What Do Sovereign Citizens Get Out of All Their Nonsense?

Great Debates
101

Moopish Americans.

102

Nice. That one’s going to get referenced.

103

Indeed. Thanks, Elendil’s Heir, for posting that. It was most entertaining. “I’m going to treat all this as a motion to dismiss,” after the litigant filed hundreds of pages of multiple documents.

For those not in the know, a “motion to dismiss” is one document that takes up one or two pages, max.

104

I’m sure that what feeds the SC movement is when their system “works.”

For example, I know a police officer around here who pulled over a driver (oops, traveller) for going 82 in a 70. He is generally a pretty nice guy and the driver had a wife and a small child in the back. The driver refused to produce a license, saying he was travelling, and said that he was John of the family of Smith. After a long attempt at getting his date of birth, the officer ran the guy’s name, got a picture of his still valid DL (about a month away from expiring) and wrote him a warning ticket for speeding.

I told the officer that, IMHO, that was probably the worst thing he could have done. I would guess that the driver (err traveller) probably drove away telling his wife that the reason he only got a worthless warning ticket was because of his legal brilliance which forced the officer to write the warning.

But the officer said that he wanted to be fair, that he was going to write a warning anyways, the guy had no warrants and he had his wife and kid with him. That seems fair enough, but it helps feed the insanity.

105

This is exactly right. The Sov Cit arguments only ever “work” because, rhetoric about “fascists” aside, most of our police and courts really do want to serve and protect. They’ll go out of their way to be fair to a litigant, because even stupid and/or crazy people have rights, and can be wronged by others.

There have been many cases in which the courts and the police have gone out of their way to figure out that the Sov Cits have a legitimate complaint buried in their mass of irrelevant nonsense, and ruled on that small part of the complaint. The Sov Cits then trumpet this as a win for their nonsense, when in fact, they won in spite of their nonsense.

106

My brother who’d probably be living in some hole under Montana if he were American seems to think that if he doesn’t know where to find some information, then the information is being “hidden from us”.
At least in his case he’s eventually realized that if he talks to certain people in his life (such as either one of his siblings) and claims that this or that is “hidden from us”, we do reply calmly and point him to the information in a very neutral source, but for some reason he never asks directly: he’ll say something like “nobody knows what a ‘calabacitas de colores’+ contract is”, then we’ll find for him

  • a document from the Spanish Bar Association explaining the concept in small words;
  • the current text of the law regarding such contracts (plain, with commentary in small words and with commentary in big words and a bunch of Latin);
  • and multiple samples of such contracts, some of them with commentary.
  • not an actual type of contract.
107

I mean… no. Not even close.

108

At one point, she yells at Randy that he is the one who has been encouraging her to stand up for this. So Randy talks the talk but can’t walk the walk. She’s dived into the deep end. She’ll dump him and take up with some *real *sovcit that her friend on the phone knows. :smiley:

109

Anyone linked to this yet?

110

Freeman successes.

:smiley:

111

This video of a Moop just came up in my Youtube suggestions.

112

I am hip-deep into Davis’ Short History of the Confederate States of America. I have to take in little bits as it is very upsetting.

I see a lot of this SC stuff in Davis. He argues that since he has fancy words and legal theories he actually won the war, or something. He ignores reality and lives in a cloud coo-coo land of nonsense and mumbo-jumbo.

Frankly I wonder is he was quite sane.

113

Very interesting thread. Since I’ve been encountering SovCits now in my practice for over 20 years, thought I’d pipe in.

  1. RickJay got it right in post # 9. In my experience, SovCits are having legal troubles in their life. Divorce, bankruptcy, lost their job - life’s not going well.

  2. They see their problems as stemming from the law. They can’t accept that the law means that they lost their business, their wife gets half their joint assets, etc. So the law must be wrong. And that sets them off in their quest through Black Law Dictionary, the Statute of Westminster 1931, and the UCC. In some cases their legal researches are aided by fellow-travellers and gurus, but in other case it’s all their own work and legal “research”.

  3. I disagree with Will Farnaby’s two points. First, the ones I have encountered don’t take the positions that the laws don’t exist and that government has no power. Rather, they believe that there are secret laws that bind government, and once they start using those laws, governments will back off. That’s not libertarianism, but rather crypto-constitutionalism.

  4. Second, I’ve not met one who use SovCit ideology as a form of civil disobedience. As far as I can tell from my dealings with them, they truly believe the legal gibberish they’re spouting, and that it will keep them from having their asses tossed in jail. That’s the exact opposite of civil disobedience. They tend to outraged when, in fact, their asses do get tossed in jail. That wasn’t supposed to happen and is just further proof of the conspiracy. (One court official told me that she once had to explain to a SovCit that the Uniform Commercial Code had no application in Canada. She said he was outraged at her apparent ignorance of basic legal principles, and that her denials helped show that he was actually on the right track. She didn’t get any impression that he was in any way faking his comments and his outrage.)

  5. It can’t be dismissed as low IQ or mental disorder. When this stuff first started popping up here, some judges actually did send a few of the SovCits off for mental health evaluations. And the report kept coming back that there was no sign of mental disorder. The individuals had strongly held, bizarre beliefs about the legal system and government, but did not show signs of mental disorder. Odd beliefs, in and of themselves, are not a symptom of mental disorder.

  6. While some of the “gurus” are in it for the money, others are true believers who have faced the inside of jail cells for their beliefs and yet come out, poorer in material wealth yet convinced of the rightness of their legal views and determined to keep “helping” people in trouble with the law by coaching them on the true, hidden law.

  7. They cannot be dismissed as harmless nut-jobs. Some of them only cause trouble for themselves, but others are fraudsters and paper terrorists, using tactics such as liens and caveats to cause financial harm to others. And, fortunately rarely, some can be violent. There was a father-son pair a few years ago who shot dead two police officers who pulled them over for a traffic violation. There was a guy who shot dead two bailiffs who came to his property over a dispute over a widening of a road allowance. And as near as anyone can tell, they thought the law was on their side to gun down uniformed officers.

114

Thanks for the lengthy post Norther Piper, but nothing there says that they are either morons or crooks. Usually both.

I guess being a simpleton is not a metal disorder as such. But people that will not take responsibility for their actions is.

115

Don’t mention them in the same sentence. Moorish folks on the whole are sane, upright citizens, an extreme contrast to the SC crazies.

116

Not actual Moors, these ‘Moors’ are a subset of ‘Sovereign Citizens’.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Moorish-Americans

CMC fnord!

117

All thirteen states signed the Articles of Confederation.

If I were to buy into such nonsense, I guarantee you I would not be paying for those books with “government” money; I’d use one of those alternative instruments the books suggest.

I’ve seen military cases dismissed that should not have been; they should’ve been continued with a corrected charge sheet. The majority of those cases were for “damage to government property” when a soldier got himself a sunburn or other injury. The best one, though, centered on an improperly complete DA Form 31 (Request and Authority for Leave). The soldier was gone for a year and two weeks. Of course he did not get paid for the whole year, but he did not get punished either. My guess is that the command did not really want to deal with him any longer than necessary so letting him off got him gone sooner. So, how did he get away with a year-long leave? Simple, friends, simple. He accidentally wrote the wrong year in the return date and the chain of command signed off on that.

:eek::eek::eek:

Yep. SovCit/FOTL/etc. bs is yet another flavor of CT nonsense. And CTers are mean-spirited shitheads who only care about how wonderful, smart, and damned clever they appear to be. And they’re egotists, obviously, which is why, as you say, they believe what other CTers tell them: it’s what they want to hear and, “By God, there’s someone out there saying it, dammit, I hear them, so it must be true, damn, I’m clever!”

Yep. Not only are those engaged in civil disobedience willing to accept the consequences of breaking the unjust law, they usually couch their disobedience on other aspects, legitimate aspects, of the legal system. They are not touting the constitution as illegitimate nor that they are some fictional identity. They are calling on their society to honor its ideals and, get this, basic laws to right a wrong.

They claim that a flag with fringes on it is an “admiralty flag” and therefore a court displaying such flag is an admiralty court with no jurisdiction over them.

That reminds me of the F14 pilot joke:

Question: What’s the biggest problem with the Tomcat?
Answer: The R10 switch.

I do believe LEO not only conducts training in various police departments around the world, but also there are seminars to discuss these particular loons.

&

Drat!

118

What about the other 37?

And their logic is the classic fallacy Affirming the Consequent
An Admiralty Court must have a flag with gold fringe
This flag had gold fringe
Therefore this is an Admiralty Court.

119

I think anyone who believes in an impossibly complicated conspiracy theory is some ways down the road to mental illness. They lack judgment and insight necessary to test the reality of their beliefs. Sounds symptomatic to me. People who have those issues plus additional issues, or have it to a great enough extent that it interferes with their functioning in significant ways, it seems to me have some sort of at least low level disorder.

I don’t think it is stupidity. (For some, I’m sure it plays a part, though.) I think it is primarily motivated reasoning. They hear about this “movement” or theory, and something (or many things) about it are deeply emotionally satisfying. Because of that, they essentially want to believe, and will seek reasons supporting it, and reject information questioning it or undermining it. They also won’t have much trouble with having to shift reasons.

Also, I used to have to deal with them more around a decade ago than I do now. The ones I dealt with were all white people, all invoking the racist underpinnings of their legal word salad theories, and all had legal troubles in which they felt wronged.

120

To be fair, I’ve found that some of THE smartest people are also the wackiest. Their intelligence and success in one area has gone to their heads to the point that they think they’ve hacked ALL the rules that the rest of world lives by.

I haven’t seen this in person with the Sovereign thing, but on stuff like medicine, religion, etc - oh boy.