Mark Pitcavage Profile picture
Senior Research Fellow, ADL Center on Extremism. Historian, long-time expert on right-wing extremism. Long-lost scion of Sidney Greenstreet. My own views only.
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Sep 21 8 tweets 4 min read
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
Aug 20 15 tweets 5 min read
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.
Aug 6 19 tweets 6 min read
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.
Aug 3 16 tweets 6 min read
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.
Jul 5 6 tweets 3 min read
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
Jun 29 8 tweets 2 min read
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
Jun 15 10 tweets 5 min read
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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Jun 12 13 tweets 6 min read
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
Jun 8 9 tweets 4 min read
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
May 14 8 tweets 3 min read
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
May 9 5 tweets 2 min read
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
Apr 29 11 tweets 3 min read
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
Apr 25 5 tweets 2 min read
I've long been interested in "Nobel Prize Winners Gone Bad," like William Shockley, who later fixated on racist "intelligence" theories. Today I came across one I didn't previously know about: Frederick Soddy, winner of the 1921 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. And co-author of this: Image The British Soddy was co-author of this 1939 pamphlet, "Abolish Private Money, or Drown in Debt," complete with antisemitic stereotype on the cover. His fellow author, Walter Crick was uncle to another famous Nobel Prize winner, Francis Crick. Crick was an outspoken antisemite. Image
Apr 19 6 tweets 2 min read
Earlier today I posted a tweet noting today is the anniversary of the OKC bombing. The bombing took many lives & fractured or damaged the lives of countless others (such as families of victims). Beyond that, it affected still other lives in unexpected ways, including my own. Through a chance occurrence, I had gotten interested in right-wing anti-government extremism the year before and by the end-1994/beginning-1995 was pretty interested in it. But I was a military history grad student finishing up a dissertation on something very different.
Apr 6 35 tweets 8 min read
I’ve been thinking about several extremist-related murders recently. Two days ago, I shared the details of one incident.

In this thread, I will share details related to a murder allegedly committed by Dejaune Anderson. Image I want to make clear that this is a murder and there are details that are disturbing. Please do not continue if you are easily upset.
Apr 4 9 tweets 2 min read
One of the things I do is track extremist-related murders (ideological and otherwise), and I thought I would tell you a little bit about a recent deadly incident involving white supremacist prison gang members. Image On November 16, the bodies of a man and a woman were found, covered up but not buried, near the Rock Creek Natural Area in King County, Washington. The man, Robert Riley, was 57; the woman, Ashley Williams, was 34.

An investigation began.
Feb 20 18 tweets 7 min read
Hello, folks. Today I want to take you on a guided tour (🧵) of the findings of a new report on an important subject: extremist-related murders in the United States.

I want to tell you about murder and extremism for the year 2023. ⬇️

adl.org/resources/repo…
ADL Report: Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2023 In 2008, we began compiling a dataset of all (domestic) extremist-related murders in the U.S. we could find, back to 1970. Since 2015, using that data, ADL has released annual reports analyzing the deaths caused by extremists (you can find the reports at ). adl.org
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Jan 31 19 tweets 6 min read
This is a thread about a Ku Klux Klan group that got what was coming to them when they messed with the wrong people in North Carolina in 1958.

If you'd like to know more, read on. The story starts with James "Catfish" Cole, a Klan leader in North & South Carolina in the 1950s/1960s. Cole usually tried to terrorize Black Americans, but in the late 1950s he expanded his hate to Robeson County, where the local population was divided between whites, Blacks & Image
Jan 13 8 tweets 2 min read
His argument is not all that coherent, but it boils down to 1) the Capitol storming was just a "5-hour riot" and 2) they did not deny the authority of the existing political order and attempt to put some alternative order in its place.

Let's take these in order. Image First, it's important to acknowledge that the actual storming of the Capitol was merely the final and, thankfully, unsuccessful part of a series of acts that occurred in many states and at many levels, from the day after the election up to Jan 6.
Jan 5 8 tweets 2 min read
I was doing some sovereign citizen monitoring today and went down a rabbit hole that resulted in me discovering that sovereigns in Arkansas have created their own "common law court."

There's an interesting history behind this.
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Anti-government extremists began creating their own bogus judicial/quasi-judicial entities with the Posse Comitatus in the early 1970s. At the time, the focus was on creating "citizens grand juries."

In the early 1980s, however, some anti-government extremists began to conceive
Dec 19, 2023 13 tweets 4 min read
Your holiday gift from me, friends, is a new look at right-wing domestic terrorism in the U.S. I examined terror incidents (attacks & plots) from 2017-2022 to look at trends in right-wing terrorism.

Report below⬇️; this thread shares some findings.

adl.org/resources/repo… The key takeaway is that, although there has been a long term increase in right-wing terror incidents since the mid-2000s, there's been a sharp rise in recent years. From 2017 to 2022, we've conservatively documented 67 such incidents. Image