Did Andrew Stack’s actions accomplish his goals?
For decades, according to deathbed testimony, the IRS made engineer Andrew Stack’s life a living hell, repeatedly seizing so much of his accrued assets as to leave him with virtually nothing for his retirement.
On Feb. 18, Stack, 53, set fire to his own house and then flew his single-engine plane into an office building that houses Internal Revenue Service offices in Austin, Texas.
Stack, who died, left behind a message posted on his Web site, detailing the tax collectors’ actions, with particular attention to “Section 1706: Treatment of Certain Technical Personnel.”
The FBI ordered the page taken down shortly thereafter. So much for the sanctity of deathbed testimony, when it conflicts with the desire of our internal army to protect their fellow worker drones.
(They failed. “I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different,” Andrew Stack wrote. “I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.”)
It appears that Stack managed to kill only one IRS worker, Vernon Hunter, 68. Two others were reportedly injured in the fire.
Less than a week later, agent Hunter’s widow, Valerie, filed a lawsuit against Stack’s widow, saying Mrs. Stack should have warned others about her husband.
Oh. Like the IRS wasn’t aware of what they’d done to Andrew Stack? Of how many people have committed suicide — sometimes double suicides — after having their lives and savings gutted by the “service”?
Why didn’t the late agent Hunter have any obligation to warn Mrs. Stack of the level of desperation to which they’d driven her husband — over Mrs. Stack’s pathetic $12,700 in “unreported income”?
Dan Ross, an attorney representing Valerie Hunter, said the Hunter family wanted to file a lawsuit early, but he declined to elaborate about why.
Oh, please.
I’ve seen people widowed. I’ve been widowed. Suing a fellow survivor is not something that generally pops into your mind within mere hours, when you’re still trying to understand your loved one is actually gone. Someone else thought this up, held the widow Hunter’s hand, and explained to her she needed to do this to protect her late husband’s co-workers — a step equivalent to the Israeli policy of hoping to make would-be terrorists think twice by bulldozing the homes of the surviving families of suicide bombers.
The IRS widow is the one with the big, tax-paid pension. And she’s suing the widow of someone the IRS already stripped bare? That’s like the wicked queen suing Snow White.
Let me say right now that I do not — not, not, not — hold with those who are now suggesting the widow Hunter’s actions only teach us that Andrew Stack’s main mistake, once he’d decided to kill one or more of the IRS agents who had been torturing him for decades, was his failure to kill the agent’s family first.
Please, if they’ve driven you to a point of desperation where you’re considering killing IRS agents, do not — not, not, not — kill their families first, so they can’t sue your widow. That would be bad.
Shun them? Refuse to talk to them socially or let them enter your home without a warrant? Of course. But don’t kill them.
I would say “Shame on you, widow Valerie Hunter,” for even suggesting such a thing, except that I don’t believe for a moment this is the widow Hunter’s idea. She knows full well her husband voluntarily chose to work as one of the weasels who tear open the viscera of hard-working private-sector Americans, leaving us moaning on the ground as the slower-moving carrion eaters, the congresscritters and their insatiable eunuch hordes, the federal bureaucrats, come slithering up to lick their chops and eat out our substance, destroying profit, entrepreneurship, the work ethic and finally prosperity itself in a once-free nation.
No, I smell the hand of the IRS and the FBI here, guiding the widow Hunter’s “lawsuit” as a tool to dissuade other IRS victims from following Andrew Stack’s example, opting to cash in their last remaining chips in an equally dramatic manner.
Probably the most interesting development in the days after this crash was the decision of Janet Napolitano, a fellow mannish incompetent who certainly ought to be dancing to “My Sharona” with Donna Shalala in Janet Reno’s basement, to declare that Andrew Stack’s dramatic exit was “not terrorism.”
Reading through the double talk, what she seems to have meant by this is that Stack was not a Muslim and that — since he acted alone — no one need fear a repeat counter-attack.
Of course, under that definition, it’s hard to understand why self-professed jihadi warrior Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s actions in killing dozens of unarmed subordinates at Fort Hood three months ago was also “not terrorism,” except that this is the administration of Barack Hussein Obama, which holds as a matter of faith, “There are no terrorists; it’s just that young Muslim men are vain and tend not to wear their eyeglasses, so at any given time you can find them shooting or flying their planes into just about anything, as Allah wills it.”
The more interesting question is: Did Andrew Stack’s actions accomplish his goals?
1) He clearly had had enough and wanted to die. Mission accomplished.
2) He clearly knew who had driven him to this extreme, and desired to take IRS agents with him Ñ otherwise why fly into an IRS office during business hours? Although trading lives one-for-one is not very good strategy, and not to be recommended, mission accomplished.
3) He wanted to do this in a manner dramatic enough that the feds couldn’t hush it up — that it would make the national news. Mission accomplished.
4) And now the most important question of all. We cannot read a dead man’s mind, but we have to ask: What would Andrew Stack have wished? Would he have wished that, from this day forward, every IRS agent might leave work thinking, “I did a good job today; I enforced the law and made sure only the minimal taxes needed to finance the limited government authorized in the Constitution were raised, fairly and equitably, under a simple tax code, the rules and the fairness of which everyone can understand”?
That “I didn’t trick anyone into making an ‘offer in compromise,’ knowing 98 percent of them are turned down out of hand but meantime their mere signature on the ‘offer’ would extend the statute of limitations by years”? “I didn’t use a ‘levy’ form to seize someone’s paycheck or bank account, leaving off paragraph ‘A’ of the authorizing statute, which says this tactic is to be used only against federal employees”?
Or would Andrew Stack have wished that every IRS agent, upon walking out to his or her car tomorrow night, would think, “I wonder if we did a sufficient job of ruining someone’s life today, using trickery and subterfuge and empty threats to ‘make this a criminal matter,’ that the next time I see them will be a final, momentary flash of their grinning face as they dive a thousand pounds of airplane engine into my office window at 200 miles an hour to burn me to a crisp?”
I think we’d all like to see the IRS playing by their own rules, reading each taxpayer his or her Miranda rights, informing the taxpayer of all his of her options, of the full consequences should he sign anything they put in front of him — or should he “refuse to cooperate,” which ALWAYS turns out to be the best course. I think we’d all like to see the IRS “interpreting” the law to favor the taxpayer. But they don’t.
I’ve given just two examples above, from my own experience. The “offer in compromise” form says the statute of limitations is extended while they have the offer under consideration, and that they can consider it for up to two years. My own good-faith offer, to the Phoenix office, filed with the help of an elderly but clueless attorney recommended for tax work by the Arizona Bar Association, was turned down, accompanied by laughter, within 48 hours. The IRS weasel then informed me “We can now continue with collection on your case for two more years.” I said, “No, you’ve turned down my offer so now the clock starts running again.” He said, “That’s not the way we choose to interpret it.” During that period, I later learned, 98 percent of all such “offers in compromise,” actively solicited by the Phoenix office precisely to bypass the legislated tolling of the statute, were turned down out of hand. Think Congress ever did anything about that scam? Think any duplicitous IRS weasels went to jail? As to the levy form, anyone can look on the back and see it starts (in weirdly faint gray type) with “Paragraph B.” Anyone can go look up “Paragraph A.” Paragraph A limits the use of such paycheck and bank account seizures to use against federal employees. Show it to your bank or employer. Terrified by IRS threats, they will not care. Think Congress is going to step in and stop this misuse of their own statute?
No IRS agent can claim to have used no trickery, no fraud, no intimidation, no empty threat to “turn this into a criminal prosecution” when they have no authorization to do so. (In fact, the accused “taxpayer” would be in much better shape if he had the rights of a criminal defendant — so try it. Call their bluff. When they use this threat to try to get you to sign what amounts to a guilty plea — you should never sign ANYTHING they hand you — say, “Wow, you’ve been authorized to turn this into a criminal prosecution? Right on! I accept your offer. Make this into a criminal prosecution, right now. Do it in writing. I’m glad I’ve got witnesses here. Let me watch you do that right now.” I know I finally did. The resulting back-pedaling was hilarious.) So given that no IRS agent can claim to have used no trickery, no fraud, no intimidation, no threats to do things they have no authorization to do, I think Andrew Stack would have wished that every IRS agent would now worry about that — that they would seek to have their home addresses and phone numbers kept secret, that they would use false names when interrogating “taxpayers,” that they would lie about what they do for a living when attending a parents’ get-togethers at their children’s schools, that they would start looking over their shoulders, everywhere they go, wondering when their plane is coming.
“I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand,” wrote Andrew Stack, in the posting the IRS and the FBI don’t want you to read. “It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country. … I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after. But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at ‘big brother’ while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough.
“I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be whitewashed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are.
“Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. The cruel joke is that the really big chunks of shit at the top have known this all along and have been laughing at, and using this awareness against, fools like me all along,” wrote Andrew Stack, knowing he was soon to die.
“Vernon Hunter belonged to a class of persons the (law) was designed to protect,” says his IRS widow’s lawsuit, filed in Texas less than a week after his death.
Right. And Andrew Stack belonged to a different class of persons — the class of persons who the law was designed to hobble, lasso, tie down and eviscerate.
I think we get it.
Mission accomplished, Andrew Stack.
And by the way, Ms. Napolitano: I think you should probably expect a whole lot more of these counter-attacks.
February 28th, 2010 at 11:45 am
I wonder if Mr. Stack had heard of The Black Arrow? Perhaps there should be a Black Arrow award.
March 1st, 2010 at 7:10 am
“that they would seek to have their home addresses and phone numbers kept secret, that they would use false names when interrogating “taxpayers,”
The IRS has been issuing false identity documents to workers on request since the late ’90s, for just this reason.
March 1st, 2010 at 8:00 am
As a curious aside, did anyone else find the amount of damage to the office building startling? How does a plane that small cause that much destruction?
March 1st, 2010 at 10:47 am
I find it interesting that the Feebs wanted to censor the written speech of Stack. It makes me play the what if game. What if I wanted to post on a website the works of Marx? Hitler? What if I published Common Sense by Paine? Or some of the other broadsides against the British in the run up to ’76? Are these all not just as inflammatory?
April 16th, 2010 at 5:20 am
[…] Mainstream newspapers have declined (as is their right) to even publish my commentary on the death of Andrew Stack, who in desperation flew his small plane into an IRS office in Austin, Texas, last month. (Find it at https://www.vinsuprynowicz.com.) […]
March 9th, 2012 at 1:17 am
I think this is how President Yomama got elected, instead of brown shirts stuffing ballot box it was IRS Agents we all know they are worse than the Gestapo
Even Germans alive during Hitlers rise to power who live in America say that the IRS Agents are acting just like early Gestapo