Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything
by
Kelly Weill
Published 22 Feb 2022
While many Flat Earthers lean conservative (I spent much of a 2019 Flat Earth conference sitting next to a man wearing a Donald Trump hat indoors), Hughes always viewed Trump with distaste. It helped that Hughes didn’t fully regard himself as subject to US laws. In various court filings before his death, he frequently used language and tactics ripped straight from the sovereign citizen movement, a bogus crusade that claims that people can skirt the legal system by declaring themselves “sovereign citizens,” immune from most laws. He told me, on multiple occasions and at great length, that he thought people’s names were actually government-owned copyrights, and that he could file lawsuits to seize those names, the very thing that had annoyed the San Bernardino authorities so much that they eventually pursued his arrest.
Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America
by
Beth Macy
Published 6 Oct 2025
See also Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (New York: Henry Holt), 2013. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33 Chapter Ten: Interventions Perryinterview by author, Sept. 27, 2023. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1 “SovereignCitizens Movement,” Southern Poverty Law Center, 2023, www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/sovereign-citizens-movement. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2 RachelGoldwasser, “Sovereign Citizenship Takes Hold Among Younger, Affluent, Female Communities,” Southern Poverty Law Center, June 4, 2024. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 DanAbrams, “Court Cam: Deputies Do Battle with Man Who Barged into Courtroom,” A&E, July 22, 2022.
The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America
by
Victor Davis Hanson
Published 15 Nov 2021
In shock that any local or regional entity would dare defy the Court’s ruling, liberals correctly emphasized, “This concept [nullification] has a long but not especially honorable pedigree in U.S. history”—apparently oblivious that such a dangerous doctrine underpinned the entire sanctuary city movement.44 Again, these scenarios of conservatives nullifying federal laws in tit-for-tat fashion, empowered by the liberal success of the sanctuary city nullification movement, are not the stuff of make-believe. Recalcitrant Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy in 2014 invoked the doctrine of federal nullification in accordance with the supposed protocols of the “sovereign citizen movement.” He certainly enjoyed some rural public support in the West as a die-hard rebel for his refusal to pay his federal grazing fees on lands that his family had ranched for decades. Yet the federal government eventually arrested him and charged him with a variety of felony counts—until a federal court judge forced the government to drop all charges on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct.45 In reaction to the election of Democratic legislative majorities in Virginia that promised tighter gun-control legislation than current federal restrictions, more than one hundred conservative Virginia cities and counties announced that they were to become sanctuary jurisdictions not subject to state gun laws.
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by
Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023
“There is no such thing as society”: Margaret Thatcher, September 23, 1987, transcript of an interview by Douglas Key for Woman’s Own, Margaret Thatcher Foundation. “If Covid was really serious”: Nikou Asgari, “‘A Form of Brainwashing’: Why Trump Voters Are Refusing to Have a Vaccine,” Financial Times, July 20 2021. “sovereign citizens”: “Sovereign Citizens Movement,” Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed November 8, 2022. popularized by leftists in Turkey: Ryan Gingeras, “How the Deep State Came to America,” War on the Rocks, February 4, 2019. “People of the same trade”: Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776; repr. London: David Campbell Publishers, 1991), 116.