If they’re not citizens of the US - shouldn’t they be deported as undesirables?
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Well, I thought we deported people in America who weren’t Citizens. Let’s see ICE earn it’s creep-money by going up against someone who, well, isn’t a two-year-old, but this will not happen; being able to carry a gun around and say the law doesn’t apply to you and not get your dumb ass beaten is the whitest of white privilege.
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This is a shallow take on sovereign citizens. In fact, the phenomenon is much more complex and interesting than “it’s those far-right conspiracy guys again”.
Sovereign citizen is a general term referring to a bunch of different individualist-tinged theories which “engage critically” with the idea of the modern state. Most of the time they do this in very naive ways, but the concept is not inherently a conspiracy theory, nor should it be conflated with white supremacy. White supremacy is the actual problem, not that people sometimes are uncooperative with the cops during traffic stops.
The idea that one is sovereign and not subject to the laws of the defacto government is asserted by many types of people from many different perspectives. There are American Indian sovereign citizens. There are black sovereign citizens.
In fact, there are black sovereign citizens whose beliefs about their sovereignty from the American government due to slavery cause them to claim title to empty mansions and live in them. Sorry, but that’s fucking cool.
Far-right conspiracy theorists who use concepts of sovereignty to do racist shit are bad. But the idea of the sovereign citizen as a boogeyman is pretty much just pro-State propaganda, and distracts the issue from “white supremacists” to “people who won’t cooperate with law enforcement”. People should be engaging critically with the concept of “citizen” and the question of where rights come from. They should be questioning police authority and the legitimacy of courts. They just shouldn’t be racist.
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I was about to ask “why can’t the cops just use the same solution they use for everything else? Just murder them.”
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shared delusion doesn’t “unsubscribe” citizenship … yet.
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Because then that shows that our entire so-called democratic civilization is actually all a facade; if they keep the culling to POC and other ‘undesirables’ the false veneer of civility can be maintained for a little while longer…
Only a tiny fraction of a percentage are… and if they ever try the shit that Cliven Bundy and his crew did, they will likely be shot and killed. If they are not killed, best believe they will end up in jail and not with any ‘slap on the wrist’ time.
Edited to correct name.
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I will simply say that the number of plot lines in the recent Red Dead Redemption II game which involved dealing with violent, bonkers sovereign citizen groups was very satisfying.
In reality, however, SovCits are a plague on our legal and police systems. They’re fools who think that they’ve found loopholes that exempt them from the bad parts of the system they don’t like while cheerfully taking advantage of the bits they enjoy.
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Shot for sure, and then have the relatives billed for the trouble they caused for officers.
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Since there is no place to deport them too. I’m assuming a raft in international water will do.
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Obviously, we need to ask the question, WITWBS.
What if they were brown-skinned?
If the cops didn’t gun them down themselves, surely they would call ICE complaining that a heavily armed foreign national was threatening the police. And ICE would put them in detention until they could find a country that would willingly accept them for deportation. Basically, permanent incarceration.
Oh I’m sure they’d change their tune and claim the were American citizens by birth, but if they were brown-skinned, no one at ICE would believe them.
The fact this isn’t even considered demonstrates the power of white privilege.
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Are they basically like the “Reichsbürger” here in Germany? In case you don´t know thats a group of mostly right-wing loonies here in Germany that claims that the German Reich never was officially dissolved (which is technically true) thus the Federal Republic of Germany is not a real state and has no authority over them. They are giving authoritys here quite a headache for a while now. And they are dangerous too since they started to arm themselves.
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Floating city, like the ones currently being proposed?
That sure sounds like punishment to me.
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The American Indian ones have a slightly stronger case since reservations operate largely by their own set of laws. They’re still US citizens however.
That said, from what I’ve seen few of the people in the movement are in it for outright racist reasons. Most of them live out in the country and never see minorities. It’s far more common that they just don’t want to pay taxes. Many will use the argument that tax is theft/immoral and that they were never asked if they want schools, roads, safety standards, public safety, clean air, not being invaded by foreign powers, etc… so it’s not moral to bill them after the fact for the services. They compare the government to that bum who walks up to your car at the red light, wipes a filthy greasy rag over your windshield, and then demands a tip.
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Is that the stupid Libertarian paradise that is guaranteed to go down in flames within a year if by some miracle it actually got built?
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Narrator: Three weeks later the floating city sank.
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In fact, some of the groups are: Sovereign citizen movement - Wikipedia
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) classifies some sovereign citizens (“sovereign citizen extremists”) as domestic terrorists.
In surveys conducted in 2014 and 2015, representatives of US law enforcement ranked the risk of terrorism from the sovereign-citizen movement higher than the risk from any other group, including Islamic extremism, militias, racists, and Neo-Nazis.
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I’m not seeing the problem here.
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easy answer, deport them
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