Academic publication retrospective - Canadian pseudolaw activity 2000-2016

[DNetolitzky]

Hi folks,

I have two publications accepted by the Alberta Law Review that expand on my old academic review of Canadian pseudolaw that was published in 2016. The first of the new articles is here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... _-_Part_II

What I did is attempted to capture pseudolaw activity in Canada prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps the most interesting observation was that the Detaxer and Freeman phenomena are dead, and did not re-activate during the pandemic, with the exception of David Kevin Lindsay, who turns out to be a pretty competent rabble-rouser.

Not really a surprise, given his history.

I've also attempted to acknowledge the very important role that Quatloos played in documenting and subverting pseudolaw in Canada. There's much more that could, and probably should, be written about that. But that will have to wait til later.

I hope members of this forum find the article interesting. Comments and observations are very welcome.

Keep well!

Donald Netolitzky

[wserra]

As always, Donald, thorough and meticulously researched. Thanks for the shout-out to Q.

I emailed you a couple of comments.

[JohnPCapitalist]

Hi folks,

I have two publications accepted by the Alberta Law Review that expand on my old academic review of Canadian pseudolaw that was published in 2016. The first of the new articles is here:
[...]
I hope members of this forum find the article interesting. Comments and observations are very welcome.

I'm plowing through the article now. I thought there were a number of great turns of phrase in there, starting with the title. "The Dead Sleep Quiet" sounds like a great title for a zombie flick, and is well chosen because while the movement appears dead, it could reemerge suddenly to devour more brains without warning.

The description of the cultic milieu was delightful: "the collective garbage heap of concepts and information rejected and discarded by mainstream communities."

I also rather enjoyed the description of one of your collaborators. When I first read "Leading extremist belief sociologist Stephen Kent ", I thought this could mean that he is a leading sociologist who happens to have some extremist beliefs, before I realized you probably meant that he is the leading sociologist studying other people who have the extremist beliefs. Fortunately, since I have met Dr. Kent on a couple of occasions over the years, I had a hard time seeing him as a fire-breathing conspiracist.

My first suggestion: You refer to pseudolaw as "Put another way, pseudolaw has become a separate and international schema of law." I think it's a mistake to refer to it as a "schema of law" because that confers on it even a slight aura of legitimacy. I don't presume to be able to argue the point with someone who functions as an academic legal theorist. But I think anything that allows someone to misquote you and think this might under some circumstances have legitimacy could create problems. The trick is to find something that clearly draws the distinction without being overtly insulting.

I wrestled with this some years ago over at fellow-traveler site TheFogbow, where a number of Quatloosians also post. Many referred to various American sovereign citizens who called themselves judges as "fake judges." I felt that this meant that they were capably acting in such a way that a reasonable person might have confused them with actual judges. But these were people with tawdry delusions. I suggested that a better description would be "pretend judges," in much the same way that an 8-year-old might pretend to be a judge. In particular, I was trying to capture the delusional nature of their claimed titles, rather than the possibility that they could commit successful fraud that I saw embedded in the term "fake." The community there eventually adopted my nomenclature.

To my mind, the distinction between pseudo-law and real law is the creation process -- people with actual authority engage in a highly structured process to create the corpus of text. A key yardstick of the process, both for creating law and for using it in practice, is to avoid absurd results, and to avoid unintended consequences. Pseudo-law is created by cut-and-paste of whatever turds floated out of the creator's particular branch of the sewer of the cultic milieu. Like most cult dogma, little attention is paid to internal contradictions in the textual corpus, and absolutely no thought to preventing unintended consequences is given.

It might be argued that internal contradictions are a feature of cultic doctrine -- L. Ron Hubbard generated tens of millions of words of contradictory bloviation that are "Holy Scriptures" for Scientology. Each reader of his sacred dreck is certain that he is right with his interpretation. That has the potentially desirable side effect of pulling people closer to the group or to its central authority figure to resolve contradictions, and it leads to splintering among people who try to take the corpus of doctrine and build a competing cult using it. But I digress.

Additionally, the pseudo-law corpus can increasingly be created by search-and-replace in a word processor, switching "Australia" in for "United States" with a few moments' work. Or Google Translate can take American sovereign citizen manifestos and turn them into Reichsburger screeds with a moments' work. Never mind the references to sections of the US constitution sprinkled liberally throughout the cobbled together result. So the size and complexity of a new pseudolaw corpus is not a reason to give it legitimacy as a parallel stream of law.

I think there has to be some term that captures the fact that any pseudolaw corpus is inherently different from the law. Perhaps there's some catchy term from the worlds of virtual reality, gaming or other unreal worlds that could imply that a pseudolaw corpus is inherently inferior to real law just in the naming of it. One virtual reality domain that might contribute is fantasy sports, so we might consider this “fantasy law.” I think that captures the idea that this is more like “legal fan fiction” than it is a viable attempt to create an alternate legal universe.

A second major observation has to do with your contrast between American sovereign citizen concepts and Canadian FOTL groups. I think you may be drawing too sharp of a contrast, painting them as polar opposites in formation and in intent, but I think the picture is a bit more nuanced. You say:

Sovereign Citizens are super-nationalists who seek to reform and restore a US that lost its way, using (pseudo)law as the mechanism to cause legal and political reform, and legitimize revolutionary and reactionary activity. In contrast, Canadian Freemen-on-the-Land were a social parasite and criminal population who sought a life of “do as I please,” and “take what I want.”

For history of the dawn of the American sovereign citizen movement, I recommend the work of Mark Pitcavage, an extremism researcher with the Anti-Defamation League (@egavactip on Twitter). His published work and his document files on that period are unparalleled (and he’s no slouch at tracking the current kooks as well). You may already be in touch with him but if you're not, he's worth getting to know. He’ll certainly be able to point out the racism and antisemitism that drove some of the early leaders to advocate for reducing the power of the federal government, which drove civil rights reform that they opposed.

My sense is that the US sovereign citizen movement is not broadly driven by revolutionary political activity. Sure, some individuals and some gurus who shaped parts of the doctrine may be fire-breathing political bomb-throwers, but I believe that most of today's SovCits buy into the theory as necessary precursors to finding the magic words that would enable them to engage in the same social parasitism as their Canadian equivalents. I think the idea of revolution is partly rooted in the American origin story -- violent secession rather than peaceful negotiation as in the Canadian origin. It's ingrained in our psyche to say, "let's overthrow the tyrants."

Another facet that may come into play is the increasing growth in the strength of the US federal government versus that of the states. That has happened substantially across most of the 20th century, particularly after WWII. This also tracks with the urbanization of the country post-depression.

The growth of post-Depression entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare) look to many rural poor as a force siphoning money from rural folks to feed urban "welfare queens." Given the American civil war, this argument can easily be twisted into a racial appeal as it is increasingly moving today. Never mind that most of the rural and poor "Red" states get far more money from the federal government than they pay in federal taxes, and poor rural whites get more government handouts (in aggregate) than urban people of color.

None of that operates in Canada, which has a far weaker central government and far more power vested in the provinces. Canada also has a somewhat smaller national wound around slavery because the UK abolished slavery peacefully across the empire in the 1830s, and Canada didn’t have a civil war over the issue.

A specific thrust of growing US federal power that may affect sovereign citizen theory is the increasing federalization of gun crimes. In the US, the Feds can, and increasingly do, take over cases involving guns, drug crimes or many other types of offenses, which results in higher conviction rates, longer sentences and other hardships for those convicted. That's another reason for gun-loving SovCits to attack the legitimacy of the federal government, especially if they or someone they know, has been convicted of a federalized crime and lost gun rights as a result.

I believe that most SovCits today are motivated by economic opportunism, exactly like Canadian FOTL's. A lot of US SovCit researchers point out that many go down the rabbit hole because they've lost kids to Child Protective Services, had significant child support burdens laid against them in divorce court, had tax issues or foreclosures, or undergone general economic hardship. The only way to get out from under the judiciary that they feel has wronged them is to call for the overthrow of the whole system.

But if you look at the last thing I mentioned, general economic hardship, I have often said that this is a significant driver in adoption of SovCit beliefs. I think most researchers underestimate the burden that a driver's license, registration and insurance represents for an economically marginal worker. Registration fees might be $100 to $200 every year or two. Driver's license renewals are less. Insurance is a far bigger burden, at $600 to over $1,200 per year depending on your location. And about half of US states levy personal property tax from $200 on up based on the value of your vehicle. This means that the average person making minimum wage has to find $120+ per month for permission to pull their car out of their driveway. The US Federal minimum wage is $7.25, and I'd guess the weighted average minimum wage based on state minimums is probably about $10.00. So a minimum wage earner who's working 32 hours per week at $10.00 per hour is spending about 10% of wages simply on government required fees that don’t offer a immediate survival benefit. That’s more than they’re spending on Social Security taxes or other federal taxes.

Even more costly than the cash for compliance is the disastrous consequence for being caught without license, registration and especially insurance. Most economically marginal people can't afford to have their car seized for these issues. That would likely mean job loss and perhaps even becoming homeless. They'll never get their car out of the impound, at the rate daily storage fees mount. The increasing use of automatic license plate readers ups the odds significantly that you'll be caught for no insurance, in part because cops aren't given discretion to let people off with a warning on these issues. Fake plates, which don't trigger license plate readers explicitly, may actually give some relief, because the cop has to decide to stop someone and deal with a much bigger mess.

Some years ago, I moved and didn’t update my address with the Department of Motor Vehicles. I didn’t pay registration fees and personal property taxes on the car because I never got a bill and it slipped my mind. I got stopped by an automated plate reader for expired registration, and my car got towed. I had to rent a car so I could go to the city hall in a city I no longer lived in to settle outstanding taxes (plus interest much greater than the tax bill), get a paper receipt, go to the DMV to pay the registration fees and a ton of penalties, pay a $300 fine in person at the police department for the moving violation once I proved that I was properly registered, and then pay to get my car out of storage. All told, it cost me about $2,500 to get my car back and took about a week. Had I lacked insurance, the same stunt would have probably cost me double that, and I might have gotten a potential misdemeanor. Fortunately, I had the cash so the whole episode was merely an enormous pain in the ass, but if I hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t have been able to raise the cash to get my car back before they sold it in 45 days for unpaid storage, as the $55 daily storage fees piled up.

The promise of freedom from the expense that offers the least immediate return on the limited funds you have to stay alive is a tempting target. And if some guru says that in order to believe that you can avoid paying car-related fees you have to believe that the US government is illegitimate, then you'll probably go along with that, as long as you have the magic paperwork to fling at the cop when you're stopped for no plates and no insurance. But you’d be believing in the illegitimate government theory to enable getting something for free, not trying to get something for free to show what a hotshot revolutionary you are.

[noblepa]

I'm plowing through the article now. I thought there were a number of great turns of phrase in there, starting with the title. "The Dead Sleep Quiet" sounds like a great title for a zombie flick, . . .

Or a 1940's "Film Noir" tough-guy detective movie.

[The Observer]

I'm plowing through the article now. I thought there were a number of great turns of phrase in there, starting with the title. "The Dead Sleep Quiet" sounds like a great title for a zombie flick, . . .

Or a 1940's "Film Noir" tough-guy detective movie.

Actually, I like Neo's explanation at the end of the article - it's so Quatloosian:

Probably the best answer is, to steal a phrase from the Cthulhu Mythos, the Canadian
Freemen are not dead but “dreaming.”