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The 'Sovereign Citizens' Movement

Some sovereign citizens arrested. Are they just idiots caught in an entrapment operation or was it a genuine plot? We'll have to wait to find out.

Nevada pair 'plotted to torture and kill police'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23822110

David Allen Brutsche, 42, (left) and Devon Campbell Newman, 67, allegedly recorded videos to justify their murder plot against police officers

A Nevada pair has appeared in court accused of plotting to abduct, torture and kill police to promote their anti-government movement.

David Allen Brutsche, 42, and Devon Campbell Newman, 67, told a Las Vegas judge they did not recognise his authority to keep them in jail.

The roommates were arrested earlier this week after a sting operation.

Police say an undercover officer spent four months with the pair monitoring their alleged "sovereign citizen" plot.

There are 300,000 followers of the sovereign citizen anti-government philosophy around the US, according to a non-profit civil rights group, the Southern Poverty Law Center.

'Domestic terrorism'
The two suspects shopped for guns, found a vacant house and set it up to bind and interrogate captives, according to the authorities.

They also allegedly recorded videos to justify their murder plot against police officers.

The investigation began when an undercover officer befriended the two accused in April, said police.

Las Vegas police Lt James Seebock told reporters the plot had been a case of domestic terrorism.

"They were furthering their 'sovereign citizen' ideology by committing criminal acts toward law enforcement," Lt Seebock said.

"The suspects believed that once the first kidnapping and execution was accomplished, they would be compelled to keep repeating their actions, kidnapping and killing multiple officers."

The judge sent them back to jail pending a court hearing on 9 September.
 
Joy Reid ‏@JoyAnnReid 17m17 minutes ago
Updating earlier tweet: Baton Rouge shooting suspect's name apparently is Gavin Long, of Kansas City, MO, connected to Sovereign Citizens.

______________________________________________________________


Since 2000, lone-offender sovereign-citizen extremists have killed six law enforcement officers. In 2010, two Arkansas police officers stopped sovereign-citizen extremists Jerry Kane and his 16-year-old son Joseph during a routine traffic stop on Interstate 40. Joseph Kane jumped out of the vehicle and opened fire with an AK-47 assault rifle, killing both officers. ...

The FBI considers sovereign-citizen extremists as comprising a domestic terrorist movement, which, scattered across the United States, has existed for decades, with well-known members, such as Terry Nichols, who helped plan the Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, bombing. ...


https://leb.fbi.gov/2011/september/sovereign-citizens-a-growing-domestic-threat-to-law-enforcement
 
mary sanchez ‏@msanchezcolumn 13h13 hours ago
Read this to understand Sovereign citizen ideology of Baton Rouge shooter


Sovereign citizens now consist of all colors and creeds

Olajuwon Ali Davis, an African-American soon to be sentenced in a criminal case, illustrates the changing face of the sovereign citizen movement.
BY JUDY L. THOMAS

The case made headlines last fall in the midst of the Ferguson unrest.

Two men with ties to the New Black Panther Party were charged with acquiring weapons in what was later revealed to be a plot to kill two public officials and blow up a police station.

The two pleaded guilty in June and will be sentenced Thursday in federal court in St. Louis. And in a lesser-known twist, one of the African-American defendants is an adherent of a movement that has its origins in racist and anti-Semitic beliefs.

Olajuwon Ali Davis is a “Moorish national” — an offshoot of the sovereign citizen movement.

Experts and authorities say the case illustrates the changing face of the movement, whose members believe the government is corrupt and out of control and has no jurisdiction over them.

While today’s movement remains largely white and still has some followers with racist leanings, a surge in the number of nonwhite sovereign citizens is underway across the country. And the biggest growth, experts say, is within an African-American branch called Moorish sovereigns, which is disseminating its ideas to a whole new batch of recruits.

“It’s a new world,” said J.J. MacNab, an author who for two decades has been tracking anti-government extremists. “And Missouri is like ground zero.”

The common denominator between sovereign citizens and more left-wing black separatists, MacNab said, is the sense of being powerless and having no voice.

“You have a group of right-wing people who feel voiceless,” said MacNab, who also is a fellow at George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security. “You look at the angst in Ferguson and you hear a lot of the same things. They would not recognize it in each other, but they have a lot of the same complaints, which is that the world is changing and we don’t get a say in it.”

Bob Harris, a former Federal Bureau of Prisons case manager who teaches law enforcement officers how to identify and handle domestic extremists, acknowledged the irony of a movement with white supremacist roots being joined by an African-American group. But today’s sovereigns, he said, aren’t like those of previous decades.

“They are much more reflective of the demographics of society today,” he said. “You have white people, you have African-Americans, you have Asians, you have Native Americans. The sovereign citizen movement has really become a melting pot.”

And Moorish nationals are increasingly occupying a bigger portion of the pot, experts say.

“In the last several years, it’s exploded,” said Kory Flowers, a sergeant with the Greensboro, N.C., police department who trains officers and elected officials on sovereign citizen tactics.

A Kansas City area sovereign citizen told The Star that he’s not at all surprised to hear about African-Americans taking up sovereign ideologies. ...


Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article32759247.html#storylink=cpy
 
There's probably some logic in that somewhere but on the face of it it sounds completely bonkers.
 
5 responses to a sovereign citizen at a traffic stop

I would recommend watching the video at the end of the article. At first I thought this was something actually created by the movement as a source of instruction. After watching all the way through, I think not - and although without any editorial comment, it's clear that whoever compiled it realised that allowing the individuals concerned to verbally trip over their own bullshit probably spoke for itself.

You also have to admire the glacial calmness which is clearly required in order to resist blowing some of these nobbers all over their own windscreens .
 
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We have many local flavors of the "alternate citizenship" delusion here in Murricuh. I once worked with a guy who was on work release, pending parole. He told me he had befriended a fellow in prison who had cracked the code and got himself established as a sovereign citizen or some such crapola. My co-worker had carefully memorized the recipe, so that he could go down to the courthouse after he was out, and file the proper paperwork. These people think that by recording a document, it makes it all real. Anybody can go to the Clerk & Recorder's office and pay the nominal fee to officially record a document proclaiming their Schnauzer, Himmler von Applesauce, to be the greatest canine ever to grace the planet, or whatever silly crap they like. It then becomes a recorded document, along with useful things like deeds, easements, wills or mining claims. My co-worker had some serious anger issues, so I never asked how his genius guru wound up in prison. Actually, I tried to have as little contact with him as possible.

Back home in farm country, there were many little cults based on some version of Posse Comitatus crackpot beliefs. They liked to put cardboard notices on their old pickup trucks in place of license plates. Local law enforcement usually ignored them unless they caught them doing something else illegal, presumably because they were such a hassle to deal with. The license plates they refused to buy were comically cheap in that place and time (about $25), but they had to be extra careful in order to flaunt their imaginary status. It was all pretty sad. Their neighbors were not able to ignore them so easily, though. It sometimes escalated into completely moronic shit shows. As noted above, most if not all adherents to this nonsense are really just trying to shirk social and contractual obligations.
 
Interesting article on The Sovereign Citizens and tax frauds.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the "sovereign citizen" movement/conspiracy theory (previously) has grown by leaps and bounds, thanks to a combination of the rise of antisemitism (long a dogwhistle in the movement, now out in the open), an increase in financial desperation and a sense of betrayal, and the movement's ability to realize real cash for its members, who have systematically defrauded the underfunded and resource-strapped IRS of move than $1B.

Ashley Powers' long New York Times profile of movement leader Sean David Morton and his wife, Melissa Thomson, is a fascinating and chilling tour through the rise of a weaponized conspiracy movement with a business-model, a grift that sucks in people from the UFO believer circuit and other fringe nodes with promises of "debt relief" that turn out to be advice on how to defraud the government and a secret history of a cabal of Jewish bankers who are responsible for all of America's woes.

This secret history is like a prototype for Qanon and other far-right conspiracy movements, alleging that a bankrupt business somehow mortgaged every US citizen for $630,000 to the US government, and that this led to the establishment of the Social Security Administration (this is the most coherent part of the theory -- it only gets stupider from here on out). "Sovereign Citizens" believe that they can speak certain words or phrases, or point out certain alleged defects in the formalities of their courtrooms (for example, whether or not a flag has gold fringe) and that these act as incantations that neutralize the power of the state.

Believers also profess a solemn duty to defraud the US government and to that end they file I099-OID IRS forms with fraudulent claims for tax returns; they also issue fake bonds that they use to defraud the IRS. The starved and weakened IRS only catches a fraction of these (thought to amount to at least $1B in total), and when they do, believers say that they didn't realize they were breaking the law -- only exploiting "tax loopholes" like rich people do. ...

https://boingboing.net/2019/04/01/2008s-broken-people.html
 
"Sovereign citizens believe that a law enacted in 1871 secretly turned the U.S. into a corporation and did away with the American government of the founding fathers.
....
The source for this date is the fact that 1933 was also the year when inaugurations were changed from March 4 to Jan. 20 — to shorten the lame-duck period of outgoing presidents. QAnon followers believe that Trump will become the president of the original republic, and not the corporation that they believe the 1871 act created. "
 
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"Sovereign citizens believe that a law enacted in 1871 secretly turned the U.S. into a corporation and did away with the American government of the founding fathers.
....
The source for this date is the fact that 1933 was also the year when inaugurations were changed from March 4 to Jan. 20 — to shorten the lame-duck period of outgoing presidents. QAnon followers believe that Trump will become the president of the original republic, and not the corporation that they believe the 1871 act created. "
Um. Was there an 1871 law about something ?
 
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Um. Was there an 1871 law about something ?

According to Wikipedia:
[The District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871] served as the basis of conspiracy theories relating to the sovereign citizen movement. According to these, the Act would have made the District, and consequently the whole United States, into a corporation. There is no evidence for these claims, which stem from a misinterpretation of the meaning of the term municipal corporation used in the Act. The vocabulary used has in fact a wider meaning here, and refers to any group authorized to legally act as a single entity (in this case, an incorporated, organized district of the United States).

This was later revived by supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory to falsely claim that former president Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 19th president of the original United States on March 4, 2021. This date corresponds to the original presidential inauguration, before it was moved to January 20 by the Twentieth Amendment (signed in 1933, 62 years after the Act, and thus - falsely - claimed to be invalid).
 
Years ago, I had the very dubious honor of working with a guy who was in the process of getting out of prison on parole. He told me he had been befriended by a "sovereign citizen" in prison who became his guru. My co-worker was planning to file the documents at the county courthouse, declaring himself sovereign, as soon as he made parole. He went into great detail about all the delusional crap he had been told, and he was convinced it was all true. The guy had some serious anger issues as well, so I limited my responses to George Noory type "izzatright" and "I see". It was really sad. The guy was trying hard to go straight and get his life in order, but his silly obsession with such lunacy could not have helped. When people buy into that kind of crap, they seem to leave whatever sense they had behind and just go full moron. I suppose it makes it easier to think of oneself as a victim, somehow. Surely a sovereign citizen behind bars would begin to notice the cognitive dissonance after a while, wouldn't they?
 
Thanks. "Municipal Corporation" is a term of art in legal language around local governments. For example, I live in an "unincorporated village" which implies that the larger ones down the road are "Incorporated villages". Not sure how a law relating to DC would affect the federal government, but I guess this is not the time to look for logic.
 
Years ago, I had the very dubious honor of working with a guy who was in the process of getting out of prison on parole. He told me he had been befriended by a "sovereign citizen" in prison who became his guru. My co-worker was planning to file the documents at the county courthouse, declaring himself sovereign, as soon as he made parole. He went into great detail about all the delusional crap he had been told, and he was convinced it was all true. The guy had some serious anger issues as well, so I limited my responses to George Noory type "izzatright" and "I see". It was really sad. The guy was trying hard to go straight and get his life in order, but his silly obsession with such lunacy could not have helped. When people buy into that kind of crap, they seem to leave whatever sense they had behind and just go full moron. I suppose it makes it easier to think of oneself as a victim, somehow. Surely a sovereign citizen behind bars would begin to notice the cognitive dissonance after a while, wouldn't they?
I ran into a sovereign citizen a few years ago but her only issue was that as such she did not have to pay taxes. The rule she used for the exemption I looked up - it is an actual exemption for residents of US protectorate Pacific Islands who earn income there. She didn't involve my organization in the scam so I had no real reason to drop a dime, I wonder how many of these people have been involved as part of profitable scams t=involving legal or tax advice or whatever.
 
A number of folks in the US, sovereign citizens and others, claim that Federal income tax is "voluntary", and therefore not mandatory. In fact the voluntary nature of the tax refers to the fact that you are responsible for figuring out and paying what you owe, rather than being automatically billed by the government. If you don't "voluntarily" pay your taxes, you're still liable.

This kind of warped linguistic logic among these people is matched only by the same used by some very deluded religious fanatics.
 
I ran into a sovereign citizen a few years ago but her only issue was that as such she did not have to pay taxes. The rule she used for the exemption I looked up - it is an actual exemption for residents of US protectorate Pacific Islands who earn income there. She didn't involve my organization in the scam so I had no real reason to drop a dime, I wonder how many of these people have been involved as part of profitable scams t=involving legal or tax advice or whatever.
They are into all sorts of illegal crap here. They have been around a while too. Most of the ones I'm familiar with are not bright enough for successful careers as criminals though. Back home in Kansas, there were a few out in the hills who would come into town driving old pickups with no license plates. In place of a plate there would be some cardboard sign or something explaining their "diplomatic immunity" or some such. The cops generally ignored them as long as they behaved. Which meant they had to be a lot more careful than the rest of us locals because if they got pulled over, there was little chance they'd get away with a written warning or just a stern lecture. I always thought that was pretty funny.

The best story I heard about that bunch involved a local farmer who was a neighbor to one of the kooks. He had been having some kind of dispute with them, and decided to go and try to reason with them. He got to the neighbor's house to find a ragtag posse there to arrest him. They were proceeding to have their kangaroo court when the "defendant" spoke up and said, "So okay, you recognize the County Sheriff as the only legitimate authority, that right?"

They allowed that that was correct. He then told them that he had left instructions with his wife to call the sheriff if he had not returned home by a certain time, then asked, "So just what are you going to tell old Roy when he gets here?" After a conference, the leaders apparently figured out they had been outsmarted, and let him go.

I was always grateful that I didn't live near any of those knuckleheads.
 
This whole idea strikes me as a sort of cargo cult of the legal profession: "Maybe by copying (without understanding) some of the outward forms of a technique that turns words into power I can turn my words into power too."

Of course, these people are right that a government only has power as long as enough people believe in it. Heaven help us if they convince enough people to embrace anarchy, but I'm heading into political territory, so I'll stop right there.
 
I saw someone mention that these people treat legal terms as if they are a Harry Potter spell. They think the power comes from just putting fancy words in the right order. Seems an accurate description.
There is some truth in that idea. It's not that they truly believe they're casting a legal "spell", but they think they're propagating, improving, or creating a coherent legal argument. But in reality it's based on definition of legal or governmental terms in ways that deviate from the widely accepted meaning of those terms.

I remember an intellectual property lawsuit a while ago that involved the legal term "famous". In this context, "famous" means something a bit different from the common definition. The word "Coca-Cola" is famous because it is closely and uniquely associated with the products of the Coca-Cola company, but, for example, "Land" is not, because - although it is associated with the Polaroid company when it comes to cameras - it is also commonly used in many other contexts, including the name of many other companies. An argument by Polaroid against, say Land Rover over use of the word "Land", based on it being famous, would almost certainly fail.

That being said, I think Sovereign Citizen types sometimes think that governments, big business, etc. (what we called "The Man" in the 60s and 70s) are using legal spells against them: the logic behind red ink, all caps, etc. (see kamalktk's link above) seems to be based on secret laws that The Man creates, but does not share with the victims.
 
I have long argued that, from the perspective of the common citizen, lawyers are today's priests and magi: They seek to intercede before powerful, apparently distant and arbitrary, entities using only arcane language. In this type of climate, it seems inevitable that other would-be magicians would try to copy the competition's spells.

It's also worth considering how many things in our modern world exist solely or largely because people believe in them. Love, money, markets, and governments all fall into this category. If enough people choose to see through the emperor's new clothes, then large parts of our lives would evaporate in the blink of an eye.
 
I have long argued that, from the perspective of the common citizen, lawyers are today's priests and magi: They seek to intercede before powerful, apparently distant and arbitrary, entities using only arcane language. In this type of climate, it seems inevitable that other would-be magicians would try to copy the competition's spells.

It's also worth considering how many things in our modern world exist solely or largely because people believe in them. Love, money, markets, and governments all fall into this category. If enough people choose to see through the emperor's new clothes, then large parts of our lives would evaporate in the blink of an eye.
Love happens. I'm sorry you've not experienced it. I _thought_ I was in love twice before the real thing.

Otherwise, you have a point.
 
Love happens. I'm sorry you've not experienced it. I _thought_ I was in love twice before the real thing.

Otherwise, you have a point.
Biological lust happens. "Love" is something you have to believe in to experience. I've been trying to disbelieve the love that has been causing me no end of pain for the last 15 years, with no success thus far...
 
I have long argued that, from the perspective of the common citizen, lawyers are today's priests and magi: They seek to intercede before powerful, apparently distant and arbitrary, entities using only arcane language. In this type of climate, it seems inevitable that other would-be magicians would try to copy the competition's spells.

It's also worth considering how many things in our modern world exist solely or largely because people believe in them. Love, money, markets, and governments all fall into this category. If enough people choose to see through the emperor's new clothes, then large parts of our lives would evaporate in the blink of an eye.
Be reassured - all four of those items will inevitably recur in some form regardless of what people choose to believe.
 
Not so. Actual physical and mental changes have been noted in people who are in love.

Quick link in support:

https://www.businessinsider.com/falling-in-love-changes-your-body-and-brain-2018-7?r=US&IR=T

Better sources can no doubt be found.

People have died from curses, or more specifically, from their belief in curses.

For the purposes of this thread, let's say that some things are harder to disbelieve than others; and usually for noticeable changes to occur in society, a significant portion of society has to adopt the new view.
 
People have died from curses, or more specifically, from their belief in curses.

For the purposes of this thread, let's say that some things are harder to disbelieve than others; and usually for noticeable changes to occur in society, a significant portion of society has to adopt the new view.
People can become ill if you convince them they are going to become ill. Something our masters might have thought about in the last 15 months.
 
Moving back to the subject at hand ...

This news story suggestively describes what may be an interesting variation on the sovereign citizenship concept. A man arrested for multiple violations in the US Virgin Islands refused to identify himself or submit to ordinary booking and judicial procedures except for self-identifying as a sovereign member of an indigenous group (with a fake tribal ID card). In this case the person allegedly seems to be asserting his personal sovereignty on the basis of membership in a recognized (but not yet codified-as-separately-sovereign) alternative group. Because his tribal ID was allegedly fake, it's unclear whether this was a sham tactic for masking a claim of sovereign citizenship.
Man's claim of tribal citizenship fails to satisfy court

A man is in jail after he was found with a gun magazine and refused to cooperate with police, providing only a tribal nation identification card not recognized as valid by the government.

The man was arrested Thursday and charged as an anonymous John Doe. However, he is also known as “Warinu Kapa,” according to the affidavit filed by V.I. Police. ...

Magistrate Judge Carolyn Hermon-Percell said the case cannot proceed until the man is formally identified by his legal name, and continued his advice-of-rights hearing until Monday. ...

The arrest occurred around 1:30 p.m. Thursday when an officer directing traffic around a two-car collision in Bournefield noticed a black Jeep Wrangler approaching without a license plate or registration sticker.

The officer attempted to stop the Jeep, but the driver swore at the officer and drove off ...

The officer got into a marked police vehicle and engaged the lights in an attempt to stop the driver, who ignored the signals until he finally stopped ...

The suspect began recording the officer with his cellphone and told him “I had no right to stop him because he is a tribal citizen,” according to the affidavit. He provided police with “an identification card of the Maipuri Arauan Nation with the name ‘Warinu Kapa,’ ” but no other identification documents.

Police smelled marijuana coming from the vehicle and conducted a search, and “a silver extended magazine for a Colt .45 was discovered in the glove compartment of the vehicle rolled up in a newspaper,” according to the affidavit.

Police also found a small amount of marijuana but no identifying documents for the vehicle or driver. ...

Investigators said they traced the vehicle’s identification number and found it registered to Terrance Martin Jr., but the suspect claimed not to know that person and “advised me that he has rights, and I cannot pin a name on him that he did not provide.”

Police placed the man under arrest and charged him with interfering with an officer discharging his duty, failure to display a registration sticker or license plate, and failure to stop when ordered to do so, according to the affidavit.

The man did not cooperate with police processing, which includes fingerprinting. He also refused to provide a recognized government-issued ID card. ...

Sovereign citizens are individuals who do not recognize government authority and do not consider themselves to be subject to government statutes or proceedings, and the term can be used to refer to a variety of people with different views on the federal government’s role in public life. ...

Sovereign citizens do not necessarily identify as a member of a specific group or indigenous nation, and there are Virgin Islanders who self-identify as members of various indigenous and tribal nations but do not claim sovereign citizenship. ...
FULL STORY: http://www.virginislandsdailynews.c...cle_68eac9a7-d80a-5808-aacb-8e11e947af62.html
 
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