The Revolution has Begun (Law Vegas Division)

[Duke2Earl]

Another very well done article. Thank you.

[LPC]

Trying to put these two flavors of crazy into two distinct groups is, I think, an attempt to assign discrete categories to an ideology that is much more fluid in terms of its boundaries.

I agree. Trying to classify these clowns is trying to classify incoherence, because you're not talking about well-thought positions or philosophies, you're talking about some very unhappy and usually not too intelligent people who are latching onto ideas and symbols that seem to give their lives some meaning.

Demo's article hit the nail on the head when she talked about outliers being the most dangerous, and not the members of (relatively) organized groups. We've all seen how many scams claim some "secret knowledge" of the tax laws, and how many fringe groups claim some kind of secret knowledge about some conspiracy. Fringe groups also claim a kind of moral superiority, claiming to be more patriotic and truer to the Constitution that the main-stream political parties. These things all boost self-esteem and a sense of community, and the people who are drawn to them are people who are doubting their own value, and want to be part of something that makes them feel better about themselves. And if a group you want to be part of rejects you, such as when the Millers got kicked off the Bundy ranch, the rejectees are likely to want to make a bigger commitment and not a smaller one, and that's probably going to mean violence.

[Demosthenes]

I've been using "Sovereign movement" as a catch-all phrase to label the amorphous blog this group has become. I think the ADL and SPLC are kind of annoyed that I've done so, but I don't really care. The various people who tracked and wrote about the earlier Patriot still can't agree on the terminology for what happened between 1969 and 1995, so I rebooted the vocabulary and started over. If they'd been consistent, I'd have used their definitions. I contacted some of earlier writer and was surprised at how quick they were to undercut their competitors' efforts.

My theory is that the Patriot movement went through several phases starting in 1960s as the Tax Protest movement, which morphed into the Posse Comitatus movement, followed by the Christian Patriot movement, then the Militia movement, but the whole damn group faded into obscurity after McVeigh brought the federal building down. Through this period, the tax protest scams, the debt elimination stuff, the conspiracy theories, the gun grab paranoia, and the militant training were present in variable amounts, depending on the leaders involved or geographic location of the network. Midwest farmers had different problems than Idaho mountain men or Southern California engineers so each subgroup grabbed whatever bits, schemes, and beliefs it needed to address its particular issues. This movement ended with McVeigh, an outlier who absorbed much from the movement but never really belonged unlike his partner in crime Nichols.

In the late 1990s, a combination of things happened. The internet took off, so ideas and schemes could now spread quickly and easily but all of the information about the earlier Patriot movement, it's history, legal theories, and violent events predated the Internet so it simply wasn't there. What you did have was the vestigial trail of tax information being passed around because the IRS and court system take years to work through such cases. So even though the militias were all but gone, and the Christian Identity Church and white supremacist groups like Aryan Nations had gone their own way, the tax protest information was still in play. Promoters like Irwin Schiff and Bob Schulz attracted new recruits by recycling the old movement's stupid tax theories, et voila, the Tax Protest movement took off on the Internet.

In the mid 2000s, the economy fell apart and when the tax scam promoters were either enjoined or incarcerated, the debt elimination and redemption theory schemes took off. Thus the Tax Protest Movement morphed into the Sovereign Citizen Movement. As these schemes fall apart and the leaders are incarcerated, the movement is evolving again right now, and there's kind of pushme pullyou thing going between the modern Militia Movement and a new Anarchist Movement. I'm pretty sure that Larken Rose tapped into this shift a couple of years ago. The groups may merge or splinter or one may subsume the other, we're watching the change happen now, and Bundy Ranch seems to be a catalyst.

So why does it matter?

The earlier Patriot movement went through a cycle that ended with McVeigh. The modern Sovereign movement is going through a very similar, but greatly accelerated cycle that could very well spit out one or more McVeighs.

This outline above is the premise of my book.

The reason why I think that it's important to differentiate between the two cycles (Patriot vs, Sovereign) is that, while they may share the same anger, iconography, and legal theories, etc. times have changed. Demographics are very different. The politics are different. The Tea Party has pushed mainstream conservative politics almost to the Patriot level, which has in turn pushed the Sovereign movement even farther to the right - so far, in fact, that they are now merging with the Anarchist movement, and the extreme far left. As younger recruits enter to movement, they bring their own symbols, memes, and conspiracy theories and they find the "patriot" label really funny.

Applying Patriot stereotypes, definitions, and symbols can be highly dangerous for those tasked with preventing or investigating crime or a terrorism event because the traditional profile no longer fits.

For example, racism and Antisemitism were significant driving factors in the earlier Patriot movement (thus the SPLC and ADL) but they aren't really today. I think it's why so many people didn't understand the significance of the swastika in Las Vegas. They immediately thought "neo-Nazi" because that's what it would have meant in the Patriot movement. Today, it means "I've killed you because I see you as no different than a Nazi thug." And if you repeatedly say things like, "they just hate Obama because he's black," and that groups looks around and see quite a few black, Hispanic, and Asian faces - people they consider friends and fellow warriors - your label is kind of absurd. The movement today is recruiting through angry memes and blind rage, not through the promise of race war.

I've started a new technique when teach some of my law enforcement classes. I asked the audience to picture what a sovereign citizen looks like. I then put up a picture of a Republic of Texas leader and ask how many imagined this. Just about everyone raises their hands. I next fill the screen with a variety of pictures ranging from a pretty young woman who
threatened to blow up a government building, a young black gang-banger who represented himself pro se in his meth dealing case in Maryland, a white computer programmer from California who shot and killed an officer who pulled him over for a traffic violation, a 16 boy who shot and killed two officers in Arkansas when his father's car was pulled over, an young Asian man who tried to blow up natural gas pipeline in Texas, a Moorish Temple leader, and a 70-year old dentist from New Hampshire, who ... well, you know.

[Demosthenes]

An example of the vocabulary issue:

Note how many times the word "Sovereign" appears in today's Washington Post article (it doesn't):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post ... an-desert/

He even linked to FBI pages and such that are specifically warning law enforcement about sovereign citizens.

[Demosthenes]

Just last month, the Anti-Defamation League conducted a training seminar about anti-government and other right-wing extremism for 150 Las Vegas-area law enforcement officers.

“The two (Las Vegas) police officers who lost their lives are only the latest in a series of casualties in a de facto war being waged against police by right-wing extremists, including both anti-government extremists and white supremacists,” Mark Pitcavage of the ADL said last week in a statement.

[LPC]

This outline above is the premise of my book.

And it's a story that needs to be told.

[Judge Roy Bean]

This outline above is the premise of my book.

And it's a story that needs to be told.

The story about waiting for the book should be told as well.

[Demosthenes]

This outline above is the premise of my book.

And it's a story that needs to be told.

The story about waiting for the book should be told as well.

I think the timing is pretty good...

[AndyK]

With respect to the ADL and SPLC, (no disrespect intended to either organization): when your only tool is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.

Both of the above organizations have been dealing with specific flavors of domestic terrorists / hate groups for so long that they're stuck in a groove; unable to fully recognize the transmogrification which has happened over the last few years.

Also, they're used to dealing with quasi-organized groups -- totally unlike the fluid mix of nutsos running around today.

Absent a strong, outspoken visible sovereign/patriot/whatever leader, they lack a target upon which to focus.

[grixit]

Demo: Back in the late 70s, i heard a report that the FBI was predicting that economic troubles in the farming sector would spur increased rightwing militancy and violence. I remember at the time thinking how silly that sounded. After all, such things were mainly the domain of the left. Who was on the right? The KKK, which was waning, the Minutemen, who just liked to play soldier, and the John Birch Society, which gave lectures. Neo nazis? Just posers. You wanted bombs and threats of revolution, you looked to the Weather Underground and their cohorts.

Of course it turned out that the FBI knew what it was talking about and i was the silly one. Took a while though.

The first public mentions of The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, made them sound like some angry fungus fermenting in a dark basement somewhere.

Then there was the case of a man who'd done time for tax evasion and was now a fugitive after shooting a couple of officers. Sorry, i forget his name. This time i correctly predicted that the FBI would not try very hard to take him alive. Still, that seemed like a fluke.

And then came the Montana Freemen. And that's when i realized, yeah, there's a movement out there. I liked what one commentator said at the time: "Even their name is a lie. They are not free, they are prisoners of their own twisted ideology.".

So question. What is the FBI saying now, and do you think they're accurate?

[Demosthenes]

Love, love, love your description of the The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord!

The FBI and I are on the same page.

Some new stories came out today, and the "sovereign" connection is again being downplayed. Not sure why.

Excerpts from: From http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/bundy ... -their-own

They weren’t Oath Keepers, sovereign citizens or militia members.

“We can’t find anything linking these two guys to anybody,” said a law enforcement official with knowledge of the ongoing investigation. “If they were a part of a group, they hid it well.”

he seemed nothing more than a muddled dabbler in the odd and un­substantiated.

“After meeting me and listening to me I am sure it was obvious to them that I was not violent,” VanDerBeek recently wrote on his campaign blog. “I will never know their reasons. They were not political killers, they were simply insane people who wanted to kill.”

[AndyK]

“We can’t find anything linking these two guys to anybody,” said a law enforcement official with knowledge of the ongoing investigation. “If they were a part of a group, they hid it well.”

"Group" is the problem. There is no group. There are a (sadly) large number of people who are pissed at the government for any of a number of reasons ranging: bad divorce/child welfare services; unemployment via jobs going overseas; home forclosure; auto tickets; NSA; IRS; Bundy's cattle; Affordable Care Act; whatever certain AM talk radio hosts blather; etc ad infinitum.

Prior to the Internet and social media, these malcontents (mostly) would just fester themselves away. Of late, they hear all the supporting echoes and determine (1) that they are right (2) that they are in a majority and (3) that they must personally take action to restore the Constitution / Christian values / founding father's beliefs.

To rehash an analogy I used here years ago, they are like race horses running with blinkers (blinders) on. They can't see anything other than a narrow focus and charge hell-for-leather in that direction.

One of the most unfortunate factors (in my opinion) is that every time one of these nut cases succeeds with a suicide via LEO, the rest of the fringies see another conspiracy / black op / false flag which just reinforces their paranoia.

[The Observer]

th respect to the ADL and SPLC, (no disrespect intended to either organization): when your only tool is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.

But with a educated, degreed historian, such as Mark Pitcavage, you would expect that the stereotyping would be kept in check. I have interacted with him many years ago and am somewhat surprised that he would be falling back on trying to stick square pegs in round holes.

[The Observer]

"Group" is the problem.

Exactly. Even using the term "sovereign citizen" is basically our attempt to group these people into a category so we can "identify" them. It's convenient and an understandable human behavior pattern; we classify everything that we come into contact if recorded history of the last 10,000 years or so is any indicator. But it all falls immediately to ruin the minute an outlier appears and wrecks our perceptions with the facts of his or her existence.

Just looking at the list of people who assassinated or attempted to assassinate the President of the US shows nearly all of them to be outliers. How many of them appeared on any lists to be checked or monitored or kept under surveillance? How many of them were grandstanding and publicizing their intention to murder the POTUS? How many of them belonged to and were visibly active in an organized group dedicatee to the overthrow of the establishment? How many of them had told their relations and/or friends of what they were exactly going to do? How many of them had been picked up before for making threats against the POTUS?

The outliers don't belong anywhere nor do they really seek to belong anywhere, despite their half-hearted attempts to join a particular organization. If they cannot take over the organization or dominate its decision making, they move on. The outliers are self-motivated and have a desire to be leaders and initiators. They want action now, and are not patient enough to wait for a grass-roots organized revolution. Most people around them on a day-to-day basis don't detect the anger that is seething inside, this even includes spouses, parents, offspring and siblings; the relatives may ignore signs, put up with mental/physical abuse, or have some empathy all out of a sake of wanting to keep from embarrassing the entire family.

The outliers' hatred is buried deep and they control it so no one else can see it. They rarely talk in terms that would show exactly how deep that hatred it; they may share with others their points of view, but the listener just comes away with the thought that the outlier has a certain dislike for the person or issue being discussed. But it keeps being fanned and inflamed within them until the day when the outliers decide that that this is the day to act. What they act on may be something a long time in the planning and design, even though it may appear to be impulsive, at least to us. And because they give little or no warning about their intent, this makes it appear to us that this attack came out of the blue. Therefore we think that the outlier was motivated by a mental imbalance when in reality he or she was just motivated by unadulterated hate.

The tax protestors, the sovereigns and the other similar groups cannot be used as a measuring stick for identifying where the outliers might be. As has been pointed out, these groups are in continuous morph, and because they frequently have strong disagreements and argue amongst themselves, the outlier will not see them as having a pure motivation as the outlier would like them to have. So the ADL, the SPLC, and anyone else for that matter who wants to keep trying to paint these groups as sources for the violence of outliers will continue to miss the mark.

I know someone will bring up the case of Jerry Kane as being an argument against what I just said. And I can understand that argument. After all, Kane had been popping off several weeks before about killing law enforcement and had instilled those thoughts in the kid accompanying him. But the point at the time was that the officers had not be aware of the sovereign movement and had they been, they might have been more wary and cautious in approaching the Kane vehicle. That is a possibility. But it does not answer the question what to do once the sovereign movement dies and something else pops up instead to take its place - which is inevitable. How do we still find the outliers flitting in and out of the next wave of politically dissatisfied reactionaries? We won't because no one can see the outlier coming - until it is too late.

[Lambkin]

Las Vegas CBS affiliate talks about sovereign citizens and Jerad and Amanda Miller, but the article doesn't really explain any connection between the two.
http://www.8newsnow.com/story/25791732/ ... extremists

The shooting rampage at an eastside CiCi's Pizza and Walmart last week is shedding light on people who hate the government and are willing to kill because of it.

[Demosthenes]

"Group" is the problem.

Exactly. Even using the term "sovereign citizen" is basically our attempt to group these people into a category so we can "identify" them. It's convenient and an understandable human behavior pattern; we classify everything that we come into contact if recorded history of the last 10,000 years or so is any indicator. But it all falls immediately to ruin the minute an outlier appears and wrecks our perceptions with the facts of his or her existence.

My definition of sovereign shifts as the movement evolves. In other words, they define it, I don't. An outlier is someone who follows the core beliefs and theories, as defined by the mass of people within the movement, but who doesn't get so wrapped up in the details (paperwork, the endless "legal" research) that he forgets about the big picture.

[The Observer]

My definition of sovereign shifts as the movement evolves. In other words, they define it, I don't. An outlier is someone who follows the core beliefs and theories, as defined by the mass of people within the movement, but who doesn't get so wrapped up in the details (paperwork, the endless "legal" research) that he forgets about the big picture.

And that approach fails, because in all honesty, as you point out, there is evolvement of the group itself. The fact that there is evolvement shows that the members of the group have no real grasp or awareness of what they really want to achieve AND how to achieve it. They shift back and forth between these two criteria without any coordination - and the groups tend to fracture and split when they focus on one or the other. Especially when the group folds up after a key person gets arrested/prosecuted/convicted.

So since they cannot define themselves to any specific degree, the responsibility falls to the outside observer to do so, if only in an attempt to bring some sort of sanity to the observation. But that is about as easy as wrestling a greased pig in a mudhole.

And I differ with the view that outliers have the same core beliefs as the groups they try to associate with. In my viewpoint, the outliers come with their core beliefs already instilled, and either try to find groups that have those or same beliefs, or try to change the group's core beliefs to match their own. I agree that they certainly focus on the big picture and don't worry about whether a document needs to be rubber-stamped with "Refused For Cause". But when you are motivated by hatred and violence, you just don't have time to waste on the little things. You just have to hope that your going out in a big bang is going to motivate others to follow in your footsteps.

[jg]

This outline above is the premise of my book.

The story about waiting for the book should be told as well.

I think the timing is pretty good...

There is a book?
Naw,................















still only an alleged book !