British Columbia courts rule that President (first time around) Donald J Trump did not miracle away all debts worldwide by NESARA and GESARA. Well darn...

[u/DNetolitzky]

https://canlii.ca/t/k895r

[u/NotCook59]

Are these “SovCits”? This should be in the SovCit Sub!

[u/DNetolitzky → u/NotCook59]

So I'm kind of particular in where and how I comment on pseudolaw stuff. The reason has to do with what I usually write about. I'm in Canada and have focused my investigations and writing on pseudolaw in Canada, since that's the domain I know well. I'm comfortable saying I am the subject expert for the country, given my frontline activities as a court worker and "hobbyist academic" work.

Now that I'm retired I'm in a position to be more public on this subject and possibly to act as an expert witness in court, academic contexts, or committee/legislative processes. That is, provided I'm careful about my credentials.

The truth is, I don't know that much about what's going on in jurisdictions like the US, Germany, the UK. I have some data, but at present there are others who are more informed. Therefore, I'm pretty cautious about commenting about other jurisdictions. I don't want to find myself under cross-examination on my writing and analyses, and then having to admit: (1) I don't really know that much about an issue/scenario, or (2) that there are better positioned authorities who disagree with me.

For example, there are a number of very well informed and insightful writers/analysts in Germany commenting on their local Reichsburger pseudolaw phenomenon. If I'm going to talk about Germany, I should point at their analyses and conclusions, rather than trying to come up with something myself.

So that leads to the "SovCit" label. You'll almost never see me use it. That's because Sovereign Citizen is used in two sense. There was and is a discrete variation on pseudolaw with its own culture in the US, who are called "Sovereign Citizens". They are the "Ur source" for much of modern pseudolaw, and have operated in various ways in the US since at least the 1980s. Depends on what you consider critical elements, particularly politics and cultural perspectives. Most describe Sovereign Citizens as right wing, libertarian, often racist and holding fundamentalist/conservative religious beliefs.

The second use of "Sovereign Citizen" is as a kind of global label for anyone who uses pseudolaw. I personally think that broader label is a mistake, because it takes a very diverse group of populations and labels them in a manner that could lead to misapprehension about population characteristics. For example, in Canada we've never really had a "Sovereign Citizen" population with the kinds of political, economic, and social beliefs typical of the US Sovereign Citizen movement. Our anti-tax Detaxers were either apolitical or politically amorphous. Our Freemen-on-the-Land movement were lefty neo-hippy anti-government social parasite basement dwellers - and more often than not involved in marijuana advocacy, production, and trafficking. More a criminal than political culture.

So I know a fair bit about US Sovereign Citizens, as in the US Sovereign Citizen movement, but I'm no expert on the population. I know a crapload about Canadian pseudolaw users and their history, to the point I'm comfortable saying I'm the expert on the subject. But those Canadians aren't true US-style Sovereign Citizens, except for a few rare exceptions.

So if you call a discussion forum or published resource a "Sovereign Citizen" or "SovCit" thing, I back away from that. I'm not a "Sovereign Citizen" expert, as I use that term. I strongly suspect I sometimes drive other commentators in the pseudolaw subject area a little crazy by how I am extremely careful to define what I mean by Sovereign Citizen, when I do use that term in public dialogue or publications. But that's why. I want to preserve my potential status as an expert to the field where I think I do have unusual and specialized knowledge. But that means me being very precise on the terminology I use. Hence, I'm not likely to participate in a "SovCit" discussion, except as perhaps an interested inquiring participant. It's not something I know all that much about. In the modern milieu where there are a lot of "nation specific" pseudolaw experts? I don't need to comment outside my area of expertise.

There's already some really problematic guesswork in the literature where, for example, genuine US Sovereign Citizen experts projected their opinions into Canada, assuming what goes on up here is the same as in the US. It wasn't, isn't, and that led to a lot of confusion, some with serious potential consequences.

Gawd I'm long winded.

[u/NotCook59 → u/DNetolitzky]

LOL. I appreciate the background. From most of our perspectives in the USA, SovCits are a joke. I don’t know what”pseudolaw even means, but from our perspective, SovCits “think” they know something about the law, when they are just being led by the nose by one guy who is selling the nonsense for a price, and they’re buying it. My view, and I think probably that of most of the contributors to this subreddit, is that they are a fringe element who would like to believe they have some “inside scoop”, when what they have is utter nonsense.

While I u destined your reluctance, your observations would be more at welcomed in this group, I am sure.