click to enlarge Chicken-Fried News: I am the law
Ingvard Ashby

Every high school student reading David Thoreau’s Walden has probably fantasized about leaving society behind and living off the land. What if you wanted to consume public utilities and drive on streets paved with taxpayer dollars but don’t want to contribute to the greater good and also be above the law?

Well that, dear readers, is exactly the kind of ideology you get from people that consider themselves sovereign citizens. They don’t have to pay taxes or respond to law enforcement or law and can live life as they see fit. It’s Libertarians that have a perverse reading of the 14th Amendment.

A man claiming to be a sovereign citizen led Oklahoma City Police on a standoff in late October after he refused to comply when officers clocked him going 75 miles per hour in a 60 mph zone on Interstate 35, according to KOCO.

“He didn’t believe the office pulling him over had the authority to pull him over,” Lieutenant Carlton Hardman told KFOR.

Officers surrounded his truck near NE 23rd Street and Martin Luther King Avenue and eventually went into custody after speaking with officers on his phone, according to KFOR because he did not sign for his traffic violations.

It might seem like a weird situation, but the FBI considers some sections of the sovereign citizen movement domestic terrorists. Alfred P. Murrah bombing collaborator Terry Nichols was a member of one such organization.

KFOR reports that one of the passengers in the traffic violator’s truck said that he considers himself a Moor, which is likely a connection to the Moorish Science Temple of America organization, which was founded on the premise that African Americans are of Moorish nationality and thus immune to federal laws. It’s hard to blame any African American citizen for not wanting to associate with the U.S. government, but this case seems a little iffy.

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