Don't ‘Blue Lives Matter’ When White Sovereign Citizens Murder Police Officers?

Officer Brandon Paudert, killed by 'sovereign citizens' in  West Memphis, Ark.

In the wake of the shootings of police officers by black-nationalist radicals in Dallas, Texas, and Baton Rouge, La., two weeks ago, a number of right-wing pundits and political leaders have openly blamed the Black Lives Matter movement for the events.

“My message has been clear from day one two years ago. This anti-cop sentiment from this hateful ideology called Black Lives Matter has fueled this rage against the American police officer. I predicted this two years ago,” right-wing Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke told a CNN interviewer.

"I do blame people on social media with their hatred towards police," Texas’s lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, said on Fox News. "I saw Jesse Jackson — I think it was on Fox, the other night, calling police 'racists' without any facts. I do blame former Black Lives Matter protests.”

On Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump blamed Black Lives Matter as a “fuse lighter” for the killings, saying “they certainly have ignited people and you see that. You see that all over. And I think it's a very, very serious situation and we just can't let it happen.”

Some have even organized a counter-movement of sorts calling itself “Blue Lives Matter,” as a kind of retort to the black movement’s thesis that black people are disproportionately targeted by police. Indeed, the phrase was Sheriff Clarke’s battle cry in his speech at the GOP convention in Cleveland on July 18, leading the crowd to chant the phrase.

Rush Limbaugh called BLM “a terrorist group committing hate crimes,” demanding the FBI investigate them, and others have similarly demanded that the movement be designated a hate group. Yet, as SPLC President Richard Cohen has explained, BLM does not even come close to meeting the criteria required for its consideration as a hate group – unlike the black nationalists who actually inspired the shootings, which are in fact designated hate groups.

Moreover, despite the efforts of right-wing media to attempt to link BLM to attacks on police officers, there have been none yet recorded to which any BLM member could be concretely connected, though some assaults have seen the perpetrators use incendiary language similar to what can sometimes be heard at BLM rallies.

All of this stands in stark contrast to media and public response to the single greatest threat to the lives and well-being of police officers in the United States over the past decade and longer: the sovereign citizens movement.

The movement, built out of a peculiar web of white-supremacist beliefs and far-right “constitutionalist” legal theories, first gained traction in the 1990s through such antigovernment “Patriot” groups as the Montana Freemen and various “redemption” scams that generally left their adherents impoverished and imprisoned. In the succeeding years, it has not gone away – and indeed has been picking up strength in the past decade, particularly fueled by right-wing reaction to the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008.

In the eight years since, sovereign citizens have killed nine police officers and injured more than a dozen others in 16 separate incidents, many of them violent responses to ordinary police actions such as issuing traffic tickets or serving warrants. Other incidents involved plots to kidnap, torture and murder police officers, or armed standoffs in which law-enforcement officers were threatened.

Here is a complete list of those incidents:

June 10, 2009, Washington, D.C.: James Von Brunn, an 88-year-old sovereign citizen who had once attempted to make a “citizen’s arrest” of the chairman of the Federal Reserve, walks into the U.S. Holocaust Museum and opens fire, killing a guard. Von Brunn dies while awaiting trial on murder and hate crime charges.

March 25, 2010, Sumter County, Florida: Brody James Whitaker, a sovereign citizen, fires at two Florida state troopers when they pull him over in Sumter County, Florida, and then flees. He’s found guilty of attempted murder and sentenced to life in prison.

May 20, 2010, West Memphis, Arkansas: Jerry and Joe Kane, two sovereign citizens, kill two police officers when pulled over in West Memphis, Arkansas, then die in a subsequent shootout with police in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart not far from the original shootings. The Kanes, father and son, had toured the country selling the sovereign-citizen scheme to paying audiences.

March 10, 2011, Fairbanks, Alaska: Francis Schaeffer, the leader of an Alaska militia and self-described “sovereign citizen,” is arrested with several co-conspirators after FBI and state agents infiltrate the militia, and accuse them of plotting to kill government employees and accumulate weapons.  They're charged with conspiracy to murder federal officials and weapons charged, and sentenced to 26, 26, and 5 years in prison.

December 18, 2011, Webster, Pennsylvania: Eli Franklin Myers, a self-described sovereign citizen, shoots two officers, killing one, at a traffic stop. He dies a day later in a gunfight with police at his Webster, Pennsylvania home.

Dec. 22, 2011, Seligman, Arizona: Shawn Rice, a sovereign citizen, engages police in armed standoff after being indicted for variety of federal charges, including money laundering. He’s found guilty and sentenced to 57 months in prison.

Dec. 16, 2012, Laplace, Louisiana: Terry Smith, Brian Smith, and Kyle Joekel, sovereign citizens with long criminal records, kill two deputies and wound two others in a shootout. All are charged with first degree murder and await trial.

March 8, 2013, Navarre, Florida: Jeffrey Allen Wright, a sovereign citizen, engages in an armed standoff with police in Navarre, Florida, telling negotiators they had no authority to arrest him. Wright is killed by officers during the standoff.

August 22, 2013, Las Vegas, Nevada: David Allen Brutsche and Devon Campbell Newman, sovereign citizens, are arrested for plotting to abduct, torture, murder a Las Vegas police officer. Brutsche pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit kidnapping, Newman pleads guilty to conspiracy to commit false imprisonment, and both receive probation.

March 25, 2014, Middleburg Heights, Ohio: Israel Rondon, a Sovereign Citizen, shoots at deputies serving a warrant at his home, and is shot dead in return. Rondon had waged a five-year court battle attempting to prove the validity of his beliefs.

June 6, 2014, Cumming, Georgia: Dennis Marx, a sovereign citizen and former TSA employee, attempts to take hostages to a Forsyth, Georgia courthouse. He shoots and injures a sheriff's deputy before being shot and killed by police during the assault.

June 8, 2014, Las Vegas, Nevada: Jerad and Amanda Miller, a married couple and Patriot movement members who had spent weeks at the Cliven Bundy ranch, go on a shooting rampage that kills three people. The rampage begins with the couple killing two police officers in cold blood while they ate lunch in a pizza shop, declaring to witnesses that “the revolution begins now” and draping the men’s bodies with a Gadsden “Don’t Tread On Me” flag. They cross the street and enter a Wal-Mart, where they kill a citizen who pulls a gun in an attempt to stop them. They’re killed by officers during a subsequent shootout inside the Wal-Mart.

June 17, 2014, Nevada City, California: Brent Douglas Cole, a 60-year-old sovereign citizen originally from Idaho, engages a Bureau of Land Management officer and a California state trooper ins gunfight when they confront him about his illegal campsite; all three men are wounded. Cole is charged with numerous federal and state felonies.

Aug. 12, 2014, Dallas, Texas: Dennis Lee Leguin, a man who called Dallas police to inform them he was part of the antigovernment “sovereign citizens” movement even as he was engaging officers in an armed standoff, was eventually arrested after taking shots at officers and locking down an upscale North Dallas neighborhood.

Nov. 22, 2014, Tallahassee, Florida: Curtis Wade Holley, a sovereign citizen with rabid antigovernment views, sets fire to his home, and then opens fire on sheriff’s deputies and firefighters when they arrive to assist. One deputy is killed and another wounded before Holley himself is shot and killed.

Sept. 24, 2015, Mineral Wells, West Virginia:  Thomas David Deegan, a heavily armed ‘Patriot,’ is charged with threatening to commit terrorist act after planning to overthrow West Virginia’s state government by targeting the State Capitol, State Police headquarters, the Kanawha County Sheriff’s Department and West Virginia National Guard facilities. Deegan is convicted of one count of making a terroristic threat and sentenced to between 2 and 8 years in prison.

All of these acts, since they are directed at police officers for their status as authority figures, are considered acts of domestic terrorism by FBI and other law-enforcement experts. This is part of why the FBI has singled out sovereign citizens for special attention as a threat to police officers in the United States, as well as a source of domestic terrorism.

Not all of the terrorism unleashed by sovereign citizens is directed at police officers, however. One of the most notorious such acts occurred on May 31, 2009, in Topeka Kansas, when a man named Scott Roeder, who had ties to sovereign citizens and the Montana Freemen, walked into a church and killed Dr. George Tiller, who ran an oft-targeted abortion clinic. Roeder was later found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

The key to understanding the threat posed by sovereign citizens is the core of their ideology – namely, that the federal government is an illicit entity devoted to the enslavement of all mankind, and that ordinary people can declare themselves “sovereigns” who stand apart from such a system, free of its obligations or its laws and capable of operating separately from it. This means they often refuse to pay taxes (which result in warrants being served) or their driving or license fees (which results in being pulled over by police), and when confronted, believe they have the right to resort to deadly force to resist arrest.

That sometimes produces scenes such as this one, which occurred in 2015 when a police officer tried to ticket a sovereign citizen in Texas:

The situation ended harmlessly enough, as a number of such confrontations do. But even afterward, the extremism can carry over into the courtroom when the “sovereigns” attempt to enforce their interpretation of the laws – such as when “liberty speaker” and “constitutionalist” guru Gavin Seim attempted to defend one of his fellow “sovereigns” in a court proceeding over a traffic violation in East Wenatchee, Wash.:

In recent years, however, there has been a peculiar adaptation of the sovereign-citizen ideology by black nationalists, who – seemingly oblivious to its white-supremacist origins – have adopted a version of the ideology by similarly declaring themselves free of white men’s laws and obligations.

So it is almost certainly not a coincidence that the Baton Rouge police shooter, 29-year-old Gavin Long, who was a member of the black separatist hate group New Black Panthers People Party, also claimed to have been a sovereign citizen.

All of these factors have led law-enforcement experts from both academic and official backgrounds to conclude that by far the most lethal threat to police officers in the United States today from radical extremists actually arises from sovereign citizens and related far-right extremists – the vast majority of whom, though not all, are white people.

There’s no evidence that Sheriff Clarke or any of his fellow pundits eager to blame mainstream black activists for the murders of police officers in recent weeks have ever spoken out against white sovereign citizens and their ceaseless assaults on policemen and other first responders. But then again, Clarke himself is closely affiliated with a right-wing extremist “constitutionalist” sheriff’s group that believes, like sovereign citizens, that its members don’t have to obey federal laws.

That could explain the peculiar silence from Clarke, at least, about the threat posed by sovereign citizens. It doesn’t explain the silence from his “law and order” right-wing cohorts, however.

County Auctions Off Property of Washington ‘Sovereign Citizen’

David Darby. (The Columbian/Zachary Kaufman)

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

It may have taken three weeks, three auctions and a handful of headaches, but the Clark County, Wash., Treasurer’s Office was finally able to auction off antigovernment “sovereign citizen” David Darby’s property this week.

Trudy Rouse, a spokesperson for the treasurer’s office, told Hatewatch that the property had been successfully auctioned to a buyer from Richland for $52,445 on Tuesday.

“They’re kind of wondering, why would I jeopardize it for $22,000,” the amount in back taxes that he owes,” Darby told Hatewatch. “The reason is, I own the land. They did not even put a lien against my land. They just said that I owed money and then auctioned it off. Well, they can’t really do that. So I’m going to take it into court.”

He added: “I wouldn’t have done this if I didn’t think I could win.”


Darby, an elderly man who has been active in far-right politics in Clark County since the 1990s, when he organized militias locally, says he believes filing the federal suit will entitle him to force his case into a “common law court.”

“That’s why they don’t want me to come in to court, because they know I will bring common law into the court,” he said. “Once we get into court, the judge is going to have to handle the court in the common law mode.”

Darby’s fight with Clark County dates back to 2009, when he stopped paying taxes after, he says, he discovered the “truth” about becoming a “sovereign citizen” and the supposed illegitimacy of both federal and state governments. Darby claims that Washington state’s original constitution, drafted in 1878 and containing clauses that negate state and local taxes, is the only legitimate ruling document for Washington, and not the 1889 constitution now observed by the state.

Darby’s property first was auctioned on Sept. 16, ending a long legal battle in which Darby’s claims were largely rebuked. However, that buyer turned out to be a friend of Darby’s, who attempted to pay for the property in cash, was refused, and then backed out when fees were added to his check payment.

That buyer, a Vancouver man named Richard Grady, told Hatewatch that he believed Darby had a legitimate claim. He said he had known Darby for several years because they both like to work on cars—Darby is a noted Jaguar collector—and “because he has been involved in the sovereign citizens movement.”

“He has a valid, legitimate claim based upon the original Washington constitution, and I agree with that argument because I’ve been involved in a similar case in Oregon,” Grady told Hatewatch.

A second auction was held on Sept. 23. Clark County Treasurer Doug Lasher said that the second buyers backed out after driving out from the Pasco area to view the property, telling him that the place reminded them of the horror film “Wrong Turn” (in which several young people become lost in a wooded area and area attacked by cannibals). “Their kids were crying because they didn’t want to be there,” he said.

Darby says that he is waiting for the new buyer’s title to become official, at which point he intends to sue Clark County for damages in federal court, which is what he claims to have wanted all along.

“I’ve got to get ahold of the new buyer, and I will sit down with him and show him that the county fraudulently sold the land,” he told Hatewatch. “They did not explain that there are two similar lawsuits over this, and he is going to have to prove that the deed of trust or anything in the color of law will actually trump a land patent.”

Land patents, a bogus legal technique once promoted by the Posse Comitatus as a way to erase farmers’ debts, are now widely used by the sovereign citizen’s movement.

In 2009, Darby filed a number of “sovereign citizen” documents with Clark County that he claims established his “land patent” on his property, something explicitly recognized under the 1878 Washington constitution that Darby claims is the state’s real ruling document.

What’s next? Darby earlier told Hatewatch that he would give up the property if he lost his case in federal court, and would not engage in armed action as other sovereign citizens have: “I’m not going to do anything radical,” he said. “I have no intention of anything like that.”

Washington State ‘Sovereign Citizen’ Plans Showdown Over His Property – But Only in Court, He Says

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

 Self-described “sovereign citizen” David Darby wants everyone to know that he has no intention of getting involved in any armed standoffs with any law enforcement officers from Clark County, Wash., where he lives. He says he just wants his day in court – even though, whenever he has had one of those, he has lost.

Most recently, the 69-year-old Darby – a longtime antigovernment “Patriot” movement activist, dating back to the 1990s, and political gadfly – was informed by a Superior Court judge that his 4.7-acre property in rural Amboy would be put up for auction, following foreclosure proceedings brought against him by Clark County for failure to pay his taxes.

“It’s all constitutional,” he insists. “Everything I’ve done is constitutional. If it’s not constitutional, then all they have to do is prove it. And I will stop this. I will pay the taxes. But because they have not done this, I would not pay the taxes. And I cannot get this into federal court until I am hurt. So once they actually sell my property, I’ve been hurt. Then I will file in federal court.”

Darby has only a few days left to wait. The auction of his property is scheduled to take place between 8 and 11 a.m. on Sept. 16.

Darby, claiming that he is a “citizen” exempt from such duties, stopped paying his taxes in 2008, beginning a long-running dispute with the Clark County Treasurer’s office that culminated in 2013 with foreclosure proceedings on his rural home – a mobile home on raised blocks — and its accompanying wooded acreage.

However, as Darby made clear back then, he purposely forced these proceedings as part of his strategy to get the issue of his claims to a “land patent” on the property heard in a federal court. “I’ve been setting up the strategy to do this because no one has ever gotten sovereign ownership of land in the courts,” Darby said. “The only way to set it up was to go into foreclosure. … This isn’t about my land; it’s about the [state] constitution.”

Indeed, Darby claims that the current Washington constitution, passed in 1889, is not valid – and that the state’s proper constitution is actually one that was drawn up in 1878, when statehood was first suggested. He also characterizes this document as explicitly creating sovereign citizenship for state residents, as well as outlawing property taxes and liens on property.

“We were already a state before they did the 1889 constitution,” he insists.

He claims he went through a complicated legal process of filing various affidavits and making public proclamations that resulted in him owning a “land patent” on his property.

“Anyone who buys my land has a big problem because I have a lawful title to my land,” he told a reporter.

Darby has been active in far-right circles in Washington state since the 1990s, when he was the Clark County representative of the U.S. Militia Association, a “constitutionalist” militia-organizing outfit directed by an Idaho man named Samuel Sherwood.

It was then, Darby told Hatewatch, that he first became interested in “common-law courts” and other sovereign citizenship theories. He says he was originally drawn to far-right “constitutionalist” legal theories by Sherwood and other far-right figures, but then became so thoroughly devoted to sovereign citizen theories.

“I found out about [sovereign citizenship] once I found out that the Constitution does not apply to U.S. citizens, it only applies to citizens of the United States of America, which ended in 1861 when martial law was instituted by Lincoln,” Darby says. “I’ve actually studied the law, the legislation, and I’ve been studying this now ever since those days, and I’ve figured it out for myself. It’s not that I’m listening to anybody else, I’ve figured it all out.”

Darby told reporter Tyler Graf of the Daily Columbian that anyone who buys the property will have to force him to leave. “We’ll have to see what happens,” Darby said. “I don’t plan on leaving. I don’t know what they’re going to try. … They know I am very serious about this. All I want is my constitutional rights protected, like every other citizen in Washington.”

That means the matter may eventually come down to a sheriff’s deputy arriving with an order to remove Darby. But Darby told Hatewatch that if matters get that far, he intends to leave peacefully.
“I’m not going to do anything radical or anything,” he avers. “I have no intention of anything like that.”

However, he said that things won’t get that far, because he intends to file a federal lawsuit against Clark County this week – as soon as they put his property up for auction: “I’m getting ready to file another suit, now that they’ve hurt me, in Superior Court,” he told Hatewatch.

Darby has written about his beliefs about sovereign citizenship at length and posted several lengthy exegeses on the Internet about them. According to a study published about his filings, Darby has claimed to have received financial backing from an anonymous East Coast organization.

Darby says he understands that people espousing sovereign citizen beliefs have gotten into armed standoffs and shootouts with law-enforcement officers over situations like his. Those people, he says, are not like him.

“The problem is that they don’t understand that the officers and all these are only doing what they’re told to do,” Darby says. “We understand that. We’re not going to have any armed confrontation. We don’t want anybody hurt. I would rather have my day in court. And that’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

Well, Maybe A Black 'Sovereign Citizen' Will Get People's Attention

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

We've discussed so-called "sovereign citizens" -- those newly revivified remnants of the militia/Patriot movement of the 1990s who believe you can declare yourself free of the federal government by filing a bunch of pseudo-legal documents saying so -- quite a bit here, particularly the threat of extreme violence they represent, embodied most recently in the case of Jerry and Joe Kane, the traveling Patriot-scam salesmen who gunned down two police officers in Arkansas.

But it's kinda strange: Even though these cases would attract huge amounts of media attention had they been committed by, say, someone of the Muslim persuasion (you know there would be nonstop coverage on Fox), scarcely anyone has paid attention to these violent crimes, at least in the media.

And there's an important thread here: Not only were Jerry and Joe Kane "sovereign citizens," so were Scott Roeder, the assassin of George Tiller, and James Von Brunn, the Holocaust Museum shooter.

So I was keenly interested when WSB-TV in Atlanta reported on a "sovereign citizen" in Georgia who has been apparently playing with the same Patriot scam that Jerry and Joe Kane were selling: moving into foreclosed homes and claiming them as your own.

If you watch the video, and the others Kane left behind, you'll see that the scheme he was selling entailed creating "strawman" companies that would enable a "sovereign citizen" to then claim ownership, by virtue of their sovereignty (often defined in divine terms), of whatever properties they set their sights upon. As one account noted:

Seminars of this type usually teach that each person has a real self and a “corporate self” that is a fabrication of the government, and that banks cannot legitimately lend money that belongs to their depositors.

“It’s mumbo jumbo; it’s magic words; it’s abracadabra,” Ms. MacNab said.

We're seeing, as I mentioned, this scam showing up in places like Seattle and Montana and California, too.

But what's remarkable about this "sovereign citizen" is that he's African-American. This is at first remarkable because "sovereign citizenship" is typically a product of racist-right organizations that preach racial separation -- 99 percent of the sovereign citizens in America are white.

But there are in fact some black-supremacist organizations such as the Black Nuwaubians who similarly truck in these kinds of conspiracy theories (which, like the white supremacists', ultimately blame Jews for all their ills). And all you have to do is listen to this fellow ramble on for a little while to realize that he's very much of this vein.

Now, if anything will get the attention of mainstream media -- and particularly the folks at Fox (Megyn Kelly, I'm looking at you) -- it's a black man indulging in this kind of rhetoric and behavior.

One can only imagine the horrified faces of the Fox anchors as they describe how this fellow has been moving into foreclosed homes and claiming they're all his! Why, hasn't he heard about white people's work ethic?

And you know the names of any of the white extremists who created and sold this Bizarro World belief system will never cross their lips.

Montana’s ‘Natural Man’ Defies Courts, Sets Up Another Rural ‘Patriot’ Showdown

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.] 


Ernie Wayne terTelgte likes to style himself as a Montana mountain man, dressing in buckskins, boots and tricornered hats and sometimes bearing an old muzzle-loading musket. He likes to elaborate upon his theories about so-called sovereign citizenship in a florid 18th-century style. But it isn’t a silly nostalgia act.

The Bozeman man has, in fact, been challenging Montana’s courts and legal system in the name of his extremist belief system all while adopting anachronistic clothing and calling himself the “Natural Man.”

Asked to explain why he was fishing without a license, terTeltge told a judge: “I was searching for something to put in my stomach as I am recognized to be allowed to do by universal law,” he said. “I am the living man and I have the right to forage for food when I am hungry.”

This all could be written off as the peculiar antics of another kook with convoluted legal ideas – something not unheard of in Montana – but for the fact that terTeltge has amassed supporters locally and regionally. His fight with the courts over what began as a simple fishing citation has become the latest cause célèbre among the far right in the Mountain West, including the region’s antigovernment “Patriots” and associated militias.

Some have gone so far as to begin organizing “citizen grand juries,” another tactic of the sovereign citizen movement, which purport to allow ordinary citizens to present cases to the local sheriff and sit in judgment of local government officials. Indeed, terTeltge himself has played a leading role in helping to organize these “juries” in the Bozeman area.

These activities have a long history in Montana, including the Montana Freemen of the 1990s, some of whom were from the Bozeman area and who practiced a similar kind of “sovereign citizenship” theory in promoting their illegal moneymaking schemes. Indeed, one of terTeltge’s cohorts in forming a “citizen grand jury”, a Bozeman man named Steve McNeil, was heavily involved with the Freemen and was arrested at one of their trials in Billings in 1996. Other extremists, such as neo-Nazi Karl Gharst, have used “citizen grand juries” to threaten the Montana Human Rights Network.

In recent years, these ideas have been spread widely in places such as Montana through the auspices of the Tea Party movement, in which old “Patriot” movement ideas have commingled freely with mainstream conservative politics, to the point that in many parts of the state Tea Party ideologues are nearly indistinguishable from the militiamen who got their start there in the 1990s.

Ernie terTeltge appears to have gotten his start that way. He first appeared on the region’s political scene in 2010, leading a contingent of Tea Party demonstrators as they protested efforts to pass health care reform outside the Gallatin County Courthouse. TerTeltge was wearing his trademark mountain man outfit.

Then, in August 2013, terTeltge was caught fishing without a license at the Three Forks Pond, a state-managed area, and refused to give the game warden his name. He was subsequently charged with resisting arrest.

TerTeltge began demonstrating in front of the courthouse in Three Forks in early November as his court proceedings began. A video shows him holding up a cardboard sign and explaining sovereign citizen ideology to passersby on the street.

Then, on Nov. 19, he made a court appearance on the resisting-arrest charge in Three Forks before City Judge Wanda Drusch. It did not go well. He yelled at the judge: “Do not tell me to shut up! I am the living, natural man, and my voice will be heard!”

He also pointed at the American flag in the corner and told the judge: “That is the Jolly Roger, that thing you call the American flag with the golf fringe around it is the Jolly Roger, and you are acting as one of its privateers!”

When Drusch got up to confer with law enforcement officers, terTeltge and his supporters peremptorily marched out of the courtroom, got in their vehicles and departed.

That tactic did not work for his next court appearance three days later, however. Once again, terTeltge tried to buffalo Judge Drusch with a flood of pseudo-legal language even as she warned him continuously that he would be found in contempt of court if he did not desist. Finally she ordered deputies to arrest him, and they did, handcuffing terTeltge as he protested: “I cannot give you recognition, I am constrained by the United States Constitution of 1789.”

Things got even stickier in January when he went before Justice of the Peace Rick West, who sent terTeltge back to jail, again for contempt, after he refused to remove his hat in the courtroom. This time, he had a larger crowd of supporters, but there were also over 30 law enforcement officers present to keep the peace. TerTeltge wound up spending 30 days in jail.

This incident threw local “Patriots” into a tizzy. One of terTeltge’s allies –William Wolf, a formerly homeless man who has been involved in efforts by Bozeman-area extremists to file for political office as Democrats – threatened to arrest Judge West as a “sovereign citizen,” setting local law enforcement even further on edge.

Then Wolf approached Gallatin County commissioners about forming a “citizens grand jury” to review claims of “human rights violations” in terTeltge’s case. The idea proved somewhat popular in Bozeman; one gathering attracted over 50 people to discuss forming what they saw as challenge to “corrupt government.”

At his most recent appearance in March, however, terTeltge was more contrite and cooperative. As a result, Judge West did not return him to jail, and he was freed until his trials begin. His fishing license trial is scheduled to begin next week.

“Patriot” movement leaders are watching the case closely. Chuck Baldwin, the former Constitution Party candidate now living in the Flathead Valley in hopes of creating a white homeland, recently returned from his visit to the Bundy Ranch standoff in Nevada and regaled an audience in Kalispell with tales of the militias’ exploits in Nevada. Then Baldwin urged his audience to pay similar attention to terTeltge’s case.

“I realize, we all recognize that everybody cannot up and leave and go a thousand miles away, depending on your schedule, your home responsibilities, et cetera. We understand that,” Baldwin said. “We still have to be watchful here in the state of Montana. We’ve got a situation in Bozeman, right here in our state, that we need to take care of, and we really need to rally around. You’ll be hearing more about that soon.”

All of this far-right activism concerns local government officials, who have become all too familiar with this brand of extremism in recent years in Montana. Jim Taylor, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Montana, noted that there’s nothing legal about these theories.

“You can’t just make up law. Law is what it is,” Taylor said. “You can’t just say, ‘And we’re going to have a grand jury on my block.’ It doesn’t work that way.”

The right-wing threats keep mounting: In Florida, 'sovereign citizens' threaten law enforcement, neighbors

-- by Dave

There's certainly plenty of reason for police officers to worry about far-right-wing nutcases gunning them down in a confrontation. Just ask the families of the two officers who tried to ticket Jerry and Joe Kane.

So down in Tampa, the cops took no chances when a "sovereign citizen" began announcing threats to law enforcement officers:

Over the summer, authorities arrested Josiah Fornof of Hudson. According to the criminal complaint, Fornof, 30, threatened to "bear arms against" two deputies with the Pasco County Sheriff's Office who were trying to serve a warrant.

... According to the affidavit, he told law enforcement they had no right to be at the home where he lives with his mother and he yelled, "Sir, if you come back, we may bear arms against you."

Fornof is being held at the Pinellas County Jail at the request of federal marshals. He is charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm.

The FBI is not commenting since the criminal case against him is still open, but threats and actions spelled out in his arrest affidavit certainly fit the criteria the FBI uses to define a sovereign citizen extremist.

"We are seeing a growth in the movement” Special Agent Michael McPherson told investigative reporter Doug Smith. "We are concerned with the sovereign citizen extremist."

McPherson is a supervisor for the FBI's Domestic Terrorism Task Force who is based in Tampa and responsible for 18 counties in Florida. He told Smith the agency uses a three-prong test to define a sovereign citizen extremist.

"The threat of force or violence, a violation of a federal law and a political, social agenda -- that's when we'd get involved."

We went to Hudson to visit the property where Fornof was arrested. Careful not to trespass, we were met out front by Nathan Fornof, who defended his brother's actions.

"We were expecting them to come in here and murder us Nathan told FOX 13. "We've been having them come up and threaten us on our grandfather's property. Next thing we know we get a visit from the FBI dragging him off saying you don't have the right to defend yourselves."

Agent McPherson is concerned about threats against law enforcement.

"The anti-government rhetoric can quickly turn to action," he said.

Gee, we wonder where they're getting [koffFoxkoff] that from. Guess we could always ask Byron Williams.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Sovereign Citizen’ Is Suspected in Georgia Courthouse Shooting

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]


A man described by authorities as an antigovernment “sovereign citizen” entered a courthouse in suburban Atlanta this morning armed with multiple guns and explosives and opened fire. The man was shot and killed by sheriff’s deputies shortly after wounding one officer in the leg.

Dennis Marx

According to Sheriff Duane Piper, the man, Dennis Marx of Cumming, Ga., drove up to the courthouse in his SUV and emerged from the vehicle with several guns and some explosives, and reportedly wearing a bulletproof vest and a gas mask. As he approached the entrance, he threw out homemade smoke grenades that briefly covered his approach with orange smoke, as well as pepper spray grenades and homemade spike strips.

Forsyth County deputy Daniel Rush came out to confront Marx and was shot in the leg. Then, as Marx proceeded into the building, he was met with a hail of gunfire and was killed.

The wounded deputy, a 25-year veteran, was taken to a local hospital and treated. Sheriff Piper praised him, saying Rush’s actions stalled Marx long enough for SWAT team officers and other deputies to arrive in place and protect the people working inside.

“It would be a guess to think how many lives he saved had he not engaged him right there,” Piper said. “Mr. Marx’s intention was to get inside that front door and to take hostages.”

Piper said that Marx was well known as a “sovereign citizen” to deputies at the time of the attack. Marx had a long-running lawsuit against the sheriff’s office over alleged unconstitutional raids on his home, and was due in court Friday morning to face marijuana and weapons charges.

Marx apparently had been living for the past week in a motel. When deputies went to his home, they found evidence that it had been rigged to blow up when law enforcement entered. Piper told a WSB-TV reporter he was confident the place had been set up as an explosive trap.

“We are quite certain it’s booby-trapped with the purpose of killing law enforcement,” he said. Piper noted that it appeared Marx had been planning the assault for some time.

Marx had been in trouble with sheriff’s deputies since at least 2011, according to the Forsyth News, when he was arrested on marijuana charges, as well as weapons possession charges. He had been suing the sheriff’s department for alleged civil rights violations and use of excessive force, and had filed papers in the suit using pseudo-legal language common to “sovereign citizen” court actions.

An amendment to the complaint he filed on April 2 alleged that a Forsyth deputy had caused a death in his family by setting events in motion that led to it.

“Plaintiff also has information and receipts to verify his statements to defendants regarding the seizure of plaintiff’s family’s property, leaving plaintiff and plaintiff’s family without the means to properly protect themselves and/or relocate, as is their Constitutional right, leading directly or indirectly to the death and/or murder of one member of plaintiff’s family,” the motion read.

A woman identified by WSB-TV as Marx’s attorney said she had recently withdrawn from the case because Marx had been dissatisfied with her representation. She said she had asked Marx to take a psychological evaluation, but he had refused.

Sovereign Citizen’s Video Shows Texas Officer Breaking Out Window After Repeated Requests For ID

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

A self-described “sovereign citizen” recently posted a video of his May arrest in Addison, Texas, by a local police officer, ostensibly to display police misbehavior as the policeman breaks out his car’s window and handcuffs him.

What the video actually seems to demonstrate instead, however, is how delusional the sovereign citizen worldview really is, and how police are ultimately driven to harsh measures in order to simply enforce traffic laws in ordinary encounters with these “true believers.”

The video shows the May 2 arrest of 49-year-old Scott Richardson after being pulled over for allegedly driving 50 mph in a 40 mph zone. Recorded by Richardson on his cell phone, it shows him arguing with the Addison officer for over four minutes before the policeman gets out his baton and breaks the driver’s side window and pulls the man from the car. At that point, the phone appears to fall onto a seat, recording the sounds of Richardson being put in handcuffs and the officer who made the arrest discussing the matter with a fellow officer.

During the course of the interchange, the officer requests the man show him his driver’s license and proof of insurance a total of 15 times before he gets out his baton, makes the same request a final time, and begins breaking the window.

Throughout the exchange, Richardson refuses the request, instead attempting to interrogate the officer.

“Mmkay, let me ask you a question,” Richardson says. “As a man, what right do you have to stop another man?” When the officer explains that the state of Texas gives him the authority, Richardson goes on to claim that speeding is not illegal in the state.

“I’m speeding? Did you realize that in the State of Texas, speeding in and of itself is not illegal?” he says.

As the Houston Chronicle notes, that is not what Texas law says: the Texas transportation code allows government to enforce speed limits.

Richardson also claims in the video that the 1979 U.S. Supreme Court case, Brown v. Texas, established that law enforcement officers are not allowed to demand a citizen's identification unless he was seen committing a felony. Actually, the case established that officers needed probable cause to detain and ID a citizen, and speeding qualifies as such.

The officer again asks for his ID, and again warns Richardson that he is facing arrest for failure to identify himself. Instead, Richardson keeps trying to question the policeman.

“Mmkay, I’m still having to ask you a question here,” Richardson says.

“That’s not how this works,” the officer responds.

“That is how this works,” Richardson insists.

Eventually, the officer shouts at the man to demand he identify himself or he will break the window open, drawing his baton and raising it. When Richardson keeps babbling into his phone, the window is broken open, the officer opens the door, and the phone falls to the floor. You can then hear the officers telling the man to stay down and then applying handcuffs and telling him he is being charged with failure to identify.

After a few more minutes, the officer can be heard conversing with another policeman, explaining that the matter was just a simple traffic stop: “All he had to do was give me his driver’s license! He was giving me that Republic of Texas crap, saying I had stopped him illegally and I don’t have the right to detain him.”

“This was for speeding?” the other officer asks.

“Yeah, that’s all it was,” the officer says. “All it was.”

A little later, he muses: “I should have known when I saw the back window. All the stickers. All that stuff.”

Schaeffer Cox And His Alaska Militia: The Classic Sovereign-citizen Saga, From Laughable To Lethal

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

The details about Schaeffer Cox, the Alaska militiaman arrested in a plot to kill and kidnap state troopers and local judges, are starting to emerge -- and they have a distinctly familiar ring to them. From the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner:

Details emerge in alleged plot to kill Alaska State Troopers judge
State court documents made available Friday detail the murders and kidnappings allegedly planned by Schaeffer Cox and militia followers as well as the secret FBI recordings that helped expose the plan.

The plan, which members of Cox’s Peacemakers Militia reportedly code-named “241” (two for one), was created as a potential retaliatory response to any attempt by law enforcement to arrest Cox, who had an outstanding bench warrant for not attending a trial over a misdemeanor weapons charge.

Under the plan, Cox and other militia members would kidnap two law enforcement officers or court officials for every militia member arrested. They would kill two officials in retaliation for every militia member killed in any conflict with authorities.

The document accuses the group of assembling an arsenal that included pineapple grenades allegedly stolen from Fort Wainwright, multiple tripod-mounted machine guns and “dozens of other high-powered assault rifles and pistols.” The court documents don’t say whether search warrants for the weapons were obtained, or if the weapons have been seized.

Most of the information in the charging documents come from private militia “command staff” meetings “lawfully recorded by the FBI through technological means available to them.”

Four of the five defendants accused of conspiring to murder and kidnap are described discussing the plan in a 17-page criminal complaint. Besides Cox, the co-defendants are Coleman Barney, 36, of the North Pole area and Salcha residents Lonnie Vernon, 55 his wife and Karen Vernon, 66.

It's abundantly clear that Cox is following the career of so many "sovereign citizens" before him -- from Gordon Kahl to Randy and Vicki Weaver to Jerry and Joe Kane: You start out as a laughable loony nutcase who believes in an alternative universe constructed of provably untrue conspiracy theories, and you end up a violent, extremist nutcase willing to gun down federal officers.

You can observe this gradual but inexorable career arc just in the videos Cox made before his arrest, including the above interview with a fundamentalist pastor made in January. In it, you can hear Cox's violent fantasies starting to bubble up, even as he claims to have 3,500 members in his Alaska militia organization:

COX: If there came a time where they were endangering my family, you bet I would kill those federal agents. And what kind of a father and husband would I be if I wouldn't? Would I sacrifice my family on the altar of submission to the wicked state? No, that would be despicable, we would highly criticize anybody who did that, stood by and watched in history. And we've got to reckon with the fact that that's our time right now.

Now, we have those agents -- with 3500 guys we have tremendous resources at our disposal. And we had those guys under 24-hour surveillance -- the six trouble-causers that came up from the federal government. And we could have had them killed within 20 minutes of giving the order. But we didn't because they had not yet done it.

Of course, you will notice that since Cox's arrest, those supposed 3500 militiamen have been pretty nonexistent on the scene, and none of the law-enforcement officers involved in his arrest have been subject to any kind of retaliation at all.

You can also hearing him make the usual disclaimers that they kick out any "violent" types from militias -- which, as always, are about as reliable as the Minutemen's similar disclaimers.

Dermot Cole at the News-Miner has more details on Cox's background:

Schaeffer Cox told a “National Collective Consciousness Call” in January that law enforcement officers and the court system in Fairbanks always treated him with “total respect” because they feared the firepower of his militia.

There is no independent verification of how big or small his group is, but he has repeatedly claimed he had 3,500 members under his command.

The 26-year-old Cox said he was treated like a foreign diplomat by the Alaska courts and didn’t have to follow the rules “because I am not of them.”

“They never make me take my hat off or say ‘your honor’ or stand up like that. I refer to them as the ‘alleged judge’ or ‘your administrativeness.’ And I don’t do anything. The police are always ‘oh yes sir, yes sir,’ very nice there.

“And they’re doing that because they know we’ve got ‘em outmanned and outgunned,” he said on the Jan. 6 conference call, a recording of which is posted on the American Underground Network website http://aunetwork.tv/.

He said he told an “alleged judge” last year he could give an order for his militia members to “stand down,” but he couldn’t guarantee they would listen if they thought the case against Cox was politically motivated.

“From one father to another father, I don’t want to put my influence to the test while the lives of you and your children are on the line,” he said he told the judge.

“I said if you want a bloody fight, if you want a war, then we’ve got one hell of a war with your name on it. But if you want peace, well then that’s what we want too,” Cox said.

Likewise, David Holthouse has the full rundown on Alaska's increasingly unhinged and violent "Patriot" movement scene:

As it stands, other Alaska militia leaders are rallying to Cox’s defense in regards to the firearms case, while making no mention of his other legal troubles. “Allow me to state that I am behind Schaeffer Cox 100 percent,” says Norm Olson, leader of the Kenai Peninsula-based Alaska Citizens Militia. “His [sovereign citizen] argument is valid. The court that is claiming jurisdiction is an ‘Admiralty Court’ constructed under statute laws of the corporation known as The State of Alaska. Schaeffer wants to be tried in a court of common law where he can face his accuser directly and try the law as well as the evidence before him. Mr. Cox is fully aware that a jury that is called to listen to the charges has the right and duty to try not only the evidence, but to judge the correctness of the law itself. Schaeffer is not unwilling to be tried, but he wants to plead his case before a common law court with a jury of his peers. Can he expect that in Alaska? Only time will tell.”

Before we get into Olson’s reference to Admiralty Courts and Common Law and other Sovereign Citizen gobbledygook, it’s worth airing his take on the militia movement in Alaska. After all, Olson’s a militia O.G.

Olson started the Michigan Militia in 1994 and helped turn that state into a hotbed of right-wing extremist activity in the mid-to-late 1990s. Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols attended a Michigan Militia meeting not long before the terrorist attack he carried out with Timothy McVeigh.

Asked to assess the current strength of the militia movement in Alaska, Olson offered this response: “Of course I cannot answer that question. To do so would risk compromising our operational objectives and resources. Suffice it to say that we are ‘nowhere and everywhere.’ I will say that any move against one of our units or members is actually a way of bringing central government abuses into the forefront of the community’s awareness. The ongoing persecution of Schaeffer Cox is a boon to our enlistment efforts.”

Here are some earlier clips of Cox in action. In these, you can see Cox cocoon himself in the sovereign-citizen alternative universe, and his rhetoric becomes increasingly violent and paranoid:



This is a story that has played itself out a number of times over the past twenty years -- I've witnessed a number of court hearings involving "sovereign citizens" trying to impose their fabricated "legal" system on the real world -- and it never has a happy outcome. Inevitably, as they become hardened in their belief that their legal fantasy is reality, there comes a confrontation with law enforcement. Often, both sides suffer harm -- but only one side loses.

In my first book, In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest, I devoted most of the second chapter to describing the dynamics of this alternative universe:

The Patriot movement appears to operate in the mainstream world, but truthfully, it does not. Rather, its believers reside in a different universe -- one dominated by an evil government and a conspiracy to destroy America. Agents of the dark side lurk in every gathering, pawns embodied in every disbeliever. Proof of this hidden reality can be found in everyday news stories and ordinary documents, if only seen with the right eyes.

The alternative reality that becomes life in the Patriot movement is like a big quilt, a patchwork of factual items -- United Nations reports, government documents, news stories -- that are patched together with other less credible information -- black helicopter sightings, suggestions of troop movements, and the like. The thread that weaves them all together is a paranoid belief in the vast conspiracy; even if items don’t appear to fit together, the irrational fear driving the movement will overlook potential conflicts.

Everyone is free to make a contribution: a military-vehicle sighting here, an obscure document there. Believers are free to ignore some patches if they happen to disagree with any singular contribution, so long as the quilt itself hangs together as an all-encompassing blanket.

The dwellers in this otherworld can be found not just in the wilds of Montana among the most radical believers like the Freemen. They can be found seemingly everywhere in the Northwest: in suburban conference centers, in rural town halls, in small Bible study groups.

Step into one of the militias’ organizing meetings -- typically held in small community halls in rural areas and towns outlying urban centers -- and you will have walked into this world.

...

By challenging the mainstream view -- that the world is essentially a safe place, that the nation is, in general, functional, even if it has problems -- the Patriots persuade their followers to place themselves outside the rest of society. Simultaneously, they offer a social structure of their own, drawn together by a Patriot sensibility that informs every aspect of the followers’ lives: legal, religious, even business behavior becomes an expression of their beliefs.

This is how people are drawn into the alternative universe of the Patriots, a world in which the same events occur as those that befall the rest of us, but all are seen through a different lens. Anything that makes it into a newspaper or the evening broadcast -- say, flooding in the Cascades, or the arrival of U.S. troops in Bosnia -- may be just another story for most of us, but to a Patriot, these widely disparate events all are connected to the conspiracy. Believers tend to organize in small local groups. They all have similar-sounding names -- Concerned Citizens for Constitutional Law, Alliance for America, and the like. They play host to the touring Patriots, the local leaders nervously introducing their admired guests. These groups operate out of the public limelight, on a low-level communications system: a combination of mailings, faxes and even Internet postings all advertise the meetings locally and regionally. Rarely does an announcement make the local mainstream press.

Most of the Patriots’ real recruiting takes place before the meetings, by word of mouth. It usually works like this:

John, a Patriot, tells Joe, a co-worker at his plant who’s going through a divorce, that he can find out ``what’s really going on’’ by attending a militia meeting. The Patriots, Joe is told, have answers to the moral decay that’s behind the way men get screwed in divorce cases.

Joe attends. He thinks the New World Order theories might be possible. He buys a video tape, maybe a book. It all starts to fit together. So this is why he hasn’t been able to get ahead in the world economically, he tells himself. He attends another meeting. Pretty soon he’s getting ``Taking Aim’’ in the mail.

Joe tells his neighbor Sam about the Patriots. Sam is dubious, but he’s been having a hell of a time paying his taxes, and Joe passes on what he knows about the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Reserve from the Patriot literature he’s read. Sam is intrigued. He reads some of Joe’s material. He goes to the next meeting with Joe. A month or two later, Sam starts drawing up papers to declare himself a ``sovereign citizen.’’

Sam goes to a picnic outing at his parents’ house. His older brother Jeff, an engineer at Boeing, asks Sam about the ``sovereign citizen’’ stuff. Sam explains. Jeff, too, is dubious, but he also happens to be a gun collector and sometime hunter, and he’s received mailings from the National Rifle Association that lead him to wonder if there isn’t something to this whole militia thing. When Sam starts talking about how the government is out of control, passing unconstitutional laws like the Brady Bill, Jeff tunes in. A month later, he, too, sits in on a Patriot town-hall meeting.

One by one it builds. Any of a number of vital issues -- land use, property rights, banking, economics, politics, gun control, abortion, education, welfare -- can serve as a drawing card. In many cases, they are deeply divisive, polarizing matters that the mainstream fails to adequately address.

Once recruits pass through any of these gateways into the Patriot universe, they are drawn further, inexorably. What once seemed like a screwed-up government has become monstrously, palpably evil. Then they learn about Patriot legal theories from people like the Freemen or from Schroder and DeMott:

* The Federal Reserve is bankrupt, a front for a phony system, run by private
corporations, of printing money that really only helps keep rich bankers awash in cash.

* The Internal Revenue Service is illegal. Federal taxes actually are strictly voluntary.

* You can exempt yourself from paying federal taxes by filing a statement declaring yourself a ``sovereign citizen.’’ This ostensibly frees you from obligation to the United States -- which Patriots say is just an illegal corporation based in Washington, D.C. -- by nullifying your participation in the federal citizenship status established by the 14th Amendment.

* This distinction, arguing that only the 14th Amendment extends federal citizenship to minorities, forms the basis for the Patriots’ contention that only white male Christian property owners enjoy full citizenship under the ``organic Constitution.’’

* In fact, the only valid U.S. Constitution is this ``organic Constitution’’ -- that is, the main body of the Constitution and the first ten amendments, or the Bill of Rights. Patriots believe the remaining amendments either should be repealed or were approved illegally anyway. In any case, they would end the prohibition of slavery (13th Amendment); equal protection under the law (14th Amendment); prohibitions against racial or ethnic discrimination (15th Amendment); the income tax (16th Amendment); direct election of Senators (17th Amendment); the vote for women (19th Amendment); and a host of other constitutional protections passed since the time of the Founders.

* Establishing ``sovereign citizenship,’’ or ``Quiet Title’’ (which similarly declares a person a ``freeman’’), exempts a person from the rules of ``equity courts,’’ which means you don’t have to pay for licenses, building permits, or traffic citations, not to mention taxes.

* The only real courts with power are the ``common law’’ courts comprised of sovereign citizens, which have the power to issue rulings and liens against public officials they deem to have overstepped their bounds. If these officials fail to uphold the common-law courts, they can be found guilty of treason, and threatened with the appropriate penalty: hanging.

It is at this end of the Patriot universe that much of its deeper agenda is revealed. When Patriots talk about ``restoring the Constitution,’’ what they often have in mind is a campaign to roll back protections embodied in a wide range of amendments, as well as establishing a reading of the Second Amendment radically different from the one traditionally accepted by the U.S. court system.

It also is at this end of the universe that the charges of divisiveness and racism often leveled at the Patriots take on some weight. Plainly, the constitutional rollbacks would return the American system to a time when racial justice was not a considered concept.

Not surprisingly, this is where the Patriots most closely resemble, and arguably are directly descended from, openly racist and anti-Semitic belief systems like those found in the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the Posse Comitatus.

Most of these views are often dismissed by the mainstream legal profession as simple nonsense promoted by crackpots. And for the most part, the Patriots’ legal theories completely disintegrate when factually examined in the cold light of day. Nonetheless, the movement’s ranks continue to grow, and the mainstream courts, particularly in rural jurisdictions, now are faced with a sudden deluge of ``common law’’ documents that throw an already overburdened system into a tangle.

All the same, there is no law against being a crackpot. Otherwise, hundreds of Elvis sighters and UFO abductees would be rotting in prison cells alongside the Patriots, most of whom also are quite free to spread their conspiracy theories. The concern, rather, is what happens when the agenda of the Patriots, constructed out of an insular, paranoiac view of reality, tries to assert itself in the mainstream world. If their form of ``republic’’ comes to be, most of society’s current protections against racial injustice would vanish.

Believers’ attempts to effect this agenda is certain to come into real conflict with mainstream Americans. Moreover, when Patriots begin to threaten public officials with hanging and other kinds of bodily harm, the potential for violence enters into the picture.

``What is going on in our society when somebody can come up with an idea like this, and a package of materials like this, and attract 200 people to a community meeting?’’ wonders Ken Toole, director of the Montana Human Rights Network. Toole has attended many of the sessions.

``To me, it's almost like a canary in a coal mine, and it's very indicative of how negative and hostile we've become about ourselves -- that somehow these people have managed to objectify the government at all levels, blame it for all kinds of things, and look for a way to kind of focus that anger.’’

'Sovereign Citizenship': Not Just For White Supremacists Anymore

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

(Via The Alyona Show at YouTube)

What do you get when you mix the mushy-headedness of libertarianism with the nuttiness of right-wing extremism, all juiced up in the right-wing populism of the Tea Party movement?

Well, one of the outcomes is the rise in "sovereign citizens" -- those folks who believe in tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories about the government, including the notion that all you have to do is magically sign some documents an voila! You're no longer subject to the jurisdiction of the federal government and its laws!

Indeed, as you may recall, this even allows you to move into mansions that are in foreclosure and proclaim them your very own. And as we saw in the case of Jerry and Joe Kane, there is a dark, violent side to this as well.

This was why, last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a study on sovereign citizens reporting a sharp increase in the numbers of people who were claiming sovereign citizenship:

As many as 300,000 people identify as sovereign citizens, the Southern Poverty Law Center found in a study to be published Thursday that was obtained by The Associated Press. Hate group monitors say their numbers have increased thanks to the recession, the foreclosure crisis, the growth of the Internet and the election of Barack Obama in 2008.

Adherents expect the current American system of government to end one way or another.
"I'm the Patrick Henry of the 21st century. I'm here to regain our freedom," James McBride said in a jailhouse interview. "I'm going to, or die trying."

At the heart of their belief system: The government creates a secret identity for each citizen at birth, a "straw man," that controls an account at the U.S. Treasury used as collateral for foreign debt. File enough documents at the right offices and the money in those accounts can be used to pay off debt or make purchases worth thousands of dollars.

The movement is based on a form of "legal fundamentalism," said Michael Barkun, a retired Syracuse University political science professor who researches anti-government and hate groups.

"These people really seem to feel that filing certain kinds of legal papers that are connected to their theories will somehow also magically have the power to alter relationships and grant things that otherwise would be unobtainable," he said.

Experts say sovereign citizens are the latest manifestation of anti-government activists going back to the Posse Comitatus movement of the 1970s, which recognized only local governments and no law enforcement official with more jurisdiction than a sheriff. In the 1980s, government protesters exploited the farm crisis by selling fraudulent debt relief programs.

You can read the full SPLC report here.

The ADL issued a similar report last week full version in PDF here:

In the summer of 2010, Americans have witnessed a wave of anti-government sentiment sweeping the country. In the mainstream, this has manifested itself in ways ranging from the spread of anti-incumbent electoral trends to the growth of anti-government movements such as the Tea Party movement.

On the fringes of American society, the growth of anti-government sentiment has helped spawn the proliferation of extreme anti-government conspiracy theories and the resurgence of anti-government extremist groups and movements, most noticeably the militia movement, which has grown from 50 groups or so in 2008 to nearly 200 in 2010.

However, there is another anti-government extremist movement that has also grown considerably in size and activity, though this growth—and, indeed, even the existence of the movement—has largely escaped public attention. This is the anti-government “sovereign citizen” movement, which has exhibited a marked increase in activity in the past several years. The sovereign citizen movement is actually larger than its cousin militia movement, and has also engaged in more violent or confrontational incidents in recent years than militia groups have, yet it has attracted at best a fraction of the attention.

Part of the reason for this lack of attention is that the ideology of the movement is complicated, its tactics and activities are unusual, and adherents of the movement typically do not form organized groups that can draw more attention. Usually, the movement operates “under the radar” of public attention; even when attention is drawn to the activities, often criminal, of adherents, the media often does not understand their connection to an organized movement.

Of special note is this point -- namely, that while "sovereign citizenship" started out as a way for white supremacists to undermine the federal government, its clientele has broadened as it has spread.

From the SPLC report:

In recent years, however, most new recruits are people who have found themselves in a desperate situation and are searching for a quick fix. Others are intrigued by the notions of easy money and living a lawless life, free from any unpleasant consequences (Moreover, many self-identified sovereigns today are black and apparently completely unaware of the racist origins of their ideology.) When they experience some small success at using redemption techniques to battle minor traffic offenses or local licensing issues, they're hooked. For many, it's a political issue. They don't like taxes, traffic laws, child support obligations or making banks rich, but they are too impatient to try to change what they dislike by traditional, political means.

In times of economic prosperity, sovereigns typically rely on absurd and convoluted schemes to evade state and federal income taxes and hide their assets from the IRS. In times of financial hardship, they turn to debt- and mortgage-elimination scams, techniques to avoid child support payments, and even attempts to use their redemption techniques to get out of serious criminal charges. Jerry Kane, who'd suffered a series of personal defeats in life, specialized in teaching a mortgage-elimination technique that had no basis in the actual law.

Once in the movement, it's an immersive and heady experience. In the last three decades, the redemptionist subculture has grown from small groups of like-minded individuals in localized pockets around the nation to a richly layered society. Redemptionists attend specialized seminars and national conferences, enjoy a large assortment of alternative newspapers and radio networks, and subscribe to sovereign-oriented magazines and websites. They home school their children so that a new generation will not have to go through the same learning curve that they did to see past the government's curtain to the common-law utopia beyond.

While the techniques sold by promoters never perform as promised, most followers are nonetheless content to be fighting the battle, and they blame only the judges, lawyers, prosecutors and police when their gurus' methods fail. While most have never achieved financial success in life, they take pride in engaging the government in battle, comparing themselves to the founding fathers during the American Revolution.

In recent months, their movement has grown to the point where a group called the Guardians of the Free Republics is attempting to assemble its own common-law-based, alternative government on a national scale. Already, the group, which earlier this year demanded that the governors of all 50 states step down, claims to have set up a common-law court in every state. At least 1,350 people have signed up to serve as jurors on these pseudo-legal judicial bodies.

This is why you'll find folks like the scary black dude in Georgia who was using sovereign citizenship to scam his way into homes. Likewise, another black couple in Georgia were arrested by police for engaging in a similar scam.

And it attracts believers like this hapless Canadian fellow, Curtis Nixon, who as you can see in the video atop the post was having trouble answering the reporter's questions through the post-bong haze.

Of course, most of them are harmless. Jerry Kane was too. Until a cop pulled him over. And then all bets are off.

Unfortunately, no one has taken this phenomenon very seriously as long as it only involved white people. Maybe now that will start changing.

‘Sovereign Citizen’ Wounded in California Campground Shootout with BLM Ranger, Highway Patrol Officer

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]


A self-described “sovereign citizen” camping out in the woods of northern California was arrested following an armed confrontation with two law enforcement officers this weekend. All three men were wounded in the ensuing shootout.

The shootout began, according to news reports, when a federal Bureau of Land Management ranger contacted the California Highway Patrol (CHP) and asked for backup at a wooded campground near Nevada City, a few miles west of Lake Tahoe and the Nevada border, as part of an investigation involving vehicles at the site. As the two officers headed into the brush and began approaching a remote makeshift campsite, they were confronted by 60-year-old Brent Douglas Cole.

Brent Douglas Cole

Gunfire was exchanged, and Cole was hit by several rounds. The BLM ranger was wounded by a gunshot to his right shoulder, and the CHP officer suffered minor injuries. The two officers were treated and released at local hospitals; Cole remains in custody at Sutter Roseville Medical Center in Roseville, where he is listed in stable condition in the intensive care unit.

Cole, according to The Union in Nevada City, has had numerous run-ins with law enforcement, including several other weapons-related incidents. The most recent of these occurred on Jan. 26, when he was arrested by Nevada County sheriff’s deputies and charged with carrying a concealed weapon.

Cole also has a history of indulging in far-right conspiracies on the Internet. At one site, he described himself as a “sovereign American Citizen attempting to thwart the obvious conspiracy and subterfuges of powers inimical to the United States.”

On his Facebook page, he has posted a number of conspiracy-related stories, including pieces describing the so-called “Bilderburger conspiracy” to control the world and various “Federal Reserve” conspiracy pieces. Likewise, his Twitter account is full of posts with a similar conspiracist bent.

After his January arrest, Cole flooded the Nevada County Court clerk with a blizzard of nonsensical, pseudo-legal filings – a typical tactic of so-called “sovereign citizens.” In one of these, Cole spelled his name in lowercase letters and called himself “a natural born, flesh and blood, living man.”


Another of these documents claimed that his right to own weapons is guaranteed under the Second Amendment and that those rights nullify California gun laws.

“Officers acted without warrant or any probable cause to seize my person using a swat team style assault, and then started looking for something to charge me with,” he complained. “I was attacked and molested, unconstitutionally arrested, unlawfully incarcerated, repeatedly intimidated and coerced to plead guilty to having committed a crime, held in secret for five days, and my property and liberty taken from me since January 26, 2014. I am being persecuted for being a gun owner, and for exercising my inherent Right by unwitting or unknowing accomplices of a seditious conspiracy against rights instituted by foreign powers inimical to the United States of America.”

As soon as he recovers from his injuries, Cole will likely get to work on a new batch of “sovereign” legal filings.