Not that I like cops but WTF did you expect sovcit?

    • carl_dungeon@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Yeah, there’s a growing subculture of people, not just in USA, that have fallen for an internet scam claiming to have found “loopholes” in the law. Generally, it involves not having legal plates on your car, registration, not paying child support or taxes, driving without a license, etc etc etc.

      They theory goes that if you just “educate” yourself on constitutional, maritime, and wartime law, you can catch police and judges in a “gotcha, checkmate” situation and they’ll be powerless to do anything to you.

      Sadly, there is a big overlap with SovCits, flat-earthers, right wing maga types, ancient alien conspiracy types, Neo-nazis/klan types, the mentally ill, and the poor and uneducated. They tend to be a group of people that dont have much in life and are susceptible to the idea that there is “one easy trick they don’t want you to know” type of cheat code to get ahead in life and leave problems behind.

      Toxic relationship that ended and now she’s asking for child support? I’ll just become an independent nation that doesn’t recognize that law. Can’t afford car payment and the bank is trying to repossess? I’ll just make up some bank docs that “dismiss” the loan. Silly stuff like that.

      There is a group of hucksters that prey on these people, they make YouTube channels, sell books, run seminars, etc etc etc to squeeze money from them while leaving these poor gullible sops running around being pedantic about the difference between “driving” and “traveling” as defined by some 18th century cattle rancher.

      • Alue42@fedia.io
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        4 months ago

        The original idea of being a sovereign citizen is fine in and off itself - something like Sealand - claiming Nation status outside the jurisdictional claim of any other nation and developing your own laws and methods for citizenship. If you can get your nation to be recognized by another and you are able to sustain yourself (electric, water, safety, roads, etc). This has happened in a few places. It’s just something eccentric people that have some method of getting some isolated land do, or that they want to not be bothered.

        But they still recognized the laws of the other places they were traveling to while they were there, because they obviously couldn’t stay only within that tiny little area forever. However, people started to claim sovereign citizenry within their respective countries and that specific laws didn’t apply to them because they were sovereign. Which is just ridiculous even if they were members of one of these sovereign nations.

        Since none of what they were saying ever seemed to work, they started coming up with these specific “phrases” that had to be used and ways of saying it, capitalization, punctuation, etc. but the most insane to recently come out is that they believe the government sets up a secret Treasury account at birth in the name of anyone with a birth certificate that the government uses and puts debts onto (that’s why they don’t want to have birth certificates) but that they can get the debts cleared and get any access to the money in the account by using specific phrases to a judge. The account is the capitalized name on the birth certificate and the actual human is the lower case name. That’s where a lot of these posted letters stem from.

        My hope is that if they are trying to purge themselves from existence in databases, they also are removing themselves from the voter rolls - because if they truly believe they are a non-us citizen, then they should have no say in the state of the country, or even the local elections, correct?