National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee Newsletter

There’s a new issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter out, with content including:

Also, on the NWTRCC blog, Erica Weiland examines the first Trump budget proposal.


Next month is the bicentennial of the birth of Henry David Thoreau, and so he’s starting to “trend.” Here are some recent examples of note:

  • A Radical for All Seasons: The surprising persistence of Henry David Thoreau by Jedediah Purdy, The Nation. Excerpt:

    On , Thoreau defied the forces of law and order and the pleas of respectable friends by delivering a defense of John Brown to 2,500 people in Boston. “The reason why Frederick Douglass is not here,” he began, “is the reason why I am.” If every privilege check had that kind of snapping specificity and quiet moral thunder, they might be both more subversive and less disdained.

  • Thoreau: American Resister (and Kitten Rescuer) by Holland Cotter, New York Times. Excerpt:

    The Fugitive Slave Act of , securing the return of runaways, tipped him over the edge from outrage to activism, though his upbringing had primed him to make the move. His mother was a founder of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society; his older sister, Helen, was a friend of Frederick Douglass; the family home, where, aside from two years at Walden, he lived till he died, was a stop on the Underground Railroad to Canada. Given this context, , for refusing to pay taxes to a slavery-supporting government was a less sensational event than history has tried to make it.


Other links of interest: