These "Sovereign Citizen" groups are a menace.

[Archae]

Latest example that guy in Tennessee who killed 4 people and is now on the run.

A friend of mine evicted one of them from a house he owned, the SC tried to bury him under fake liens filed in court.

My friend won against the SC, but the SC left Wisconsin and never paid the judgment.
His current whereabouts are unknown, and my friend ended up going bankrupt.

[Hoyt]

1. Most of them are ignorant white wing racist gun-nuts.

A few years ago, one of them shot a deputy and was planning to take over a county courthouse in Georgia. Not sure, but I think the Bundy Ranch militia fools are much the same.

All these type groups -- usually heavily armed and full of hatred -- are terrorist organizations.

[Gothmog]

2. The ADL did a training session on hate groups for my firm

This group is scary

[moondust]

3. Once you start believing

the law doesn't apply to you--where does it end? Waffle House? Bundy ranch? Methodist church? White House? ...

[WhiteTara]

4. Menace? They're white supremacist terrorists.

[Lee-Lee]

5. Not all of them, there are black sovereign citizen groups

The ideology can be found among some racist groups, but it is certainly not exclusive to white people of exclusive to racist beliefs .

[LanternWaste]

8. Is that a statistical standard or statistical aberration?

"there are black sovereign citizen groups..."

Is that a statistical standard or statistical aberration? If the latter, the demographic most associated with the movement becomes the de-facto face of that movement. Which is why American neo-Nazo groups are collectively referred to as white, even though one organization had seven minority groups within it.

And, as no one has argued that the SC are 'exclusively' white, you appear to be arguing against a premise no one other than you has put forth.

Kudos on your consistency, though. Who know what it will reveal next...

[Lee-Lee]

14. My experience is racism isnt an overriding factor for most of them

Most are just deep believers in the conspiracy theories that make up the SC belief system.

To ascribe them as just a racist movement, as the post I was responding to did, is an inaccurate statement.

In fact one the fasting growing segments of the SC movement is among non-whites.

Racism really isn’t a core of SC beliefs at all. Some, even many, SC’s may also hold racist views but it really isn’t a part of the SC belief system.

[Generic Brad]

6. I had a relative like that

He refused to pay taxes. Drove without a drivers license. But he was always first in line for any government benefit he could get.

[Archae]

7. He end up going to jail?

[Generic Brad]

12. He did not

Not sure what happened to his meager possessions after he died. It was a long time ago.

[TheDebbieDee]

9. You should search Youtube for videos

Of the garbage the nutjobs spew at traffic stops and in court cases...

The US judicial system is learning how to deal with them now but for years the arguments of Sovereign Citizens tied court cases in knots!

SC also started this nonsense abt secret govt accounts established in your govt name to be used to "discharge" the debts of Citizens..

[Lee-Lee]

10. They are a huge scourge for sure

They are cut from the same cloth as people like 9/11 truthers. They get this idea that they know more than everyone else and are smarter than everyone else and they thrive in thag feeling of superiority it gives them. As part of that they ignore or find reasons to discredit anything that doesn’t fit what they want to be true, misconstrue things to mean things they don’t, put full faith in things false but presented by fellow believers as truth, and take tiny shreds of what is legitimate and use that to justify 1000x more that isn’t.

Except they do it with the law. The sovereign citizen movement is essentially a giant conspiracy theory that revolves around the law and legal system in the USA being illegitimate and only they know the truth and what they say is the real legitimate law. All the courts and government and police are an illegitimate conspiracy against them.

And then, fancing themselves bigger experts than everyone else they proceed to act on that via the legal system, as you said abusing it with false filings and claims.

So in their delusion about what they feel the law says, when the system doesn’t actually work that way they see themselves as the oppressed victims, being assaulted. They see attempts to enforce the actual law as an attack on them since they think it’s all fake and being used to oppress them.

And that’s what makes them really dangerous.

[Ms. Toad]

11. It is a real problem.

Particularly their use of the courts. As someone can't just say, "that's stupid." You actually have to walk through and explain step by step why you can't use the Uniform Commercial Code to establish you are not required to have a driver's license. Not that I've ever had to do that. . .

(I drafted opinions in an appellate court, and these sovereign citizens were maddening - they had just enough connection to the law that you couldn't get away with just saying, "that's just stupid." To be the target and have to spend a fortune defending against the nonsense would be even worse. At least I was getting paid to do it.)

[KT2000]

13. WA had to install

armed State Patrol to guard certain state offices because of these nuts. The office that licensed electricians and contractors especially had problems. They mainly went there to harass employees and make a big show of their sovereign citizenshipness.

[jmowreader]

15. Tennessee citizens know how to deal with them

This is a case I followed for a long time:

https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/crime/2018/01/31/tennessee-sovereign-citizens-trial-randall-bean-heather-ann-tucci-jarraf/1084220001/

Utne Reader Condensed Version: Randall Beane, Air Force veteran, spent himself into Springsteen Debt territory. Trying to get out of it, he finds sovereign citizen guru Heather Ann Tucci-Jarraf online. It is known in the SC community that when you enter a Routing Transit Number for a Federal Reserve Bank and your social security number as an account number, into a bank’s online money transferring program, “money” will appear in your bank account and it is supposedly from your secret federal bank account. (When the transaction gets to the Fed it kicks out and the “money” is removed from your account.) Then they start whining about how the money was stolen from them. One of the biggest guys pushing this is Harvey Denson Jr., an unemployed man who washes cars for food money, lives in his automobile and goes by Harvey Dent online. He’s who Beane and TJ not the idea to do this from.

So...here’s the crime. USAA allows you to buy CDs via wire transfer. He tried to buy seven $1million CDs. Two went through. He immediately cashed them out, paid off his bills with part of the money and tried to buy a $500,000 motor home with some of the rest. The plan was to drive to San Antonio from Knoxville to instruct USAA that secret accounts really exist. He was arrested in the parking lot of the RV dealer as he prepared to leave. Heather was arrested at the White House as she tried to get in to teach Trump the secret accounts exist. (She was also going to teach Fearless Leader that she’d foreclosed on every government in the world on Christmas Day 2012,, but that is a story for another time.)

After a madcap trial and 2.5 hours of deliberation, Randy and Heather were found “unbelievably guilty” and will be sentenced shortly. Beane is very old and will probably die in prison.

Worse: Heather is a Gonzaga Law graduate and was once an attorney. I figure she had to have been at Zip’s on Division dining on Bulldog Burgers -the official fare of Gonzaga students - the day they taught law in law school. No one is really this stupid, but Heather gave it the old college try.

[Ilsa]

16. I bet the FBI is overwhelmed keeping up with these nutters. nt

[Johnny2X2X]

17. Trump directed them to focus only only Muslim Extremists

The FBI has been looking at these groups less because of Trump's direction.

[Ilsa]

18. I'm not certain I believe that the FBI would

shift that hard just because president dumpster-fire tells them to.