Wesley Snipes: Tax-Relief Cultist?

Just relax, this image will all make sense if you just keep reading.

And to be fair, who hasn't asked themselves that same question, right?

Wesley Snipes on Trial

From 1999 to 2004, the actor Wesley Snipes earned $38 million appearing in more than half a dozen movies, including two sequels to his popular vampire thriller “Blade.”

Actor Wesley Snipes with his press assistant Judy Smith in December 2006. The 45-year-old action star is set to go on trial Monday, Jan. 14, 2008, on tax fraud and conspiracy charges.

The taxes he paid in the same period? Zero.

But unlike other celebrities who find themselves on the wrong side of the Internal Revenue Service, Mr. Snipes has a flamboyant explanation: he argues that he is not actually required to pay taxes.

Mr. Snipes, who is scheduled to go on trial Monday in Ocala, Fla., has become an unlikely public face for the antitax movement, whose members maintain that Americans are not obligated to pay income taxes and that the government extracts taxes from its citizens illegally.

This makes the case a lot more interesting because I've actually witnessed this sort of thing before in my personal life. I make custom flags and banners for a living, and a few years back two FBI agents visited me. They brought with them a flag I had made for a client about a year prior. It was a 'Moorish' flag, based upon the design of the Moroccan flag. The guy who paid me to make the flag was one of the 'black power' types -- but nice. Maybe he was putting on a nice face for me because he needed the flag made, but in any case in he paid for the work I did. His beliefs were a bit strange. Since I make flags and flags represent beliefs, I try not to ask too many political questions. What that means is, I've made lots of flags for socialists and other people with wild, outlandish, unworkable ideas. So I try not to ask, so as to preserve my own sanity and to save time. Once someone starts talking about their beliefs, there's this crazy inertia that develops -- and it all takes time.

Apparently I had a lot of time on my hands that day, because I did ask him what his organization believed. He told me that blacks were really descended from an ancient race that existed over 200 million years ago. This antedeluvian race had all sorts of technology, etc. I bit my tongue, I didn't want to break it to him that the dinosaurs were really ruling the Earth at that time, but whatever, I was enthralled. How weird!

Anyway, I made his flags with his custom design and he paid for them in cash. A year later, the two FBI agents show up with the flag in their hands and ask me about it. It turns out that this guy was giving the flag to members of his weird congregation and telling them that once they fly this flag in front of their home, they are technically a part of his 'nation' and therefore separate from the United States. These people were told that they had 'seceded' in a sense. In practical terms, they were told that they would no longer have to pay income taxes. No one informed the IRS, and so naturally these people were now in serious trouble and the FBI was on the lookout for this fellow.

It appears that the same sort of scam may have been played on Wesley Snipes. The circumstances may be slightly different, but the same sort of run-around may be in the making:

His involvement with the tax resistance movement may stem from his association with the Nuwaubians, a quasi-religious sect of black Americans who promote antigovernment theories and who set up a headquarters in Georgia in the early 1990s.

In 2000, Mr. Snipes sought a federal permit for a military training compound on land next to the Nuwaubian camp; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms rejected the request.

I did some checking up on the 'Nuwaubians' and they're weird, really weird -- seems like Scientology may have competition for the souls of hapless celebrities. After reading the wiki entry on them, I think the guy I made a flag for must have been a Nuwaubian! Go read the entry on them right now, here's an exerpt:

White people (sometimes also referred to as “Amorites,” “Hyksos,” “Canaanites,” “Tamahu,” or “Mankind”) are said in one Nuwaubian myth to have been originally created as a race of killers to serve blacks as a slave army, but this plan went awry:

The Caucasian has not been chosen to lead the world. They lack true emotions in their creation. We never intended them to be peaceful. They were bred to be killers, with low reproduction levels and a short life span. What you call Negroid was to live 1,000 years each and the other humans 120 years. But the warrior seed of Caucasians only 60 years. They were only created to fight other invading races, to protect the God race Negroids. But they went insane, lost control when they were left unattended. They were never to taste blood. They did, and their true nature came out.… Because their reproduction levels were cut short, their sexual organs were made the smallest so that the female of their race will want to breed with Negroids to breed themselves out of existence after 6,000 years. It took 600 years to breed them, part man and part beast.^[20]

Nubians are said to be only accidentally a “brown” race – they have rusted in Earth’s atmosphere from their original green color because the magnesium in their melanin has been replaced by iron. The original, supreme, “Ether 9 beings” in Nuwaubian mythology were also green because of chlorophyll in their skin.^[21]

Some human varieties are explained by variations in extra-terrestrial descent. Morbidly obese people, for instance, may be descended from the grotesque and elephant-nosed Deros (see also: Richard Sharpe Shaver); people with Down’s Syndrome may be descended from the 48-chromosomed Teros. (Some Teros are said to live underground on Earth today, with some resembling humans so much that they can come to the surface and mingle with us without being noticed.)^[22]

Another Nuwaubian explanation of racial difference has various human types evolving from various primate species, with some Caucasians deriving from cross-breeding the baboon and orangutan, Pygmys from the chimpanzee and gibbon, and so forth.^[23]

I have to keep reading, I can't tear my eyes away. I've never heard so many crazy beliefs bundled together in one cult. The image above is the cover to one of the Nuwaubian books, found via Wikipedia.

Comments?

Oh, something else from the wiki entry:

[The founder of Nuwaubianism] has been quoted by his followers as saying that he is a Republican and so Nuwaubians are encouraged to vote Republican.

Oh great.