Adventures In HellwQrld: Interview with Allie Mezei about the Sovereign Citizens movement.
In this bonus episode Mike Rains interviews Allie Mezei about the history of the SovCit movement, how it started, how it's changed over the years and what the future holds for everyone's favorite YouTube videos of people getting into arguments with police and judges. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
and welcome to a bonus episode of Adventures in Hellworld.
I am Mike Rains, a.k.a.
Poker and Politics, and today we're going to be talking about Sovereign Citizens with Allie Mezzi, who knows this field very well and has studied the Sovereign Citizen movement in depth.
So thank you for being here, Allie.
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
When did the Sovereign Citizen movement really pick up steam in America?
What was its origins?
What was the start of this whole nonsense about wistful thinking gets you out of paying taxes?
So the Sovereign Citizen Movement started, what we understand as the Sovereign Citizen Movement, grew originally out of what was called the Posse Comitatus Movement.
And the Posse Comitatus Movement originally grew as the results of the convergence between the Viteks Protester Movement and Christian Identity Ideology.
The tax protester movement is pretty much what it sounds like.
There's never been a time in American history where people have not been unhappy about paying taxes.
But New Deal tax increases led to there being a resurgence and an invigoration of complaints about the 16th Amendment, which is what established the federal income tax.
So, Ben, you know what Christian identity is, right?
Yes.
Christian identity is basically just this idea.
For me, it's a version of Christian nationalism, where Christianity should be the one true religion in America.
It should be above all others.
The Constitution is Wrong!
On the idea about freedom of religion and re-founding America in the image of a Christian nation with a theocracy at the top of it is pretty much their goal.
Yes.
And there's also a lot of very, very weird metaphysical ideas about race.
And for instance, there's a lot of them that believe that people who are not white Western Europeans don't have souls.
It's also very inherently anti-Semitic, and they believe that there is an impending race war.
And they are one of the groups in, you know, just The wide, kind of the wide umbrella of the far right that in the middle of the century were really worried about interracial marriage becoming legalized.
So if you look into a lot of sovereign citizen ideology, a lot of them will start complaining about 14th Amendment and the 14th Amendment citizenship.
And a lot of this is because they hate the 14th Amendment.
And why would they hate the 14th Amendment?
It's because this started with Christian identity.
Sorry.
So the years 1953 to 1969 were marked by the judicial reign of Chief Justice Earl Warren.
And the Warren Court is considered to be the most progressive court in American history.
And many of its land right rulings applied the 14th Amendment to protect minorities' civil rights and civil liberties.
For instance, in 1954, the court decided Brown v. Board of Education and Bolling v. Sharpe And the big thing was in 1967, the Supreme Court passed down Loving v. Virginia, which legalized interracial marriage throughout the United States.
affirm that Mexican-Americans and all other national ethnic groups have equal protection
under the Constitution. And the big thing was in 1967, the Supreme Court passed down Loving
versus Virginia, which legalized interracial marriage throughout the United States. And
this made a lot of people incredibly angry. One of these people was a preacher and a failed
California gubernatorial candidate named William Pater Gale.
He was based in California and he wrote about politics and religion in his ministry newsletter, Identity, under the pen name of Colonel Ben Carson, which she adopted from the protagonist of the KKK propaganda film, Birth of a Nation.
Subtle!
Oh, yeah.
So, you know, there was this just horrible, horrible newsletter that had all of this really, really nasty stuff.
Just reprinting the protocols, basically.
Yeah, and more creative stuff.
Oh, thank God.
I need my racism to be creative.
Right, right.
Yeah.
He promoted the writings of tax protesters because he didn't like taxes either, alongside these really elaborate anti-Semitic conspiracies.
And he had these strange and esoteric legal theories about how God handed down his plans to mankind in the form of documents such as the Magna Carta and the Mayflower Compact.
And so this is about 1970.
And in 1971, Gail, who had a bit of an audience going, authored what he called the Guide for Volunteer Posses, in which he declared that the county was the only legitimate seat of power in the U.S.
and that the sheriff was its only legal law enforcement officer.
And under the Guide for Volunteer Posses, the sheriff could mobilize all able-bodied men in the town to upkeep the law.
And then if the sheriff didn't do that, that group of able-bodied men could go and hang him in the town square.
So this body of militarized men would be called the posse comitatus, which is Latin for the power of the county.
Then Gail started publishing more and more directions for forming these posses, and it was about how groups of seven white Christian men living in a single county would band together and elect a posse commander and an assistant commander who would run a posse like a military organization.
And Posse slowly started forming across America.
And the people that would join this were other religious fanatics, but also tax protesters, people who had been involved in sagebrush activism in the West.
You know, just people who were frustrated with the federal government, and then people from the Minutemen militia, and militant members of the John Birch Society.
However, you know, this was something that was catching on, but not really.
You know, Gale had his audience, but it wasn't particularly broad, and he wasn't interested in leading a movement, really.
Then, a guy named Henry Lamont Beach.
Who goes by Mike Beach stepped onto the scene.
How much do you know about the silver shirts?
I don't know anything about the silver shirts.
That sounds incredibly interesting.
They are an esoteric Nazi movement that got big before World War II.
Although the more Nazi and the more World War II it got, a lot of the esoteric stuff kind of started to fall by the wayside.
It was pretty much just like an American Nazi kind of like loose espionage movement in the United States.
Anyway, Mike Beach was an American Nazi.
Um, he was a retired laundry machine repairman from Portland, Oregon, and around 1973, he started up a publishing outfit and plagiarized Gale's Posse guides to publish them in the Posse Blue Book, which was 16 pages long and designed to fit in a pocket.
And on the front, the book depicted a five-pointed sheriff star and the back cover was emblazoned with the phrase, the United States of America was founded as a protest against taxation.
I was literally going to make that comment at the start of this thing when you were like, America's always had a problem with taxes.
I'm like, yeah, we founded the nation as a result of a tax protest.
So yes, that seems right.
So the fact that Mike Beach, the American Nazi, beat me to the punch is incredibly frustrating.
Screw you, Mike Beach, for stealing my thunder, you no-good so-and-so!
The one quick thing I wanted to bring up is that the Posse Comitatus Act was like an effort to upend Reconstruction back in the 1800s, so it kind of lay dormant before this stuff picked up.
Right now it took it isn't it maybe spiritually is, but it's not actually connected to that.
It's more of like, you know, this is a Latin phrase that sounds cool.
And also like, yes, we want to start violent county based groups.
And I just want to point out that, um, So, I think the underlying point of this stuff wasn't necessarily that they deeply, you know, at least people like Gayle and Beach deeply believe the pseudo-law, although they might have.
They just wanted to create little harassment pods, where the point was, get men together, identify men in your area that feel this way about the government, And get willing to do violence against the local government and against federal operations in your town with them.
And, you know, it's set up in the trappings of all this, you know, stuff about the Magna Carta, all this stuff about like, oh, these are the secret rules.
That was the window dressing to get your foot in the door.
The actual goal was terrorism.
It was just sort of like, here's the legal reasons why we're doing the terrorism.
But what we really care about is doing the terrorism.
Right, right.
And so, with Mike Beach and his little publishing house, the posse comitatus got a lot bigger.
It spread.
In this period, there started to be a ton of posse-related crime, and most of it involves kidnapping IRS agents and then filming them and screaming at them.
Oh, admit that you're a communist Asian!
Admit that you're an infiltrator!
You know, there were all these show trials, which is actually something you'll see a lot today in Sovereign Citizen stuff, or in people who borrow ideas from Sovereign Citizens, where they have these over-the-top show trials of people they hate.
Like, you know, during the Obama era, they would try Obama in absentia.
Or, you know, how they, like, will have, like, a trial for Fauci for, like, you know, YouTube or something.
Oh, and they do all these things where it's like, the World International Tribunal has found Fauci guilty of crimes against humanity and has sentenced him to death in absentia, and then you look it up and it's a guy with a blog who's just- Right, right.
Yeah, it's a guy that, like, stood in the middle of, like, Times Square yelling or something.
Yeah, there's a guy that that's his racket is he's creates these things that sound incredibly important.
And he has nice letterhead on these papers.
But he's just a dude with a block.
I can't even remember his name.
But I remember All these different people will be like, Fauci, Obama, this person, that person, like the International Rights of Humanity Court has ruled them guilty.
And then you dig into it and it's just Bob Smith from Oregon who runs WorldInternationalCommittee.org on the internet and is begging for donations.
Yep, that's that's a lot of that.
But um, yeah, so in the mid 1970s, there was this growth of the movement, and they would organize these wide ranging harassment campaigns, usually based in one county, or maybe, you know, like, two or three counties of posse men would get together, and they would They'd orchestrate these campaigns against judges, mayors, state assemblymen who they believe wronged them.
Or, you know, again, they would target IRS agents a lot.
Like, you know, if there was a federal IRS building or someone was going out, like, to do an audit, they would follow them around and...
Try to scare them with guns.
And sometimes, you know, when union organizers would come to try to organize itinerant farm
labors, they would also, you know, they would also try to scare away union organizers.
Because nothing says freedom like preventing collective organization.
How dare you want to collectively bargain and fight capitalism, you commie!
Pretty much, yeah.
Federal law enforcement, they uncovered some posse schemes to do assassinations, and handfuls of them were tried and convicted.
The FBI was like, this is not a big threat, this isn't going to be an issue, we're just going to kind of watch it to make sure.
And this was before it got really big.
So in the late 1970s, the farm crisis started.
And it was the perfect storm for posse comitatus radicalization and recruitment.
So there were a lot of different causes of the farm crisis that came together to make life in rural America miserable.
So under the Nixon administration, New Deal protections for farmers were kind of stripped away, and the price of grain started dropping.
And then with years, all but the largest corporate farms were losing money.
Then the Carter administration started embargoing a bunch of Soviet Bloc trade partners.
And American farmers would sell grain to the Soviet Bloc.
So then the demand for grain started to plummet.
So it's lower prices, lower demands.
And then at the same time, the Federal Reserve, they spiked loan rates in an attempt to fight inflation.
So debt on farmland and equipment doubled nationwide between 1978 and 1984.
Debt on farmlands and equipment doubled nationwide between 1978 and 1984.
So low grain prices and high interest rate triggered a massive wave of foreclosures
on small farms in America's heartlands. So out of this kind of turmoil rose the
American Agricultural Movement or the AAM.
And there's a lot of AAM history that I'm not going to get into.
And though the AAM was a politically conservative quote-unquote group, it was also a very populist group.
That demanded the federal government intervene to save America's family farms.
Like, you know, oh, we're, you know, good old conservative people, but the federal government needs to act right now to stop this.
Conservatives for socialism.
In this case, for white people.
That's basically how we, like, Social Security was great when FDR did it, and then when LBJ opened the door for non-whites to get their hand in the till, suddenly Social Security became an entitlement that needs to be pruned and monitored.
Because, uh, you know... Entitlement became a dirty word.
Yes, oh yeah, an entitlement.
Yeah, no, that just means that someone said it was yours at some point.
Right.
Yes, I'm entitled to it.
That is correct.
The posse started to infiltrate VAM.
In an interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center, Daniel Levitas, who has done a ton of research on this and whose research has been pretty helpful to my own understanding.
It was a really good starting point when I began this.
He explained how the Posse managed to grow by infiltrating the AAM, the American Agriculture Movement.
So he said, farmers were getting organized as a political force and were holding mass meetings.
It was like a virus.
What the Posse did was put the DNA of its conspiracy theories into the cell of the farm movement.
Which became a carrier for it.
If there had not been a farm protest movement, the posse would not have spread.
So by attaching itself to the political organization of farmers, the posse just swelled in size.
The FBI reports state that there were 10,000 active posse men in America at any given time.
But in his research, Daniel Levitas thinks that the Bureau might have severely underestimated the popularity of the ideology.
Estimates drawn from the circulation of posse comitatus books and newsletters indicate that its height in the early 1980s, at least 100,000 people were in some way associated with the posse.
That is not good, one would go so far as to say.
So this movement is in the 1970s.
It is a populist movement.
They are, at the very least, pretending to stick up for the farmers who are losing their property to the federal government.
And it's, again, the little guys getting kicked around by big bad Washington, D.C., who ain't looking out for you.
So we got to band together against them.
Right, they would say stuff like, oh hey, do you know why the Federal Reserve spiked the interest rates?
It's because they're trying to destroy you so that they can nationalize your farm.
Which didn't happen, just bigger corporate landowners snapped those little farms up.
Um, and you know, I don't want to say that, you know, all farm, um, that all of the momentum and all of the anger from the farm movement was channeled into this.
That's not true at all.
There were a ton of other groups, like, um, Prairie Fire Rural Action, actively anti-posse comitatus, anti a lot of, like, the really racist and conspiratorial stuff, um, and they tried really hard to organize and support people in rural areas and to, like, You know, show that like small farm owners and other people in these rural economies, including the laborers, had common interests and that they should stand together.
So, you know, it's the agricultural protest movement has so many different facets.
I just don't want it all to be colored.
It's like, Being part of Posse Comitatus, because Posse Comitatus did take a ton of that to grow.
But, you know, it is just like one little detail in kind of just this wide, wide movement and, you know, this social upheaval that kind of shook rural areas due to debt expanding so much.
So that's where we're at in the 1970s.
How does it transition further?
Because to me, it felt like the militia movement and this right wing extremism where it became very much in vogue to be Anti-government and right-wing was under Clinton because... Right.
So I think that like part of that involves like the death of the posse a little.
And I just want to point out that also with the farm movement, a really, really important part of modern sovereign citizen comes kind of starts around there.
And that is the grift.
Posse men and then posse affiliates would ferociously just steal from their new audience of soon-to-be homeless farmers.
A man called George Gordon ran a fake law school and charged desperate farmers about $1,000 a week for private counseling and would sell box cassettes for thousands and thousands of dollars because he said, like, hey, if you spend this money right here, you can get your farm and your livelihood back.
There was a guy named Conrad LeBeau who he had a main career as a quack doctor who said he could cure AIDS with hydrogen peroxide.
But he would also go around by selling foreclosure and legal karate kits, which promised to be a trick to get out of loans.
A guy named Roger Elvick pretended to operate a bank and instructed his customers to pay off their loans with his counterfeited site drafts.
It was like a fake check form.
And this is also where a lot of this fake paperwork starts getting really popular.
I was going to mention that this sounds like the whole thing where if you just fill out the right forms you don't have to pay federal income tax anymore.
So we're getting into that becoming a form of the scam where if you just say the magic words the laws of the United States of America no longer apply to you because you have entered into like this new form of reality, where
you're part of true America or some sort of other nonsense that allows you to
be no longer beholden to the laws that the sheep have to follow.
Yeah, um, basic. Yeah, basically. So the posse by like the late 80s kind of
died. And there was a couple of reasons for that. One One, a lot of people that were involved with the high levels of it started to get arrested.
For instance, there was a guy that was a huge radio star and, you know, would go on talk programs named Jim Wickstrom, who I believe got in trouble for, like, money laundering.
And then like threatening a judge.
Mike Beach just died because he was really old.
And you know, there was some other major figures that either passed away or were sent to prison for a very long time.
There was also an issue where someone who had been involved in the local posse, in a local posse, but then kind of started traveling as like a like, you know, roving tax avoidant.
Advocate?
Yeah, he got into a shoot. This is a guy named Gordon Call.
He killed, he killed some policemen and there was a nationwide manhunt for him. And that kind
of turned a lot of people off the movement.
Oh man, if only QAnon and if only the talking points had been around at that point, that
guy would have been a false flag. MK Ultra Sleeper.
Oh no, no, no, there's a ton of conspiracies about him.
Because he actually, so he died in a shootout with federal law enforcement agents, and there are a bunch of like, The federal law enforcement, I think they actually really did mess up with the shootout.
I think they just flooded a house that he was hiding in with a bunch of tear gas and started shooting.
There is an official story that Call killed a local policeman that was helping them, but investigations have kind of shown that it's possible that the local policeman died by friendly fire and just absolute chaos.
So there's a bunch of theories that Oh, well, you know, they went in and they tortured Kahl.
Or, the real reason they killed that policeman was because the policeman at the last moment was like, Gordon Kahl is right, I'm gonna fight you.
And, you know, they did all these horrible things.
I love that one, that last theory, as the cop is breaking in with the other cop, she's like, wait a minute.
This guy's right!
America is a corrupt cesspool!
I'M DOING IT!
I'M ON THE OTHER SIDE!
I'M PILLED!
Like, just deciding to go out in a blaze of glory... I mean, I was a county sheriff, so it's like, you know, if all power is to the county sheriff... Wait a minute!
I'm the one in charge here!
I run everything!
Oh man... But no, it's very likely that, just in this absolute chaos, that guy did get killed by friendly fire.
There was also a really, really terrible... There was a really bad cult in, I believe, Rulo, Nebraska, that they killed an adult man and a seven-year-old boy, and it was just really, really grim crimes when this ended up getting prosecuted.
The judge made a statement at the end of the case, like, this is the worst thing that's ever happened in Nebraska.
Um, and this guy was a, um, the guy who was in charge of this group was a, um, a posse man, and he was, like, a confidant of, like, the radio guy, Jim Wickstrom.
And so, you know, there were, like, headlines at the time when this happened called, like, Sodomite cults in, um, Nebraska, because there was a lot of sexual assault there.
So, you know, like, just any affiliation with that was not great.
So between people going to prison, With like, you know, the Gordon Cole shootings.
It kind of started to die out as the posse comitatus, especially because also like, once the farm movement was like losing its focus a little bit, there was not as much like things that they could infiltrate to continue to spread.
There were no new cells to spread the cancer, like.
They didn't have a different populist movement to infiltrate and manipulate.
The way QAnon is just constantly moving from anti-Obama to anti-Biden to anti-vaccine, just to now pro-Putin-Ukrainianism.
I mean, just this whole thing where it's like, just keep finding that new healthy cell to jump into and try to get your poison in, because you've got to keep the movement going somehow.
Right.
And then in the 90s, you know, there's this militia movement.
And a bunch of the militias were sovereign citizens.
An example of this was the Montana Freeman.
And the Montana Freeman kind of, they turned fake paperwork stuff kind of into a form of art.
A lot of people will call what they, they didn't start it, but they Kind of like, you know, in the news popularized it, the idea of paper terrorism, where you basically just overwhelm local systems or people that you don't like with all these fake claims, fake, you know, bills of stuff, just fake everything, just nonsense.
And, you know, it was pretty present in the militia movement.
But, you know, after after kind of the posse fell by the wayside, the scammers kind of kept going.
So there was a bunch of more like independent sovereign citizen gurus in the 90s, too, that were starting to sell their ideas as, you know, they were the ones that started calling themselves sovereign citizens.
They were the ones that, you know, it might predate that, but I think, like, you know, the words became much more popular and in the forefront around that time.
Where, you know, there were just all of these, like, you know, individual little con men running these, like, seminars or, you know, on very, very extremely early online stuff.
Yeah, that was kind of this transformation in the 90s into kind of how we're seeing it now, where it's, you know, not one really movement.
And, you know, every time there is like some sort of economic decline or trouble, the sovereign citizen movement kind of pops back up.
In the 2008 foreclosure crisis, there was a huge surge of sovereign citizens during the House foreclosure crisis.
Use these forums the bank can't take your house like that kind of stuff where Just any sort of escape hatch people could possibly be looking for because just like those farmers in the previous decades You're desperate.
You're going underwater.
You might be homeless someone offers you a path to freedom and So you take it because you trust them, and even if you don't trust them, you don't have any other better options, so you might as well just swing at it.
Right.
Or even where they actually do, where there actually might be free or relatively inexpensive legal aid, they don't know how to access it.
And you know, also I'd say that another thing that started happening in the 1990s and going forward is that the sovereign citizen movement kind of diversified.
For instance, a lot of the white supremacist stuff, while some people kept it towards the forefront, A lot of it dialed it back and made it like less obvious or removed it entirely.
For instance, something that a lot of people I think don't know when they talk about sovereign citizens is that a large portion of sovereign citizens in America are Black Americans, where it's generally called Moorish sovereign citizen.
And, you know, they're not like a monolith in belief, but a lot of them believe that All Black people are immune from law in America because of a treaty that George Washington signed with Morocco in, I think, 1871.
And, you know, that's very popular in some areas.
And also in prisons, a lot of, like, you know, regardless of, like, the race of people, a lot of people will, like, you know, kind of get sucked in by these jailhouse sovereign citizen lawyers.
For instance, did you know that Jared the Subway Guy became a sovereign citizen in prison?
Oh, I can imagine that guy would do anything to I'm surprised Jared's still with us because the whole prison justice thing and all that ugliness in our American judicial system
Yeah, no.
But you know, people who are not as high profile as Jared and also, you know, maybe a lot of people who are in prison because of unjust reasons or, you know, people who are more sympathetic than Subway Jared also get taken up by this.
There's just a ton of that in prisons.
Because, you know, I think that something that I like to try to dispel about sovereign citizens is that, like, not all of it is, like, just some small business owner or racist throwing a fit because they don't want to pay taxes.
There are a lot of people that get involved in this because, like, they're just, they don't have access to, you know, what they feel is equal justice or they feel like they've been ripped off because of just how things are, how like, you know, inequities in our system.
For instance, in addition to more sovereign citizens, there is a small but fairly persistent core of Hawaiian liberation movement people who are sovereign citizens.
And of course, you know, that's not widely representative of people who are Hawaiian liberation activists.
But, you know, there's a frustration that, you know, the United States is asserting jurisdiction at all over, you know, Hawaii.
That, you know, some people adopt these ideas that have been so decontextualized from the original posse white supremacy of it.
You know, because they really just want to throw off like what they, and I think with good argument, they feel is like this illegitimate reign over them.
Right.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I have heard of the Free Hawaii Movement before.
I've heard of people talking about that kind of stuff.
So that all makes a lot of sense to me.
That's out there.
It is interesting, though, that a lot of their roots come from what is a movement that would- a lot of those people probably wouldn't be very cool with Polynesians if they were allowed to speak freely about such things.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, just like, again, even though they're not like the people that come to mind when you talk about sovereign citizens, again, there are a lot of people of color or just otherwise, you know, also economically marginalized people who could do get taken in by this.
And that's something that's really, really kind of difficult.
Because it's like, it's frustrating because it's like, I think that a lot of these people's frustration can be like, legitimate in some way where it's like, oh, I was profiled by the police.
Or, you know, I have a public defender who's just telling me like, oh, just plead guilty, you're going to get a better time.
When I'm swearing up at like, you know, I'm swearing up and down, I didn't do it.
Or, you know, there's a lot of things that like sovereign citizens will fight that, Like, have you ever seen sovereign citizens get angry over a traffic ticket or, like, a parking ticket?
A lot of those things, it's like, you know, I'm an attorney.
If I get a parking ticket, I get pissed off, but I've got money that I can pay that with.
There's a lot of people that if, you know, they get, like, an $100 parking ticket or something, that might jeopardize, you know, them having groceries next week.
And so, you know, just anything that's like, oh, this is how you can bite it.
You know, this is how you can bite it yourself for free.
That's really appealing to some people.
Absolutely.
Anyway, all of this is, again, as I've said before, it's an escape hatch.
It's a way out of the system.
Another part about conspiracy theories that is so attractive is it's hidden knowledge.
It's the knowledge that only the select, only the chosen few have.
The majority don't know that these forums will get you out of this problem.
They don't know that if you listen to these tapes or hear these speeches and then do the right things and say the right words, you can get out of having to pay your traffic tickets.
You can get out of having to pay back the bank, the money you owe on your house,
you can free yourself from the tyranny of this cruel government.
Right, or you know, everyone else is so foolish and so weak-willed that they gave up their real rights
and you're the one that's strong enough to fight for them.
Yeah, yeah, it's like, you know, this idea that you are of a special one,
you are of a chosen one.
And you know, again, there are sovereigns, but like also like some sovereign citizens are just basically like people that are like throwing fits that they have to pay taxes.
Those also exist.
But...
Not everyone's a desperate, struggling person just looking for a way out.
There are people who are just, I hate taxes!
I hate taxes and now I don't have to pay them because I filled out these forms.
How do you like them apples, copper?
Right, right, exactly.
Because like, there are just so many different types of people who become sovereign citizens, and also just so many different strains of belief with them.
Because, you know, a lot of time people will ask me, like, Ellie, you know, what does Sovereign Citizens actually believe?
Like, what's at the core of it?
And, like, there's about a trillion separate answers.
Because, you know, there's no real one metaphysical bedrock.
You know, some believe that it is God's law.
That all of the sovereign citizen stuff that I do is because I'm following God's law and you're not.
Some say the ultimate authority is the Magna Carta.
Some, the Articles of Confederation.
Other, that secret treaty between George Washington and Morocco.
And then many others think it's the Uniform Commercial Code.
Or there's the German Sovereign Citizens that think that the Second Reich never ended.
The thing is, it's like there's not really one thing.
And I think there's a Canadian court decision called Meads vs. Meads, which I actually really recommend as like a primer on the Sovereign Citizen movement.
It's about a hundred something pages long and it's very detailed, but it's also just, it's like very good.
The judge who wrote this took a long time and it's a really interesting, good resource.
And they call sovereign citizens, because sovereign citizen is kind of a narrow term because there's a whole bunch of people who do sovereign citizen-esque things that don't identify themselves as sovereign citizens.
They call them Yeah, they call them organized pseudo-legal commercial argument litigants.
Because, you know, that's supposed to be just like a broader idea of these people who use these pseudo-legal arguments.
And I'm going to read from that case really quickly because I think how they summarize what ties all these different types of people together is quite good.
Organized pseudo-legal commercial argument litigants do not express any stereotypic belief other than a general rejection of court and state authority, nor do they fall into any common social or professional association.
Arguments and claims of this nature are in all kinds of legal proceedings and all levels of courts and tribunals.
This group is unified by one, a characteristic set of strategies, somewhat different by group, that they employ.
For instance, you know, stop quote, for instance, the fake paperwork, or, you know, the I am traveling thing that they'll do when they confront a cop that pulls them over and asks for their license.
Traveling versus driving.
Right, right.
You know, they all have like kind of these catchphrases, basically.
Then specific but irrelevant formalities and language which they appear to believe or portray as significant.
And the commercial sources from which their ideas and materials originate.
So this category of litigant shares one other critical characteristic.
And you know, this is the big one.
This is the big one.
They will only honor state regulatory contract, family, fiduciary, equitable, and criminal obligations if they feel like it.
And typically they don't.
Because it's like, okay, so when people ask me, Ellie, what do sovereign citizens believe?
The answer is, I don't have to do anything that I don't want.
And I have this elaborate artifice that I have put over that.
That really does kind of cut it to the core of the issue.
So we had the Sovereign Citizen Militia Movement in the 90s, and then I'm sure this stuff was- And not all Militia Movement in the 90s was Sovereign Citizen, there was just a lot of adherence and a lot of overlap there, but not a complete overlap.
No.
So yeah, so that was a thing that was happening.
So then we get into, I'm sure again, that 9-11, Global War on Terror.
I'm sure that inspired a lot of people because that was back when Alex Jones was pretending
like he wasn't right.
All right, well, you're extremist and he hated W. Bush because W. Bush did 9-11 as an inside
job and then you get Obama, which obviously a black Democrat being the president would
not make a lot of these people very happy.
What was the what was it like in like that timeline basically from two from 9-11 onward?
Like I would find a demarcation for us would probably be before Trump got elected because
Once Trump gets elected, we get QAnon and then that can of worms gets open.
So after 9-11, before Trump, what does the movement look like?
I would say that there's less militias than there was really in the 90s.
Because, you know, that kind of died down a little bit.
There was so much, you know, not that there's not a bunch of militia still, but, you know, there was so much enforcement that kind of, you know, fell by a bit.
But it was a lot of grifters, a lot of sovereign citizen gurus that were out kind of selling their ideas.
And again, the foreclosure crisis for houses really, really gave them a big kick.
You know, just a bunch of people that were trying to get out of these, like, you know, Financial binds.
And yeah, no, it's just people that were scamming a lot of the time.
And you know, they would they would have a bunch of entry points.
For instance, a big one is family court.
You know, a lot of the times when most people interact with the legal system, most regular people who aren't business owners, they'll usually probably like hit it with You know, maybe something criminal or like traffic tickets, sometimes landlord-tenant, occasionally small claims, but another big one is family court.
And you know, in family court, unlike criminal court, you aren't given a lawyer.
You've got to afford one.
So people who can't afford or don't like, sometimes, you know, it's like, You go to a lawyer, the lawyer is, you know, lawyers, it's not good as we are.
We actually do have an ethical code we have to follow.
And if we say that, you know, you can't win this, you don't have a case, you know, we can be like, well, here's how I can mitigate this for you.
Or here's like, you know, a strategy that we can employ where it's find a way that To resolve this in your interests, but you're not going to win it.
Some people will just upright refuse to take that from a lawyer.
Because they think, no, I'm right, I should win under the one way forward, and that's justice that I do that.
You know, in addition to the people that can't pay, there's also the people like that who do not want what a lawyer can tell them.
Um, which I think actually kind of really, uh, intersects with the January 6th defendants in a lot of the ways, where, you know, there's a couple of sovereign citizens in them, or people using sovereign citizen, um, arguments, but a ton of them just haven't accepted, um, help from any federal defenders, because they don't like what the federal defenders tell them.
They don't like what, like, it's like, well, you know, you broke onto a federal building and you rioted, so...
We got you on tape punching a cop.
Take a deal and I'll try to keep your jail sentence down to four months.
And that person's like, but I was right to punch that cop.
He was violating my freedom.
He was allowing a stolen election to happen.
Right. Yeah. No, there are people who don't want to hear what a lawyer acting within the
realm of ethics would tell them. So they'll go there. And family court is a huge area of
recruiting for that. And I think that, again, it was a bunch of scammers.
There was, you know, of course, some of it that intersected with Tea Party stuff.
But yeah, no, just scammers, scammers, scammers, scammers, scammers.
It feels like the further we go along with this, the more scammy the movement gets.
It's so weird how the grift is what matters after a while.
Absolutely.
Yeah, no, it's not great.
It's really just...
Because other than like, you know, just, oh, so okay, another thing that sovereign citizens do.
It's like another grift thing.
Because actually the first time I ever encountered a sovereign citizen, I was doing an internship at a judge's office in 2013, because I was not a law student yet.
I was like an undergrad that was like filling the judge's paper and stuff.
I was not a law student.
I was an undergraduate and I was like getting the judge coffee, running papers for him, just kind of observing stuff.
And we had a sovereign citizen litigant in the court.
And this guy, he was one of many sovereign citizens that... So one thing that a lot of sovereign citizens believe is that you have a secret bank account where they keep all of your taxes.
And if you follow the secret, if you follow the secret, you can withdraw from that bank account and take out all of your taxes and the huge amount of interest on it.
And it's basically you file a fraudulent tax return.
And this guy had organized a group of people, most of them who were homeless or senile, to withdraw from their bank accounts and give him a cut.
And fortunately, I...
I don't think the people he conned were prosecuted because, very fortunately, with tax stuff, if you don't know that you, if you make a good faith mistake on your taxes or you believe, you know, it's like if you really believe that you are owed something or you don't owe something, you won't be held criminally liable.
You will be held civilly liable and you have to either give over or give back the money.
But, you know, you're not going to go to prison.
So, you know, people who are scammed usually can get out of it.
But, you know, there's a ton of sovereign citizens like this that do these weird plans where they just get people to file a bunch of fraudulent tax returns.
That is a really bizarre scam.
I mean, they're getting paid to process these fake tax returns, I assume?
Oh, yeah.
No, they get a cut.
Oh yeah, that's how this works.
Always gotta get your taste.
Always gotta wet your beak, as one of my friends in Vegas would always say.
We had those people, and then our favorite super-secret spy on the internet shows up.
Exactly when did QAnon reach out to this movement?
Because they reached out to everything, but the thing that I can mostly recall from the spread of the movement is that A lot of the people that I remember from QAnon early on were anti-vaxxers, and it didn't matter.
Because they were anti-vaxx in 2018 and early 2019, and that was a niche issue.
Nobody cared about it.
And then, oh no!
Being anti-vaxx was so important in 2020!
Do you know any major QAnon promoters that were really into the Sovereign Citizen movement or people that were Sovereign Citizen that dipped their toe into QAnon?
What was that meeting like between the two movements?
So, I think that Sovereign Citizens have been in pretty much every conspiracy community.
got absorbed by QAnon.
So to some level, like the co-mingling has been a very like kind of passive, like, you know, a passive thing almost, where there wasn't like a big overshare.
It was just that these areas they both existed in just You know, just came together.
As for major promoters, I think a lot of them have said some Sovereign Citizen stuff at one time or another.
But you know, I know that a lot of the ones that do like the financial system stuff, like Like Charlie Ward, Charlie Freak, they've had sovereign citizens around.
The now-deceased Robert David Steele would host Russell J. Gold on his show, and Russell J. Gold is an absolutely wild sovereign citizen.
He is the protege of a man named David Wynn Miller.
Who claims that he died in a race riot in Milwaukee.
And I'm trying to remember what organ he said an inept surgeon removed.
He says that this inept surgeon removed one of his organs but put it back in.
And he came back to life with a 200 IQ, not having to sleep, not having to age an immortal, which is not true because he's dead now.
This guy, David Wynn-Miller, had this whole thing about, like, you know, how he died and he came back to life, like, supercharged.
And I think he started in the 90s, his whole deal.
I think he started in the 90s and was big in the 2000s.
But he came up with this entire fake language and this entire thing that he calls a quantum parse syntax.
But it's like it's not a real legal document if it's not written in this imaginary thing where he says that only nouns are Only nouns are leperative, but he gets around that by changing verbs in his weird fake documents into gerunds.
For instance, instead of saying, like, I ran, he would go, like, for the running of David Wynn Miller, and he changed his name to David hyphen Wynn colon Miller because he needed it to be a noun, but really it was like, I think, two adjectives and an adverb or something like that.
Like, you know, just very weird, like, just esoteric stuff.
But he passed away, I think of old age or something of natural causes.
He returned to his home planet because he was immortal.
There's no way he could possibly have died.
Something like that.
And his protege, Russell J. Gold, has done a lot of recruiting in QAnon and QAnon-adjacent communities.
And he has been hosted by Robert David Steele.
I'm trying to think if there's any QAnon promoters that are, like, super full Sovcet, because a lot of them just dabble here and there, but then they'll, like, host more Sovcet people on shows.
Yeah.
You know, that sort of thing.
I remember Incarnated Extraterrestrial, that idiot, IET, the dumb puppy.
Oh, yeah, that asshole.
Yeah, he was, like, super, super mega deluxe into, like, Sovereign Citizen, because he got into the D.C.
Corporation Act of 1871 and all that stuff, which was basically, that was kind of QAnon's, like, last ditch effort to save the Trump presidency.
Right.
Was the whole original Constitution angle that was their new play.
Right.
Yeah, something that sovereign citizens, many of them, believe is that in 1871, the United States stopped being a republic and it became a corporation.
And this is because there was a law passed by Congress called the D.C.
Organic Act of 1871.
And what this was because was the reason that they passed this law.
The reason they passed this act was the area of the District of Columbia was just not equipped to be a modern city of the 19th century.
There was being organized well as a municipality, like trash was piling up in the streets.
Just, you know, the roads weren't being fixed.
The organization of the city was so bad.
D.C.
decided, okay, let's create a new form of government.
Let's create a new form of government for Washington, D.C.
to maintain the city.
And so they created this act that just reorganized how D.C.
was run.
In it, the city of DC is described, the governing body of the city of DC is described as a corporation.
And that just means a body, a body organized for a specific purpose.
A lot of towns, if you look at a charter of a small town or a city, will describe the city as a corporation.
Because, you know, it's a body of people that are trying to do a certain thing.
Namely, maintain, you know, just maintain the municipality.
There's, uh, Las Vegas is actually, most of the strip is not actually in quote-unquote Las Vegas.
It's in an unincorporated section of the state so they can kind of avoid local regulations because it's like kind of not Las Vegas proper.
That's one of the weird little things about that town.
If you dig into it.
Right, no, like, the word corp, you know, this corp, corp, just means a body.
And they love to play word games with that.
For instance, they'll be like, did you know that you're secretly dead?
That's why corpse and corporation have the same, like, core.
Mind-blowing gif here.
Right, it's like- Oh my god!
Yeah, just wild stuff.
But, you know, they believe that when this act was passed, it actually dissolved the United States government.
Because there's a little bit in it saying, like, oh, we're dissolving the government in D.C., meaning we are dissolving the group that currently governs the municipality of D.C.
to replace it with this other group.
That is also going to maintain the municipality of D.C.
So they say, oh, so they're dissolving the United States government in D.C.
and replacing it with a corporation.
And I just want you to know that also that government of D.C.
has since been replaced, I think, of the 70s with the Home Rule Act.
Which was another just reorganization of the DC government.
And so they think that everything in America, all of the American government since that point has been fake.
And I want to say that not every sovereign citizen believes this, but a good portion do or say they believe it.
Because, you know, again, the point of it is just to say what you said and the rules don't matter.
What I say matters.
And they believe that, you know, there's not any actual legitimate U.S.
government.
Which is why, you know, when they thought that, you know, when they were trying to explain that, you know, oh no, Trump is still the president, he's gonna be inaugurated on March 4th, they were saying, yeah, he's gonna be the 19th president because Ulysses S. Grant was the president when When the Home Rule Act was passed.
So Trump's going to be the 19th president because there hasn't been a real president since the government was destroyed.
Yeah, Grant was the 18th president.
He was the last real president.
Trump will be the 19th president of the country of the United States of America, the Republic of the United States of America, not the corporation.
And I've also heard people saying that Biden is the president of the corporation.
Trump is the president of the country.
Biden's presidency rules over nothing.
Trump is actually the one with the real power in his country presidency.
Yep.
Yeah, that's something that, you know, a lot of them, a lot of them do say.
So now for the kind of spitballing and projection kind of thing, beyond QAnon, where is the movement going?
What people are pandering to them?
Because right now, I mean, QAnon and the anti-vax stuff is kind of the new hotness in right-wing conspiracy worlds.
Well, sovereign citizen stuff also is getting paired in with the anti-vax stuff because it's trying to avoid local laws, regulations, you know, federal mandates.
You know, they try to play with that too.
Right now, you know, also mentioning it is also like just relevant to QAnon is that Ron Watkins, who's running for Congress in Arizona, has been traveling around with a woman named Mickey Klan, who is, I don't think she identifies herself as a sovereign citizen, but she's using sovereign citizen, you know, paper terrorism tactics to encourage people to harass people at local school boards.
And, you know, I think that, you know, there's probably going to be a lot more of this, this paper terrorism thing, this more of this paper terrorism.
And, you know, and I think that kind of goes back to, like, you know, kind of the kind of unsaid secret behind the posse stuff.
This is about finding and organizing people willing to harass individuals in local governments.
For instance, with Mickey Klan's scheme, which is called Bonds for the Win, there are some old laws on the book about... Surety bonds.
I talked about this on a podcast a couple of weeks ago.
Yeah, surety bonds.
I've heard about this.
As part of, you know, no one's ever going to get removed from office because of these stupid letters that she's getting people to send.
But it's getting people, angry people, in municipalities to identify people that live close to them who are the face of their problems.
And it also gets them to identify other people in the area who think like them.
And it is organizing and bringing people together to harass local officials, to intimidate them, to sow confusion, to sow fear.
And that's the purpose.
And I think that, you know, we're probably going to see just as this goes forward, You know, it's kind of becoming a little more mainstream by all of these like, you know, anti COVID measures that we're going to be seeing like pseudo law being just, again, it's always kind of been a tactic for just continue to be used just like a locus to for harassing public officials, and just anyone in communities that you don't like.
And that's, you know, I think that's something that is likely.
Yeah, Ron Watkins had filed a like a certibond claim against the governor of Arizona and it was like super psyched about it.
And like the person he filed it was like a representative and they were like, Oh, great.
You're one of these dum-dums.
Thanks.
Thanks, Ron Watkins.
You're the best.
Right.
And you know, I think with a lot of sovereign citizens, a big part of these elaborate displays of like this language, like, you know, like the kind of the rants, the screeds, it's a performance.
And I think the social media era or like, you know, just the aim of going viral or the aim of being shared on Telegram.
I think, you know, do we have like a video of someone who really knows what they're talking about and then the bad guy, even if it's just the clowny clerk, not knowing how to respond.
I think that, you know, even though this has always kind of been a thing with Sovereign Citizens, if you go on Sovereign Citizen YouTube, it's wild.
You know, I think more and more people are going to be using these stands, these kind of rituals, to get attention, to build online following, as just performances.
Yeah, because it's a way to show that you are defying the illegitimate Biden government where they stole the election, they've locked you down, they're trying to inject you with this deadly poison, all this kind of stuff.
So why go with just half measures of speaking out against the cabal and all that kind of stuff like QAnon?
Why not go the full way and declare yourself actually immune to the corrupt laws of this unlawful government and that you are now separate from the rules of this illegitimate regime?
That seems to me like a kind of obvious thing to do.
Right, because you know, there's, um, there's also groups like the, um, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Police Association, I think it's called, that are police officers that believe in sovsit stuff.
Ultimately, that's also just, like, trying to organize, you know, local- the local people that actually, by force, keep laws that only they want.
Hey, the laws I like are good.
The laws I don't like are bad.
And that's how reality should always work.
So yeah, I mean, this is, you said that at the start, that that's kind of their whole thing.
Anything I don't want to do, I don't have to do it.
Any other details about the movement that you think people need to know about?
The gold fringe on the flag and maritime law, all that sort of frivolity?
Ooh, I can tell you a little bit about the gold fringe.
I'm all about the gold fringe.
I had jury duty like two or three years ago and walked into the courtroom, gold fringe on the flag.
This is bullshit!
There's no justice in this house of lies!
Nuts to this!
If I ever get called for jury duty, I'm probably not going to be selected.
They will they do not like lawyers on jury duty.
Because like usually it's it's because like the other jurors will give their say more do.
And like that that would be unfair.
I mean, I would personally like to have more do over like, you know, over what I think should happen.
But I could understand why, you know, the court might not want that.
Even if I would serve with the utmost integrity.
With the gold fringe.
According to one of many schools of sovereign citizen thought, there are two types of criminal proceedings, which are common law trials and admiralty tribunals.
And you can tell what type of proceedings are happening by the flag in the courtroom.
And what their idea of what a common law trial is, is supposed to be like, A private criminal prosecution, which used to be how it worked in England.
I don't know when it stopped in England or what English law is like, but it used to be that if someone, I don't know, stole your, at the time, horse, you would have to go in and call for them to be prosecuted, and you would have to go do the prosecution.
You know, this changed with public prosecutors being added to the picture.
And, you know, that's why when there is a case, a criminal case, it'll be like the prosecutor representing the people.
For instance, the people of California versus OJ Simpson.
And they think that those publicly prosecuted cases are not legitimate.
Only the privately prosecuted cases are.
And, you know, private prosecutions really aren't a thing in most of the U.S.
A couple of states allow them in really limited circumstances.
For instance, misdemeanor.
A lot of animal rights groups use private prosecutions for animal abuse stuff, but there's only a couple of states that allow it because they don't want people harassing other people by bringing private prosecutions against them all the time.
For these illegitimate admiralty trials, Which is, you know, when the state prosecutor is the prosecutor.
You can tell that one of these is happening, one, by the state prosecutor, but two, so you can tell if it is one of these illegitimate admiralty trials or if it is a common law trial by the flag.
If the flag is exactly described as it is, if the flag is exactly like it is described in the United States flag code, then the case is a case under common law and it's good and it's real.
But in the sovereign citizen world, what if the flag's gold?
What if the flag has that little gold fringe on it?
Then that means that it is an admiralty law case.
And in order to send someone to prison, or impose a fine on them, or to make them pay child support, the court will have to force them into an admiralty tribunal.
And they can apply illegitimate statutory law.
They also tend not to think statutes, which are like, you know, the laws passed in the, you know, in our state houses are real.
In order for one of these admiralty trials to begin, the judge, the judge in the courtroom must have a gold fringed flag hoisted, because that symbolizes naval warfare.
And then the There must be a bar placed between the judge and the rest of the courtroom.
So then they place a bar between the judge and the rest of the courtroom.
And this symbolically transforms the rest of the entire courtroom into the brig of a ship.
That's impressive.
I'm so glad to hear that.
That's the ultimate transmutation.
I thought the blood and flesh of Jesus in the Catholic Church was a great transformation.
This is even better.
Right.
So, you know, they basically, when the gold fringe is flying, that means you're under Admiralty Law, and if it's in a courtroom, that means that you're in a secret boat, and you are about to be tried under Admiralty Law.
And that's the gold fringe.
Oh, it's so good.
I love it.
I knew most of that, but the boat part is so- that's just a cherry on top.
That's so sweet.
It's like just awesome, like a little bit of like, esoteric stuff.
Another thing that they love is the UCC.
So in the real world, the Uniform Commercial Code isn't a law.
It's a set of guidelines drafted by a bunch of legal scholars that serve as suggestions about how to make contract law for goods and services the same across state lines.
And most states, even though the UCC itself isn't a law, most states base their commercial codes on the recommendations in the UCC, and people will refer to things in the UCC because You know, it's just like a reference point where because so many states have adopted it, it's just easier that way.
So sovereign citizens believe that the UCC is a federal law or often the law of the corporation that establishes how the, you know, again, how the corporation works.
You know, they say, oh, see, commercial code, it's, you know, it's because it's a corporation, not because, you know, it's supposed to be about the sales of goods.
They think that the UCC has these loopholes that they can exploit, that they can exploit to kind of get around the rules.
For instance, they think that if they write, without prejudice, UC-1308, or all rights reserved, UCC-1207 on a document, Then, you know, they can engage with the government without losing their sovereignty or without consenting to the government's rules.
Sometimes they'll also do this by writing, like, sui juris, which means of one owns right next to their name, or they claim that they're, if they're in court, You know, they think, like, oh, if you go to court, you consent to the government's rules.
As opposed to, like, no, the government makes the rules because they're the ones that have a monopoly on violence.
And you kind of have to go with what they say.
They think that they can just, like, get out of it by not consenting to it.
So they say that they're appearing as their own representative.
So they don't, like, consent to being treated under the government's rules.
Right, that's the Sovereign Citizen cartoon where the guy was like the agent, the advocate, the person, and the individual, and the judge kept going through all those different names for that person.
Right, right.
Yeah, because something I think people ask about a lot is like, what does it mean by someone saying, okay, the individual, the person, what's that?
So Sovereign Citizens, a lot of them believe in something called a straw man.
And the straw man is a fictional corporate entity that is created in each individual's name when that person is issued a birth certificate.
The thing is, it's like, they think that, you know, the government has no control over us until they consent, until we consent.
But they have control over the imaginary straw man that they invented.
And to control us, the government has to trick us into consenting to be treated as a straw man.
Oh, I was about to say, what's the price on redemption?
that you can un-fuse yourself called redemption that they do.
It's usually like someone has to buy something from a scammer.
Oh, I was about to say, what's the price on redemption?
Oh, that sounds like it'd be very lucrative.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Like people will sell like redemption kits or fake IDs that are like based on that.
You know, just huge, huge business there.
So, right, if you go to court when your straw man is sent to mail.
They will say that, like, I got this letter from the government and my name is in caps.
That's my straw man, that's not me.
You're trying to summon my straw man, so I don't have to go.
But, you know, when they're dragged into court either because they're arrested or because, like, someone's like, okay, you know, this is gonna get worse if you don't show up, they will say, like, I'm not consenting to be treated as my straw man.
That's, you know, that's me the person.
Straw man's also called a person.
You know, I am, you know, I'm not Allie, capital A-L-L-I-E, the person.
I'm capital A, lowercase l, lowercase l, lowercase i, lowercase e, the flesh and blood individual, or the woman, or something like that.
Where you can say like, I'm not consenting to be treated as my straw man, but I'm here as a representative of my straw man.
And like, you know, they do this huge pageantry of saying that I am not this name on this envelope.
And yeah, they just kind of like, Yeah.
to dodge responsibility for like, you know, stuff that way, or be like, Oh, no, no, I don't know these taxes. My straw
man knows these taxes. Or, you know, oh, I don't know my child
support. My straw man knows this, this child support. You're not sentencing me to prison for setting my neighbor's house
on fire. You're sentencing my straw man to prison. And I don't
consent to going to prison. You know, it's it's stuff like that.
You know, this is also esoteric, and it really doesn't matter.
Because I think, as I mentioned, a lot of the power in this is the confusion it causes.
Or if you're doing something like paper terrorism, bogging people down in papers.
Another big tactic of theirs is filing liens, fake liens, against people they don't like.
For instance, if If you're in a trial, you know, you're on trial for stealing a car, I don't know, you can go while you're out in Bond and go into, you know, the county office and get a get a form and say like,
There is a $70 million... the judge owes me $70 million and he secured it with his house.
And then, you know, they file that and it goes through.
And, you know, the judge can get that removed, but it wrecks his credit in the meantime.
And, you know, this can be, like, really, really burdensome, especially when they, like, kind of focus it on people like county clerks or just random people who are working processing paper in a county office that might not have a lot of resources and patience to deal with it.
Um, so yeah, like, it's, you know, I'd say that a lot of, like, the powers in that, but also, you know, as I mentioned, the Bonds for the Win thing, or the original Posse Comitatus thing, it's about identifying people to intimidate and grouping people together to go intimidate them.
So yeah.
Yep.
So yeah, the Sovereign Citizen movement is tons plus the funds.
So the standard kind of outro here is, where can people find you on the interwebs?
How can they interact with you to learn more about this nonsense and everything else you do?
So I have a Twitter account that is at Peniel Decalcify.
I tweet about Sovereign Citizens semi-often, sometimes, but it's mostly just a personal Twitter account.
That's that's it.
That's it.
That's where you can find me.
Where you can find me.
Catch you later, suckers.
So thank you for taking the time here.
Yeah, no, it was great talking with you this evening.
I was glad to have you.
I was glad to do this.
This was very interesting.
I learned a lot more about Sovereign Citizens than I because one of the things that one of my friends always says to me about stuff is like, I had no idea how deep this went.
And I'm like, welcome to reality.
There's nothing humanity ever does where they don't go whole hog on it.
There's nothing you can get a surface-level analysis of and go, boom!
Nailed it.
Done.
Don't need to learn anything more.
You can do this.
There's so much more.
For instance, in the 90s, the Montana Freedmen.
Fascinating.
David Wynn Miller.
Completely rabbit hole.
The Moorish Sovereign Citizens.
Fascinating movement in and of itself.
Just so many different things going on that I cannot even begin to explain in this time.
Right.
We could do a 10-part series and still not cover all of it.
So thank you for joining us.
I am going to either fall asleep or spend the next hour killing robot dinosaurs and then falling asleep.
That sounds fun.
Oh, it's incredibly fun.
Horizon Forbidden West has been everything I've hoped it to be and a bag of chips.
