When the Immune System Turns on You#

There’s a disease in medicine called lupus. It’s autoimmune — the immune system, the very machinery designed to protect your body, starts attacking your own healthy tissue. Your antibodies lose the ability to distinguish a foreign invader from your own cells. The system built to keep you alive slowly kills you from the inside.

I think about lupus every time I think about the IRS scandal.

Not because I’m a doctor — I’m about as far from that as it gets. But because what happened with the IRS is the political equivalent of an autoimmune disorder. And understanding it in those terms makes the threat impossible to miss: the most dangerous thing an institution can do isn’t fail to protect you. It’s aim its power directly at you.

Let me walk you through what happened, because the details matter — and too many people have already let them fade. Which, of course, is exactly what the people responsible were banking on.

Starting around 2010, the Internal Revenue Service began systematically targeting conservative organizations — Tea Party groups, patriot organizations, anyone with certain keywords in their applications for tax-exempt status. These groups faced extraordinary scrutiny: invasive questionnaires demanding donor lists, detailed activity descriptions, even the content of their prayers. Applications that should have cleared in weeks were stalled for months, sometimes years. Some groups simply folded — which, naturally, was the whole point.

The IRS wields enormous power. It can audit you. Freeze your accounts. Impose penalties that wreck your financial life. Refer you for criminal prosecution. That power exists for a legitimate reason: making sure everyone pays their share and that tax-exempt organizations actually deserve the exemption. That’s the immune function — identifying and neutralizing entities gaming the system.

But what happens when that immune function gets aimed at people not because they’re gaming anything, but because of their political beliefs? When the audit power, the scrutiny power, the delay-and-obstruct power gets deployed selectively — not against fraud, but against dissent?

You get an autoimmune attack. The institution’s legitimate power becomes a weapon pointed at the very citizens it’s supposed to serve.

The IRS scandal follows what I call the Immunity Hijack model — a three-stage process by which a protective institution transforms into a predatory one. Each stage is more insidious than the last.

Stage One: Function Drift.

Every government institution has a defined function — its immune purpose. The IRS exists to administer the tax code fairly and uniformly. Its antibody target: tax fraud, noncompliance, illegitimate exemptions. When the system works, the IRS identifies these threats and neutralizes them regardless of the target’s political identity.

Function drift kicks in when targeting criteria shifts from behavior to identity. The IRS didn’t ramp up scrutiny on Tea Party groups because those groups were committing fraud. There was no evidence of widespread fraud among conservative tax-exempt applicants. The scrutiny was triggered by who they were — keywords in their names, the political orientation of their missions. The immune system’s targeting algorithm got rewritten: the new pathogen wasn’t “tax fraud.” It was “conservative political organizing.”

That’s the moment the autoimmune disease takes hold. The antibodies are still functioning. The scrutiny machinery is still running. But the target has changed. The immune system is attacking healthy tissue.

Stage Two: Legitimacy Camouflage.

Here’s what makes institutional autoimmune attacks far more dangerous than external threats: they wear the uniform of legitimate authority.

The IRS wasn’t using illegal methods. It was deploying its standard toolkit — questionnaires, reviews, audits, processing delays. Every individual action could be justified on paper: “We’re conducting due diligence.” “We’re ensuring compliance.” “We’re following procedure.” Each piece of the attack, viewed alone, looks routine. Only when you step back and see the pattern — the systematic, selective, disproportionate application of “normal” procedures to a specific political group — does the autoimmune nature of the attack snap into focus.

This is the genius of power weaponization: it doesn’t need to break the law. It just needs to selectively enforce the law. The rules get applied with surgical precision to the “right” targets and conveniently relaxed for everyone else. The institution can always point to its authority: “We have the power to audit. We have the power to question. We have the power to delay.” And they’re right — they do. The abuse isn’t in the power itself. It’s in the targeting.

The weaponization doesn’t even require human bias anymore. CNN reported in April 2026 that the IRS is now deploying artificial intelligence for enforcement decisions — selecting who gets audited and who doesn’t — even as the agency has shed over a quarter of its experienced tax examiners and revenue agents. Former IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel warned that AI must be used “responsibly and strategically” with human review to ensure reliable output. But strip away the reassuring language and the structural danger is obvious: an algorithmic targeting system, operating inside an institution with a documented history of selective enforcement, supervised by a skeleton crew of overworked humans. The autoimmune disorder isn’t being cured. It’s being automated.

Try proving that in court. Try proving your audit wasn’t random due diligence but politically motivated persecution. The burden of proof sits on you — the citizen, the small organization, the volunteer-run group that can barely scrape together legal fees. Meanwhile, the institution has unlimited resources, unlimited time, and the full weight of government authority behind every action. The camouflage of legitimacy makes victims question their own victimhood: Maybe I’m paranoid. Maybe this is just how the process works.

That’s not a bug. That’s the design.

Stage Three: Accountability Vacuum.

Who ordered the targeting? Investigations circled that question for years without landing a definitive answer. And that’s no accident — it’s the third stage of the autoimmune attack.

Nobody signed an order. No memo circulated saying “target conservative groups.” The targeting emerged organically — through cultural signals, political alignment within the agency, the kind of implicit direction that leaves no fingerprints. The people doing the targeting could honestly say they were never told to do it. They just… knew. They read the political environment. Understood which way the wind was blowing. Acted accordingly.

This creates a perfect accountability vacuum. Political leadership claims ignorance — “I never ordered this.” Mid-level managers claim they were following the culture. Frontline employees claim they were following the managers. Nobody ordered it. Everybody did it. And nobody can be held responsible because the attack was distributed across hundreds of individual decisions, each small enough to be defensible in isolation, collectively devastating in aggregate.

The immune system was hijacked. But there’s no hijacker to arrest.

I want to be clear about why this matters beyond the specific politics of the IRS case, because the principle at stake here is bigger than any party or election.

The Institutional Immune System runs on trust. Citizens accept the enormous power of institutions like the IRS — the power to demand your financial records, impose penalties, investigate your affairs — because they trust that power will be applied fairly. Not perfectly. Fairly. The social contract says: we grant you these extraordinary powers, and in exchange, you wield them based on behavior, not identity.

When that contract breaks — when power gets weaponized against specific groups for their political beliefs — the damage reaches far beyond the immediate victims. It corrodes the foundational trust that makes institutional authority possible in the first place. If the IRS can target conservatives today, it can target progressives tomorrow. If the tax code can be weaponized, so can the regulatory apparatus, the licensing system, the permitting process, the grant allocation pipeline. Every institution with discretionary power becomes a potential weapon.

And once citizens lose faith that institutional power will be applied fairly, one of two things happens. Either they withdraw from civic life — why bother organizing if the government’s just going to crush you? — or they demand the institutions be torn down — burn it, it’s rotten beyond saving. Both outcomes are catastrophic for a functioning democracy.

So what’s the defense against autoimmune institutional attacks? How do you stop the immune system from turning on the body it’s meant to protect?

Start with structural separation of power and targeting. The people who define enforcement priorities should not be the same people executing enforcement actions. Targeting criteria should be transparent, auditable, and subject to independent review. When patterns of selective enforcement surface, there should be an automatic trigger for investigation — not an investigation run by the institution doing the targeting, but by an independent body with real authority and real teeth.

Second, asymmetric accountability. Right now the institution holds all the power and the citizen carries all the burden of proof. That needs to be partially flipped for targeting decisions. When an institution chooses to scrutinize a citizen or organization, it should bear the burden of demonstrating the scrutiny was based on behavioral criteria, not identity. Make the institution prove its targeting was clean, rather than making the citizen prove it was dirty.

Third — and this circles back to everything I’ve been saying about the Institutional Immune System — we need to build immune defenses against the immune system itself. Watchdog mechanisms that monitor the monitors. Oversight bodies that audit the auditors. Checks on the checkers. It sounds redundant. It is redundant. And that redundancy is the only thing standing between legitimate institutional authority and weaponized institutional tyranny.

The IRS scandal wasn’t just a political controversy. It was a clinical demonstration of what happens when an institution’s immune system develops an autoimmune disorder. The antibodies turned on the body. The protector became the predator. And the most frightening part wasn’t the attack itself — it was how long it took anyone to notice, and how little accountability followed.

The paradox deepened in 2026 when CNN reported that President Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against his own IRS and Treasury Department over the leak of his tax returns by a former contractor — a contractor who’d exploited, in the lawsuit’s own words, “longstanding security failures the IRS had been warned about.” A sitting president suing the agencies he oversees, with his own administration’s lawyers negotiating the settlement. A federal judge openly questioned whether the arrangement was constitutional. The case is a perfect specimen of institutional autoimmune collapse: the body attacking itself, the immune system unable to distinguish oversight from predation, and the structural absurdity becoming so deep that even the courts aren’t sure where the disease ends and the cure begins.

Who guards the guardians? It’s the oldest question in political philosophy. And we still don’t have a good enough answer.