JOHN CURLEY

‘It’s sort of insulting’: Brian Heywood says lawmakers can’t keep their house in order amid income tax push

Feb 28, 2026, 5:01 AM

The “millionaire tax” has drawn mass criticism as it’s made its way to the House, including 61,000 members of Let’s Go Washington, led by Brian Heywood.

Heywood discussed the proposed bill on “The John Curley Show” on KIRO Newsradio, stating that Washington’s lawmakers continuously push toward raising taxes, but none of the money spent has been beneficial in fixing the state’s problems.

“The measure of success in the state seems to be how much of taxpayers’ money you spend, not whether it was actually effective,” Heywood said. “There’s no accountability here, and it means they’re not serious. It’s sort of insulting that they’re saying we don’t have enough money. We need more of yours when they can’t keep their house in order.”

Heywood retold a story about a Senate hearing where tens of thousands of people opposed the “millionaire tax.” The massive increase in viewership was then labeled as fraud, with claims that Let’s Go Washington was using robots to push a narrative.

“We got 61,000 people who signed in on the legislator system to voice their opinion against the tax,” Heywood said. “It was so shocking to them. Normally, if they get 500, that’s a lot; if they get 10,000, that’s a big deal. Immediately, the response was, ‘Well, it must be bots.’ In fact, we created a not a bot organization, so when people signed in today, we had almost 1,000 people sign in as ‘not a bot.’

“There are people who are so pissed off that people sign in multiple times, so there were duplicates in the count,” he continued. “In the system, there’s nothing to completely verify your ID; that’s how they set it up. So, they’ve set it up, probably about as strong as our voter IDs on the regular system. Then suddenly, these people who don’t want voter ID were screaming, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s duplicates.’ They used the word fraud to try to get rid of the trust in the system.”

Despite his skepticism, Heywood believes the opposition’s efforts have already made an impact on lawmakers.

“So last week, three Democrats changed their vote, and that I promise you would not have happened if we hadn’t had 61,000 people signing in,” he said. “It scared them, they had to do it so they don’t get hit so hard in the primary. I know at least 100,000 people, unique individuals who signed in this time on the list that signed in as opposed to that, that’s not small. I think it could peel off some of the Democrats. There’s a small chance that we could push this back a little bit. Granted, I got to smoke a little bit of crack to totally believe that.”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

Listen to John Curley weekday afternoons from 3 – 7 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

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