reaching and severe consequences of publicized civil disobedience in a country like the United States are not those from within the legal system. Most acts of civil disobedience break laws that carry comparatively low sentences even if convicted. And so most people’s fear of legal consequences are not rooted in fear of the conviction, but fear about future impacts on their employment.

If an American loses their job over an arrest or conviction and cannot quickly find new employment, that person is also likely to lose their health insurance and eventually, their housing. Our country has no real social safety net. In that way, the government largely leaves punishment for speech up to the modern private sector.

These potential consequences of speaking publicly can impact anyone, but I know I am situated such that they impact me less than many Americans, and that my speech is likely to reach more people. It felt necessary to share my decision, and decision-making process. As a mentor said when I talked through tax resistance with him, 90 percent of organizing is education.

Randy Kehler described his actions as “demonstrat[ing] that positive, nonviolent change in our lives and in the world is not only an urgent necessity but humanly possible.”

In this very dark moment, it can be difficult to believe that positive change is humanly possible.

It becomes easier to believe positive change is possible when you see people willing to take on risks in pursuit of that change.

While things can get better, they will not get better without sacrifice. What people can afford to sacrifice will vary, in no small part because in this country, actions have different consequences for different people. What an action costs me, a financially stable and well-connected U.S. citizen, is very different from what it might cost someone else. Embarrassingly, those of us lucky enough to be comparatively well-situated in this country often feel in some way that we should not be the ones to act because we have more to lose. It is precisely because we have more to lose that we must act. Those multi-layered privileges insulate us from real harm.

This is not to say potential sacrifice is not scary. No matter how many times you take a risk to stand up for what you believe in, the anxiety never really goes away. So if you want to stand up for what you believe in, you have to figure out how to motivate yourself to act despite the anxiety.

I ask myself what I think I would do if asked the question from a distance. If I were a student in a history class decades down the line, learning about the present administration, what would I think I would do? Would I rather give the government $9,000 that will be spent primarily on bombing people overseas and building concentration camps for my neighbors, or run the risk of being audited or—worst case—being charged with a federal misdemeanor that could lead to additional fees being assessed and/or prison time?

From a distance, I know what I would pick. In fact, I think of myself as someone who would run the risk of going to prison to stop concentration camps even if I wasn’t being asked to directly contribute money to their buildout. When I learned about pacifists who participated in draft refusal during the Vietnam War, I was confident they were doing the right thing, and that if I were similarly situated, I would have joined them.

These days, I am forced to check, over and over, if my self-conception is accurate.

Perhaps it’s selfish, but sometimes, the desire to be proven right about how I see myself is the only thing that forces me to be brave. I am proving myself to myself.

And I am not paying my federal income taxes this year.