The Sunday afternoon podcast with Greg Reese

The Stamp Act of 1765 was the first direct tax levied by Parliament on the colonies, which had no elected representatives in Parliament to approve or debate it. British Parliament later stated in the Declaratory Act that they had “full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America in all cases whatsoever.” According to the story, the American Revolution wasn’t about the size of the tax, it was about the right of Britain to impose taxes on the colonists without their consent.From 1868 to 1913, 90 percent of federal tax revenue came from alcohol and tobacco taxes. In 1909, President Taft recommended that Congress propose a constitutional amendment to give the government power to tax incomes without apportioning the burden.In 1913, the Federal Reserve Bank was established. Along with it came the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, which gave what many court cases show to be undue power to the Internal Revenue Service. This includes case law that was withheld from IRS employee training, such as Stanton v. Baltic Mining Co. Bill Benson’s findings, published in “The Law That Never Was,” make a case that the 16th Amendment was not legally ratified and that the Secretary of State committed fraud when he declared it so in 1913.The 1913 Form 1040 shows that only those with annual incomes of at least $3,000 were instructed to file an income tax return — the equivalent to approximately $98,000 in 2025. And only about three percent of the population was subject to the income tax. In the years following the Great Depression taxes were raised from about a tenth of a person’s income to a third. And during WWII the taxpayer base was expanded from 4 million people to 42 million. The Current Tax Payment Act of 1943 required employers to withhold federal income tax from an employee’s paycheck each pay period and send the payment directly to the IRS.There is no statute in the Internal Revenue Code that clearly makes the average American wage earner liable to file a 1040 or pay income tax on their labor. And the Code of Federal Regulations, 26 CFR § 601.602, states explicitly: “The tax system is based on voluntary compliance.” The IRS counters that Congress gave the Secretary of the Treasury power to enforce these laws through involuntary collection if voluntary compliance fails.In 2026, while many Americans struggle to make ends meet, and argue that the IRS is unconstitutional, the White House is targeting a July 4 deadline for the CLARITY Act to become law, which will be the legal framework for the agentic crypto economy, and comprehensive oversight by the IRS. Changes to Internal Revenue Code §6045 require brokers — “any person who is responsible for regularly providing any service effectuating transfers of digital assets on behalf of another person.” — to report digital asset transactions to the IRS.This is happening on the international level as well, by the time the agentic AI commerce is fully running, every wallet, every broker, and every cross-border data-sharing agreement will already be wired directly into the IRS and its international counterparts.The US has explicitly rejected the CBDC model in favor of privately issued, dollar-backed stablecoins regulated under the GENIUS Act and soon the CLARITY Act. But the surveillance and programmability concerns associated with CBDCs are still being achieved through state-mandated reporting wrapped around privately issued tokens that are functionally just as traceable.Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin which handles 98% of AI agent payments, is positioning itself as infrastructure for tokenized carbon credits. And so if a future carbon tax were ever implemented, the infrastructure will already be in place for it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregreese.substack.com/subscribe

In the early nineteen-hundreds, French psychologist Pierre Janet, studied what he called, “désagrégation,” the splitting of consciousness under trauma. Janet studied several patients whose traumatic histories had led to what modern science calls, Multiple Personality Disorder.Severe trauma in childhood can fragment the mind into different parts, known as “alters.” The purpose of the alter is to spare the individual the trauma, so the individual consciousness is unaware of the alter, they exist separately.According to history, this has been understood for millennia and these alters can be programmed and trained, and can hold information inaccessible to the core personality. You can trace this knowledge all the way back to the Egyptian Mystery Schools, to the Knights Templar, and through all the various Secret Societies that followed. The neurological research has shown that the alters are different people with different brain activation patterns, autonomic responses, visual acuity, and allergic responses. Some alters speak languages that the individual can’t. This explains why these alters were seen as demonic possession in the past, and why many still see it that way.Government studies on combat veterans after World War One showed that extreme stress can produce amnesia and identity disruption. During World War Two, Dr. Josef Mengele experimented with traumatizing children, and beginning in 1945 with Operation Paperclip, the United States began recruiting several scientists involved in this research into the CIA.The CIA’s Project BLUEBIRD attempted to create amnesia in people with hypnosis, drugs and electroshock. This continued with Project ARTICHOKE where the CIA added sensory deprivation and forced morphine addiction. A 1952 memo shows they were looking to see if a person could be made into an unwitting assassin. In the MKULTRA program, the CIA added a psychological trauma they called “psychic driving,” often administered while the person was under the influence of LSD. And with Project MKOFTEN, the CIA began experimenting with demonic possession and looking into occult rituals that could influence behavior.According to scores of victims, many of whom have mysteriously died or disappeared, the world stage is cast with psychotic victims of trauma based mind control with multiple personalities who do exactly what they are told.Lieutenant Colonel Michael Aquino of the U.S. Army’s Psychological Operations, who founded the satanic Temple of Set in 1975, and managed to get it listed in the U.S. Army Chaplain’s Handbook, published a paper in 1980, “From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory,” that suggested targeting the domestic population with ELF waves and any other type of technology available that could control behavior. There is a Trauma-Based-Mind-Control-lite version for the entire population, known as, Affective Management and Crisis Capitalization. Strategies of using stress and fear to induce regression and make the population dependent on authority figures or comfort objects.Terror Management Theory has demonstrated that when subjects were shown imagery of death or disasters, they were more likely to vote for authoritative leaders who promised safety and purchase luxury items they didn’t need.A frightened population demands more policing, they tolerate more surveillance, and they prefer to stay indoors. When the population is subjected to mass trauma, they fall into a state of collective dissociation, and unpopular policies are pushed through that would not be accepted by a logical thinking mental state. Like the Patriot Act, or a governmental system run by Artificial Intelligence. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregreese.substack.com/subscribe

In the Mind-Wandering Discovery by Killingsworth & Gilbert, over a quarter-million data points showed that people were not focused on what they were doing for about forty-seven percent of their waking lives, and the less focus they had, the more unhappy they were. Decades of research show that nearly half of daily life consists of automatic behaviors executed without conscious decision-making. Unconscious automatic brain activity precedes conscious awareness by about half a second, and in most cases, will help keep you consciously oblivious to half of your waking life.There is a default setting that our nervous system goes into whenever we lose focus and wander. Scientific studies have identified it as The Default Mode Network. This is what Buddhism calls, ignorance, and Gurdjieff called waking sleep. Many spiritual traditions have diagnosed the human condition as one of chronic inattention, and have taught various practices to remedy this problem and help us wake up.But this chronic inattention is big business for authoritarian governments which is why there has been so much invested into covertly programming the subconscious mind with media. If people are content to live half their life unaware of themselves, then a governing system will manage their lives for them as they see fit. The unconscious brains of billions are programmed to make predictable choices without ever activating conscious awareness and critical thought, and that’s old fashioned compared to the latest neural implant science.The claustrum is a thin, irregular sheet of neurons present in both hemispheres of the brain and has more bidirectional cortical connectivity than any other structure. It is believed to be the “conductor of the orchestra” that binds together all sensory streams into a unified conscious experience. In the Koubeissi Study of 2014, electrodes were placed between the left claustrum and the anterior insula of a patient who was conscious and performing tasks. When they turned the electrode on, the fourteen hertz signal caused an immediate shut-down of conscious awareness. The patient had a blank stare and was unresponsive to commands, but continued to perform their automatic behaviors. Once the switch was turned off again, the patient experienced immediate recovery with no memory of the interruption. If consciousness can be switched off with a 14 Hz signal, and most people are already operating unconsciously half the time, the implications for autonomy are profound.Focused self-awareness brings more happiness and success, and for regular practitioners, much more. Meditation experts have significantly changed their own brain structure and are operating on levels unattainable to those with a wandering mind. But for the beginner, this higher consciousness is achieved with the simple practice of becoming fully aware of whatever you are doing at any given moment. This is expressed succinctly with the Zen proverb, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”A significant amount of the population is mostly running on auto-pilot and making decisions based on subconscious triggers, and there isn’t much you can do about that. But if you truly want freedom, the default zombie mode of thinking must be overridden through regular daily practice. It doesn’t cost anything, and you can start right now.“Chop wood, carry water” means whatever you are doing, do it with presence. Like Thich Nhat Hanh famously wrote, daily chores are not chores, they are opportunities to practice mindfulness and experience the miracle of life by being fully present.When everything we do is done with intention, only then can we claim to have agency over our own self. And without that agency, there will be an authoritarian state to administer it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregreese.substack.com/subscribe