Alice in Sovereign Citizenland
[ by Charles Cameron — offering context for a remarkable court appearance ]
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David Hall, a member of the Sovereign Citizen movement, appeared before Judge John “Jay” Hurley, Broward’s First Appearance and Extradition Judge, and the exchange in the upper panel below is a transcript of a portion of their interaction:
The lower panel is taken from Alice in Wonderland, a book written by the individual Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson — a mathematician and logician at Christ Church, Oxford — in the person and under the assumed name of Lewis Carroll.
The distinction drawn by Mr Hall between the individual and person who go by the name “David Hall” follows much the same surreal logic as that of Lewis Carroll’s Red Knight. Judge Hurley handles the matter with gravitas and grace, as you can see:
Hat-tip: JJ MacNab, author of The Seditionists: Inside the Explosive World of Anti-Government Extremism in America
March 27th, 2016 at 7:11 pm
Turtles all the way down.
March 27th, 2016 at 9:52 pm
The sovereign citizens believe in the power of words and recursions to a really remarkable degree. Have you looked into their beliefs, Charles?
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Apparently (and I may have this wrong) they feel that any interaction with the government, particularly where one signs a piece of paper, converts a person into a part of an apparatus not unlike the Matrix, in which those people lose all their rights.
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Here’s another video MacNab posted. The guy keeps referring to himself as “the living natural man,” which distinguishes him from that component of the Matrix. Apparently flags with gold fringe are part of the apparatus that forces people into the Matrix.
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But it all does contain some interesting recursion and wordplay.
March 27th, 2016 at 11:32 pm
— and a longer version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rUPFXbADvE
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I once received an introduction to Sovereign Citizen ideas around taxation by an enthusiastic member, but found it dull as well as dubious. I’m certainly intrigued by the movement as an aspect of conspiracism that also includes overtly religious aspects that I consider important to track, but don’t quite know where it fits in my ontology.
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Here’s a related article I came across on 3 Quarks Daily today — Here comes pseudolaw, a weird little cousin of pseudoscience
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I’d likem to get hold of MacNab’s book..