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Feb 17 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
My sharp-eyed colleague has a point about these Canadian "No trespassing flyers" directed at law enforcement. The language on them is not specifically sovereign, but it was quite possibly inspired by similar sovereign notices.
People can download these flyers online and print them out (not sharing the link). Here's an example from last September: Image
For decades, American sovereign citizens have been creating special "no trespassing" signs directed explicitly at police & government officials. In fact, this particular sign below, which is being sold online, actually has a history dating back to the 1980s (or even 70s). Image
Just earlier today, doing research on anti-government extremists in the 1980s, I came across a newspaper article about an extremist who had a sign with that exact same language (you can tell it's dated because of "HEW," a gov't dept that ended in 1979).

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More from @egavactip

Mark Pitcavage Profile picture
Feb 19
I was looking at some old-emails today and came across an interesting 1999 communication from a staff member of the John Birch Society that is kind of interesting, so I thought I would share it. The context of his e-mail is that in 1998 I had published a report on a certain type
of scam both aimed at & propagated by anti-gov't extremists. In that report, I discussed the problem of warnings by the gov't of a scam marketed to people distrustful of the gov't, and suggested that some fringe pubs, like the JBS's New American, might be approachable to warn. Image
In 1999, the then-research director for the JBS saw my comment and wrote me an e-mail about it, essentially gently pushing back at my suggestion--for interesting reasons. This e-mail I reproduce here. I have not included the name of the research director, who is still alive and
Read 6 tweets
Mark Pitcavage Profile picture
Feb 15
I'd like to share in this thread some of the interesting findings in our new report, "Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2021."

adl.org/murder-and-ext…
We were able to identify at least 29 people killed in the U.S. in 2021 by domestic extremists. This is 6 more than in 2020, but still less than in previous recent years. The main reason? Those years had more extremist shooting sprees, which cause death totals to rise. A lot.
Extremist shooting sprees were behind all the highest yearly death tolls except 1995, the year of the Oklahoma City bombing.
Read 12 tweets
Mark Pitcavage Profile picture
Feb 4
The earliest murder I can point to being connected to the militia movement is an interesting story. I propose to tell it in this thread.
One of the pioneers of the militia movement was Mark "Mark from Michigan" Koernke, the mustachioed bundle of braggadocio who became popular in the early 1990s with his pass-around VHS tapes and his shortwave radio program. His sign off? "Long live the Republic. Death to the
New World Order. We shall prevail."

Though the big militia group in Michigan was the Michigan Militia, w/units around the state, Koernke had his own little militia of followers, which he called by various names, ranging from the Michigan Militia-at-Large to the Colonial Marines.
Read 16 tweets
Mark Pitcavage Profile picture
Jan 30
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.
Read 24 tweets
Mark Pitcavage Profile picture
Jan 15
This is a video showing British sovereign citizens doing things that would be so typical for American sovereign citizens. To provide a little context: "common law courts" are bogus courts that sovereign citizens sometimes establish notionally or actually, and which are typically
used as pretexts for other actions ranging from "paper terrorism"-style harassment to the sort of arrests threatened here. Common law courts in the sovcit movement date back to the late 1970s but became a huge fad in the movement in the 1990s, when scores of them sprung up. This
resulted in a lot of arrests, deflating the fad, so the only have appeared occasionally since (though they do create similar entities, including county assemblies and jural societies). Another thing the sovereign citizen frequently does, like the "constables" here, is to create
Read 4 tweets
Mark Pitcavage Profile picture
Jan 14
It's Friday, so let's Learn about Extremism! Today I want to tell you a little about one of the many women who played important roles on the far right in the United States.

I present to you Mary Lyrl Van Hyning (1892-1973), who was a prominent far right activist from the 1930s
through the 1950s, as the editor of an antisemitic and conspiratorial publication, Women's Voice, as a publisher and distributor of a variety of right-wing tracts, and as a speaker and conference organizer.

She also could rock a hat.
Van Hyning got her start with the isolationist Mother's Movement in the years before World War II. She and other far right women in Chicago formed the group known as "We, the Mothers, Mobilize for America, Inc."

In early 1941, Van Hyning began what would be a 20 year career of
Read 19 tweets

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