Man gets 40 years for fake legal filings

[The Observer]

Sovcitizenry seems to start most commonly when people have revocations, expired tags, delinquent tickets, and so on, because they want to find loopholes (or perhaps just legitimate means, at first) that allow them to keep living their lives the exact same way with no troublesome interruptions. Randy seems to be of the less common, but sweeter and juicier, white collar sovcit cultivar.

I have remarked upon this issue before in regards to tax deniers/protesters as well. Most of them seem to either have a financial crisis or an expectation that they should be doing far better financially than they currently are. They also seem to have the perception that they are smarter/superior than their peers; again, they are tragically wrong. All of this starts feeding into a state of denial as they look to blame others (the government, the "system", the rich, etc.) for why they are behind the 8-ball. As an example you may want to search for "Richard Simkanin" on the threads here for a sad story about a businessman who flushed everything he had down the metaphorical toilet (including his health and life) in order to keep believing the lies that he didn't really owe taxes.

[AnOwlCalledSage]

Most of them seem to either have a financial crisis or an expectation that they should be doing far better financially than they currently are.

Whilst this a US topic, as we've ventured into general Quatloos advice, the UK topic doesn't have quite the same bias.

Our system of PAYE makes avoiding tax very difficult for a normal fool to find themselves too far down the rabbit hole. Instead the UK FOTLer seems to consist mainly of people who owe relatively small amounts of local taxes or motoring fines, converting these small amounts into losing their houses by following stupid advice. We have legal protections for those who cannot rather than won't pay. Willfulness has to be proved! Even our failing to pay their mortgage morons only get themselves into that position by ignoring the numerous statutory and legal protections a home owner has.

All tax systems will have people who don't like paying tax but it's the sheer bloody-mindedness of the UK FOTLer to lose everything for no reason that makes the UK topic a thing of beauty.

[AndyK]

Mr/Mrs/Ms Macdowell

1 - Please post a photograph of yourself wearing the helmet you use to keep your head from exploding while trying to understand the sovs.

2 - It's important to separate the sovs from the tax evaders/protesters. Although they may overlap or merge, they have distinct separate roots.

The TPs are in it for the money, pure and simple. They don't want to pay taxes so they chase down ways to evade them.

Sov mentality, on the other hand, seems to arise from the concept of "bad things are happening / have happened to me because of someone's/something's else fault or actions" For instance:

I got fired and lost my job and then my house because someone else had it in for me.
State Child Welfare took my children from me for no valid reason.
My village has ordered me to remove my treasured antique car parts collection from my front lawn.
And so on.

However, once someone starts down either the TP or Sov path, they find a treasure trove of supportive information on the Internet; stories of how to beat the system, avoid taxes, recover your self, etc. That's when the two paths often converge and lead to the same rabbit hole.

Good luck with your thesis and please post a link when it's available. I suggest you start a new thread for it so it doesn't get lost.

[khmacdowell]

and just a few posts ago, someone was saying a 40 year sentence in this case was ridiculous. We showed him, dinna we?

In all seriousness, financial liability notwithoverstanding, I feel like sentences like this with the understanding parole chances increase dramatically upon genuine renunciation of the ideology behind the fraud are the best compromise, especially since Rosado's last public breaths were incoherent ranting about the injustice he was experiencing - not even the barest hint of remorse. The only slight problem is the remaining true believers would take this as evidence of the very brainwashing they claim exists. However, I err on the side of not indulging fraudsters, paper terrorists, straw terrorists, or even living flesh and blood terrorists.

Sovcitizenry seems to start most commonly when people have revocations, expired tags, delinquent tickets, and so on, because they want to find loopholes (or perhaps just legitimate means, at first) that allow them to keep living their lives the exact same way with no troublesome interruptions. Randy seems to be of the less common, but sweeter and juicier, white collar sovcit cultivar.

[...] As an example you may want to search for "Richard Simkanin" on the threads here for a sad story about a businessman who flushed everything he had down the metaphorical toilet (including his health and life) in order to keep believing the lies that he didn't really owe taxes.

Rubbing my hands together in anticipation. Listening to the Leighton Ward vs. Lawyer recording legitimately made me sad. The lawyer even says "has anyone ever agreed with you except for the judge in your fake court (David Wynn Miller I believe)?" and Ward replies "that doesn't matter." He doesn't even have a magical incantation in response; he's just obviously committed at that point, literally to the point of taking 20 years on the chin. The "just keep digging" technique seems pretty universal.

Ultimately, I think the reason this whole spectrum is so intransigent is because confirmation bias is guaranteed: it either "works," whether temporarily or through sheer coincidence unrelated to any other facts of the scam/case, which proves it's real, or it doesn't work, which proves it's real because the corporation is making an example.

Most of them seem to either have a financial crisis or an expectation that they should be doing far better financially than they currently are.

[...] All tax systems will have people who don't like paying tax but it's the sheer bloody-mindedness of the UK FOTLer to lose everything for no reason that makes the UK topic a thing of beauty.

I knew the schemes were common everywhere in the Commonwealth and U.S.A. but now I'm interested in regional idiosyncrasies. For the most part it just seems to be ported verbatim, which sort of just proves how asinine it all is, but I guess preserving aspects that are more harmful in a regional adaptation is asiten.

[...]

I got fired and lost my job and then my house because someone else had it in for me.
State Child Welfare took my children from me for no valid reason.
My village has ordered me to remove my treasured antique car parts collection from my front lawn.
And so on.

However, once someone starts down either the TP or Sov path, they find a treasure trove of supportive information on the Internet; stories of how to beat the system, avoid taxes, recover your self, etc. That's when the two paths often converge and lead to the same rabbit hole.

[...]

That's a good point - that the entry point may vary but they're assimilated into the larger collective as they get more committed. The CPS component I only learned of recently. That, even more than financial woe, indicates to me that it's just an outlet to deny culpability and feel inherently entitled to redress. "I love my kids so let me find proof that it's society that's evil." A strange juxtaposition, since across the board sovcits emphasize autonomy and yet only view others as capable of incompetence or wrongdoing.

Psychoanalysis doesn't seem to explain the "I've already put 10 judges in jail" bit as well, though. I guess a healthy dose of psychosis is just the glue that binds it all together.

[Gregg]

Most of them seem to either have a financial crisis or an expectation that they should be doing far better financially than they currently are.

Whilst this a US topic, as we've ventured into general Quatloos advice, the UK topic doesn't have quite the same bias.

Our system of PAYE makes avoiding tax very difficult for a normal fool to find themselves too far down the rabbit hole. Instead the UK FOTLer seems to consist mainly of people who owe relatively small amounts of local taxes or motoring fines, converting these small amounts into losing their houses by following stupid advice. We have legal protections for those who cannot rather than won't pay. Willfulness has to be proved! Even our failing to pay their mortgage morons only get themselves into that position by ignoring the numerous statutory and legal protections a home owner has.

All tax systems will have people who don't like paying tax but it's the sheer bloody-mindedness of the UK FOTLer to lose everything for no reason that makes the UK topic a thing of beauty.

Absolutely true. I have noticed that most of the UK people are complaining about Council Tax, which in the US would kind of be like local tax and its piddling amounts compared to our income tax.

[DNetolitzky]

I knew the schemes were common everywhere in the Commonwealth and U.S.A. but now I'm interested in regional idiosyncrasies. For the most part it just seems to be ported verbatim, which sort of just proves how asinine it all is, but I guess preserving aspects that are more harmful in a regional adaptation is asiten.

I think it is helpful to separate pseudolaw and its objectives and the characteristics of pseudolaw host populations on a functional basis.

If pseudolaw worked, it would do something very specific. Pseudolaw shifts the balance of authority away from state, court, and institutional actors, and towards individuals. Pseudolaw is therefore broadly appealing to any community which views its treatment by 'conventional authority' as unfair. Pseudolaw makes 'conventional authority' illegal.

What changes between affected (or infected) communities is the narrative of grievance and the narrative of empowerment. I've done some work tracing the spread of pseudolaw into new jurisdictions and communities, and these 'leaps' are not so much a question of modifying pseudolaw, so much as embedding its concepts in a new conspiratorial mythology.

There are also legal adaptations too - the Sovereign Citizen parent version of pseudolaw doesn't work terribly well in Commonwealth countries, but once a bit of 'localization' occurred in Canada around 2000, the result was readily transferable to the UK, the Republic of Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.

(To be fair, the Australian situation is a bit complicated because in that jurisdiction pseudolaw entered multiple times from multiple sources. But the Canadian version was probably the 'best fit'.)

I second AndyK's observation to not confuse tax protestors vs Sovereign Citizens. In Canada we had an analogous split - what we called Detaxers vs Freemen-on-the-Land. The former was greed based (with a smidge of ideology), the latter much more political/ideological (though very, very shallow). The Detaxers imploded once the tax man proved successful. The Freemen were much more resistant to failure, and instead still root around trying to find the missing last piece to obtain their Freeloader lifestyles.

One of the reasons the Sovereign Citizen movement holds such emotional and intellectual power is it provides a way for disenfranchised and marginalized people to re-cast themselves as the last remaining true defenders of the US way of life and Constitution. That's a pretty powerful ideological foundation, especially in times where there is a perception that government has gone off course.

If you are interested, I have a couple conference papers published which focus on these questions:

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... _Pseudolaw

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... gal_System

Something else which may be worth a look is a recent book by Spencer Dew: The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali (University of Chicago Press, 2019). The Moorish branch of pseudolaw never made much sense to me, but Dew has done a very credible job of trying to explain those communities and their perspectives.

My chief concern is I think Dew understates the negative effects of Moorish pseudolaw, and largely ignored its association with criminal activities and gang culture, but, at a minimum, that book is the best explanation I've seen the Moorish legal belief framework, told from the insiders' perspective.

Good luck on your thesis!

Donald Netolitzky

[notorial dissent]

Observer has a good point. US sovcits seem to come in four varieties:

• 1 ones who have (generally big)tax issues and no real idea or way of dealing with them otherwise,
  
  2 ones who have smallish tax and/or bureaucratic issues, seemingly unmanageable money/bills/mortgage problems, or more likely family services serious issues and can't/won't deal with them,
  
  3 ones who regrettably have nothing better to do with their lives since they are going nowhere and doing nothing and may rightfully or wrongfully think the world is out to get them,
  
  4 ones who are quite frankly criminals, frauds, in it for money. A sizable community.

A lot of the US variant is based on the "it's not my fault/responsibility" mentality that seems to be very prevalent among the US contingent.

Another component is that being a sovcit guru for pay is a growing criminal enterprise in the US, Winston Shrout comes immediately to mind.

The UK situation does seem to be considerably different because of the way your systems are set up. It also seems to be dealing with a somewhat different part of the population than the US segment. Most of the UK variant seem to be borrowing almost exclusively from their Canadian brothers with the exception of the marginally original magnum carter collection of illiterates who think being in "lawrful rebellion" is an excuse to not pay their rates. Otherwise not so much.

The Canadian variants never really had much success as they started out almost exclusively using US laws to justify what they were doing. Failed pretty spectacularly and universally in the tax arena where I believe it all sort of started, then tried to move on to other areas even less similar to their US counterparts where the square wheels really started to fall off the chariot of fail. The second, or maybe it was third I can't quite keep it straight, wave happened when the tax scammers adapted, sort of and came up with their new and improved scams which Bunrnaby has been so assiduously chronicling for us to our great amusement. I do have to say that on the main, the Canadian tax scammers are at least more entertaining and possibly more inventive, if stretching a point til it turns in to a circle can be called that, business vs hobby ruling for a start. They just aren't any better at it than their US counterparts who regularly crash and burn on the pyre of the tax court's infamous lack of a sense of humor.

Don't take this the wrong way, but in my view at least, the Canadian variant just don't seem to get or have the concepts originality and creativity, not in the least, not at all. Maybe it has to do with the proponents involved. Almost everything, if not all the bunkum and hooey that has been inflicted on the Canadian courts all these long years, until fairly recently, was stolen part and parcel whole and unchanged from the US, for which I heartily apologize. It started with taxes, then seems to have migrated on from there mostly unchanged to ever greater failure. Leading ultimately to the Great Rooke Smackdown.

The one glaring exception, bright light in the firmament, if you can call it that, although personally I think it is just fetid swamp gas, of which I know Canada is replete with, is the Paracyte Belanger and his majikal mystical King James "your laws don't apply to me" droolings. The problem again here is that it doesn't work any better than any of the rest of it.

Ironically, or maybe not, the Canadian pay for play fotl gurus don't seem to be able to make more than a subsistence living, if that off their trade. Same as their British cousins it would seem.

Mr Netolitzky has hit straight to the heart of the matter. The sovcits/fotls are attracted to and cling so hard to the ideologies because it

provides a way for disenfranchised and marginalized people to re-cast themselves as the last remaining true defenders of the US way of life and Constitution

and to get out from under whatever it is that is oppressing them. Basically a method, an excuse/justification, and a result. The GLARING problem is that THE MODEL/THEORY DOESN'T WORK!!!!!!



And in conclusion, sovcitery/fotlery is for people who can't/won't deal with real life/law and/or both, or maybe just growing up.

[The Observer]

I second AndyK's observation to not confuse tax protestors vs Sovereign Citizens.

I disagree with that observation. It fails to take into account the fact the sov/cit movement directly evolved from the tax protest movement in the United States. As the various tax denier leaders started getting nailed, convicted and/or jailed (such as Irwin Shiff,Larken Rose, Eddie Kahn, etc.) the survivors had to come up with a "new" angle that would allow the con artists to continue raking in the rubes while hopefully delaying the authorities. And we got to see several people start raising sov/cit arguments as a reason why they and others didn't owe tax (Ed and Elaine Brown as one example); this was usually expressed as stating that the government did not have jurisdiction over them due to their interpretation of the law.

But the "new" angle really wasn't new - this was just recycled repackaged and reflavored crap that Posse Comitatus had tried years before. The Posse boys were arguing sov/cit nonsense long before (1969) anyone else had thought of trying this; they did it to evade income taxes, avoid getting driver's licenses, to argue that government-issued currency was not legal, and similar things that you see nowadays in sov/cit agendas.

Are there sov/cits who are paying their taxes? Of course. Are there some who are not? Of course. The whole point is that you cannot separate the goats from the sheep - they continue to mutate and evolve into whatever they need to be in order to keep escaping what they fear most: accountability. And more often than not, that boils down to not having to fork money over for some responsibility they have under the law. That could be taxes, license fees, driving tickets/fines, alimony, or child support. There will always be a minority of people who will glom onto this nonsense in an effort to solve their own peculiar issue (child custody, anti-vaccination, etc.) and the scammers will gladly welcome them in order to make their con game look widely supported. But we shouldn't be fooled into believing that this is an entirely separate movement that has nothing to do with not paying taxes.

That being said, as humans we classify and divide things into categories in order to make the processing of data easier. Some social scientists say this is a result of evolutionary development for survival in order to identify threats or potential threats. But since it tends to be done on the fly, we can get it wrong and categorize things based on erroneous impressions, bad data, and confirmation bias.

[khmacdowell]

Most of them seem to either have a financial crisis or an expectation that they should be doing far better financially than they currently are.

Whilst this a US topic, as we've ventured into general Quatloos advice, the UK topic doesn't have quite the same bias.

Our system of PAYE makes avoiding tax very difficult for a normal fool to find themselves too far down the rabbit hole. Instead the UK FOTLer seems to consist mainly of people who owe relatively small amounts of local taxes or motoring fines, converting these small amounts into losing their houses by following stupid advice. We have legal protections for those who cannot rather than won't pay. Willfulness has to be proved! Even our failing to pay their mortgage morons only get themselves into that position by ignoring the numerous statutory and legal protections a home owner has.

All tax systems will have people who don't like paying tax but it's the sheer bloody-mindedness of the UK FOTLer to lose everything for no reason that makes the UK topic a thing of beauty.

Absolutely true. I have noticed that most of the UK people are complaining about Council Tax, which in the US would kind of be like local tax and its piddling amounts compared to our income tax.

I had no idea about the council tax component. Really, I don't have any ideas about any taxation issue in the U.K., but ruining your life over the most trivial tax while automatically paying the majority of taxes is peak sovcit. I guess sovereignty is amplifying minor penalties and sentences resulting from otherwise routine infractions that could be easily resolved, and the more minor the penalty and the more convenient the resolution, the sovereigner it gets.

I knew the schemes were common everywhere in the Commonwealth and U.S.A. but now I'm interested in regional idiosyncrasies. For the most part it just seems to be ported verbatim, which sort of just proves how asinine it all is, but I guess preserving aspects that are more harmful in a regional adaptation is asiten.

I think it is helpful to separate pseudolaw and its objectives and the characteristics of pseudolaw host populations on a functional basis.

If pseudolaw worked, it would do something very specific. Pseudolaw shifts the balance of authority away from state, court, and institutional actors, and towards individuals. Pseudolaw is therefore broadly appealing to any community which views its treatment by 'conventional authority' as unfair. Pseudolaw makes 'conventional authority' illegal.

What changes between affected (or infected) communities is the narrative of grievance and the narrative of empowerment. [...]

I second AndyK's observation to not confuse tax protestors vs Sovereign Citizens. In Canada we had an analogous split - what we called Detaxers vs Freemen-on-the-Land. The former was greed based (with a smidge of ideology), the latter much more political/ideological (though very, very shallow). The Detaxers imploded once the tax man proved successful. The Freemen were much more resistant to failure, and instead still root around trying to find the missing last piece to obtain their Freeloader lifestyles.

One of the reasons the Sovereign Citizen movement holds such emotional and intellectual power is it provides a way for disenfranchised and marginalized people to re-cast themselves as the last remaining true defenders of the US way of life and Constitution. That's a pretty powerful ideological foundation, especially in times where there is a perception that government has gone off course.

[...]

The specificity is enhanced by the fact that all the conspiracy theories revolve around everyday, or at worst, modestly common, infractions and punishments. The cargo-cultesque beliefs focus only on the immediately applicable parts of the conspiracy, at least at first. Maybe the continued negative experiences lead to further radicalization and entrenchment.

I wonder what the reaction would be, the level of engineering required to effect the circumstances notwithstanding, if you handed a journeyman-level sovcit a print copy of the MPEP and said "there's a government conspiracy that steals inventions from the people, go through this book and find all the evidence so we can blow the lid off the whole thing!" Of course the MPEP references statutes, regulations, and codes, all of which sovcits claim are not "law," but it also cites judicial decisions, which they somehow believe is typically legitimate while also believing essentially every court they end up in is illegitimate. Though, my point is, I think none of that would matter, because, obsessive though they may be, they seem to universally lack the cognitive apparatus to conceive of law in any way that approximates that which actually prevails in their society. Hence the, you know, American sovcits referencing the Magna Carta and FMOTL referencing the exact same terms sovcits do. Or perhaps the tendency of sovcits to reference "international law" in America, whereas to the government, international law is such low-hanging fruit as to be unworthy of an intentionally cliché punchline.

I'll read your papers LOL!

I second AndyK's observation to not confuse tax protestors vs Sovereign Citizens.

I disagree with that observation. It fails to take into account the fact the sov/cit movement directly evolved from the tax protest movement in the United States. As the various tax denier leaders started getting nailed, convicted and/or jailed (such as Irwin Shiff,Larken Rose, Eddie Kahn, etc.) the survivors had to come up with a "new" angle that would allow the con artists to continue raking in the rubes while hopefully delaying the authorities. [...]

The scammiest part to me, at least in terms of its baldness, is how many you can find claiming that they either personally know of incidents where their tactics "succeeded," or that they themselves have succeeded, or, worst of all, that they will post videos of arraignments where they him and haw like a neglected empty-nest wine housewife's chihuahua then march out smugly because they didn't get the death penalty, thereby proving the impregnability of their arguments, whereupon a cursory follow-up shows a not guilty plea was entered on their behalf and they were mailed a notice to appear and subsequently either fulfilled their obligation to the state, silently so as to not displace the wool orbit protectors of their devotees, or were issued a bench warrant.

While the fraud peddlers are definitely of a different sort, since they must at least be possessed of a marginal cunning (even if they believe their own bullshit), they seem to revert to using the same few blunt instruments, i.e. right to travel, bonds, Federal Reserve Notes, SS cards, and birth certificates are all on thick paper with numbers and security features therefore Rothschild serpent debt slave Matrix-robot-harvesting bank accounts, obviously outmoded definitions in ancient public domain versions of an already non-authoritative law dictionary, end of the gold standard therefore greenback Rothschild British Roman Illuminati Reserve sheckels are worthless even though they are either grifters for profit or trying to get out of small fees and fines denominated in same sheckels, state vs 14th amendment citizenship, etc. But even more, Moors spout the same gibberish, resulting in a superficially far-right white racist contingent and a black radical (and perhaps also superficially far right) contingent making the exact same claims. I say superficially just because I think they're explicitly non-ideological. In fact, it's hard to be ideological when you think the entire world everyone else is arguing over is an illusion. And they also detest LEOs and the justice system, which wouldn't fit the characterization either,

To me, the actual common denominator is simply the same life-isn't-fair (or blatant incompetence) woes affect everyone, and the literature, despite its specific function, is very nonspecific in nature, meaning it just organically has coalesced. Also inorganically, though, as career grifters spread it intentionally.

The bizarrest thing is that both financial scammers and marginalized white and black lower middle class traffic code violators do end up following the exact same script in court. To nominally bring it back around to the topic, I can't but wonder what the breakdown is with people like Rosado who, as far as can be ascertained, is probably of average or very slightly better intelligence and (formal or otherwise) education, between "true believers" and "I can't stop now."

[TBL]

Now I'm no legal big-brain like so many of the long-term posters on the Q! But, I like to think I can contribute some small amount, even if it's just to ask sometimes snarky questions that get the smart people talking.
I do, however, see that many of the sovcit types seem to be of higher intelligence, at least as it would be on an IQ test. At least the "leaders" or scam artists seem to be. It may just be that they are the shooting stars that burn brightest and flame out spectacularly and therefore are most reported on.

One thing I always felt awkward about was this supposed near-religious fervor relating to specific, cherry-picked laws or groups of laws but complete denial of others. That's pretty common and well covered, but I just don't see how some of these relatively intelligent people miss the fact that laws are created, modified, and enforced by the will of the people, right or wrong. There could be a law written outlawing alcohol, I think I read about that somewhere , and whether or not it made sense or should be a law, it would be the law. People agreed to it through their elected representatives and that's how the system works, like it or lump it.

There's a way to argue your beliefs and get the law changed, but few seem to go that direction.

[notorial dissent]

Hey, if you have a sense of humor, a teeny bit of common sense, and functioning gray cells, I would expect you to do more than alright. The sense of humor really helps. Welcome.