So whence do Sovereign Citizens come from, exactly ?

Great Debates
21

I will never NOT find the ‘Freeman Successes’ section of that page funny. I encourage everyone to review it.

We’re avoiding the larger issue of where they come from. It’s not the book or white supremacist nonsense. It’s the same sort of feeling of powerlessness that inspires people to believe they know more medical stuff than their doctor or more legal stuff than their lawyer.

The simple fact is that - for a goodly portion of American society - the fact of ‘experts’ or ‘trained professionals’ is inherently threatening. The acknowledgement that another might have greater knowledge/experience is an acknowledgement of powerlessness. For a subset of those who are truly powerless that’s unbearable and the idea that they can outwit/know more than/subvert with magic words or anti-vaxx or whatever is a means of asserting their own worth in the face of their apparent ignorance.

It’s insecurity that drives a lot of this.

22

OK, so I will not always assume they are racists as there is no evidence in this case. But the fact that he charged for his tax fraud seminar “per man” and that wives and children were free indicates just a slight change flavor of bigotry and not a lack of it.

I will still temper my claims in the future.

23

Is it not possible that this insecurity is driven by their perceived loss of “rights” which is really a reduction in white and/or male privilege? We commonly see this when people make a claim of a “war on christians” which almost always is really due to an attempt to allow non-christians to exercise the same rights.

24

I will note that I cannot find evidence that they self identified as members of the sovereign citizen movement.

25

Or perhaps it’s driven by the same loss-of-caste existential despair that is killing off middle-aged white Americans.

26

The Southern Poverty Law Center has a good intro.

27

To respond to both you and rat avatar at once I’ll say that I understand where you’re coming from. However, I think it’s facile to try and point it at racism as most racism comes from the same insecurity that drives this sort of movement.

The underlying sense of powerlessness/helplessness works at a level beyond race and so forth to the underlying sense of worth of the individual involved. In a larger society - such as we inhabit, one beyond the tribal, essentially - each individual has to acknowledge their place inside the larger whole. That acknowledgment can be seen as destroying or shrinking the individual beyond what some find tolerable. Whether it’s the sense of loss of prestige, or the meaninglessness of one’s spot in a large corporate employer or whatever, one’s personal worth is seen as smaller than the whole.

Most people get on with their lives with a certain level of angst and just move forward. But some look for a reason that they, themselves, have the worth they feel has been taken away. It often comes out in narcissism or some other form of foolishness. It may also - to be perfectly fair - be expressed in art or some other accomplishment such as building a business or whatever. Great works can come from that level of insecurity.

But for some people it becomes a search for WHY they feel so small. That can become this sort of ‘magic words’ FotL nonsense. Note, how in each case given the FotL expresses his or her superior knowledge and power thereby overriding those who CLAIM power - judges, police and such - and putting them in their place.

It’s sad, really. But lack of ultimate authority over one’s life is one of the prices we pay for a larger industrialized society.

28

There were a lot of these types where I grew up in the early 80’s(north central SD). Gordon Kahl shot a US Marshall just across the North Dakota border. I believe a lot of it can be traced to the farm crisis/recession of the time. People were losing farms and jobs and wanted to believe it was someone else’s fault.

A high school classmate’s father went through all sorts of lawsuits trying to prevent the foreclosure of his farm. I didn’t pay much attention but he claimed something along the lines that since the money wasn’t backed by gold it wasn’t legal money and so somehow he didn’t have to pay the money back. Dad, who was very much a “if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing” type of person, only would say he had no problem with the money when he took the loan. The classmate was very embarassed by his Dad’s antics and ironically ended up a banker.

29

They aren’t all uneducated yokels either. A neighbor who is still big on this stuff was a range science professor before he came back to take over the family ranch. He is smart but crazy as a loon.

30

Okay if you want to try for a rational explanation, here’s the best you have. After the Civil War ended, there was a debate about what should be done with the seceding states. During the war, the general position of the United States government was that secession was illegal and therefore the southern states couldn’t have actually seceded and formed a new country - they were always part of the United States even if they were denying it.

Ironically, when the war ended this position was adopted by the southern states. They said that if the official position of the United States government was that there had never been any secession then the southern states should resume their pre-1860 status with all the full rights as states that the northern states had.

From a logical standpoint, this argument had the merit of consistency. But from a political viewpoint, it wasn’t going to happen. Nobody in the north was going to pretend the war hadn’t happened and let the same southerners who had promoted secession and war stay in power.

So the seceding states where placed under federal military control. Congress, which did not allow southerners to take their seats, enacted the Fourteenth Amendment. And the southern states were essentially told that ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment would be a condition of being restored to full statehood. The southern states did so.

Some people have therefore argued that the Fourteenth Amendment was not legally adopted. They raise three issues: that the Congress that enacted the Fourteenth Amendment was not a valid Congress because it had refused to seat southern representatives; that the southern states were forced to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment; and that three northern states which attempted to withdraw their ratifications were not allowed to do so. These people feel that the broad powers of the federal government which are derived from the Fourteenth Amendment are therefore illegal.

31

But, the sovcit doctrines appear to go way, way beyond that. Remember that the movement (or phenomenon, really) has its roots in Posse Comitatus, an organization that denied the legitimacy of all government above the county level – a position no state of the Confederacy would have entertained for a moment. In their present iteration, the sovcits have developed a doctrine that confuses or conflates the common law (a historically contingent product of Anglo-American cultures and judicial systems) with natural law (an abstract philosophical effort to identify timeless and universal principles of ethics) – neither of which they understand very well. ISTM that their distorted version of common law is, like natural law or the laws of mathematics, presumed to be not a human creation at all strictly speaking, but something that was “out there” and discovered by humans. In short, it is unalterable by governments, legislatures, referenda, judges, diplomats, wars, revolutions or mass movements.

32

From The Grapes of Wrath:

33

I wonder how many economists would agree/disagree with that?

34

I figure anyone can find the crazy parts of the movement. I was trying to present the possibly non-crazy part.

35

Denying the validity of the 14th Amendment is about as non-crazy as being a serious Jacobite in this day and age. And probably psychologically similar.

36

And just in case the Free(Wo)man on the Land managed to evade all the other snares and traps, the Ebil Gummint has the Buck Act to fall back on. Read it and weep.

37

Actually I think the arguments for denying it Little Nemo states are fairly reasonable. Whats crazy is denying that the Federal government will enforce laws on you with as much physical force as necessary whether or not the 14 amendment is valid. Even if you’re right, they’ve got all the power and your magic words aren’t going to stop a bullet.

38

We just had some “right to travel” arrests here in paradise.
A number of the same arguments:
"The unidentified man who appeared in court Monday was wearing a white T-shirt with black block letters, all capitalized, saying, “GOOGLE LEGAL NAME FRAUD,” and told the court he doesn’t have a legal name.

“I don’t have a name,” the man said.

Turning to address the gallery, he added, “I just want to say that this whole system is fraudulent. It’s illegal to use the legal name that’s on the birth certificate. It’s a contract that was entered into by my parents and the Crown Corporation in London, which I was not privy to, yet I am held by, supposedly, right? Any time I would use that name, I would become a third-party interloper, fraud. That would mean the whole system itself is fraud.” :rolleyes::rolleyes::confused:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/01/06/world/europe/ap-eu-germany-boulez-a-life.html?_r=0

39

Wow, that is a migraine-inducing site, both for content and layout.

40

Clearly a Jewish conspiracy to introduce crippling headaches and ocular disurbances to the Freemen on the Land.