The Sovereigns Return

As a long time observer of right wing threats to our country, nothing has disturbed me more than the Sovereign Citizen movement.  This is not an organization per se, but a collection of individuals and groups who share a bizarre set of beliefs about the United States.  It seemed for several years that the colossal idiocy that lies at the center of their claims was dying a well deserved death, as it was even more ludicrous than the normal run of right wing cant.

In the end, of course, it all comes down to the same old Conservative obsession:  cut my taxes. Sovereign Citizen nonsense has always been about why the Federal and State governments have no right to tax the adherents of this inane cult.  The difference between Sovereign Citizens and run of the mill Conservatives is that the Sovereign Citizen movement has spawned a long series of horrible, violent incidents, including numerous murderous attacks against police, judges and other government figures.  Terry Nichols, for example, the associate of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was associated with the Sovereign Citizen movement. In fact, these people, that seem so idiotic to outsiders, represent the greatest threat of terrorist violence in the country today, and have for a long time.  Many of the adherents of this movement are unaware themselves that it is an outgrowth of Aryan Supremacist groups, being directly connected, for example, to Richard Butler, the seminal figure in the growth of American white supremacism, and the eighties Posse Comitatus movement, the forerunner of today's white supremacist militias.  Here is a brief description of the movement from longtime expert on extremism,  Mark Pitcavage:

"A term used to describe adherents to a philosophy derived from the group Posse Comitatus that posits that there are two types of citizens: "Fourteenth Amendment Citizens," who are subject to the laws and taxes of the federal and state governments, and sovereign citizens, who are subject only to "the common law." Sovereign citizens claim that they have absolute mastery over all their property (including freedom from taxes, regulations, ordinances, or zoning restrictions), that they essentially do not have to pay taxes (aside from tariffs and a few other insignificant taxes), that they are not citizens of the United States but are "nonresident aliens" with respect to that "illegal corporation," that the only court which has jurisdiction to try them for any matter is a common law court, and that they can never be arrested or tried for a crime or matter in which there is no complaining victim, as well as various other notions."

So, why has this nearly moribund phenomenon suddenly emerged from the grave?  Well, it all comes down to one of the primary beliefs of Sovereign Citizens.  And I hope you will forgive me for going into this in some detail, as I am afraid we are going to be living with the consequences for the foreseeable future:  

"We are not living in a country with a government of the people, by the people, for the people, but we are part of a giant Corporation, The United States Corporation, and the President of America is the CEO. We are only the employees. This Corporation, in its turn, is owned by another Corporation, The British Crown...The scam has been set up so that when you register with the ´Federal Government´ in any way, by accepting a Social Security Number, driver´s license, or any of the other official federal documents, you are, unknowingly, contracting to become an asset-employee of the United States Corporation..."

And how did this come to be?

"The UNITED STATES was formed in 1871, which controls only the District of Columbia and the territories it purchases or acquires; Puerto Rico, Guam, Virginia Islands...There are 2 United States, one formed in 1787, the collection of the several sovereign states of the union, and another separate and different one formed in 1871, which only controls the District of Columbia and it’s territories. Others may can give you specific references and explain this further. Here is an outline of the concepts.

The date is February 21, 1871 and the Forty-First Congress is in session. I refer you to the "Acts of the Forty-First Congress," Section 34, Session III, chapters 61 and 62. On this date in the history of our nation, Congress passed an Act titled: "An Act To Provide A Government for the District of Columbia." This is also known as the "Act of 1871." What does this mean? Well, it means that Congress, under no constitutional authority to do so, created a separate form of government for the District of Columbia, which is a ten mile square parcel of land.  The Act of 1871 formed a corporation called THE UNITED STATES. The corporation, OWNED by foreign interests, moved in and shoved the original Constitution into a dustbin. With the Act of 1871, the original Constitution for the united States (1788) was defaced in effect vandalized and sabotage when the title was capitalized and the word "for" was changed to "of" in the title THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA."

Now, as I mentioned, this utter rubbish seemed to have just about died out in the last few years, as numerous Sovereign Citizen leaders were sent to prison for violence, or for using this doctrine as a part of the marketing of criminal tax avoidance schemes.  So why am I talking about it today?

Well, curiously enough, it provides a perfect, explanation, at least for those whose minds are so eaten with right wing idiocy that they can't distinguish truth from fantasy, of why Joe Biden is not currently the President of the United States.  In fact, according to this rubbish, all Presidents since the eighteen elected before 1871 are illegitimate, and all laws passed since then, including all Constitutional amendments, have absolutely no validity.  This, notably, includes the 20th amendment, passed March 2, 1932, which moved the date of the inauguration from March 4th to January 20th.  So, according to these idiots, Biden's inauguration was utterly illegal, and the real President, Donald Trump, will be placed in office on March 4th.

I can't go on here without pointing out that by this logic, Donald Trump himself was an illegitimate President, and everything he did is null and void.  That seems to have never occurred to the wingnuts who are buying into this argument in droves the last couple of weeks, but then nobody ever said that right wing beliefs made any sense, except as a sort of adult tantrum to get what they want regardless of the circumstances.  Anyway, back to the story.

So, why has Sovereign Citizen idiocy re-emerged so swiftly and so completely, within a matter of one week, which is all it has been since Biden was inaugurated?  I think that the answer is simple- this malicious nonsense provided them with a ready-made reason to go on denying that their God-man lost the election last November, and with a pre-manufactured justification for resorting to violence or any other sort of tantrum as an alternative to giving up their delusions, and their fundamental belief that only they, as white people, are entitled to all the wealth that this country can provide.  This is actually a worse eventuality that it would be if they really came to believe this nonsense through any sort of normal thought process.  It shows that they are ready to kill us for nothing, to destroy us just to avoid giving up their delusions.  It is a very bad sign of what the Republican party intends to do to this country in the next couple of years.  Even when we win, we lose, at least when the other side doesn't give a damn about the rules, fairness, or anything else that could be seen as human decency.

Sad to say, I know I will have much more to say about this ugly development in the future.  In the next couple of days I will have a Wingnut Wrapup that is delusional beyond what I have been accustomed to document, and which contains an even uglier undertone of barely repressed violence toward Republicans' enemies.  Our nation has proven more resilient than, say, the Weimar Republic, and has managed to hang on to its form of government, if only barely.  But the threat is not over.  The hatefulness into which Republicans have voluntarily sunk still threatens to destroy us all, and it will take a degree of determination which the Democrats have not generally shown, to preserve our freedom.