Turning Dickensian, this could be called a Tale of Two Gurus, as the histories, success, and failure of its two main actors, Robert-Arthur: Menard, and Dean Clifford, are closely intertwined. These two are the leading Freeman-on-the-Land gurus, and while I have not observed them in open conflict, they nevertheless are clearly rivals. The rise of one has been accompanied by the ruin of the other,
Their histories have indeed intertwined but one's rise has not been accompanied by the other's fall this time because they are now both totally discredited. Möwe had this to say about Dean right off the bat;
Clifford, on the other hand, positioned himself as a blue-collar dude who had woken up, had enough, and was going to get everyone out from the yoke placed by malevolent forces. His approach was confrontation – he’d fought off the CRA, the cops, and you could too.
At least to the casual observer that would seem to be where Clifford's career as a counter-state resistor had begun. But unknown to his Freeman customers and myself, Clifford had first learned of and developed his ideas in a separate subculture, the Canadian Skinhead, NeoNazi and White Supremacist communities. This fact only recently was broadly disseminated thanks to a combination of disgruntled Skinhead ex-customers, and anti-racist monitor organizations. The most detailed information is courtesy of Anti-Racist Canada:
In a sense this is not really a surprise – the White Supremacist community was for a long time a primary marketplace in Canada for De-Taxer concepts. Early gurus David-Kevin: Lindsay (extensively profiled in
Meads v. Meads, 2012 ABQB 571 at paras. 100-108) and Eldon Warman (
http://www.detaxcanada.org) had long marketed to this community, though at present belief and support among White Supremacist groups is pretty limited, as they have had many opportunities to watch the failure of these ideas at close quarters. In fact, it’s not unusual to see these ideas openly mocked in forums such as Stormfront.org.
So this is where Dean (aka "Sovereign") came from, and then abruptly emerged into the Freeman-on-the-Land limelight. Clifford now makes no mention of his racist background, and while he is, in certain senses, a ‘kinder, gentler Dean’, he still remains a far more militant personality than Menard. In fact, Clifford has much similar in his attitudes and operations to the old-school U.S. Sovereign Citizen gurus who emerged from a similar context, however he's smart enough to know that he will lose much of his customer base if he expresses overtly racist attitudes - it's just not that popular in Canada.