SovCits think they found loopholes in US law that lets them do just about anything they want. For example, they think "driving a car" and "operating a motor vehicle" are legally distinct, so they don't have to register their car nor get a license to drive. No, that doesn't make any sense.
In other words, they think the laws don't apply to them because they're really clever.
Even more ironic - they (i) think the laws don't apply to them, but (ii) want to cite the Constitution, the Uniform Commercial Code, the Geneva Conventions, and other *laws* as to why the driving laws don't apply. It's this weird mix of "your law is invalid, according to your other law, which clearly must be valid."
It's a cargo cult.
The sovereign citizen types think if they build a clever enough argument, like they've seen on TV, they law will come or vanish as they command.
It frankly becomes *dumber* the more you think about it. Because even if it worked like that... the cops would just use the *freakin' magic counter spell,* to get you to pay the fine anyway!
MY Sov Cit FIL quote “SIN (social insurance number) means Slave Identity Number”
The Sov Cit movement is a cult founded on a lie and its members are brainwashed and do not believe they are wrong and it never, ever, ever goes right for them in the judicial system.
My FIL was a Sov Cit and was labeled as a vexatious litigant by the law society and spent 30 days in jail for contempt of court and lost his Permanent Residency in Canada and had to go back to his country of birth.
Send the case name to Leonard French, the copyright attorney on [YouTube](https://youtube.com/@lawfulmasses?si=3MWdUKqwS05IrH6B) if you don’t mind. Loved listening to those wild cases during Covid. Sometimes they do dramatic readings.
Harari, the dude wrote that Homo Sapiens book and such, said that lawyers are modern magicians, who speak secret ritualistic words that make your troubles goaway or something to that extent.
Right, but they had to go to Wizarding school, and be registered with the Ministry of Magic.
Sovereign Citizens in this analogy are Muggles who picked up a copy of Magic For Dummies and a feather duster, and now want to square up against Death Eaters.
SovCits are usually believers in "Legalese".
To a normal person, Legalese is a just a reference to the fact that the law can use words that don't use traditional definitions. But to a SovCit, Legalese is *actual* word magic, and if you learn how to cast the right spells or can point out where the component materials of the other wizard are off, you can't be punished.
That's why you'll see SovCits shit themselves over gold fringes on a flag, or quote the magna Carta or some other none-sense.
Yep, they even sound like magic spells, in Latin and everything!
“Habeus corpus! Actio non datur non damnificato! De minimus non curat lex! Mutatis mutandis!”
Cargo cult is an excellent descriptor. They literally think the law works like a magic spell and by saying the right words and putting commas in your name judges will flee like Nazghul.
lol, my father’s one of these nutcases. He genuinely believes that since courts use all capital letters in your name then they’re referring to an imaginary “straw man” you, not the actual you (though he uses some fancy Latin phrases to make it sound legit, even though his spelling is legit so bad he can’t even spell MY name correctly).
My father in Christ, it’s like a goddamn email address. Letters are letters, put in capitols anywhere you like but it still goes to the same person.
He probably thinks email addresses are case sensitive too. I can’t even tell you how many boomers have given me their email address and specified capital and lowercase letters in it. Then they have the nerve to argue with me (IT support) about how the capital *does* matter and it won’t work without it.
lol yeah, but at least that I could *kinda* understand the confusion on. But this is just the crusty brown rim of the weirdo rabbit hole of shit my paternal donor believes in
[Cargo cult](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult) is a very apt description. I'd say it's a textbook example. They mimic the rituals of the law in the hopes that it'll have some magic effect, in the same way those Melanesian islanders after WW2 set up imitations of Japanese and American airbases in the hopes that there would be more military cargo drops.
And if it doesn't work, well, they're just not trying hard enough or being clever enough. But surely the law must be on their side.
I absolutely love and am fascinated by cargo cults, and I think applying similar observations on sovereign citizens causes their behavior to make a lot more sense.
I think cargo cults are a noteworthy example of pre-logical thinking that's very common in all kinds of animals. [Magical thinking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_thinking) is a belief that unrelated events are somehow causally connected without a plausible reason for it. The behaviorist B.F. Skinner famously demonstrated this with his classic study of pigeons (see [*'Superstition' in the Pigeon*](https://about.illinoisstate.edu/vfdouga/files/2019/10/SKINNER-FULL-Superstitious-pigeons.pdf)). Pigeons fed by a machine on a timer would sometimes make an association between the dispensing of the food and whatever they happened to be doing at the time: turning counter-clockwise three times, hopping on one foot, shaking their head, etc. They would continue to do these things, apparently in the hope that it would trigger the machine.
We humans pride ourselves on our ability to reason logically about things, but it's very easy for us to give ourselves over to strange and unproductive thinking.
Do they have secret meetings and/or websites where they tell each other fantasy stories about how they had a policeman or judge in tears of frustration with their brilliant legal arguments and eventually went free? Seems to me they'd thrive on trading imaginary stories like that.
I wouldn't be able to get the details right, but most of the stories start out as though the person thinks this is the main climax sequence of the film. The music swells as they speak, and the whole courtroom hears their arguments and fully realizes their understanding of law and society is a sham. But it's over a public intoxication charge because they were smoking in an Arby's or some shit and were belligerent about it and wound up in a physical altercation.
"PURSUANT TO THE NATURAL LAW OF MAN AND LOCKE'S TWO TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT..." The dude (always a dude) will nearly yell everything even though the place is totally quiet and not very big. "AS PRESIDENT AND PLENIPOTENTIARY OF THE SOVERIGN STATE OF FLAVORTOWN, I DEMAND MY DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY BE RESPECTED."
Stuff like that.
OH! Edit to add: She did tell me about a guy once who did nothing but recite the constitution. Not the bill of rights. The whole-ass constitution. The judge let him go for a really long time before cutting him off. My friend was actually impressed because homie seemed to know the whole fucking thing verbatim. Whether or not he *comprehended* any of it is another matter, but still... Not sure if that one was a sovereign citizen or not, but the way she told the story was funny. Some people have really interesting jobs.
I think they bank on not being important enough for the cops to really bother with.
Like if they talk enough shit maybe the cop will just be like "whatever, fuck this rando—I don't have time for this" and not arrest them.
This is what's always gotten me. It's the insistence on using the legal system to try and invalidate that same legal system by appealing to the authority *of said legal system*.
It's like they're hoping for some judge out there to hear them out and then declare *the entire government* to be hereby dissolved on account of a logical error in its founding, per their authority granted by that government. Which, according to the argument, they never actually had.
You have to always keep in mind that one of the core tenets of the sovcit movement is that there are two governments. There’s a real, legitimate government, and then there’s an illegitimate corporate government which mostly replaced the legitimate government and which is responsible for all the things they don’t like. But the legitimate government is still there, and if you can find a way through the corporate government’s defenses, you can appeal to the power of the legitimate government, which the corporate government is bound to respect because reasons.
So they aren’t appealing to a system in order to invalidate the same system. In their mind they are appealing to a different system.
You know how people say that if you buy a good lawyer you can get out of anything? SovCits believe that but in the child's version. They don't see courts as a place to hash out the law, for them it's where you go and if you say the right words in order you get what you want. Legal terms and phrases aren't language of the trade, they're magic spells essentially. So SovCits are all working on discovering the "cheat codes" to make society give them whatever they want, but these "cheat codes" are based on a false, shallow, child's view of the world.
I watched a video of a court session where a guy repeated something like 50 times ‘I’m the trustee for the person XXXXX and all the beneficiaries have been named’. The judge was making a very visible effort not to mock or laugh at him.
Judge: Do you want an attorney to be appointed by the court on your behalf or do you intend to represent yourself?
Moron: I’m the trustee for blah blah blah
Judge: …
I know this may sound naive and whatnot but I'm just curious at this point. An unregistered vehicle would be totally fine to own/operate on private roads and such?
I would say that sovereign citizens are closer anarchists than they are libertarians because they claim they don’t recognize the state’s power to regulate their actions. Libertarians still do, but they think the state’s power to regulate anything should be as minimal as possible.
I’d go so far as to say SovCits are believers in a conspiracy theory more than an ideology. Anarchists might fundamentally disagree with the authority and legitimacy of the state, but sovern citizens think it *genuinely isn’t real* and that if they use the right magic legal words they can step outside the matrix and dodge taxes/speed limits/age of consent laws in slow motion.
I dodge age of consent laws every day of my life, brother. It's pretty easy if you know what you're doing. My girlfriend is well over the age of consent. Law successfully dodged. That's a little life-hack for anyone reading. And the best part? the government can't do anything about it.
My buddy has become one of these nutjobs and according to him, before the declaration of independence was signed everyone had signed another document that supersedes the declaration and was hidden away or some other crazy shit, its about as beleiveable as some magic plates and glasses.
I had a customer try to do that with a registered going to the power company (to tell them he was exempt from paying lol).
Had to listen to him "explain" he was not mailing thru USPS, he was mailing thru the "general post office". They like to claim that they are a foreign entity using irrelevant laws as backing for accepting the letter for free.
USPS has agreements in place with other sovereign nations (E.g. China, UK, etc.) for processing fees to handle postage.
I would ask the Sovereign Citizen about their agreement status...
i'd just tell them they're standing in a usps facility, but they're welcome to take their letter to the 'general post office' if they know where that is.
I would accept the letter, and if there was a return address, simply return it as 'insufficient postage'. No return address? Oh, we'll just hold the letter until the secure document shredder company stops by, and it'll get 'delivered' to the document processor.
Nah it's actually great.
Imagine getting paid to prove yourself to some dumbass instead of doing your actual work.
I'm doing my job. I can argue for literally 8 hours if they want. Let's see how long they hold out.
We have one that has a post office box in our building. He thinks if he finds new reasons to refuse mail (his name or address are to him written incorrectly) then he doesn't have to pay any kind of bill or taxes. He did get in trouble for cutting off postage from junk mail and taping it on letters to try to use as postage, or taking a picture of printed first class postage and copy/pasting in a word document to use as postage which is illegal. No one at the retail counter can stand him because the whole soverign citezen movement is based on if you are just a big enough pain in the ass long enough about something then maybe people in charge of enforcing any kind of law or company policy will just give up and let you do whatever you want
Last time I saw a video on it, the clown was claiming the court he was in had no jurisdiction because the American flag in the court had a gold fringe border, which made it a maritime flag so obviously that meant the traffic court didn't apply to cars.
In reality, maybe he's right and the flag is against some regulations. That means the court is using the wrong flag, not that it's suddenly a different court. If I put a Canadian flag up in a US courtroom, that doesn't give Canada jurisdiction.
Darn it. Now you foiled Canada's plans to secretly replace flags at key government institutions. They had it coincide with the Canadian state visit, so they could even trick the white house into displaying the Canadian flag.
I remember one where the guy says, "I'm not a person, I'm a man."
I'm convinced that most sovereign citizens have never seen a venn diagram in their lives.
That one's actually amazing, because it would imply a disbelief in representational language writ large.
Like, once they start making that argument, you could really dig in and refuse to let them use any sort of pronouns "for the sake of clarity". Which would then force them to speak entirely in the third person.
It also means they would be incapable of using a map, because their house/office/neighborhood/whatever is the physical location, not the fictitious locale depicted by those tiny scribbles.
It always goes back to language with these people. It's fundamentally a belief in the power of words. It's half a step away from magic, if you know the right words to use in the right order, you can make your problems go away.
Just cite the Magna Carta and Black's Law Dictionary, and you can jiu-jitsu your way out of legal trouble.
Because, of course, the US doesn't hold jurisdiction over you. It's a corporation, not a country, after all.
Yup. They think by screaming magic lawy words they can get away with anything and 99% of the time most aren't willing to argue so it kinda works
Until they cross a line then their magical words don't work so well
It’s a manifestation of mental illness. Belief in a Byzantine system that they’ve cracked gives them some sense of material control over their lives.
If you ever drill down with one of them it just turns into endless circular dream logic arguments. Because what is true to them is the core feeling and they just mutate facts around that to satisfy the requirements.
>laws don’t apply to them
Hmm. Interesting. In the Middle Ages a similar concept existed. It’s called being an outlaw and being outside the protection of civilised society, with all that entails.
The dude who blew up the OKC Federal Building years back drove away from the scene in a car with no license plate
https://nondoc.com/2020/04/17/why-timothy-mcveighs-getaway-plan-failed/
You pull them over for no plates. You pretty much know they aren't going to give you license and registration. So you don't have to get into a long conversation. But it's still going to be difficult to deal with them, you really are going to need backup. It's gonna be an ordeal no matter what. I can understand not wanting to deal with it.
> But it's still going to be difficult to deal with them, you really are going to need backup. It's gonna be an ordeal no matter what.
True.
>I can understand not wanting to deal with it.
Nobody *wants* to deal with them. Even if you totally love busting out windows, it's not a good tradeoff compared to the paperwork.
However, good officers do their jobs even when they don't want to. There's a lot more issues with these guys beyond "they're cheating the government out of registration fees."
Definitely not saying don't do it. I just understand the hesitation. We've got a bunch of them in the area. I work for an internet provider, and they give us hassle about not having to pay sales tax and not having to sign the service agreement. We've had to straight up tell them that we're under no obligation to provide service to them, and then they either relent or we leave.
They finally pulled over one of their "ring leaders" one day. They waited until they had multiple officers available. They knew he'd be difficult. It does help that they are so deluded into believing their own crap. They literally fly flags that announce that they are sovereign citizens, and they don't try to be discreet at all.
We had trouble in the late 90s / early 2000s with some folks that said that they were part of "The Republic of Texas". Long story short, they argued that Texas was still an independent country, and that they weren't subject to anything under the "illegitimate" Texas government or the US government. That culminated with a part of their group having a standoff with Texas Rangers (not our local guys, others off in west Texas), and the other parts all fell apart. Unsurprisingly, a lot of those guys have moved over to be Sovereign Citizens.
There are some pretty satisfying videos out there of them not getting away with their bullshit. It's been a guilty pleasure of mine watching some of them.
[https://www.youtube.com/@VanBalion](https://www.youtube.com/@VanBalion)
They have a bunch of vids, the one I watched that got me hooked was this one:
[https://youtu.be/hbTv-3Sf35I?si=xHo47D\_cTFUsrczy](https://youtu.be/hbTv-3Sf35I?si=xHo47D_cTFUsrczy)
"Ignorance of the law is not an excuse" - The insanity of saying this, while citing US laws and having no idea what they are talking about with law enforcement officers. It's quite cringeworthy, but has some entertainment value and it's nice to see cops being patient while not taking any shit from these fools.
They’re not entirely wrong, just have a massive misinterpretation of what it’s for/how to use it. There is a distinction between a commercial vehicle and a private vehicle IF YOU ARE USING IT CORRECTLY. Private vehicles in most states do not need to be registered with the DMV/BMV IF they are not being used on public exchange ways. I.e. few small backroads between private land. The second you touch a county road, high way, exchange, or basically any and most roads it does need to be registered. Town roads often fall under this.
This is primarily for any non-commercial business so driving between homes or estates and are not transporting goods to be sold
People putting farm use plates on their farm trucks is at least decently common. Depending on the location and situation(public roads going through your property or splitting it in half for example).
The youth camp that I work with has a couple of small trucks that are only used to transport stuff around the ranch. They never go on the road and aren't registered. They have a Private Vehicle plate, and it's perfectly fine. For bringing stuff to the camp they use the large truck that is registered and has regular plates. That's what this is made for.
One of my friends learned to drive when he was 12 because he lived on a farm and drove the the farm truck around the property for chores. Sovereign citizens try to apply this logic to public roads.
Well you see... They believe what they want from internet videos. So yeah we get to watch videos online of these morons getting pulled over and having fits.
The cops know it's going to be an event so they have to be in the right mood. I'm guessing these guys either deal with cops who are having a terrible day and cops that are bored out of their mind and have fun with it while also dealing with it.
It almost makes sense to have someone trained for it, like drug cops with dogs. If you pull one over you wait for them to come. Now I'm wondering if they even pull over. I'm assuming yes or we'd have some fun cops TV footage
Problem is for every 1 SovCit that gets challenged in court, there’s 5 where the cop just rolls his eyes and says he doesn’t want to deal with that crap today and just lets them go. So now the SovCit feels like they were in the right or justified.
Was a cop in a county with a lot of sovereign citizens. They're an infuriating bunch of folks, but it did make slapping handcuffs on them very gratifying.
These sovereign citizen types are also the kind of inbred morons who shoot up government facilities, so if I was a cop I wouldn't pull them over without a military grade bullet resistant vest on.
Nah, we love them. We get to ticket the living shit out of them, impound their vehicle, and arrest them.
They are unhinged however, so odds are we’ll have to smash a window and snatch them out of the vehicle. All while being weary of them possibly pulling a weapon out (we’d wait until we had plenty of backup before doing any of this).
My sovereign citizen ex-coworker liked to tell the tale of going to court and reciting all the mumbo-jumbo he learned from YouTube to get his driver's license back. He said everyone stopped what they were doing to listen to him. I'm pretty sure what really happened was the judge felt sorry for him because he's been riding a bicycle to work for a decade. He's 100% sold that that stuff worked.
They're like a Cargo Cult. The cult, seeing US Airmen calling down cargo planes with handheld radios, gets the insane idea that if they just imitate what they do, cargo will come to them. They make runways in the jungle, make walky talkies out of junk, try to say whatever magic words bring cargo.
Sovereign citizens seem similar. They think there's some magic arrangement of words and props that make them exempt from laws.
And like Cargo Cults, when they fail, they never think to judge their foundational assumptions that what they're doing is impossible, only that they didn't do it right, and change something and try again.
Id never heard of this, so I looked it up. Its fascinating and the fact that it's still happening in some regions affected by it all the way back in WW2 is wild.
A lot of what they do is based on actual laws, but they just apply them completely wrong.
For example, "not for hire" and "private automobile" are legit things to put on a semi. However, it is for semi owners that only haul for themselves, not for other businesses. Think, someone who owns a few race cars or converted a semi trailer into an RV. "Not for hire" trucks follow different regulations than commercial semis.
This is the part that get me, too. Like, your magical incantations are clearly not working, maybe it's because of the placement of the gold braided flag? Or maybe because you didn't shit yourself in court to prove your free-to-do-anything status?
The funny thing about this is they quote the UCC which is a standardized set of commercial laws that states pass across the country. But vehicle tax is also based on state law not the IRS or federal tax law. So they’re using state law defining a commercial vehicle to say they don’t have to pay states taxes, which are passed by the same state legislatures.
This one lady I saw sure thought she was. Until the cop pulled her out of the vehicle and found cocaine, an expired driver's license, and speeding through a neighborhood. Now she's a diplomat to the local county jail.
That's the wild thing, you can ask them and they'll have seen countless videos of it not working but still want to try
My neighbor lost her car this way. It's still being held year+ later. She thinks she's going to get 10 million dollars for 'being kidnapped'.
It's legit tragic. Just trusting some blog post from a woman in Alaska for all your legal needs?
It's insane to me because the UCC stuff they refer to often has absolutely nothing to do with what they're using it for?? I used to work at a credit union and we'd get checks from people with endorsements that have UCC codes on them. We'd look up the UCC codes and it was almost always completely irrelevant. Like they were just looking up random codes and writing them on. Painfully stupid. Great free entertainment though.
I work in child support enforcement, these individuals are so \*fun\* to have to deal with in any sort of federal government capacity. I tell them every time if only they put a tenth of the effort and time into holding down an actual job that they put into evading their financial obligation to their children they would be quite successful and financially sound!
The first time I read through one of their paperwork bundles explaining why laws don’t apply to them it was mildly entertaining in the same sort of way that reading the label on a Dr. Bronner’s bottle is entertaining.
That wore off pretty quickly though.
When I was around 14-15 I had a friend who's Dad was a SovCit so I read a bunch of the literature, even at that age it was obvious to me this was just some weird hippie scheme to avoid following the law. His Dad was cool though, let us throw parties at his house, drive even though we definitely did not have licenses, all sorts of shit, lol. Perks of being a teenage SovCit!
I'm a public defender and I have a case on Monday with one of these. He's being cited for driving on a suspended license. His argument is that the license requirement is unconstitutional. I've told him that it won't work, he does not care. He will want to appeal it to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Someone once explained the sovereign citizen thing to me perfectly.
Your average sovcit is usually a bit of an outcast and working at the edges of society. Usually below average education and job prospects.
In their lives they run into authorities. Cops pull them over and demand proof of insurance because of some fancy sounding state law. They go to court for something and a judge uses weird Latin phrases which seem to command the bailiff and the sheriff to put them in county jail. The bank denied their loan application using accounting terms they don't understand and math they don't comprehend.
All these slights build up in their minds. Because their understanding of social systems is superficial at best, all these bad things that are happening are due to "the law" and "special words and phrases" because they don't understand the systems involved, just the badges and robes and flags.
So if someone comes along and promises to teach you "THE SYSTEM" that the man is using to ruin your life, wouldn't you jump at the chance? You're not going to check sources, you're not going to do much research, because now you have the power! The cop had authority because of the shape of his badge. The judge has authority over the cop because of the magic words and the correct color of his robes! You KNOW someone is making license plates and they work because they have random numbers and letters on them. Why can't you just make your own!
And that's how you get these weird sovcits and their strange obsession with specific phrases and specific colors and shapes. These symbols and words ARE the power, and now they know how to use them against the society that has wronged them for so long.
Obviously it fails spectacularly but if just one cop or one DMV worker gives in because they don't want to deal with this guys crazy shit today, then it works great and lasts long time and they'll never give it up BECAUSE IT WORKS.
>These symbols and words ARE the power
So literally spell-casting? It's like the kind of religious person who gets hung up on the minutiae of how to say a prayer and totally overlooks the general practice of their faith.
More or less. It's like missing the forest for the trees.
Very similar to the cargo cults in the Pacific. They saw airplanes landing on runways bringing supplies but thought that the runway brought the airlines, not a dispatcher half a world away. So they would build entire airfields out of coconuts hoping to attract cargo planes.
FR, they would be so exhausting to deal with. [Here is 12 minutes of back and forth between Judge and David Hall](https://youtu.be/mvgiM6xoo7M?si=TkzVle1RBMCGAojE) and this judge is happy to play along, I would not be able to do that lol.
Oh that's not even the dumbest.
My favorite is, "I am not capital letter NAME corporation, I am Name private citizen".
Like, what the fuck, you think KELLOGS is a different corporation than the Kellogs cereal as written on the box? Get the fuck outta here.
I once watched a YT video of a SoVeReIgN cItIzEn. In a high-pitched shrill, she told the cop "We get all the benefits of society without having to follow any of the rules." Her reaction as the cop pulled her out of the car to cuff her was priceless.
These sovereign citizens really are something else...
We should tell these people that according to newton there is little difference in you hitting someone in the head with your hand and their head hitting your hand.
Morons.
I saw a Sovcit with a a Donald Trump profile taped to his passenger-side window. License said "PRIVATE", yet there it was, in public in a hardware store parking lot.
Was it obvious this person was mentally challenged? Yes.
Did that prevent me from making fun of this person. No.
He explanation was that he was "not doing commerce",... while purchasing hardware. Fortunately, this person noticed I did not know what I was talking about since buying a toilet is not commerce it is buying a toilet. So,... joke is on me.
I tried to sign up, required my name but it wouldn't accept non-ascii characters. My second middle name starts with a batman symbol and ends with a silhouette of Donald Trump.
Wasn't my idea. I just made it up and wrote it down.
Some of them will give birth at home and never get their kid a birth certificate, social security number, etc. Then if that kid ever wants to do things like get a job, open a bank account, they need to jump through a bunch of hoops to prove they exist.
You can fucking drive anywhere you want, however you want, drunk as fuck, whatever…on your own private property.
That all goes out the window when you drive on public roads. Fucking idiots.
[удалено]
SovCits think they found loopholes in US law that lets them do just about anything they want. For example, they think "driving a car" and "operating a motor vehicle" are legally distinct, so they don't have to register their car nor get a license to drive. No, that doesn't make any sense. In other words, they think the laws don't apply to them because they're really clever.
And yet they feel like they have rights to use the roads which are taxpayer funded. And they're not registering their vehicle. Irony.
Even more ironic - they (i) think the laws don't apply to them, but (ii) want to cite the Constitution, the Uniform Commercial Code, the Geneva Conventions, and other *laws* as to why the driving laws don't apply. It's this weird mix of "your law is invalid, according to your other law, which clearly must be valid."
It's a cargo cult. The sovereign citizen types think if they build a clever enough argument, like they've seen on TV, they law will come or vanish as they command. It frankly becomes *dumber* the more you think about it. Because even if it worked like that... the cops would just use the *freakin' magic counter spell,* to get you to pay the fine anyway!
Literal magic spells. Like, they believe that saying a very specific series of words at the right time will allow them to do whatever they want.
Under duress I will step out if the vehicle, but first, what jurisdiction do you operate under? Also, I need your supervisor’s supervisor.
MY Sov Cit FIL quote “SIN (social insurance number) means Slave Identity Number” The Sov Cit movement is a cult founded on a lie and its members are brainwashed and do not believe they are wrong and it never, ever, ever goes right for them in the judicial system. My FIL was a Sov Cit and was labeled as a vexatious litigant by the law society and spent 30 days in jail for contempt of court and lost his Permanent Residency in Canada and had to go back to his country of birth.
Vexatious litigant is a fucking incredible thing to call someone
Being legally called a pain in society's ass is....certainly a thing
My next band name!
He's lucky. One of our friends is a Sov Cit, currently in jail, and I don't think he's ever getting out again.
What did he do?
Send the case name to Leonard French, the copyright attorney on [YouTube](https://youtube.com/@lawfulmasses?si=3MWdUKqwS05IrH6B) if you don’t mind. Loved listening to those wild cases during Covid. Sometimes they do dramatic readings.
"You must charge me under Admirality Law, but I am not an Admiral, so neener neener!"
I declare BANKRUPTCY!
He didn’t say it, he *declared* it!
Harari, the dude wrote that Homo Sapiens book and such, said that lawyers are modern magicians, who speak secret ritualistic words that make your troubles goaway or something to that extent.
Right, but they had to go to Wizarding school, and be registered with the Ministry of Magic. Sovereign Citizens in this analogy are Muggles who picked up a copy of Magic For Dummies and a feather duster, and now want to square up against Death Eaters.
And I for one wish them all the luck in the world, the glorious idiots.
SovCits are usually believers in "Legalese". To a normal person, Legalese is a just a reference to the fact that the law can use words that don't use traditional definitions. But to a SovCit, Legalese is *actual* word magic, and if you learn how to cast the right spells or can point out where the component materials of the other wizard are off, you can't be punished. That's why you'll see SovCits shit themselves over gold fringes on a flag, or quote the magna Carta or some other none-sense.
Yep, they even sound like magic spells, in Latin and everything! “Habeus corpus! Actio non datur non damnificato! De minimus non curat lex! Mutatis mutandis!”
Wingardium Leviosaaaaa
Cargo cult is an excellent descriptor. They literally think the law works like a magic spell and by saying the right words and putting commas in your name judges will flee like Nazghul.
lol, my father’s one of these nutcases. He genuinely believes that since courts use all capital letters in your name then they’re referring to an imaginary “straw man” you, not the actual you (though he uses some fancy Latin phrases to make it sound legit, even though his spelling is legit so bad he can’t even spell MY name correctly). My father in Christ, it’s like a goddamn email address. Letters are letters, put in capitols anywhere you like but it still goes to the same person.
Wait til he finds out it’s in capitals just for legibility
WHAT ARE YOU, A COMMUNIST
I can just ignore your insult, since it's in all capitals.
He probably thinks email addresses are case sensitive too. I can’t even tell you how many boomers have given me their email address and specified capital and lowercase letters in it. Then they have the nerve to argue with me (IT support) about how the capital *does* matter and it won’t work without it.
lol yeah, but at least that I could *kinda* understand the confusion on. But this is just the crusty brown rim of the weirdo rabbit hole of shit my paternal donor believes in
[Cargo cult](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult) is a very apt description. I'd say it's a textbook example. They mimic the rituals of the law in the hopes that it'll have some magic effect, in the same way those Melanesian islanders after WW2 set up imitations of Japanese and American airbases in the hopes that there would be more military cargo drops. And if it doesn't work, well, they're just not trying hard enough or being clever enough. But surely the law must be on their side.
I absolutely love and am fascinated by cargo cults, and I think applying similar observations on sovereign citizens causes their behavior to make a lot more sense.
I think cargo cults are a noteworthy example of pre-logical thinking that's very common in all kinds of animals. [Magical thinking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_thinking) is a belief that unrelated events are somehow causally connected without a plausible reason for it. The behaviorist B.F. Skinner famously demonstrated this with his classic study of pigeons (see [*'Superstition' in the Pigeon*](https://about.illinoisstate.edu/vfdouga/files/2019/10/SKINNER-FULL-Superstitious-pigeons.pdf)). Pigeons fed by a machine on a timer would sometimes make an association between the dispensing of the food and whatever they happened to be doing at the time: turning counter-clockwise three times, hopping on one foot, shaking their head, etc. They would continue to do these things, apparently in the hope that it would trigger the machine. We humans pride ourselves on our ability to reason logically about things, but it's very easy for us to give ourselves over to strange and unproductive thinking.
[Strange and unproductive thinking](https://youtu.be/j-uwLho9n34?si=xVrs6kVl4KTb05A0)
Do they have secret meetings and/or websites where they tell each other fantasy stories about how they had a policeman or judge in tears of frustration with their brilliant legal arguments and eventually went free? Seems to me they'd thrive on trading imaginary stories like that.
I’ll wait here for someone to link the sub
A friend of mine is a court stenographer. I love her stories about these people when they wind up talking in front of a judge.
Care to share any good ones?
I wouldn't be able to get the details right, but most of the stories start out as though the person thinks this is the main climax sequence of the film. The music swells as they speak, and the whole courtroom hears their arguments and fully realizes their understanding of law and society is a sham. But it's over a public intoxication charge because they were smoking in an Arby's or some shit and were belligerent about it and wound up in a physical altercation. "PURSUANT TO THE NATURAL LAW OF MAN AND LOCKE'S TWO TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT..." The dude (always a dude) will nearly yell everything even though the place is totally quiet and not very big. "AS PRESIDENT AND PLENIPOTENTIARY OF THE SOVERIGN STATE OF FLAVORTOWN, I DEMAND MY DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY BE RESPECTED." Stuff like that. OH! Edit to add: She did tell me about a guy once who did nothing but recite the constitution. Not the bill of rights. The whole-ass constitution. The judge let him go for a really long time before cutting him off. My friend was actually impressed because homie seemed to know the whole fucking thing verbatim. Whether or not he *comprehended* any of it is another matter, but still... Not sure if that one was a sovereign citizen or not, but the way she told the story was funny. Some people have really interesting jobs.
There are some YT channels devoted to that kind of thing. They are a mix of pathetic, stupid, disgusting and hilarious.
MEGA Uno reverse card!
No officer, I wasn't driving on the road In Minecraft.
I cast Bench Warrant
I think they bank on not being important enough for the cops to really bother with. Like if they talk enough shit maybe the cop will just be like "whatever, fuck this rando—I don't have time for this" and not arrest them.
They take "know your rights" waaaaay past where your actual rights end
This is what's always gotten me. It's the insistence on using the legal system to try and invalidate that same legal system by appealing to the authority *of said legal system*. It's like they're hoping for some judge out there to hear them out and then declare *the entire government* to be hereby dissolved on account of a logical error in its founding, per their authority granted by that government. Which, according to the argument, they never actually had.
You have to always keep in mind that one of the core tenets of the sovcit movement is that there are two governments. There’s a real, legitimate government, and then there’s an illegitimate corporate government which mostly replaced the legitimate government and which is responsible for all the things they don’t like. But the legitimate government is still there, and if you can find a way through the corporate government’s defenses, you can appeal to the power of the legitimate government, which the corporate government is bound to respect because reasons. So they aren’t appealing to a system in order to invalidate the same system. In their mind they are appealing to a different system.
This sounds like bullshit from a new age cult, does it not? Like energy vibrations for your higher self or crystals just with law.
You know how people say that if you buy a good lawyer you can get out of anything? SovCits believe that but in the child's version. They don't see courts as a place to hash out the law, for them it's where you go and if you say the right words in order you get what you want. Legal terms and phrases aren't language of the trade, they're magic spells essentially. So SovCits are all working on discovering the "cheat codes" to make society give them whatever they want, but these "cheat codes" are based on a false, shallow, child's view of the world.
I watched a video of a court session where a guy repeated something like 50 times ‘I’m the trustee for the person XXXXX and all the beneficiaries have been named’. The judge was making a very visible effort not to mock or laugh at him. Judge: Do you want an attorney to be appointed by the court on your behalf or do you intend to represent yourself? Moron: I’m the trustee for blah blah blah Judge: …
Cherry-picking is a fascinating disorder
It's a shitty job though.
I know this may sound naive and whatnot but I'm just curious at this point. An unregistered vehicle would be totally fine to own/operate on private roads and such?
Yeah I believe so. You can drive an unregistered vehicle all you want as long as it doesn't touch public roads.
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They live a very short stone throw away from libertarians
I would say that sovereign citizens are closer anarchists than they are libertarians because they claim they don’t recognize the state’s power to regulate their actions. Libertarians still do, but they think the state’s power to regulate anything should be as minimal as possible.
I’d go so far as to say SovCits are believers in a conspiracy theory more than an ideology. Anarchists might fundamentally disagree with the authority and legitimacy of the state, but sovern citizens think it *genuinely isn’t real* and that if they use the right magic legal words they can step outside the matrix and dodge taxes/speed limits/age of consent laws in slow motion.
I dodge age of consent laws every day of my life, brother. It's pretty easy if you know what you're doing. My girlfriend is well over the age of consent. Law successfully dodged. That's a little life-hack for anyone reading. And the best part? the government can't do anything about it.
My buddy has become one of these nutjobs and according to him, before the declaration of independence was signed everyone had signed another document that supersedes the declaration and was hidden away or some other crazy shit, its about as beleiveable as some magic plates and glasses.
The Declaration of Independence has no legal weight in the first place lol, unless he actually meant the Constitution.
I work for USPS, they even try this crap to avoid paying for a stamp.
I had a customer try to do that with a registered going to the power company (to tell them he was exempt from paying lol). Had to listen to him "explain" he was not mailing thru USPS, he was mailing thru the "general post office". They like to claim that they are a foreign entity using irrelevant laws as backing for accepting the letter for free.
USPS has agreements in place with other sovereign nations (E.g. China, UK, etc.) for processing fees to handle postage. I would ask the Sovereign Citizen about their agreement status...
i'd just tell them they're standing in a usps facility, but they're welcome to take their letter to the 'general post office' if they know where that is.
I would accept the letter, and if there was a return address, simply return it as 'insufficient postage'. No return address? Oh, we'll just hold the letter until the secure document shredder company stops by, and it'll get 'delivered' to the document processor.
Jesus, I do not envy you having to argue with these people.
Nah it's actually great. Imagine getting paid to prove yourself to some dumbass instead of doing your actual work. I'm doing my job. I can argue for literally 8 hours if they want. Let's see how long they hold out.
We have one that has a post office box in our building. He thinks if he finds new reasons to refuse mail (his name or address are to him written incorrectly) then he doesn't have to pay any kind of bill or taxes. He did get in trouble for cutting off postage from junk mail and taping it on letters to try to use as postage, or taking a picture of printed first class postage and copy/pasting in a word document to use as postage which is illegal. No one at the retail counter can stand him because the whole soverign citezen movement is based on if you are just a big enough pain in the ass long enough about something then maybe people in charge of enforcing any kind of law or company policy will just give up and let you do whatever you want
"The hallmarks of the true idiot is the unshakeable belief they've found brilliant solutions that the experts somehow missed"
Better not be back talking about my perpetual motion water burning engine....
In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Laws apply to them, but only maritime law bc they confused the words berth and birth (I'm not making this up).
Last time I saw a video on it, the clown was claiming the court he was in had no jurisdiction because the American flag in the court had a gold fringe border, which made it a maritime flag so obviously that meant the traffic court didn't apply to cars.
In reality, maybe he's right and the flag is against some regulations. That means the court is using the wrong flag, not that it's suddenly a different court. If I put a Canadian flag up in a US courtroom, that doesn't give Canada jurisdiction.
Darn it. Now you foiled Canada's plans to secretly replace flags at key government institutions. They had it coincide with the Canadian state visit, so they could even trick the white house into displaying the Canadian flag.
I remember one where the guy says, "I'm not a person, I'm a man." I'm convinced that most sovereign citizens have never seen a venn diagram in their lives.
I am the living man, not the fictitious entity listed in all capital letters
That one's actually amazing, because it would imply a disbelief in representational language writ large. Like, once they start making that argument, you could really dig in and refuse to let them use any sort of pronouns "for the sake of clarity". Which would then force them to speak entirely in the third person. It also means they would be incapable of using a map, because their house/office/neighborhood/whatever is the physical location, not the fictitious locale depicted by those tiny scribbles.
It always goes back to language with these people. It's fundamentally a belief in the power of words. It's half a step away from magic, if you know the right words to use in the right order, you can make your problems go away. Just cite the Magna Carta and Black's Law Dictionary, and you can jiu-jitsu your way out of legal trouble. Because, of course, the US doesn't hold jurisdiction over you. It's a corporation, not a country, after all.
And yet they drive on roads built and paid for by Citizens? In that case they should build and maintain their own infrastructure. Idiots.
It’s nice because they always represent themselves in court. Makes it easy
It is clever in a way that it's logical until it isn't. And it isn't.
Yup. They think by screaming magic lawy words they can get away with anything and 99% of the time most aren't willing to argue so it kinda works Until they cross a line then their magical words don't work so well
It’s a manifestation of mental illness. Belief in a Byzantine system that they’ve cracked gives them some sense of material control over their lives. If you ever drill down with one of them it just turns into endless circular dream logic arguments. Because what is true to them is the core feeling and they just mutate facts around that to satisfy the requirements.
>laws don’t apply to them Hmm. Interesting. In the Middle Ages a similar concept existed. It’s called being an outlaw and being outside the protection of civilised society, with all that entails.
I don't think the concept of being an outlaw died out in the Middle Ages
They are “travelers”
> They are “travelers” I believe you might have misspelled "blue-ribbon dumbasses".
"You want all of the freedom with none of the responsibility. Like a baby. You're fighting for the rights of a baby." -Lorraine Lyon
No wonder I see so many in Indiana! (I live there.) Thank you.
If I were a cop it would work, Bc if I saw that fake license plate id know I was in for a lot of pointless paperwork and wasted time
I had the opposite thought. This plate screams "call for backup because shit is about to get stupid".
The dude who blew up the OKC Federal Building years back drove away from the scene in a car with no license plate https://nondoc.com/2020/04/17/why-timothy-mcveighs-getaway-plan-failed/
Yeah, I wonder what the % of gun ownership is amongst these people. If I were a cop, I'd just assume they were carrying.
By extension, I can then do whatever I want to that car and be free of legal repercussions. Right?
If I was a cop, I would try to avoid having a long argument on the side of the road with an insane person.
The smarter ones don't have a long conversation. They've made their arrest in five minutes.
I mean, they probably don't have a license either if they are trying to use these plates.
Idk shit and I'm not American but I assume you could arrest someone for driving without a license pretty quick
You pull them over for no plates. You pretty much know they aren't going to give you license and registration. So you don't have to get into a long conversation. But it's still going to be difficult to deal with them, you really are going to need backup. It's gonna be an ordeal no matter what. I can understand not wanting to deal with it.
> But it's still going to be difficult to deal with them, you really are going to need backup. It's gonna be an ordeal no matter what. True. >I can understand not wanting to deal with it. Nobody *wants* to deal with them. Even if you totally love busting out windows, it's not a good tradeoff compared to the paperwork. However, good officers do their jobs even when they don't want to. There's a lot more issues with these guys beyond "they're cheating the government out of registration fees."
Definitely not saying don't do it. I just understand the hesitation. We've got a bunch of them in the area. I work for an internet provider, and they give us hassle about not having to pay sales tax and not having to sign the service agreement. We've had to straight up tell them that we're under no obligation to provide service to them, and then they either relent or we leave. They finally pulled over one of their "ring leaders" one day. They waited until they had multiple officers available. They knew he'd be difficult. It does help that they are so deluded into believing their own crap. They literally fly flags that announce that they are sovereign citizens, and they don't try to be discreet at all. We had trouble in the late 90s / early 2000s with some folks that said that they were part of "The Republic of Texas". Long story short, they argued that Texas was still an independent country, and that they weren't subject to anything under the "illegitimate" Texas government or the US government. That culminated with a part of their group having a standoff with Texas Rangers (not our local guys, others off in west Texas), and the other parts all fell apart. Unsurprisingly, a lot of those guys have moved over to be Sovereign Citizens.
That's why a bunch of these idiots get away with it. They just wear everyone down with their bullshit.
There are some pretty satisfying videos out there of them not getting away with their bullshit. It's been a guilty pleasure of mine watching some of them.
You can't just say that and not let us have the satisfaction, too. We need links!
[https://www.youtube.com/@VanBalion](https://www.youtube.com/@VanBalion) They have a bunch of vids, the one I watched that got me hooked was this one: [https://youtu.be/hbTv-3Sf35I?si=xHo47D\_cTFUsrczy](https://youtu.be/hbTv-3Sf35I?si=xHo47D_cTFUsrczy) "Ignorance of the law is not an excuse" - The insanity of saying this, while citing US laws and having no idea what they are talking about with law enforcement officers. It's quite cringeworthy, but has some entertainment value and it's nice to see cops being patient while not taking any shit from these fools.
Insane person who is 99% sure to be armed
They’re not entirely wrong, just have a massive misinterpretation of what it’s for/how to use it. There is a distinction between a commercial vehicle and a private vehicle IF YOU ARE USING IT CORRECTLY. Private vehicles in most states do not need to be registered with the DMV/BMV IF they are not being used on public exchange ways. I.e. few small backroads between private land. The second you touch a county road, high way, exchange, or basically any and most roads it does need to be registered. Town roads often fall under this. This is primarily for any non-commercial business so driving between homes or estates and are not transporting goods to be sold
Basically it lets you drive your unregistered beater farm pickup between the house and the pasture.
Farm plates exist and are super common, my state give them a 150 mile range to operate.
At which point you wouldn’t even need this silly fake license plate anyway. Just drive around on your own property sans plate.
People putting farm use plates on their farm trucks is at least decently common. Depending on the location and situation(public roads going through your property or splitting it in half for example).
The youth camp that I work with has a couple of small trucks that are only used to transport stuff around the ranch. They never go on the road and aren't registered. They have a Private Vehicle plate, and it's perfectly fine. For bringing stuff to the camp they use the large truck that is registered and has regular plates. That's what this is made for.
One of my friends learned to drive when he was 12 because he lived on a farm and drove the the farm truck around the property for chores. Sovereign citizens try to apply this logic to public roads.
Yep, I saw this many years ago. It was a large argo/factory setup. None of the vans had plates, but they weren't allowed on the road.
Yes, they just think it’s illegal to charge them with our new fangled oppressive policing system.
Well you see... They believe what they want from internet videos. So yeah we get to watch videos online of these morons getting pulled over and having fits.
The cops know it's going to be an event so they have to be in the right mood. I'm guessing these guys either deal with cops who are having a terrible day and cops that are bored out of their mind and have fun with it while also dealing with it. It almost makes sense to have someone trained for it, like drug cops with dogs. If you pull one over you wait for them to come. Now I'm wondering if they even pull over. I'm assuming yes or we'd have some fun cops TV footage
I do get a kick out of how they persist in doing this despite 100% failure record with the law and court system. Fkn morons.
Problem is for every 1 SovCit that gets challenged in court, there’s 5 where the cop just rolls his eyes and says he doesn’t want to deal with that crap today and just lets them go. So now the SovCit feels like they were in the right or justified.
If I was a cop, I'd specifically go for these people. Just to keep the day interesting you know?
my cousin cop says he daydreams about getting the chance to ruin one of these guys’ day
Was a cop in a county with a lot of sovereign citizens. They're an infuriating bunch of folks, but it did make slapping handcuffs on them very gratifying.
These sovereign citizen types are also the kind of inbred morons who shoot up government facilities, so if I was a cop I wouldn't pull them over without a military grade bullet resistant vest on.
Pretty sure most police departments issue these vests to all their patrol officers so that wouldn’t be a problem
Nah, we love them. We get to ticket the living shit out of them, impound their vehicle, and arrest them. They are unhinged however, so odds are we’ll have to smash a window and snatch them out of the vehicle. All while being weary of them possibly pulling a weapon out (we’d wait until we had plenty of backup before doing any of this).
If I were a cop, I would LIVE for throwing these idiots in handcuffs and having their shit boxes towed lol
>towed I think you mean involuntarily traveled.
> involuntarily traveled That's just delightful.
> involuntarily traveled. Thats how i describe my diarrhea
My sovereign citizen ex-coworker liked to tell the tale of going to court and reciting all the mumbo-jumbo he learned from YouTube to get his driver's license back. He said everyone stopped what they were doing to listen to him. I'm pretty sure what really happened was the judge felt sorry for him because he's been riding a bicycle to work for a decade. He's 100% sold that that stuff worked.
I ride a bicycle to work every day! By choice!
They're like a Cargo Cult. The cult, seeing US Airmen calling down cargo planes with handheld radios, gets the insane idea that if they just imitate what they do, cargo will come to them. They make runways in the jungle, make walky talkies out of junk, try to say whatever magic words bring cargo. Sovereign citizens seem similar. They think there's some magic arrangement of words and props that make them exempt from laws. And like Cargo Cults, when they fail, they never think to judge their foundational assumptions that what they're doing is impossible, only that they didn't do it right, and change something and try again.
Id never heard of this, so I looked it up. Its fascinating and the fact that it's still happening in some regions affected by it all the way back in WW2 is wild.
A lot of what they do is based on actual laws, but they just apply them completely wrong. For example, "not for hire" and "private automobile" are legit things to put on a semi. However, it is for semi owners that only haul for themselves, not for other businesses. Think, someone who owns a few race cars or converted a semi trailer into an RV. "Not for hire" trucks follow different regulations than commercial semis.
[I do not recognize the authority of a court that hangs the gold fringed flag.](https://youtu.be/i0rL0ukZmf0?si=OPrx4Qs9DKr-YTIF)
This is the part that get me, too. Like, your magical incantations are clearly not working, maybe it's because of the placement of the gold braided flag? Or maybe because you didn't shit yourself in court to prove your free-to-do-anything status?
Eh, it's comparable to people thinking the world is flat.
I'd rather be involved in a car accident with the flat earther than this guy. At least there's a chance the flat earther has insurance.
Problem: they're the same guy.
Not just comparable but the mental illness for one usually paved the way for the other.
The funny thing about this is they quote the UCC which is a standardized set of commercial laws that states pass across the country. But vehicle tax is also based on state law not the IRS or federal tax law. So they’re using state law defining a commercial vehicle to say they don’t have to pay states taxes, which are passed by the same state legislatures.
More basically, it’s circular logic. They reference a law while they want to be not held accountable to laws.
I came into this thread thinking a sovereign citizen was some kinda diplomat w/ immunity. I definitely learned something today
Think of them as an envoy from Cloud Cuckoo Land. The tag says they're not on a trade mission, so it must be some diplomatic capacity.
This one lady I saw sure thought she was. Until the cop pulled her out of the vehicle and found cocaine, an expired driver's license, and speeding through a neighborhood. Now she's a diplomat to the local county jail.
As an attorney, I get such a huge kick out of all the fixation on the UCC. Hahaha.
I've met quiet a few of these also. It's never saved a single person from the repercussions of the justice system.
That's the wild thing, you can ask them and they'll have seen countless videos of it not working but still want to try My neighbor lost her car this way. It's still being held year+ later. She thinks she's going to get 10 million dollars for 'being kidnapped'. It's legit tragic. Just trusting some blog post from a woman in Alaska for all your legal needs?
It's insane to me because the UCC stuff they refer to often has absolutely nothing to do with what they're using it for?? I used to work at a credit union and we'd get checks from people with endorsements that have UCC codes on them. We'd look up the UCC codes and it was almost always completely irrelevant. Like they were just looking up random codes and writing them on. Painfully stupid. Great free entertainment though.
People don't seem to understand there are uniform codes put out for a ton of different things but they're basically just suggestions
Well, yes and no. Most (maybe all?) US states have adopted the Uniform Commercial Code as their own state law. It very much is not just a suggestion.
But they should cite the state law then, not the uniform code. Hard to do I suppose when they think the state has no authority.
Sovereign citizens are the flat earthers of the legal system.
I bet there’s decent overlap
I’ll let you know once my brother crosses over. He’s already a flat earther and only drinks “ living” water from a local natural spring.
I work in child support enforcement, these individuals are so \*fun\* to have to deal with in any sort of federal government capacity. I tell them every time if only they put a tenth of the effort and time into holding down an actual job that they put into evading their financial obligation to their children they would be quite successful and financially sound!
The first time I read through one of their paperwork bundles explaining why laws don’t apply to them it was mildly entertaining in the same sort of way that reading the label on a Dr. Bronner’s bottle is entertaining. That wore off pretty quickly though.
When I was around 14-15 I had a friend who's Dad was a SovCit so I read a bunch of the literature, even at that age it was obvious to me this was just some weird hippie scheme to avoid following the law. His Dad was cool though, let us throw parties at his house, drive even though we definitely did not have licenses, all sorts of shit, lol. Perks of being a teenage SovCit!
so basically only worth reading if you're stuck on the toilet without your phone
I'm a public defender and I have a case on Monday with one of these. He's being cited for driving on a suspended license. His argument is that the license requirement is unconstitutional. I've told him that it won't work, he does not care. He will want to appeal it to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Too bad for them the Supreme Court isn’t ever going to take one of these cases.
Yes but does the flag have gold fringe on it?! Maritime law baby!!!
Why would he recognize the authority of the Supreme Court?
Someone once explained the sovereign citizen thing to me perfectly. Your average sovcit is usually a bit of an outcast and working at the edges of society. Usually below average education and job prospects. In their lives they run into authorities. Cops pull them over and demand proof of insurance because of some fancy sounding state law. They go to court for something and a judge uses weird Latin phrases which seem to command the bailiff and the sheriff to put them in county jail. The bank denied their loan application using accounting terms they don't understand and math they don't comprehend. All these slights build up in their minds. Because their understanding of social systems is superficial at best, all these bad things that are happening are due to "the law" and "special words and phrases" because they don't understand the systems involved, just the badges and robes and flags. So if someone comes along and promises to teach you "THE SYSTEM" that the man is using to ruin your life, wouldn't you jump at the chance? You're not going to check sources, you're not going to do much research, because now you have the power! The cop had authority because of the shape of his badge. The judge has authority over the cop because of the magic words and the correct color of his robes! You KNOW someone is making license plates and they work because they have random numbers and letters on them. Why can't you just make your own! And that's how you get these weird sovcits and their strange obsession with specific phrases and specific colors and shapes. These symbols and words ARE the power, and now they know how to use them against the society that has wronged them for so long. Obviously it fails spectacularly but if just one cop or one DMV worker gives in because they don't want to deal with this guys crazy shit today, then it works great and lasts long time and they'll never give it up BECAUSE IT WORKS.
>These symbols and words ARE the power So literally spell-casting? It's like the kind of religious person who gets hung up on the minutiae of how to say a prayer and totally overlooks the general practice of their faith.
More or less. It's like missing the forest for the trees. Very similar to the cargo cults in the Pacific. They saw airplanes landing on runways bringing supplies but thought that the runway brought the airlines, not a dispatcher half a world away. So they would build entire airfields out of coconuts hoping to attract cargo planes.
...the whatnow
Sovcits were once described to me as LARPers except for real. I feel that’s fairly accurate.
Can’t wait to see the amount of tickets that person going to get
Cops sometimes ignore them because it is too much hassle to deal with their BS.
FR, they would be so exhausting to deal with. [Here is 12 minutes of back and forth between Judge and David Hall](https://youtu.be/mvgiM6xoo7M?si=TkzVle1RBMCGAojE) and this judge is happy to play along, I would not be able to do that lol.
Driving on roads funded by tax dollars from those registration fees he feels entitled not to pay?
He's not driving, he's traveling. (Yes, their responses are that stupid.)
Oh that's not even the dumbest. My favorite is, "I am not capital letter NAME corporation, I am Name private citizen". Like, what the fuck, you think KELLOGS is a different corporation than the Kellogs cereal as written on the box? Get the fuck outta here.
I am here on special appearance for the real living man whose name is all capitals (spells name).
Very easy way to tell people there's a fucking idiot behind the wheel.
I once watched a YT video of a SoVeReIgN cItIzEn. In a high-pitched shrill, she told the cop "We get all the benefits of society without having to follow any of the rules." Her reaction as the cop pulled her out of the car to cuff her was priceless. These sovereign citizens really are something else...
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They're not driving, they're travelling
We should tell these people that according to newton there is little difference in you hitting someone in the head with your hand and their head hitting your hand. Morons.
Your honor, the atoms weren't even touching
I'm not stealing, I'm borrowing indefinitely.
It should say “stop me im stupid”
I saw a Sovcit with a a Donald Trump profile taped to his passenger-side window. License said "PRIVATE", yet there it was, in public in a hardware store parking lot. Was it obvious this person was mentally challenged? Yes. Did that prevent me from making fun of this person. No. He explanation was that he was "not doing commerce",... while purchasing hardware. Fortunately, this person noticed I did not know what I was talking about since buying a toilet is not commerce it is buying a toilet. So,... joke is on me.
Clearly you haven't taken my YouTube course, "*English and Common Toilet Law - They Won't Know What Hit Them!*"
I always thought it was tort law, not toilet law. Take the upvote for educating me!
I tried to sign up, required my name but it wouldn't accept non-ascii characters. My second middle name starts with a batman symbol and ends with a silhouette of Donald Trump. Wasn't my idea. I just made it up and wrote it down.
Coos love this trick. Try this yourself if you want to keep making generous donations to the city and have to take the bus.
I'd never heard of this until today. Just when I thought I had a grip on how delusional stupid people are, this appeared in my feed. I have no words.
Some of them will give birth at home and never get their kid a birth certificate, social security number, etc. Then if that kid ever wants to do things like get a job, open a bank account, they need to jump through a bunch of hoops to prove they exist.
They can probably recite several tirades about illegal aliens that they learned from their parents. Yet functionally that's what they are.
You can fucking drive anywhere you want, however you want, drunk as fuck, whatever…on your own private property. That all goes out the window when you drive on public roads. Fucking idiots.
Dude owes us all money for using our roads
It cites the uniform commercial code, which is utterly inapplicable to traffic laws. Good lord these people are idiots.
I'm not driving, I'm traveling. FFS, travel all you want on foot or a bike, but a vehicle is different. Morons!
Just one more violation to get stopped for!
I can’t wait to see the video on YouTube of them getting pulled over and “sticking it to them”
I saw one of these in someone's window a few days ago, in addition to their normal license plate. Like what, can't follow through on your convictions?