Sovereign Magic for Fun and Profit
by Primo Encarnación
My cousin, Jesus Hachecristo, had been looking into the sovereign citizen movement because he heard that he could get out of a traffic ticket if he just filed the right papers with the court. This intrigued me, because I am a law-abiding citizen, except when it comes to the road, that Darwinian jungle. Just for future reference, if you’re driving in the state of Ohio, the left lane belongs to me by right of conquest. I’m not sayin’; I’m just sayin’.
But it turns out there’s a lot more to this movement than meets the eye: not only can you free yourself from the tyranny of tyrannical tyrants as a sovereign citizen, you can also tap into millions of dollars that already belong to you! Or, more accurately, to YOU.
You see, you are not YOU. YOU is the name on your birth certificate, or your drivers license, or on every piece of paper the IRS sends to you. Check it out, I’ll wait. Notice how your name is in all capital letters? That’s YOU. YOU was created on the day you were born, and a trust fund valued somewhere between $600,000 and $20 million has been appropriated by the government in YOUR name as some sort of shell corporation for you. I didn’t quite grok the reason they did that, and the discrepancy between the low and high payouts has to do with which sovereign citizen you talk too, but they are all 100% sure it’s there, and they are all 100% sure that even if it belongs to YOU, you can get your hands on it.
The government can do this because the country was founded on common law, but was secretly switched over to admiralty law, either during the Civil War, or more probably, during FDR’s term when sovereign citizens think we went off the gold standard, which actually happened under Nixon. You can tell we are under admiralty law because the decorative gold fringe on many US flags is actually an indication of our bondage to the naval nation.
At this point of the lesson, I stopped Jesus and asked him if he’d been chugging home-made mescal. The whole thing sounded like a disjointed bunch of conspiracy mcnuggets, but he assured me he was sober, and as my auto insurance is way too high, I let him go on.
Which I immediately regretted, because it seems that the only way to tap into these things is by some not-yet-discovered Kabbalistic mish mosh of the right phraseology, the right paper, the right punctuation, the right ink, the right citations, the inspissated blood of a patriot and a twist of lime. In fact, the more he went on, the more it sounded like somebody decided that alchemy was passé (especially now that we’re off the gold standard) and that the true money-making magic could only be unlocked by a quasi-Constitutional incantation, splitting yourself in half so that the true you can play Bird Hall Putsch in wintry wildlife sanctuaries, while corporation shell YOU still has to foot the bill or be keelhauled under the secret maritime law of evil America.
It’s Hogwarts for people who want free money and no responsibility.
And this is why you can’t reason with the Cliven and Ammon Bundy’s of this world. There IS no negotiation which can result in them recognizing the authority of the country in which they live because they are not citizens of that country, they are citizens of themselves. Therefore, they expect to make money as ranchers without paying for grazing rights on federal property at a 90% discount from private fees. They can only achieve their God-promised success if the government GIVES them stuff. But they don’t believe in government handouts, so the government must therefore have STOLEN the giveaways in the first place.
In the end, Jesus recognized the futility of a belief system based on a stuck CapsLock key and a decorative fringe. But for the now-dead LaVoy Finicum, whose government handout ended when they took away the herd of foster kids he turned to when that cattle thing wasn’t working out, that realization never came. Or maybe it did, and that’s why he chose suicide by cop.
Oy,Primo! So that’s what its all about! Delusion Central! Thanks for the bit about the fringe on the flag. Many years ago I was told that only military courts were allowed to have such flags and to have a fringed flag in a civil courtroom was not just invalid but an infraction worthy of a fist fight. And no, I am not interested in going after all that money that belongs to me. Its probably got a tracer on every bill!
1Yeah, those people who believe he was shot while his hands were up apparently didn’t see the part where he put his hands down and started fumbling for something near his waist. Suicide by cop? Nailed it, Primo.
It never fails to astound me that so-called “patriots” don’t realize that the Constitution replaced all other forms of government and superseded all previous documents like the Magna Carta. They can bring up all the ancient laws and proclamations they want; the only rules and laws that apply are delineated in the Constitution. Dopes.
2It’s all clear to me now. Thank YOU!!!
3Fringe on the flag? So they want to believe that the court isn’t valid because the municipality buys from the lowest bidder, which in this case is probably military surplus.
This is a special kind of crazy.
4So that’s where “fringe elements” come from! I never knew!
5Primo: do you write for a living? Love your posts.
6Excellent! Totally clear and concise description of our rights as sovereign citizens of ‘murrica. Personally, I believe that I will go along with the more sane citizens and follow the laws, pay my dues, and enjoy my freedom from conspiracy theories 🙂 Thanks for the laugh Primo!
7BarbinDC, isn’t that kind of like where the New Testament replaced the Old (the Magna Carta of religion)?
8Ah ha … It was worth reading the entire thing to get to those last two paragraphs to finally say: Ah Ha … Jose, I can see or, in this case, Jesus!! LOL
I read somewhere on-line, probably on Facebook, that ole Finicum and his missus actually ran 50 foster kids through their homestead.
9My local Libertopian claims that we don’t have to pay income tax because of some extra-terrestrial (i.e. far out there) notion that income is only profits earned in the course of importing goods from other countries.
10Primo Encarnación, thank you and your cousin, Jesus, for that journey through the ‘mind’ of a welfare roper. If all of them are entitled to that maximum mooch of $20 million, with interest, fines, penalties and an added aggravation fee, they’ve all exceeded their cap. Past time for them to roll up in their Gadsden flags and find their own 2nd Amendment way out. No more suicide by cop, as there’s no more left in their mooch allotment for free bullets.
11Brilliant Primo, and thanks.
All I want to know is this: Have the redneckeliosis whinybaby asauras vacated the premises of Malheur? ….. and when will the place be fumigated?
12So sovereign citizens are different from the apocryphal welfare queens they hate so much… How?
My best guess would be the color of their skin. If you’re tan to any degree and the government helps you out, you’re a welfare queen. If you’re frog-belly white, you’re a sovereign citizen who is fully entitled to have federal monies handed to them.
Gender may also play a role.
13I can click my heels together 3 times, but I don’t have a pair of ruby slippers.
Can I still get my free cash?
14Well, he said he’d rather die than be taken into custody, so he got his wish. People who say that sort of thing shouldn’t do things which would cause them to be taken into custody. And guess what, if you go for a gun in front of the cops, they will shoot you regardless of skin color and cowboy hat.
Now when are those other yahoos going to be charged with everything they’ve done and made to repay the costs of the local and federal governments riding herd on their stupid butts for weeks too long?
15Not to mention the cost of putting the wildlife refuge back the way it was pre-takeover, and of course the dildo disposal alone is going to run into the hundreds if not thousands of dollars.
16Interestingly, LynnN, you’d be right if you spoke to some sovereign citizens, who claim that the 14th Amendment specifically placed African Americans under the aegis of the Federal government, but as it happens, the sovereign citizen movement has quite a few black adherents.
On the rare occasions that they do get together (the movement seems to attract mostly loners, as these types of movements are wont to do) they try to gloss over their differences and concentrate on the “true enemy.”
There is nothing to join, no dues to pay, just chat rooms, legal dictionaries and reams and reams of paper. They attack individuals by filing liens (where the county clerks of the courts are either credulous or cretinous) and they attack government by filing, filing and filing again.
Also, it must be noted, that all sorts of different movements have similar goals and overlapping issues, so sometimes it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Thus NeoNazi’s or white supremacists or Christian Identity fiends or all other sorts of mean, nasty, ugly Group W Bench-sitter-types find myths, ideologies and strategies consonant with their own brands of nuttiness within the sovereign citizen movement.
17La Voy Finicum? I can’t get past the sense that this is an assumed name. Some sort creole or faux latin for life’s end. Sad and delusional.
18I’d rather have 2 families of Syrians next door than those delusional “sovereign citizens.” I wish they’d be “sovereign” over their own minds.
19Thanks for clarifying some of the crackpot details, Primo. I learned about the sovereigns when one of them was elected to our county government (he has since moved on to prison) and another one, living a few streets over, was elected to the municipal council (his house is the one with the bathtub on the porch, the junk in the driveway, and the array of signs proclaiming that thou shalt not trespass on his sovereign land.)
20Lless: it’s one of them Mormon names.
21I’m SO tired of these welfarians. 90% discount on grazing, fostering children for pay, all kinds of subsidies, and they bitch about “takers.” Rest in pieces, Finicum.
22Zyxomma, Finicum said, according to an article I read, that he primary source of income was the money he got from the state for fostering the children.
23“Sovereign” and “citizen” are mutually exclusive words. To use them together makes no sense. But then, look at the people who use those words and… well… hmmmmm….
24there are two kinds of people who buy into this whole “sovereign citizen” BS:
1. the grifters who use it to con the rubes out of their hare earned cash, by getting them to attend “seminars”, and buy written/recorded materials, for hundreds of dollars, that all purport to explain to them what a “sovereign citizen” is, and how to benefit from it. it’s all bogus of course, but the #2’s lap it up like cheap bar liquor at 4am.
2. the rubes, usually white & male, who have fallen on difficult financial times, and are desperately searching for a way out of the dilemma. amazingly enough, becoming a “sovereign citizen” means they get to ignore the harsh realities of their lives, and they will miraculously go away (they won’t).
25I read recently in a thread on a different site a comment by one of those sovereignite-types who wants us to go back to the “original” Constitution. I just can’t wrap my mind around the concept that somewhere, locked in a secret vault in some wingnut christian church there is the “original” constitution, not the, mmmm ersatz one in Washington DC. You can’t deal with people like that, it’s like trying to nail jell-o to a tree.
26One of my relatives espoused the government conspiracy theories described by daChips, er Primo, but he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. I’ll bet the current crop of sovereigns have a mental profile along those lines.
27I’ll bet those foster kids are jumping for joy to be placed with someone closer to sane.
Dang! Just this week I heard those Bundynuts near Burns described as outhouse patriots! Shocking! Tsk. Tsk.
28♬ Sing me a song I’m the sovereign man …
… apologies to Billy Joel.
29Huh?
30When my daughter was little I told her the flag’s stars represented the 50 states, the stripes represented the original colonies, and the fringe represented the lunatic fringe.
31