Mark Pitcavage Profile picture
May 10, 2022 16 tweets 10 min read Read on X
I decided to do another sovereign citizen "show and tell" thread today, prompted by having discovered a series of nifty new bogus sovereign license plates.

So buckle up, folks, it may be a bumpy ride!
Let's start with the new plates, from a Moorish sovereign citizen group, with different plates for different regions.

It took the sovereign citizen movement 50 years of making bogus plates to come up with some attractive ones.
They do look nifty. Illegal, but nifty.
Some, however, opt for more boring bogus plates.
Here's a potpourri of sovereign citizen plates.
One new twist on the sovereign citizen bogus license plate is the "religious autonomy" plate.
Hawaiian sovereign citizens have their own various plates.
Sovereign citizens don't always spend their time on bogus plates. This one's offering a mock trial you can attend.
Some make bogus ID cards, too. Or even their own birth certificates--although many sovereigns prefer to call it their "born day" rather than their "date of birth." Sometimes you even see a "date of conception" on a bogus ID.
Sovereign citizens often believe the government has created fictional duplicates of people called "strawmen," that are used for nefarious purposes. Often they use the movie The Matrix to explain this, but here a voodoo analogy is used, which is interesting.
Since 1999, sovereigns have believed regaining control of their strawman can give them access to a magical treasury account. A more recent variation--VERY popular these days--is that it's not a treasury account but a "birth certificate trust," aka a "cestui que vie" trust.
One variant of this theory says that the birth certificates end up in the Vatican.
When I read this post, I thought "okay, not bad little sovereign citizen joke there, armies, ha ha," but then I got to the end and discovered my first sovereign citizen menstrual cycle reference.
Sovereign citizens are really the ultimate example of misplaced confidence.
Another *big* trend right now, taught by some sovereign citizen gurus, is that getting a passport is necessary for becoming a sovereign citizen (or "American state national") and gives you magical immunities.
And finally, I'll leave you with one the oldest sovereign citizen beliefs of all, inherited from the tax protest movement--that paper money is not remotely close to legitimate. Only gold and silver, or notes backed by gold and silver, are legitimate money.

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More from @egavactip

Dec 13
Let's see how antisemitic Twitter is doing right now. I know; I'll search on the recent uses of the term "Holohoax," a Holocaust denial expression meant, as you no doubt figured out, to characterize the Holocaust as a hoax.

Hmmm. Quite a references. Let's look at a few.
Here's a typical one, making essentially highly qualified claims ("soldiers") to assert falsehoods. Others found plenty of documentation. Note as well their explanation for the Holocaust denial laws that some countries have. Image
This post, from an hour ago, is similar, asserting things (like there were no gas chambers killing people) for which there is an incredible abundance of evidence. Image
Read 11 tweets
Dec 12
Gather round, people, while this thread tells you of the George Santos of the mountains of West Virginia, a man named Joseph De Soto, recently elected to the WV state legislature, and who was just arrested for threatening to kill other members of that body. Image
This past year, De Soto--a recent arrival to West Virginia--ran for a seat in the state house. He beat the incumbent in the GOP primary. Unfortunately, not a single Democrat ran against him; his only opponent was from the tiny right-wing extremist Constitution Party. De Soto won. Image
De Soto boasted, though, a sterling resume--he was a "physician-scientist," biblical scholar, conservative writer, and former U.S. Army combat medic. He had three doctorates, including medicine, pharmacology, and "national security." Image
Read 11 tweets
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

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