Suspected Pipeline Bomber Has Anti-Government Extremist Ties, Admired Joseph Stack

Anson Chi on YouTube

Anson Chi, the north Texas man authorities suspect bombed a natural gas pipeline station in Plano, Texas, on June 18, is an anti-government extremist active in the tax protest movement.

Chi, 32, a former engineer who claimed to have “retired” but was living with his parents, supported many causes, including environmental and animal rights causes, but the convictions he expressed most strongly in on-line writings were anti-government ones. He routinely posted anti-government comments to his Facebook Wall, collecting them from both the right and left.

However, statements by Chi in recent years reveal a strong connection with the right-wing “patriot movement,” especially its tax protest branch. The tax protest movement claims Americans aren’t required to pay federal income taxes and a government conspiracy is hiding this fact. “There is no law for the average American to pay the income tax,” Chi claimed in 2010, “as stated over and over again by the Supreme Court—case closed!”

In 2010, after fellow tax protester Joseph Andrew Stack flew his plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, in a suicide attack, Chi posted a link to Stack’s suicide note while proclaiming, “Bring down the IRS!”

Chi’s postings reveal familiarity with the movement’s pseudo-legal arguments, as well as key figures. Chi easily rattled off the names of tax protest gurus and court cases involving tax protesters. Saying he was a “paralegal,” Chi claimed to be friends with tax protest movement attorneys Tom Cryer and Larry Becraft, and to have attended the trial of Sherry Jackson, a former IRS employee who joined the tax protest movement and was convicted in 2007 of failing to file income tax returns.

Chi was also familiar with the pseudo-legal arguments of the sovereign citizen movement, proclaiming in late 2010 that he knew “all about admiralty maritime law and the strawman theory.”

Chi’s other fixation was on the banking system; like many anti-government extremists, he was obsessed with “international bankers” and the Federal Reserve. “Your life is under control by greedy private bankers,” he told visitors to his Facebook page, “especially since they print YOUR money based on nothing but thin air!”

Chi liked the movie Zeitgeist, as well as other recent popular on-line movies that combined New World Order and Federal Reserve conspiracy theories with New Age concepts. Chi’s postings reflected the theories advanced by such movies. “The private central bankers like the Rothschilds—changed from Jewish name Bauer, like Henry Kissinger changed from Heinz Loeb,” he wrote in 2010, “are…a bunch of con artists, working as the financial gatekeepers…for the Vatican.”