Mark Pitcavage Profile picture
Jan 30, 2022 24 tweets 17 min read Read on X
Time for yet another Show and Tell thread about sovereign citizens. In these threads I show artifacts and ideas from this unusual movement, along with some explanation and context, and maybe a bit of snark.

Okay, let's get going!
The above ID card has several postal hallmarks of sovereign citizen, including "zipcode exempt," "near 78767," "general delivery," & "Texas Republic."

Below we see documents a sovereign is preparing to mail. I am half convinced sovereigns are the ones keeping the USPS running.
Sovereign citizen license plates are always fascinating--one could collect these as a hobby and never run out of variations.
As I've mentioned before, some are designed a lot like real license plates, and are intended to pass as legit, but most are far more "in your face."
Sovereign citizens do not always call themselves that; in fact, sometimes they deny they are sovereigns. They have a lot of names for themselves. One that has picked up in popularity in recent years is "American State National."
Some more "American State National" sovereign citizen stuff.
The largest U.S. variant within the sovereign citizen movement--a variant now appearing in some other countries--is the "Moorish sovereign citizen" variant.
For a good 25 years at least, the Hawaiian independence movement has been rife with sovereign citizens.
Of course, by now, the sovereign citizen movement has spread across much of the world. Australia has one of the most active sovereign citizen movements, which has exploited paranoia over vaccines and covid countermeasures. This group is the Gumbaynggirr Government.
The Gumbaynggir group provides here a great example of sovereign citizen logical argument:
One sovereign citizen group, at least, has been started in Jamaica, the Sovereign Maroon Global Tribal Nation.
There's one group in the Philippines that had seeming sovereign citizen hallmarks, but I wasn't quite sure.
But it was this story, about one of them getting in trouble while in Singapore, that seems to confirm there's at least a sovereign influence here. This guy's not the first sovereign to get in trouble in Singapore.
roadkillandotherobservations.com/2021/08/07/mr-…
I've talked before about "sovereign citizen doublespeak," which is when a sovereign deliberately chooses the wrong meaning for a word with two meanings, or applies unusual homonyms, like "currency" = "current + sea." Here are some great examples.
One Moorish sovereign citizen group has recently created its own currency, the "dollarium," which it *claims* is gold-backed. Given that it has denominations in the billions, you may draw your own conclusions.
You may have noticed the unusual spelling in the above items. That is a bizarre hallmark of one particular group, the Moorishe Nationall Reepublic Federall Governmente. They seem to think it is "Annciente Ennglishe."
The "Purple Thumb Community" is a New Zealand sovereign citizen group. It was started by a follower of deceased American sovereign guru David Wynn Miller. Note it asking for an "energy exchange donation," i.e., $$$.
New Zealand has had sovereign citizens for quite some time. Some Maoris are sovereigns.
Sovereign citizens enjoy creating charts to illustrate the difference between their status and those of others, or of their system of laws vs. the illegitimate system.
The way sovereigns get their ideas is pretty simple. One sovereign, somewhere, simply makes something up. If it is interesting, other sovereign citizens will copy it. Eventually it becomes "fact" to sovereigns. One example is the sovereign citizen version of the American flag.
Sovereign citizens like to create fake government agencies, including fake law enforcement agencies. One recent creation are the "Continental Marshals." Recently they've expanded to "Intercontinental Marshals." The Moorish Empire even has a "Secret Service."
Because sovereign citizens began in the US, when sovereigns get going in other countries, they borrow a lot from the US, including references to the Uniform Commercial Code, as in this Panamanian example.
One very old sovereign citizen tradition is creating bogus vigilante courts called "common law courts." Sovereign citizens in Great Britain and Australia have recently discovered this. Also included here is a U.S. "common law grand jury" document.
I'll end with this: a sovereign selling "Baby Deeds," which are to be used instead of using a birth certificate..

That's it. Until the next time, may the UCC be with you.

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More from @egavactip

Jun 15
Today I decided to go trawling for neo-Nazis, to learn something I did not previously know, and discovered an interesting (to me) story.

It starts in 1967 when the Overseas Weekly, a sometimes lurid tabloid newspaper designed for U.S. military personnel (sample below) published Image
an expose of neo-Nazis in the U.S. Army in Germany. I can't find the original article, but here, in this tweet and the next, is a summary subsequently published in Jet Magazine. Please read.


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Note that the story reveals 21-year-old medic Bobby Lee Pace of Nacogdoches,Texas, as one of the leaders of this group of American Nazi Party members in the U.S. Army in Europe.
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Read 10 tweets
Jun 12
One of the things I have been doing for around 29 years or so is what I call "trawling for sovereign citizens." Because they use so many specific phrases, you can search on those phrases (on the web or, say, a newspaper database) to find more sovereign activity.

Let's try!
One phrase often used by sovereigns today is "cestui que trust;" sovereigns believe everybody has one and you can claim it and get magical powers (see example below from a ruling on a bankruptcy filing). So let's grab a time machine and go hunting. Image
Let's use a newspaper database and go back to the 1980s to plug that phrase in. Within minutes, I've spotted an early sovereign citizen using it in a 1984 sovereignty declaration made in a newspaper (they are, though, using the phrase differently than a modern sovereign would). Image
Read 13 tweets
Jun 8
Thread. I noticed "U.S.S. Liberty" was trending and immediately knew why. On this day in 1967, during the Six Days War, Israeli air and naval forces mistakenly attacked a U.S. naval vessel, killing and wounding a large number of U.S. personnel. The attack was the result of the Image
confusion of war and several significant errors by the Israeli military and was a tragic, preventable incident. Many of the details of that incident remain disputed even today, but what is not in dispute is that for the past 60 years antisemites and anti-Israel ideologues have
used the incident to create conspiracy theories and to spread antisemitic and/or anti-Israel sentiment within the U.S. Given the current tensions and controversies, it was only natural that they would use the anniversary of the attack to continue this tactic. Image
Read 9 tweets
May 14
8th Circuit Court of Appeals rules that a sovereign citizen representing him/herself using sovereign citizen arguments would not in and of itself be disruptive/obstructive conduct serious enough for a judge to refuse to let them represent themselves.

ecf.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/24/05/2…
The ruling includes some excerpts from court, such as this one. Here, saying he is on special appearance means that he claims he is not appearing as a witness or defendant but is only there to contest the court's jurisdiction over him. Saying he is the "beneficiary" means that Image
he is claiming he is not the person being prosecuted; rather an artificial entity created by the illegitimate government is the actual target of prosecution, not the flesh and blood person. This is also why he describes himself as a third-party intervener rather than a defendant.
Read 8 tweets
May 9
This is a bizarre modernization of the right-wing mantra that the Ku Klux Klan was founded and run by Democrats. See next tweet.



"GOP lawmaker claims KKK is ‘the military wing of the Democratic Party’ in closed door meeting ahead of antisemitism hearing"cnn.com/2024/05/08/pol…
There is no such thing as "the KKK," in the sense of a singular organization (not since circa 1944). There are instead a number of tiny, independent Klan groups. All of them are right-wing, none of them have ties to "the Democratic Party." They are, though, racist & antisemitic. Image
Every version of "replacement theory" is racist; most are white supremacist. The notion that immigrants coming to the U.S. "have no interest in being Americans" is an ancient anti-immigrant trope that 200 yrs ago was used on the Irish/Germans (& every immigrant group since). Image
Read 5 tweets
Apr 29
I decided to have YouTube playing (on my smart tv) while I was working on something at home today and randomly searched for a video related to my home town, El Paso.

What I had selected turned out to be someone who had come to El Paso (for the first time) basically to look for
hordes of "illegal aliens." She knew nothing about the city before she traveled there, but started driving around downtown El Paso, at 7:45am on a Wed. Everywhere she looked, she saw more "visitors," as she referred to them. Yet to a non-paranoid person familiar with
El Paso, the video showed El Pasoans working, shopping, waiting for the bus, waiting for places to open. It also showed some probably from Juarez who had come across for the day to shop or work. Many of the streets were pretty empty, because most places weren't open yet.
Read 11 tweets

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