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Mark Pitcavage

@egavactip

3 Dec

I'm going to offer a "survival strategy" for Twitter. It may not be for everyone, and it's not something that could probably be used every time, but even using it sometimes might help you keep your sanity.

There's lots of content on Twitter--from awful things posted to posts about awful things--that might make you mad. Or furious. And you might be tempted to make an enraged response. Or a ton of them. Or come to Twitter every day to "do battle." That may not be a healthy thing, for

you or for Twitter generally. Sometimes that anger is fine, or even appropriate. But too much of that will possibly shorten your life and even more likely lessen your enjoyment of it.

But one strategy you can sometimes employ is to take one of those awful posts and instead of

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Mark Pitcavage

@egavactip

6 Nov

One of the historical questions related to extremism that I've pondered for years is the odd composition of white supremacy in the history of anti-government extremists over the past 50 years. I'll explain in this thread....

Leaving aside single issue movements, one of the best ways to visualize the extreme right in the U.S. is as two overlapping spheres, each consisting of a number of movements. One sphere consists of white supremacist movements, the other of anti-government extremist movements.

The two spheres have a fairly small amount of overlap. In the 1970s and 80s, the amount of overlap was far higher, but it began to decrease in the late 80s, a trend that continued for the decades afterwards. What I find so interesting is the identity of the white supremacists

Read 16 tweets

Mark Pitcavage

@egavactip

4 Nov

1. Today, the Medal of Honor is our nation's highest award for bravery, given only to people exhibiting the utmost in bravery or self-sacrifice (like throwing themselves on

"Lawmakers Ask Biden to Rescind Medals for Wounded Knee Massacre"

nytimes.com/2021/11/03/us/…

2. a grenade). However, in the early decades of the Medal's history, throughout the 19th century, this was not the standard, and in some cases the Medal was almost handed out like candy. For example, during the Civil War, the Medal was promised to any member of the 27th Maine

3. who reenlisted, resulting in hundreds of undeserved medals awarded. As a result, as early as a hundred years ago, the U.S. government began "unawarding" nearly a thousand such medals awarded in previous decades. Leaving any political or ideological issues completely aside, it

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Mark Pitcavage

@egavactip

28 Oct

I've been talking recently about the sovereign citizen habit of taking a word and replacing it with a homonym or similar sounding word with a different meaning in order to change the meaning of a word or sentence. Here's another example. It is common for sovereign citizens not

to use the word "inalienable," as in "inalienable" rights, but to use "unalienable"--and usually "un-a-lien-able." In this way they can speak about the word "lien" (remember they are obsessed with liens and the UCC).

Here's an example mentioned in a court decision on a filing by sovereign citizen/tax protester Robert Beale (father of alt right writer Vox Day).

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Mark Pitcavage

@egavactip

27 Oct

https://twitter.com/egavactip/status/1453420593345351682

Thanks to all who responded! Here's the answer: The "reliance defense" was one of the most popular tax protest strategies of the 1990s. In the 70s-80s, tax protesters generally tried to make their tax protest arguments in court, like the 5th Amendment meant they didn't have to

https://twitter.com/egavactip/status/1453420593345351682

pay income tax or that the 16th amendment was never lawfully ratified. Those always failed. Then, in the early 90s, a number of tax protest leaders began selling "expert letters" to people telling them that in their legal opinion, those people didn't have to pay taxes. That

way, or so the reasoning went, if those people were ever charged with tax-related crimes (crimes that generally require a *willful* intent to violate the law in order for conviction), they could whip out those expert letters and basically say "Judge, I honestly thought I didn't

Read 4 tweets

Mark Pitcavage

@egavactip

27 Oct

Sovereign citizen gurus consistently do a fascinating thing with language. They have the habit of taking a word in print that has multiple meanings and ascribing to it the wrong meaning rather than the actual meaning in context. They also do the same thing with homonyms or

similar-sounding words.. This allows them to really twist the meaning of the passage, because they have radically changed the ostensible meaning of a word in it. For example, they may refer to a defendant in a criminal case and say that this person is "on the defense."

Then they say that means the prosecution is "on the offense," which means that the prosecution are the real "offenders." See what I mean?

In the next two tweets is an example I found this evening, which deliberately conflates "birth" and "berth." It's quite fascinating to me.

Read 5 tweets

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