I thought about mentioning something regarding giving up your citizenship in my post, but I decided against it because SCs don’t do that. Nothing in their theory pushes them to do it. Tying their ramblings to the perfectly rational, factual process of renunciation of a citizenship is imputing more meaning to those ramblings than they’re ever going to have on their own.
The cannier SCs know they don’t want to not be American citizens. They like being citizens of a First-World country with all of the privileges, legal and economic, which go along with that. They just want to slide themselves into a category where they can have all those privileges without the (frankly minimal) obligations American citizenship entails. Which was a point I made in my previous post: If being a Sovereign Citizen became legally possible, it would be the ultimate dodge for every corporation to engage in, so they’d be irresponsible not to, if you accept the premise that a corporation’s goal is maximization of shareholder value.
On the other hand, it would be downright hilarious to watch the Sov-runs’ faces were a judge to tell them that their latest piece of nonsensical paperwork just renounced their citizenship and they were therefore due to be deported to the cholera belt.
Let us imagine that we allowed someone to declare themselves sovereign citizens. They would be giving up all legal protections. Anyone could rob them, kill them, burn down their property (indeed they could have no legally recognized property) without any fear of legal sanction. How long would such a person survive? And if somehow, he did, what would his life be like, knowing that anyone could stick a knife in his back and steal everything he has (but doesn’t own) with total impunity.
Courts rule based on the law. Sovereign Citizens have the same legal protections as everyone else just as they are subject to the same legal punishments as everyone else. The law applies to them, even if they don’t accept the validity of that law.
First: That isn’t what SCs believe. They think they can still get all the benefits of living in a society of laws, even if they, themselves, have opted out of most of those laws. They bang on about the UCC and, depending on the specific brand of crazy, divine law or common law or something else. They want laws to protect them, just not laws that inconvenience them in any fashion.
Second: You almost hit on why modern societies don’t do the “outlaw” thing anymore. We really don’t want vigilantism, either from people who hunt outlaws or from outlaws who have to resort to banditry and violence to survive. That kind of stuff destabilizes a society. It’s inherently bad if you want to run a civilization, as opposed to feuding petty tribal chieftains like Western Europe circa 500 CE.
The only thing you can do with SC babble is ignore it as word-noise and move on with the real legal process.
Which Shows where the Problem is: they don’t think this through. It’s crazy rambling, and they Need help. But interning them in a mental Hospital (Aside from the severe lack of them) runs quickly into the Problem of abuse (in the USSR, dissenters often ended up in mental hospitals because “obviously” opposing the perfect System meant they were insane; and less pressure from ai and UN), and that it’s forbidden to put People there against their will. But part of their delusion is lack of awareness that they are delusional. It’s a catch-22.
I wonder: would it be possible to write a Video game to simulate an empty Stretch of land, and let a score of SCs battle it out, so they can see how “no laws to restrict us” would look like? Would that pierce their Fantasy about coming out on top as Rambo, instead of getting shot in the back after half an hour?
You could, but then every single corporate officer could become an SC and you have essentially the same problem.
Besides, if you allow SCs at all, they can say that in their special UCC, they can create a corporation which is an SC; that would actually be marginally less insane than what they usually try to use the UCC for, anyway.
Desperation and cognitive dissonance aren’t insanity. Thinking you’re smarter than you really are and being an insufferable jackass about it isn’t insanity. Joining what amounts to a religious movement based around pseudo-history and pseudo-law isn’t insanity, either. I’m sure some of the SCs are legitimately insane, but you can explain their behavior even if they aren’t.
Perhaps more cynically, we don’t need to diagnose them with “sluggishly-progressing schizophrenia” (a fake diagnosis the USSR gave to dissidents) to keep them locked up. They do that to themselves by acting on their beliefs.
That would be hilarious to watch: “Spawn camping infringes on my rights as a natural born human being to rek n00bs and git gud!” “I do not consent to this rocket up my rectum! I DO NOT CONSENT!”
Can’t say that much about all SC’s, but I remember my brother crowing and bragging about some piece of paper that he had that he had “filed” at the county clerks office that meant that he was no longer a citizen of the United States of America. He was still a citizen of the State, but not of the federal government.
But, in any case, I am pretty sure that their legal mumbo-jumbo does involve revoking federal citizenship. (Not that you can actually do that.)
To be fair, I am no expert on these idiots, just because my brother is one. I really didn’t listen to his ramblings too closely, I was mostly tasked with engaging him at family events so he didn’t bother others and ruin their time, and in any case I have only spoken with him once in this last decade.
That’s SC nonsense. You can tell because it’s legally incoherent, in addition to being bizarre in smaller ways: Like, you can completely redefine your relationship to the Federal government at a county clerk’s office?
Yeah, a lot of them want to revoke Federal citizenship but keep state citizenship, as your brother does, or they try to draw a distinction between 14th Amendment citizens and actual citizens, which is incoherent because the 14th Amendment applies to all citizens, and at that point it’s impossible to ignore the racist underpinnings of their nonsense: The 14th Amendment is one of the Reconstruction Amendments, most specifically the one which ensured former slaves would be considered citizens on a par with White people, so being opposed to that isn’t even subtly racist.
Anyway. They want to do a few things. None of them fully match up with the real process of renouncing your citizenship, because that process makes logical sense, which none of their beliefs do.
Something about counties being the only real seat of power that a sovereign citizen recognizes. Like I said,m he was quite proud that he got this paperwork filed.
My reaction was less impressed. I was pretty sure that you couldn’t do that, and if you could, well, that’s a terrible idea.
He thought he could get away with not paying taxes or child support. Gave his ex a “voucher” to to take the child support money out of his gold account at fort knox.
Obviously, that didn’t go too well, and he seemed surprised at spending a bit of time in jail for non-payment, even after the judge gave him every chance to make things right. I suppose there was gold fringe on the flag, or something.
Not defending it at all, just offering what I know from an aghast bystander’s perspective. I think it is one of the stupidest things ever.
I once mentioned to him that technically income taxes shouldn’t be legal, as the amendment that made them legal was passed under taft, who was born in ohio, which was technically not a state at the time. I meant this fairly jokingly, as there are alot of reasons that that statement is not really all that true. But, within the same conversation, he used this piece of trivia that I had told him to try to convince me that taxes were unconstitutional. This is the mentality of a SC, grasp onto any sort of technicality they can find, and extrapolate it into what they want.
My offer to sovereign citizens is a one way trip out to international waters, and if the ask very nicely, we’ll give them a raft too.
They decide they want to come back and live by our rules, I have no problem with that, but I’d make them take the citizenship test that we give to any other naturalizing citizen.
I simply tell Sovereign Citizens that if they really want to live the lifestyle they espouse, they should move to one of those countries where everyone agrees with them. Like Venezuela. Or Afghanistan.
Somalia is my go-to choice for all manner of Libertarians. Each resident there gets exactly as much liberty as they can successfully defend and pays exactly as much taxes as they can’t successfully defend against.
Given the context, it seems obvious that (6) means you can renounce your citizenship within America if you do it in writing if we’re at war. Odd little quirk.
Since 2012 that’s not really true. Somalia has a government of sorts now, certain pockets are held by Islamist insurgents but it’s by no means a free for all with no central government like it used to be from 1991-2006.