Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/11/cult-postmasters.html
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8 Likes
Well if the Constitution doesn’t apply to them then they can’t claim second amendment rights.
It takes an incredible amount of delusion to think that declaring yourself an armed foreign occupying force in the US is going to improve your way of life. These guys are seriously lucky that the authorities don’t take their clams seriously and send in the army.
65 Likes
72 hour psych hold?
Let qualified mental health professionals determine if they’re a danger to themselves or others, and if their delusions make them incompetent to stand trial for their offenses.
16 Likes
Basically it’s either treason, or acting as a hostile state-within-a-state. In other words, an enemy power. That would be the logical reaction. Trouble is the cops and courts are all tied up in knots because these are white folks, so they must be good ol’ boys, right? 
47 Likes
If a black man pulled a gun or ran from the cops I don’t think they have as much doubt about what to do. The guy in the video looks just like the Mr. Show parody of these sovereign citizen guys.
22 Likes
I say arrest them, try them, and let them explore the limits of their sovereignty in jail.
27 Likes
The SPLC mini-documentary includes “filming police officers” as a sign that someone may be part of the Soverign Citizen movement.
Fuck that.
26 Likes
Video of one of them at home.
9 Likes
Refighting the Civil War, but retail rather than wholesale.
5 Likes
I’m imagine they’re starting from a “rights are taken away,” not “rights are assigned” position.
3 Likes
Asinine comes to mind after reading this.
6 Likes
Obligatory link to the Findings of Justice J. D. Rooke in Meads v. Meads; here.
In which he examines (and eviscerates) all the most major forms of SovCit horseshit.
I actually met one once here in the U.K.
I was in a JobCenter collecting unemployment benefits at the time, and this woman started talking to me. I made polite conversation, as one does, and she gradually segued into talking about how hard her life was ever since she married a Jewish man and acquired his surname, and how she had to contend with anti-semitism now, and I duly agreed that this was a prevailing problem in Britain and sympathised with how awful it must be.
And then she went on to start talking about this police officer who had it in for her (which sounded eminently believable, the world being what it is) and how she’d spent time studying up on the law herself (which is fair enough, I do that too) and then onto how you could deal with corrupt cops by “charging them before the King’s Bench”, which would result in twelve judges coming directly to your house to hear the case, and where “you’d both be just natural humans” without any special privileges, and at that point I realised she was a Freeman on the Land whackjob.
I had a brief but painful struggle not to burst out laughing in her face, but thankfully I controlled myself.
34 Likes
It is a sign that they might be, but so is breathing air, eating food and drinking water.
We need a lot more evidence than that.
18 Likes
I’m thinking they come from a “fuck you, I do what I want” position.
9 Likes
They’re not labeled extremist/terrorist groups? Color me surprised (not)
13 Likes
Deport them?
14 Likes
As i would treat it, if they are claiming themselves to be outside of the law they would essentially be forfeiting their citizenship. And as such they should be treated as being illegally within the country. However i doubt any other country would want to take them.
18 Likes
I dunno… part of me wants them treated like anyone resisting arrest.
And the other part applauds them fucking with the authoritarian control.
ETA - man, with the current climate, the last thing I’d do is to claim I wasn’t a US citizen. Do you want to end up in a tent city, because that is how you end up in a tent city.
13 Likes
An interesting aside and not really related to the topic of sovereign citizens, but at the end of the video there’s a memoriam for police officers killed by domestic radical right extremists and the name Bruce Vanderjagt caught my attention. He was a Denver cop who was killed in a gunfight with a skinhead back in 1997. Locally, it was a huge story at the time until Columbine happened a few months later. I remember it well as I grew up about a mile away from where it happened.
The story itself is incredible and worthy of a review on its own. It involves a girl who was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison even though she was sitting in the back of a police car handcuffed at the time he was killed. It even includes Hunter S. Thompson who got involved after learning about the case.
I have to say though that I really don’t see the connection of this case and the sovereign citizen movement. The punk who killed Vanderjagt wasn’t a right wing ideologue - he was a skinhead thug who hated cops. Still, it’s a fascinating story in and of itself on multiple levels.
6 Likes
White Privilege at its most disgusting and egocentric level; any Person of Color trying to pull this bullshit would be jailed or shot, or possibly both.
43 Likes
