Comments by "wily wascal" (@wilywascal2024) on "QAnon & Sovereign Citizens Are Coming for the Child Welfare System" video.

  1. David Straight is just one of many grifters working this scam. Anna von Rietz is another one. They're all very similar, albeit each have slightly different twists. The different groups mostly interact with those in their respective group, but also communicate with and relate to each other. They use legal harassment and legal chicanery to clog up judicial and governmental systems, a tactic designed to make them unpalatable to legal and civic enforcement of the law. Besides being detrimental and destructive to our society, people within the sovereign citizen movement can be violent and dangerous. Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh of the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing were closely associated with and motivated by this movement. The reason I know all of this is because my brother got involved in the sovereign citizen movement over five years ago. It's actually a movement that has been around for 50 years, although I had never heard of it before then. I asked him some questions about it, had him show me the mission statement of the group to which he was engaged with, and told him right away that it was obviously a scam, pointing out a number of problems and flaws with what they were preaching. He wasn't convinced, so I took time to do the research on the movement, and presented him with key facts about it that I though should surely be enough to dissuade him and disassociate himself from the movement. Unfortunately, regardless of any facts or reason presented, he refused to be convinced, and is still a "true believer" to this day, no matter what additional arguments and evidence provided since. To demonstrate how insidious this movement is, I should note that my brother is a very generous, reserved, and nice person, one who is not racist or right-wing, someone who is never violent, of fair intelligence, and has always had his head on straight. The concept of a sovereign citizen originated in 1971 in the Posse Comitatus movement as a teaching of Christian Identity minister William P. Gale. The concept has influenced the tax protester movement, the Christian Patriot movement, and the redemption movement—the last of which claims that the U.S. government uses its citizens as collateral against foreign debt. ~ Wikipedia The "sovereign citizen" movement is a loosely organized collection of groups and individuals who have adopted a right-wing anarchist ideology originating in the theories of a group called the Posse Comitatus in the 1970s. Its adherents believe that virtually all existing government in the United States is illegitimate and they seek to "restore" an idealized, minimalist government that never actually existed. To this end, sovereign citizens wage war against the government and other forms of authority using "paper terrorism" harassment and intimidation tactics, and occasionally resorting to violence. The key distinguishing characteristic of the sovereign citizen movement is its extreme anti-government ideology, couched in conspiratorial, pseudohistorical, pseudolegal and sometimes racist language. Beginning in the late 1960s, a number of right-wing fringe groups formed that questioned the authority and nature of the federal government. Most grew out of a recently emergent right-wing tax-protest movement: arguments about the illegitimacy of income tax laws were easily expanded or altered to challenge the legitimacy of the government itself. The most important of these groups was the Posse Comitatus, which originated in Oregon and California around 1970. Members of the Posse Comitatus believed that the county was the true seat of government in the United States. They did not deny the legal existence of federal or state governments, but rather claimed that the county level was the "highest authority of government in our Republic as it is closest to the people." The basic Posse manual stated that there had been "subtle subversion" of the Constitution by various arms and levels of government, especially the judiciary. There was, in fact, a "criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice, disfranchise citizens and liquidate the Constitutional Republic of these United States." The ideology of the sovereign citizen movement had matured and crystallized by the 1980s as an unusual form of right-wing anarchism that focuses, on the one hand on the importance of local control and, on the other hand, on the avoidance of virtually all forms of authority and obligation. Sovereign citizen ideology justifies these goals by claiming that at one time there was an American utopia governed by English "common law," a utopia in which every citizen was a "sovereign," and there were no oppressive laws, taxes, regulations or court orders. However, a conspiracy gradually subverted this system, replacing it with an illegitimate successor. Different sovereign citizen theorists have varying versions of this progression, but most include the following elements: the alleged suppression of a "missing" 13th Amendment that would have disallowed citizenship for attorneys; the Reconstruction amendments; the 16th Amendment (allowing an income tax); the 17th Amendment (allowing popular election of senators); the Federal Reserve Act and the 1933 removal of United States currency from the gold standard. By that time, many sovereign citizen theorists agree, the United States government was completely illegitimate, using emergency war powers and other unlawful measures to rule unconstitutionally. Among the various subjects of energetic sovereign citizen revisionism, perhaps none is more important than the 14th Amendment. Ratified in 1868, the Amendment had several aims, including the guaranteeing of United States citizenship for the ex-slaves. But to sovereign citizens it did much more; they claim that before its ratification, virtually no one was a "citizen of the United States." ~ ADL (Anti-Defamation League) Domestic Terrorism The Sovereign Citizen Movement Sovereign citizens are anti-government extremists who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or “sovereign” from the United States. As a result, they believe they don’t have to answer to any government authority, including courts, taxing entities, motor vehicle departments, or law enforcement. This causes all kinds of problems—and crimes. For example, many sovereign citizens don’t pay their taxes. They hold illegal courts that issue warrants for judges and police officers. They clog up the court system with frivolous lawsuits and liens against public officials to harass them. And they use fake money orders, personal checks, and the like at government agencies, banks, and businesses. That’s just the beginning. Not every action taken in the name of the sovereign citizen ideology is a crime, but the list of illegal actions committed by these groups, cells, and individuals is extensive (and puts them squarely on our radar). In addition to the above, sovereign citizens: Commit murder and physical assault; Threaten judges, law enforcement professionals, and government personnel; Impersonate police officers and diplomats; Use fake currency, passports, license plates, and driver’s licenses; and Engineer various white-collar scams, including mortgage fraud and so-called “redemption” schemes. ~ FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
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  2. 'Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America' by Kathleen Belew (Harvard University Press, 2018) The movement “brought together members of the Klan, militias, radical tax resisters, white separatists, neo-Nazis, and proponents of white theologies such as Christian Identity, Odinism, and Dualism” (ix). What was it about the movement that brought these ideologies together? The promise of violence — rather, the promise that members would get to inflict violence on other people. Belew writes that as the white power movement matured, it became more violent, and “[as] violence came to the fore of the movement, distinctions among white power factions melted away” (60). Belew calls this process “violent community formation” (34). Yet as a social movement, Belew makes a distinction between the white power movement’s “revolutionary violence” and the Ku Klux Klan’s “vigilante violence.” Vigilante violence “served to constitute, shore up, and enforce systemic power” (106). Given that the U.S. government has a long history of “defending vigilante violence by refusing to enforce the law” (99), law enforcement inaction and vigilante violence may be understood together as a case of one hand washing the other. Revolutionary violence, however, sought to overthrow the state. It is the white power movement’s goal of overthrowing the federal government that sets it apart in the history of white supremacy in the U.S.
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