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.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Mark Pitcavage

Mark Pitcavage Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @egavactip

Sep 21
Thread

The sovereign citizen movement emerged in Wyoming in the 1980s. By the mid-1980s, sovereign citizens were printing their various notices and declarations in the classified sections of Wyoming newspapers.
Here's (part of) a 1985 declaration by sovereign citizen Murray Watson claiming that he has signed no contracts that would put him under the jurisdiction of admiralty law (a common sovcit belief is that a conspiracy replaced the common law with admiralty/maritime law). Image
A couple of months later, John Allemand Jr. published a similar document. Here's a segment: Image
Read 8 tweets
Aug 20
This is a little thread about the benefits of phraseology searching when monitoring/conducting research on extremism, whether you are a scholar, journalist, activist or something else.

My example is from the sovereign citizen movement, which is peculiarly susceptible to this Image
methodology (as you'll see), but it is broadly applicable for many different types of extremism, though much less useful for movements, such as the boogaloo movement, that tend to communicate primarily in memes.
I'm going to start with something I found in an old newspaper. My original research question was basically, "When did sovereign citizens first start using the phrase 'threat, duress and coercion' in their documents or on other documents, such as when signing a driver's license?"
Read 15 tweets
Aug 6
This is a thread that seems as if it is about one person, but there's a TWIST, and it's actually about another person, and about how the influential extremists are not always the ones you read about on the news or hear about on social media.

Ready?
Last night I thought about making a post about the first prominent white supremacist I met face to face. After some thinking, I realized it was probably Nord Davis, a Christian Identity adherent from North Carolina. I saw him at an event in Ohio in 1996 not long before his death.
Davis's greatest notoriety probably came after his death, as it was revealed that he'd had ties to the family of 1996 Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph. Here's Nord in the early 1970s, when he was running for office on the far right American Party ticket. Image
Read 19 tweets
Aug 3
I'm in procrastination mode today, so let's talk about sovereign citizen license plates, an always interesting subject. I've made hundreds of posts about sovcit license plates, so why not a few more?

Specifically, I want to talk about their origins and early use! Image
The sovereign citizen fixation with license plates pre-dates the movement itself (which began to cohere in the late 1970s). It starts with its parents: the tax protest movement and the Posse Comitatus. Anti-gov't extremists really did not like having to have (& pay for) plates.
Some simply wouldn't use them. Here is tax protest guru Vaughn Ellsworth arguing for this tactic in 1975. Image
Read 16 tweets
Jul 5
Thread: Carlo Maria Vigano, the Italian (now former) archbishop, refused (like some other extreme-right Catholics) to accept the 1960s Vatican II modernization of the Church and was outspoken in



"Pope Excommunicates Trump-Loving Ultra-Conservative"thedailybeast.com/carlo-maria-vi…
expressing far-right beliefs. When recently accused of "schism" in the Church, his defiant response focused on conspiracy theories involving "international Freemasonry" and accused the Church of being "inclusive, immigrationist, eco-sustainable, and gay-friendly." The inclusion
of completely secular issues such as immigration and the environment illustrates that he is waging an ideological battle as much if not more than a theological one. So do his references to classic conspiracy theories over the Bilderbergers and the Trilateralists. Image
Read 6 tweets
Jun 29
So this evening I was randomly looking at old Ku Klux Klan newspaper articles--because I don't have a life--and came across an interesting phenomenon. It started with a wire service article about a college sophomore, Helen May Marcell, who wrote a song called [cont'd] Image
"Daddy Stole Our Last Clean Sheet and Joined the Ku Klux Klan." Shortened versions of this tidbit started appearing in newspapers all around the country in 2024--but with a strange twist. Miss Marcell was from Ottawa, Kansas, but when newspapers repeated the factoid, most of
the papers simply flat-out lied and substituted their own location or a nearby town, instead of the student's actual location. Obviously, these newspapers could not have all independently come up with this, so someone had to have sent this out with the suggestion of changing the
Read 8 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(