It’s hard to ignore the tragedy of two police dead and a third injured by a “self-declared sovereign citizen” but I suspect that we’re going to.
Of course, we’ll have a lot of analysis. We’ll have experts talking about it and we’ll have something similar to the voyeuristic attention to the Erin Paterson murders. Ok, I get that people were interested in what was happening. I get that we all wanted to see if she was found guilty or not…
And when I say “all”, of course, I mean that we all had to be interested because it was on every news bulletin and the mushroom murders spore-ned quite a few podcasts…(Did you like what I did there?)…
However, we won’t start talking about the fundamental idea and the big issue. When does an ideology become so dangerous that it should be banned? When does something become such a threat that action needs to be taken?
It’s easy when we define something as “the other”? Then we find it easy to look at it as “Something We Need To Do Something About”. For example, if you look at the rhetoric of certain politicians on China, you’d only have to reverse that and see that – so far – China’s lack of response shows incredible restraint. It’s ok for some minister or shadow minister in Australia to say things like: “War with China is inevitable” but imagine the reaction if a Chinese spokesperson were to say something like: “It seems likely that we’ll have a war with Australia given their hostility…”
So while the sovereign citizen movement has all the sophistication of a six year old setting up the rules for their bedroom, we need to start thinking seriously about the dangers. Yes, it’s easy to indulge them when the sign says: “KEEP OUT! GEORGE’S ROOM!”, but they still accept that their parents will clean the room and pay for the energy bills. When people start to assert that they’re going to arrest the magistrate or the police because things aren’t going their way, we’ve moved into a step beyond anarchy and have entered some sort of Kafkaesque world where an individual believes that he or she has the power to impose laws that don’t exist on others. To say that one doesn’t feel the law applies to them because they didn’t agree to it is one thing; to say that some law applies to someone else because you say it does, is the sort of egocentric behaviour of a child or an absolute ruler…
Speaking of which, did you happen to catch the cap that Trump was wearing the other day? It said: “Trump was right about everything”… Now I don’t know about you but – speaking as someone who is also right about everything – I find it rather pathetic that one would feel the need to wear a cap saying it. It’s like wearing a t-shirt saying “Good-looking guy”. It’s as though the person feels that unless they point it out, you won’t notice.
Which is certainly true of Trump. I mean there are lots of things that he seems to be wrong about. Even if you were one of those people who thinks that he’s doing a lot of good for the US, you’d have to concede that he’s been divorced a few times, so he can’t have been right about those marriages… Or the times when he seems confused about historical events… or contemporary events, such as who was President when certain things happened or who actually pays for tariffs… or what he started saying at the beginning of his answer… or, well, most of things he says.
Whatever…
The danger is that Trump thinks like the sovereign citizens. He thinks that a person should be fired and when he was on “The Apprentice”, he only had to say it, so now that he’s President of the Free World, he should be allowed to say that person needs to be deported and it should happen because, well, isn’t democracy all about elected your tyrant?
Sometimes we get annoyed about certain laws. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to cut down a tree on my own property? Why should I be fined for going through the red light when it was just a mistake and I didn’t have an accident? Why should I have to turn down my music just because my neighbour has no musical taste and wants to sleep when it’s only 2.23am? But the reality is that most laws protect us more than they oppress us. Not all, and of course we should protest and fight to change the more draconian ones. But that doesn’t mean just sprinkling fairy dust and reciting I believe, I believe in this five things which make me immune to the laws of the country in which I live.
And that should apply to everyone, even if you happen to be the actual President of the US or owner of the largest media company in the world.
Also by Rossleigh:
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The Donald’s abnormal “administration” keeps taking childish behaviour to ever higher levels of lunacy.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/hegseth-s-undiplomatic-treatment-of-marles-reveals-a-chaotic-ungenerous-ally-20250828-p5mqhw.html
And Marles is an idiot who should be replaced by someone who has more common sense and, at the very least, an understanding of the military. The closest Marles ever came to anything military was when he got a super soaker water gun as a birthday present.
Curious as to how Sovereign Citizens are presented by the media as a distinct organic entity, but share conspiracy theories, various issues, talking points and views that match the US fossil fueled think tank networks, and RW MSM, promoting ‘segregation economics’.
Further, Crikey linked them to far right groups who turn up to LGBT etc rallies as counter demonstrators, and some others claim that some police were way too chummy sharing white supremacist gestures etc.
US NGO SPLC has a ’24 overview of the ‘movement’, excerpts:
In 2024, sovereign citizen activities fell into four categories. The first category of activity was perpetrating violence. Sovereigns committed a sizeable number of violent incidents, primarily against members of law enforcement…..
The second category of activity was crimes committed by sovereign citizens that did not end violently or have a violent component to them…..
The third category of activities was the merger of sovereign citizen and non-sovereign citizen extremists in activities and events that furthered sovereign citizen agendas, and, in at least one case, involved the harassment of public officials (think anti-Covid/vaxx freedom rallies, convoys, Jan 6 etc).
The fourth area of activity was the creation and growth of sovereign shadow governments, called assemblies, whose formation is based on both historical U.S. law and made-up arbitrary rules. Sovereigns develop these with the goal of replacing the United States government in the future. They typically involve the formation of various “government agencies.” (see DOGE, expansion of ICE & FBI….).
They help form a motley coalition of seemingly disconnected and disparate groups, but all roads lead to Rome, or the end game is the same, trying to bring on crisis and destruction?