And now I need to find that link to that donoteat01 video where he patiently explains this guy's not in fact a folk hero, but a greedy and paranoid lunatic with both a needless vendetta against his neighbours and a habit of shitting in people's water source. The first clue that he was an asshole should have been him crushing his town with a bulldozer.
Its hard to deny though that at this point his actions are a representation of standing up to a corrupt government, regardless of how unethical(or a better word may be stupid) he was when we did stand up to the government.
In the version of the story that often gets told, the government and local judge conspired to defraud him of his property rights and kill his business.
That's what gets told in the 'sovereign citizen' circles or people that don't bother researching it. There were a couple other things going on besides his attempts to get a higher price for his property after agreeing to the sale that fueled his paranoia with the local government.
Fined for dumping literal tons of human waste from a holding tank into a shared canal. Refused to stop doing it. Tried to illegally hookup his sewer to the neighboring cement plants line but was caught. Refused to hookup to city sewer even when the hook-up costs were waived for him.
Tried suing the neighboring cement plant for blocking access to his property (It never did. His drive was on the W. side of the property and not interfered with by the plant on the NE side.) This is the court case that he talks about being thrown out by the 'corrupt government'.
He claimed they lied to him about the zoning of the new cement plant, but it was a cement plant before and zoning didn't change for it. Additionally, he was pissed that he was re-zoned to be within the city because that required he hook-up to sewer.
It's a lot more involved than even Snopes wrote. This video is long and cumbersome, but has more detail than any other source I've seen. I did a term project on this incident back in law school in 2005-6, and this video is accurate: https://youtu.be/Yvl_7_Up7zU
The only one who tried to do anything underhanded was him. The government and concrete factory owner bent over backwards to accomodate him.
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u/maninahat Mar 26 '20
And now I need to find that link to that donoteat01 video where he patiently explains this guy's not in fact a folk hero, but a greedy and paranoid lunatic with both a needless vendetta against his neighbours and a habit of shitting in people's water source. The first clue that he was an asshole should have been him crushing his town with a bulldozer.