Olympia Snark Ranger - Washington State Satire

06/25/2026

My latest article.
Are you allowed to judge anything anymore?
What about this green technology being pushed onto us?
What happened to letting us decide?
Why can't I become an educated "expert" too?
Whats going on here?

Let's talk.

Words matter, and few words get worked harder than "green."

06/10/2026

Politics as Religion: Flags, Hats, and Parades as Modern Sacred Objects

Religion does not require gods, spirits, or the supernatural. When defined by what it *does* rather than what it claims about the unseen, religion emerges as any cultural system that supplies shared beliefs, moral frameworks, rituals, symbols, material objects, and communal identity around ultimate concerns—meaning, justice, destiny, belonging, and the boundary between what matters most and what is ordinary or profane.

Under this functional lens, many political movements qualify as religions in practice, even when they are explicitly secular or atheistic in content. They build comprehensive worldviews, demand loyalty, create moral communities, and use material culture and public ritual to make those worldviews tangible and emotionally compelling. The evidence is not hidden in theology. It is visible in merchandise, parades, and the way people treat flags, hats, and images as charged objects worth defending or desecrating.

The Functional Definition at Work

A useful working definition runs like this: A religion (or religious-like system) organizes beliefs, practices, values, symbols, and institutions around fundamental human questions—suffering, morality, purpose, identity, and collective destiny. It distinguishes the sacred from the profane, fosters cohesion through ritual and shared narrative, and motivates behavior by making certain concerns non-negotiable. The “ultimate” can be a god, enlightenment, the nation, the revolution, historical progress, or equity. The mechanism remains similar.

Political movements frequently activate every element of this definition. They offer origin stories and eschatological visions (the revolution that will arrive, the nation that will be restored, the arc of history that bends toward justice). They draw sharp lines between the community of the righteous and the threatening or impure “other.” They generate moral fervor and willingness to sacrifice. And they do so without needing any reference to the supernatural.

Merch as Functional Idols and Scripture

In traditional religions, statues, icons, relics, and sacred texts are not merely decorative. They concentrate meaning, serve as focal points for devotion or reflection, mark identity, and participate in ritual. Desecration of these objects is experienced as an attack on the faith itself.

Political movements produce exact functional equivalents through mass-produced merchandise. A specific hat, t-shirt design, flag, or banner condenses an entire ideology into a portable, wearable, displayable form. Wearing it or flying it performs belonging. Displaying it at home or on a vehicle turns private space into a shrine to the cause. When opponents mock, burn, or ban the item, the reaction often exceeds what pure commercial branding would provoke—because the object has acquired sacred charge through repeated ritual use and emotional investment.

These items function as modern idols and pocket scripture. They do not require theological claims to operate this way. Their power comes from what they represent and how communities treat them: as non-negotiable markers of identity and as objects that must be respected or defended. The commercial nature of the production does not diminish the role; it often amplifies it by making the symbols ubiquitous and accessible for daily performance of faith in the movement.

Parades and Processions: Collective Ritual in Public

Religious traditions worldwide have long used public processions—people dressed in symbolic clothing, carrying images or banners, moving together through space while combining solemn meaning with festivity. Carnival parades, relic processions, chariot festivals, and saints’ day marches turn belief into embodied, collective action. The joy and celebration are not side effects; they are part of what binds participants and makes the ritual memorable and attractive.

Political movements replicate this pattern with striking fidelity. Rallies, marches, and parades bring adherents together in coordinated apparel (the merch), carrying flags and signs (the functional idols), and often blending grievance or purpose with music, chanting, and a festive atmosphere. The event claims public space as sacred to the cause. It enacts the narrative in real time. It generates the emotional intensity that private belief rarely achieves on its own.

Whether the occasion is mournful, triumphant, or anticipatory, the structure serves the same ends: reinforcing who “we” are, dramatizing the boundary with “them,” and renewing commitment through shared physical action. The presence of genuine enjoyment—people having a good time together while affirming their deepest convictions—does not make the event less religious in function. Many traditional religious festivals deliberately include feasting, music, and celebration for precisely the same reason: affective bonds strengthen when meaning and pleasure travel together.

Why the Overlap Matters

Seeing political movements through this functional religious lens does not require claiming they are “the same” as Christianity, Buddhism, or Islam. It reveals why certain secular ideologies can generate comparable levels of devotion, sacrifice, purity enforcement, and conflict. When a movement supplies ultimate concerns, charged symbols, ritual practices, and public performances of belonging, it activates deep human capacities for meaning-making and group cohesion—capacities historically channeled through religion.

This explains several observable features of contemporary politics that rational-interest models struggle to account for: intense emotional investment in seemingly trivial symbols, moralization of disagreement, the power of collective events to renew energy, and the way material culture becomes a daily discipline rather than mere consumer preference.

Implications for Governance: Why Separation of Church and State Remains Essential

When political movements develop dense religious-like features—complete with sacred symbols, ritual calendars, purity tests, and non-negotiable ultimate concerns—the principle of separation of church and state becomes even more necessary, not less. This separation does not express hostility toward religion. It protects the integrity of both religion and the state in a pluralistic society. By preventing any single religious or quasi-religious ideology from capturing state power, it safeguards freedom of conscience for individuals and minority communities. It keeps the state from coercing belief or observance and prevents religious institutions from being corrupted by the temptations of political enforcement and public funding tied to loyalty. History shows that when the state endorses or privileges one comprehensive worldview—whether traditional religion or a secular political creed—dissenters quickly become second-class citizens, and the favored system tends to harden into orthodoxy enforced by law rather than persuasion.

The same logic applies to proposals that would have the state officially designate dedicated months or periods to celebrate one particular religion above others. In a genuinely pluralistic nation, such state-sponsored elevation is not neutral celebration; it is an exercise in cultural establishment. It signals that one faith tradition enjoys official favor while others are merely tolerated. Citizens who do not share that religion, or who hold no religion, are implicitly placed outside the circle of full national belonging. Over time this breeds resentment, defensive identity politics, and the very sectarian conflict that separation of church and state was designed to prevent. Genuine religious vitality and cultural confidence do not require the state to pick winners and stage official festivals on their behalf. They flourish better when the state remains neutral territory—protecting the right of every group to celebrate its own traditions in its own spaces and on its own calendar, without turning public institutions into instruments of religious preference or political liturgy.

A Clear-Eyed Conclusion

Politics has always borrowed from religion’s toolkit. The functional definition simply makes the borrowing visible without requiring supernatural belief on either side. Flags function as banners. Hats and shirts function as vestments or devotional wear. Parades function as processions. Merch functions as portable idols and scripture. When people dress in the symbols, carry them through the streets, and celebrate together, they are participating in a living system that meets the same human needs traditional religions have long addressed: belonging, meaning, moral orientation, and the public dramatization of what matters most.

The difference lies in content and claimed authority, not in the underlying architecture. Recognizing the architecture does not diminish either politics or religion. It simply allows clearer analysis of why certain movements inspire the loyalty, sacrifice, and symbolic warfare usually associated with religious faith—without gods, and sometimes while loudly denying any religious dimension at all. In such an environment, maintaining a principled separation between the state and any comprehensive belief system, religious or political, remains one of the most practical safeguards of liberty.

06/09/2026

What’s Really Driving Washington State’s Leftward Shift?

I’ve been sitting with this question for a while: what actually explains Washington’s steady move to the left over the past few decades, including the growing room for explicitly socialist and anti-capitalist politics in places like Seattle?
I feel a lot of the usual answers and explanations miss something important.

Some people say it happened because capitalism failed regular people. Others say it happened because capitalism succeeded so well that people felt they could afford to experiment with bigger government and more redistribution. Some point to demographics, education levels, or cultural changes in institutions. All of those played a role, sure, duh. But the bit that often gets downplayed is just how much of this shift happened during a period of real prosperity!

Washington didn’t drift left while the economy was collapsing. It drifted left while the Puget Sound region was creating enormous wealth the likes the world has never seen! The rise of Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks and more, and the broader tech economy brought very high-paying jobs, expanded tax revenue, and turned the area into one of the strongest most powerful economic engines in the country - on even a bad year.

👉 That kind of sustained abundance, naturally, undebateably changes what politics focuses on.

When a society is mostly worried about basic growth and opportunity, politics tends to stay focused on production and results. When prosperity becomes more taken for granted, attention shifts toward how the gains are distributed, who’s being left behind and what what looks like, and what problems can be solved through more government action. Within that environment, arguments for heavier regulation, stronger redistribution, and even direct critiques of capitalism start to sound more reasonable to more people.

This helps explain how someone like Kshama Sawant could win and hold a Seattle City Council seat for ten years while openly describing herself as a revolutionary socialist. Her support didn’t mean most voters wanted to abolish capitalism. It showed that enough people were frustrated with outcomes on housing, inequality, and corporate power that an explicitly anti-capitalist message could win in at least one part of the city.

The bigger issue isn’t any one politician. It’s what happens to debate and decision-making when one broad direction becomes dominant for an extended period of time.

When one side holds most of the cultural and institutional power in a region for some 40 years, opposing or even just cautious opposing viewpoints signaling a warning, tend to lose standing. Arguments about incentives, trade-offs, regulatory costs, or unintended consequences get treated less like useful input and more like resistance to progress. Over time, that reduces the quality of feedback the system receives as outright hateful, triggering, or racist. Policies and assumptions can drift further without enough pushback to catch problems early.

Abundance makes this dynamic easier to sustain. When the economy is generating enough revenue and living standards are high for a large share of the population, it creates more margin for error. People feel like there’s enough slack to keep adding rules, spending, and mandates without immediate crisis. That slack can delay the moment when the costs of reduced flexibility become obvious.

Housing is one of the clearer places to watch this in practice.

The big drop in Seattle’s multifamily permitting after 2022 was mostly driven by national interest rate increases that made large projects much harder to finance. That wasn’t a Washington-only problem. But the real test is still ahead of us.
When financing conditions improve and capital becomes available again, how quickly does housing production actually recover? If supply comes back reasonably fast, then the slowdown was mostly about interest rates. If it stays sluggish even with better financing, then local rules, permitting systems, political priorities, and accumulated constraints are probably playing a bigger role than supporters of the established ideologies acting the conduit for reform, want to admit.

That’s why the permit data is worth paying attention to. It’s one of the few things that’s hard to spin. Either projects get permitted and move forward, or they don’t. It gives us a measurable way to check whether the current direction is leaving the region more or less able to respond when conditions change.

I don’t think any single explanation fully accounts for Washington’s leftward shift. Inequality, demographic sorting into urban areas, institutional influence in universities and media, and generational experiences all mattered. But abundance is the factor that made the other ones more powerful. Sustained prosperity gave people the confidence to prioritize redistribution, equity, and stronger government intervention while treating the underlying systems that generate wealth as relatively automatic.

Whether that shift ultimately strengthens or weakens Washington’s ability to keep producing broad prosperity is still being tested. The data on housing, economic growth, migration, and public outcomes will keep providing evidence either way.
The results will eventually speak for themselves.
Genuine pushback and different readings are welcome.

06/05/2026

It would appear, the second coming of Christ is indeed nigh, because I received a CC of a letter from what appears to be addressed to Governor Bob Ferguson from James Madison, himself - regarding the recent infiltration of government into women's genitalia.

Montpelier, Virginia
June 5, in the Year of our Lord 2026

To His Excellency, Governor Robert Ferguson
of the Commonwealth of Washington

Sir,
I have lately been made acquainted, through such channels as the modern age affords, with your Executive Order of the first instant, directing the agencies of your state to fashion policies, trainings, and accommodations in the workplaces under your charge for those women experiencing the natural change of life known as perimenopause and menopause. You frame this as a matter of fairness, of retaining experienced hands in the service of the public, and of dispelling what you term the “invisibility” of this stage in the order of nature.

Permit an old man, long returned to dust yet still attentive to the principles that animated the founding of these United States, to offer a few reflections drawn from the experience of framing a government of limited and enumerated powers.
We who labored at Philadelphia and in the several ratifications held it as fundamental that the powers of government, whether federal or state, must remain few, defined, and tied to the great ends of securing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—not of supplying every convenience or mitigating every discomfort that attends the human condition. The clause touching the general welfare was never intended, as some now seem to suppose, as a warrant for the magistrate to reach into the ordinary transactions of private life, the relations of master and servant, or the intimate workings of the female constitution. Such an interpretation, if suffered to prevail, would render every natural infirmity or passage of life a proper object of public regulation. The poor, the aged, the afflicted in mind or body—all might then claim the same solicitude, until the state becomes the universal nurse and the citizen a perpetual ward. I have elsewhere warned that once Congress (or by analogy a state executive) may employ the public treasure or the coercive authority of law for whatever it pleases to call the general welfare, there remains no limit to its pretensions. Education, the relief of distress, the regulation of every domestic arrangement—nothing would lie beyond its grasp.

Menopause, Sir, is no new malady invented by the present age. It is the appointed close of a woman’s fruitful years, as fixed by the Author of our nature as the seasons or the tides. In my own time, and in the generations before, women bore this change, as they bore the labors of childbirth and the cares of household and field, without expecting the civil magistrate to adjust the temperature of their chambers, to alter the cut of their garments, or to command their employers to rearrange the hours of labor. They relied, as free people ought, upon the resources of family, of private charity, of their own fortitude and the skill of such physicians as they could command. That many continued in useful occupation through these years is evident from the annals of our country. To treat this passage as a species of disability requiring systematic state intervention is to confound the distinction between the ordinary course of Providence and those extraordinary burdens that may justly call for the protection of law.

I do not doubt that certain symptoms may, in particular cases, rise to the level of a genuine impairment that disables a woman from the ordinary duties of her station. Where that occurs, the existing law of your state already provides a remedy through the ordinary processes of reasonable accommodation for proven disability. To go beyond this—to direct the creation of model policies, the training of every supervisor, and the promulgation of guidance to private employers—is to erect a new apparatus whose tendency will be to multiply claims, to burden the productive with fresh regulations, and to accustom the citizen to look to government for the management of what was once the province of private judgment and mutual agreement.

Nor can I forbear to observe that the same reasoning which justifies special provisions for one stage of female life may, with equal plausibility, be extended to every other difference that nature or circumstance has established between the sexes, or between individuals. Once the magistrate undertakes to equalize the natural inequalities of constitution, he embarks upon a course without end and without principle. The republic we sought to establish was not one in which the state would make all conditions alike, but one in which equal laws would protect the equal rights of all to order their own affairs according to their several capacities and circumstances.

You speak, Sir, of losing experienced women from the workforce. I would remind you that the surest preservative of useful labor is not the multiplication of accommodations but the preservation of that spirit of industry, frugality, and self-command which alone renders a people capable of self-government. When every natural trial becomes an occasion for public remedy, that spirit is enfeebled. The woman who has learned to bear her lot with patience and to adapt her labors accordingly will contribute more to the strength of society than the one who has been taught to expect the state to smooth every rough place in her path.

I write not in the spirit of censure but of counsel, as one who helped to frame a Constitution whose chief excellence lay in the restraints it imposed upon power. If your order is meant only to remind public officers of duties already prescribed by existing law, it may do little harm. If it is the first step toward a more general superintendence of the health and domestic arrangements of the people, it will prove, in the end, a source of greater mischief than the inconveniences it seeks to remedy.

I remain, with due respect for the office you hold and for the people you serve,

Your obedient servant,
James Madison

05/10/2026

https://substack.com//note/p-197127670?r=424vjj

Treason, Not Terrorism.

04/27/2026

Fourteen dead gray whales now. Starving to death.

So tell me—is it my fault there are potholes crumbling the roads in downtown Seattle? Is it the fault of someone who lives there, pays their “fair share” of taxes, or even the road crew busting their asses? No. Potholes happen. The only people who deserve blame are the ones responsible for fixing them—the ones in charge of maintaining the roads, the bridges, the infrastructure.

That’s how I see so many things in this world. We each have our little corner to take care of. In a neighborhood, you mow your lawn, fix your fence, keep your yard decent so the whole block doesn’t look like hell. But who’s handing out the tools? Who’s getting rich selling them? And who’s actually in charge of the big picture?

That’s why it drives me insane when I hear this collective guilt trip that “the human race” is the problem destroying the planet. BS.

No. It’s the people in power! The governments, the cities, the towns, the homeowners’ associations, the banks, the CEOs, the managers—the ones who were handed the responsibility to protect the water, the air, the wildlife, the infrastructure. They’re the ones who keep choosing the path that makes them more money or lines their own pockets instead of doing what’s right.

The rest of us—the 99.9%—we’re just trying to live. We need a car to get to work. We need food on the table. We need heat in the winter and a roof that doesn’t leak. We’re not out here scheming to kill whales or melt ice caps. We’re just surviving in the system they built and they maintain.

So when someone says the gray whales are dying because of “humanity’s pollution,” I call it what it is: madness. It’s the same as blaming the average taxpayer for a collapsing bridge. The fault lies with the people charged with protecting these things, not the people forced to live inside their failures.
We’ve had the technology for decades—far more efficient vehicles, cleaner energy, better ways forward. But those inventions keep getting buried, bought out, or regulated into oblivion because they threaten the profits of the people at the top.

So stop beating yourself up. We’re all just doing the best we can with the hand we were dealt. The second we all start feeling personally guilty for the planet’s problems, the people who actually created most of them get to play savior with their “solutions” that somehow never quite arrive tomorrow.

They broke it. They profit from it. They should damn well fix it. Will they though? 🤔

04/12/2026

Rob McKenna Just Walked Straight Into Ferguson’s Trap – And Handed the Democrats the Key to Unlimited Income Taxes in Washington

The Candle of Hope is being blown out.

Most people still think this is about taxing millionaires. It isn’t. That’s the packaging. The actual fight is about whether Washington can build a full income-tax system without ever asking voters to change the Constitution.

Listen up, Washington taxpayers.
I’ve been sounding the alarm on this for months. While the legislature was still debating ESSB 6346 – the so-called “millionaires tax” – I laid out the entire playbook in private analysis: this wasn’t just another tax bill. It was a deliberate constitutional pressure test engineered to force the courts to redefine what counts as a “property tax” under our state constitution. The goal? Blow open the door to broad income-style taxation without ever needing a voter-approved constitutional amendment.

And now? Rob McKenna and the Citizen Action Defense Fund have filed the lawsuit on April 9, 2026 – exactly the predictable, by-the-book attack I warned would play right into Bob Ferguson’s hands.

They did it anyway.

McKenna, joined by former Supreme Court Justice Phil Talmadge, filed in Klickitat County Superior Court arguing precisely what everyone expected: income is “property” under nearly a century of precedent (Culliton v. Chase, 1933), the 9.9% graduated rate on income over $1 million violates Article VII’s uniformity requirement and 1% cap, and the whole thing is unconstitutional on its face.

Ferguson couldn’t have scripted a better opening act. On the day he signed the bill (March 30, 2026), he smirked to reporters: “I’m very familiar with Rob McKenna. As AG, we never lost a case when Rob litigated the other side, so we feel confident that we’ll prevail against him yet again.”

That wasn’t trash talk. That was a victory lap. Ferguson knows McKenna is repeating the exact same losing strategy that failed against the capital gains tax in Quinn v. State (2023).

You do not have to assume intent to see the obvious pattern, here. The structure, the rejected amendment that would have actuallt made this only upon millionaires, and the timing of this lawsuit all point in the same direction.

Once you see that pattern, you cannot unsee it - and it seems, I'm the only one! And once the court validates this structure—even of only narrowly—the legal battle field will never be the same amd WA State, will likewise. This is it, people, this is not catastrophizing. This is a permanence we will never be able to go back from. It is the final kill shot to financial liberty in WA State.

Here’s Exactly How the Trap Was Built – And Why McKenna’s Lawsuit Triggers It

Go back to the original ESSB 6346 text. It doesn’t call itself a property tax. It imposes “a tax… on the receipt of Washington taxable income.” It imports federal adjusted gross income wholesale, adds state modifications, deductions, carryovers – the full income-tax machinery – while carefully avoiding any language that would lock it into Culliton’s definition of “income as property.”

The rejected Gildon amendment proved the intent: Democrats killed the language that would have made the entire act “null and void” .

👉 ...unless voters first approved a constitutional amendment. They didn’t want the safe, honest path. They wanted the litigation path – the one that lets the Washington leftist Supreme Court do their dirty work for them. 💣💥

They are counting on something very specific: that most people will focus on the rate, the threshold, and the politics—while missing the legal mechanism that actually matters. By the time that mechanism is visible, it is already locked in by precedent.

Remember the capital gains tax? Challengers argued “this is income/property → unconstitutional.” The Supreme Court (7-2) said: “No – it’s an excise tax on the transaction of selling assets.” Boom. Article VII bypassed. Precedent set. Ferguson and the legislature watched that ruling and built ESSB 6346 to force the next logical step:

👉 ...“If we can reclassify that, we can reclassify this.”

This has to do with removing democracy, the will of the voters, from the will of government where the voters have been distinctly clear for 100 years.

So, side step the voters.

Watch the language when this reaches the Supreme Court. You will not hear “income tax.” You will hear phrases like “statutory tax base,” “incidence of taxation,” and “not a tax on property as historically defined.” That is how they are going to be moving the line—quietly, surgically, and after the fact.

McKenna’s complaint walks straight into that precedent. Straight into Ferguson's trap.

By leading with the clean “income = property” argument, he gives the court the easy off-ramp it already used once: distinguish, reinterpret, or narrow Culliton just enough to call this a “statutory tax on receipt” rather than a property tax. Ferguson’s team has been telegraphing this for months.

👉...The bill was written expecting this lawsuit. Make sense now, how they have done something so blatantly obviously in violation of the constitution, yet?

This Is Happening Right Now – And It’s Worse Than You Think

The lawsuit is live. Trial court will probably strike it down quickly (rural venue, bound by precedent). Then it rockets to the Supreme Court – exactly where Ferguson wants it. The current court has already shown it’s willing to reinterpret tax categories to protect legislative policy. A “win” for the state here doesn’t just save the 9.9% tax.

👉 ...It widens the non-property-tax box permanently.

This is how structural change happens in real time: not through a single sweeping decision, but through one “limited” ruling that becomes the foundation for the next, and the next, and the next, until the original boundary is unrecognizable. That has been their goal all along.

Future legislatures get a green light: more “receipt” taxes, more federal AGI conformity, more progressive structures –

👉...all without amending the constitution or asking voters.

The integration clause in the bill (other tax reforms reverse if this falls) was written to make the whole package durable. This is the foundation test. Capital gains was the warm-up.

I have been saying this now from the moment I heard about this and asked, how the @&!& can they do something they know is going to lose? I spoke this same message months ago when I pored over the bill language, the rejected amendment(s), and now Ferguson’s pre-filing confidence. McKenna’s team is fighting the last war. The Democrats are fighting the next one.

Right now, most opposition is reacting to the tax itself. Look at right, while the left gets it done over there. That is exactly one step behind where this fight actually is as designed, as predicted, as expected. This is no longer about stopping a tax - it never was.

👉 It is about stopping the legal framework that makes the next ten taxes possible. And if McKenna et al do not get their heads around this, we the people are screwed going forward for a semblance of financial freedom. And it will begin small, no big deal, just pennies and develop into a full blown pay your share, peasant. No, I'm not being hyperbolic. Read the room.

If you think this stops at “millionaires,” you are reading the label, not the system. Ignoring the rejected Amendments. Systems expand. Once the mechanism is validated, thresholds move. Definitions shift. And what starts at the top never stays there.

How to Actually Head This Off and Defeat Ferguson’s Route – Before It’s Too Late

McKenna’s lawsuit is necessary, but it is not sufficient - even remotely. So badly so, it has be questioning if he is'nt just playing the prescribed part FOR Ferguson and the democrats! Relying on the same argument that already failed once is playing checkers while Ferguson plays 3D chess (see his smug comments, again). Here’s the real path to kill this for good and slam the door shut:

Supplement the Lawsuit – Don’t Just Repeat It

McKenna/Talmadge must immediately layer in the stronger attacks:

Force a functional test: Even if labeled something else, this tax walks, talks, and calculates like income (net, federal-dependent, no true “privilege” or discrete transaction). It fails as a legitimate excise under the court’s own Quinn logic.

Hammer the no-privilege angle: What “privilege” is the state granting when someone earns wages or receives pass-through income? None. Traditional excise taxes require a state-granted privilege (roads, liquor, etc.). This doesn’t.

Expose the delegation problem: The bill outsources its entire base to the federal IRC. That raises serious control and vagueness issues.

Box the Supreme Court in so tightly that upholding it requires openly admitting they’re overturning or gutting Culliton – something the justices have so far avoided doing explicitly.

Parallel Voter Offense – The Referendum and Constitutional Amendment

Let’s Go Washington is already moving on a referendum. Accelerate it. But don’t stop there. Launch (or support) a constitutional initiative that explicitly defines income as property subject to Article VII limits and requires voter approval for any income-style tax. Force the issue out of the courtroom and back to the people – where it belongs. The rejected Gildon amendment showed Democrats fear this path. Make them own the fear.

Political Warfare – Target the Court and the Legislature

2026 Supreme Court elections matter – multiple seats are up. Make this the central issue. Public education campaigns exposing the “classification trap” will build pressure. Remind voters: Ferguson rejected the clean constitutional fix because he wants judicial activism, not democracy.

Public Exposure

This is the whistleblower moment. Share the bill text side-by-side with McKenna’s complaint. Show the rejected amendment. Highlight Ferguson’s preemptive gloating. The more taxpayers see the engineered trap, the harder it is for the court to pretend this is just routine litigation.

Washington’s constitution was written to protect against exactly this kind of power grab. The legislature didn’t amend it – they built a litigation machine instead. McKenna’s team just handed them the perfect test case.

This is not a theory. This is a long game sequence. And you are watching it play out in real time.

We still have time to flip the script. There is hope, but its a candle fighting to stay lit in a hurricane. But only if we stop playing defense on their terms and start forcing the fight where it hurts: function over label, voters over courts, constitution over classification games.

This is the moment. I have and am still warning you.

Share this article.
Link the bill.
Demand better from the challengers, McKenna et al.

Washington’s no-income-tax status – and your wallet – depend on it. Our Future depends on it. This is it, people. This is the government our forefathers warned us about.

Finally, everyone SHOULD be having that intuitive, proverbial “what the hell is going on” moment right now. How does this even make sense? What the %&@? is REALLY going on?!?

How could they knowingly build something they knew would get challenged?

How could they create something that appears to run straight into the Constitution?

Now you know.

Because Captain Obvious, it was never just about whether it survives.

It was about forcing the friction piece to the surface — and subverting it entirely to open a whole new arena of tax revenue into a State that refuses accountability, yet prides itself on transparency.