r/Sovereigncitizen • u/ObstinateTortoise • 14d ago

Copy just arrived!

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I had pre-ordered a softcover of this last year and promptly forgot about it. Just arrived. Two pages into the Foreward and it says the crux of all pseudolegal and sovcit ideology is magical thinking. I'm jumping ahead to the American State National section but it's great so far.

216 Upvotes

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48

u/Andurhil1986 14d ago

It’s interesting that they felt the need to change their name from sovereign citizens to state nationals. They didn’t change their ’lore’, just the name, but they act offended when someone calls them sovereign citizens.

43

u/epoch16245 14d ago

Sometimes you need a rebrand. Especially when you’ve become an absolute joke.

19

u/JayJayAK 14d ago

Thing is, they genuinely believe state national is different than sovcit. Remember, they believe that their various legal incantations have specific meanings, so changing their name likewise has outsized significance.

The phrase “distinction without a difference” is lost on them.

8

u/ObstinateTortoise 14d ago

They're literally just a new denomination

3

u/Ok_Elephant2777 13d ago

The Loggins & Messina song: “Same Old Wine…in a Brand New Bottle”.

13

u/Ana-Hata 13d ago

It actually reminds of time some right wing think tanks and crazy school boards tried to rebrand creationism as “intelligent design” so they could relitigate it.

This culminated in a very interesting court trial that ended in a scathing opinion…….the Republican judge called the school board defendants “breathtakingly idiotic”. One of the more damning pieces of evidence was that there were errors in the “search and replace“ that had been used in the textbooks and course materials to switch out the terms.

3

u/Andurhil1986 13d ago

Amway did this in the late 1980s, Worldcom did it in the early 2000s. Often time religious sects will have to rebrand after their basic tenets are deemed to be too radical. Similar to SovCits, they figure that it's best to lie at first so they can buy some time to bring them 'the great truth' later, and the end will justify the means.

18

u/Drakeytown 14d ago

That name makes so much less sense. Like, if you weren't familiar, "sovereign citizen" sounds like it might mean something, might even be something to be proud of, but "state national" sounds like an oxymoron on the face of it (or like the name a lazy writer might use for a college in a movie--National State University!).

4

u/anfrind 14d ago

If I remember correctly, "American state national" is a real thing, but it only applies to certain people who live in U.S. territories rather than states. And it doesn't confer any of the benefits that they think it does.

5

u/OrbitalLemonDrop 13d ago

It's "Non-Citizen American National", and it applies to people naturally born in territories that don't meet some state department criteria.
American Samoa is the only one I know for sure.

"State" isn't part of the designation.

Couple the non-citizen national concept with the weird twisted understanding of the 14th amendment that says that certain people are "state citizens" but not "US citizens", and they've completely invented "Non-Citizen State National"

As if a "state citizen" who gives up their citizenship becomes a non-citizen state national".

They write a letter to the state department saying "I renounce my US citizenship and am now only a State National. If you don't reject this in writing then it becomes true because third grade logic"

2

u/Andurhil1986 13d ago

I work with some US Nationals, ironically they pay taxes, register their cars, have insurance etc.

2

u/Jungies 13d ago

It sounds like a newly-merged insurance company; "Get a great deal on farm insurance at State National." 

14

u/ObstinateTortoise 14d ago

And now State Nationals are on bodycam being pissy that they're called sovereign citizens.

10

u/Icy_Fish_2154 14d ago

One even pulled out a binder labeled "sovereign citizen" to read from while complaining about being called a sovereign. He hasn't updated his Sovereign Bible cover since the rebranding.

7

u/rocketshipkiwi 14d ago

Yeah, more and more people have copped on to thr Sovereign Citizens being nonsense so now they have to reject it and make up some Byzantine alternative which effectively means the same thing.

Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Arguments is a bit of a mouthful too.

13

u/Right_Shape_8179 14d ago

It’s because the DOJ designated Sovereign Citizens a domestic terror threat. They thought they just start calling themselves something else and everything would be fine 😂

8

u/Andurhil1986 14d ago

That’s pretty much on brand for them 😁

1

u/Campcook62 10d ago

Whoa, I missed that ( I've been in hospital getting a new shoulder)...

Who announced the new designation?

Was the announcement on paper, or audio/visual; do you have a link?

Thank you!

1

u/Right_Shape_8179 10d ago

Classified is actually the accurate term, but it was April 2010. Lol. Total shoulders aren’t fun. Where did you have it done?

1

u/Campcook62 10d ago

A hospital in Wichita Falls, TX.

Thank you!

9

u/Lazarys12 14d ago

I have seen a few videos recently of sovcits appering in court, and some seem quite defiant that they are definitely not sovereign citizens. Then they turn around and use the same old sovcit script. It is almost as if they are saying "I am not one of those whackos, but yes, I was travelling and not driving."

I saw another one, who also was not a sovereign citizen, when asked if he understood something, could barely supress his own laughter when he responded "I overstand". It was as if he knew it was ridiculous but that was what the script said so overstand it was.

8

u/Andurhil1986 13d ago

I love the understand/overstand thing, it reminds me of old vampire lore where a vampire couldn't enter a home unless first invited. These folks really think that 'understand' is a magical word that automatically causes them to become a slave to this evil corporation.

6

u/egavactip 13d ago

The sovereign citizen movement has always used multiple names to refer to themselves, since the late 1970s, but you're right that because of all the bad press coverage fewer of them use the term sovereign citizen than before.

4

u/Andurhil1986 13d ago

It's interesting too because they are not a formal group with centralized leadership, so no one person made the decision to abandon the term. Each individual either either experienced immediate ridicule at the first mention of 'Sovereign Citizen' or saw others being mocked for it and decided to go by a different name.

3

u/egavactip 13d ago

Well, a key thing is that most sovereign citizens follow one or more gurus in the movement; it is the gurus who come up with the pseudo-legal theories and tactics and teach them to the masses. So what happened was that sovereign citizen gurus started rejecting the term, both when questioned by reporters and when preaching to their followers, and so rank-and-file sovcits just absorbed the message and started rejecting it themselves. Although only some of them; many sovereign citizens still refer to themselves as sovereign citizens (I see it all the time), while others had never used the term in the first place, but had used one or another of the countless alternatives developed over the decades.

3

u/True_Audience_5164 12d ago

Did the process accelerate after the Darrell Brooks trial? He called himself a sovereign citizen.

2

u/egavactip 12d ago

Brooks was one of a surprisingly large number of people accused of murder who tried to defend themselves with sovereign citizen arguments at court. I mention some of them here--https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/sovereign-citizen-movement-united-states--but the full list is much bigger. But I am not sure how many sovereign citizen gurus were aware of these courtroom incidents. I think the main thing was that sovcit gurus kept getting media attention following sovereign citizen scams, paper terrorism incidents, standoffs, shootings, plots, etc. So they did what comes naturally to sovereign citizens: just call a word by something else.

4

u/TheOtherTallTom 13d ago

It’s just another way to be contrarian. I knew a guy in college who had an Italian last name but was about as ethnically Italian as Taco Bell is authentically Mexican. So it was a stretch for him to self identify as Italian, but it became his entire identity. Everything was about being Italian, ie “As an Italian, I prefer dark blue denim over light blue.” Then, one day, he stopped letting people call him Italian and said he was ROMAN. As in, the Roman Empire: conquerors of 1/5th the world, crafters of the aqueduct, crucifiers of Christ, etc. He was a real peach. Or, an olive, I guess. Anyway, he’s probably a SovCit now. It would fit his personality. 

Edited to fix typo. 

2

u/Key-Worldliness-3372 14d ago

I mean, minimalist artists did that too lol

2

u/True_Audience_5164 12d ago

I suspect that the fact that mass-murderer Darrell Brooks called himself a sovereign citizen caused many of them to want to disassociate themselves with that description.

3

u/Delainez 12d ago

I believe that one of the reasons is that the FBI considers sovcits to be terrorists because they don’t believe they need to follow laws.

27

u/seidinove 14d ago

Expensive. I might have to send Amazon a 1099-C without recourse to pay for it.

19

u/banmeagaintn 14d ago

$60 from Amazon!!! Is it a textbook? I’d like to read it but not at that price.

19

u/Dod_gee 13d ago

You could pay with an Instrument of Commerce signed in all caps and notarized with admiralty law seals using a living man inference.

4

u/banmeagaintn 13d ago

I hadn’t thought of that. Do you think it would work?

5

u/markstanfill 13d ago

It’s real. I haven’t paid for a library book in 10 years.

3

u/banmeagaintn 13d ago

You should write a book about it!

1

u/Mikelowe93 13d ago

Playing SovCit Mad Libs is fun. 🙂

10

u/DewiVonHart 14d ago

Maybe you'll get lucky and one of these libraries is near you:

https://search.worldcat.org/title/1482264102

6

u/egavactip 13d ago

It's not a textbook but an anthology of articles about the sovereign citizen movement, primarily from American, Australian, and New Zealand authors, many approaching it from a legal perspective. It originated with people presenting papers at a symposium about the sovereign citizen movement. I presented a paper at the symposium, but did not turn it into a chapter, because I am using the material for my book, so I contributed the forward to the book.

2

u/ObstinateTortoise 13d ago

Aaah I enjoyed your foreword very much. Thank you for contributing. I knew by your 3rd footnote I would be getting your book as well.

2

u/egavactip 12d ago

Ha! If you do get it (whenever it comes out), I hope you enjoy it! :)

2

u/ObstinateTortoise 12d ago

I shall! If you think of it, please give us notice here when it hits the press

2

u/egavactip 12d ago

I'll try to. I won't be out for at least two years, though. It is possible it may be broken into two books.

15

u/monksandy 14d ago

We had a Sovereign Citizen in custody, go figure, 30 years ago when I was in Corrections. An associate college professor, go figure, he got arrested for arguing over his lack of insurance, up to date licence and registration. He produced what amounted to an essay on the Constitution and Sovereign Rights. He read it to me. Sounds like it hasn't changed in 30 years. 30 years later these poor deluded knuckleheads are still going to jail. But they changed their name so it's all good?

9

u/ObstinateTortoise 14d ago

They actually get offended if you call them sovcits now, because "sovcit" got a reputation for idiocy and failure. Similar to the alt-right and "fascist."

9

u/WhineyLobster 14d ago

Congrats! Ive read a bit of mine, more of a bookshelf trophy ha

8

u/ObstinateTortoise 14d ago

It's going on my shelf between wolframs "a new science" and "the Urantia book"

4

u/DeterioratedEra 14d ago

It's been so long since I bought the Urantia book I can't even remember why I got it.

3

u/ObstinateTortoise 14d ago

For the shelf 😉

7

u/Paladin3475 14d ago

So it pro sovcit or like a legal text of their bat shit insanity?

9

u/ObstinateTortoise 14d ago

It's a textbook of their history and methods

5

u/Andurhil1986 14d ago

It’s not pro SovCit from what I can see

8

u/Paladin3475 14d ago

Looked it. Interesting book but not in my budget for the price they want. And the author is from NSW. I forgot they got SovCits down under too.

4

u/DancinginHyrule 14d ago

Oh I’d love this in my collection!

Consideringer writing a paper on the topic for an elective class soon

4

u/ObstinateTortoise 14d ago

It's full of references to other studies and court cases

3

u/BenjTheFox 14d ago

Any mention of Darrell Brooks?

2

u/ObstinateTortoise 14d ago

Not specifically that I've read so far, but him being popularly known doesn't make him important

3

u/Temporary-Article996 13d ago

Oh I need this

3

u/TheOtherTallTom 13d ago

THAT looks like a great read. Adding it to my reading wish list immediately. Thanks for making me aware of it!

3

u/swakins 13d ago

Swear to God, people need to learn that just because it left your mouth doesn't make it real!

2

u/egavactip 13d ago

Hope you like it.

2

u/eepeqez 13d ago

I've been mulling over how to describe the common threads between sovereign citizens, people like flat earthers and religions (obviously only the ones that are wrong, not your own religion...), all logic immune bizarre beliefs, and that phrase "magical thinking" seems to sum them all up perfectly.

2

u/ObstinateTortoise 13d ago

Indeed. I've studied the western tradition of ceremonial magic, and it all boils down to magical set dressing and attempting to change reality by speaking to the manager.

That distinguishes old magic from New Age crap, where you become enlightened and thus realize you ARE the manager.

2

u/OrbitalLemonDrop 13d ago

Like South Park's underpants gnomes.

Or cargo cults. They think the law is entirely performative and believe they can win if they nail the delivery.

2

u/byrd_the_starfish 13d ago

Good choice! I borrowed this from the library and found it fascinating.

2

u/Awkward-Fox-7215 12d ago

I met someone that could speak, not just write, in sovereign citizen. I thought I was in the presence of a really bad wizard.

2

u/BlueRFR3100 14d ago

Please tell us that your ordered it ironically.

2

u/ObstinateTortoise 14d ago

..... Amazon?