If you thought the Tea Partiers were loony, wait till you meet the sovereign citizen movement. Winston Ross has a profile of these nutters, who count among their members, or at least sympathizers, imprisoned young earth creationist Kent Hovind and his former attorney, Glen Stoll. Their home base is the Embassy of Heaven church in Oregon, led by a pastor who calls himself Paul Revere.
His name is Craig Douglas Fleshman, though he won’t answer to that, just as he no longer carries a driver’s license or pays taxes. Pastor Paul Revere doesn’t recognize the authority of the State of Oregon, the United States of America, or anyone else that presumes to have some command over him. He answers only to God.
“We believe there’s only one sovereign,” Revere told The Daily Beast. “And it isn’t us. Jesus said to render to Caesar that which is Caesar’s and render to God that which is God’s.”…
They are “sovereign citizens,” inspired by any number of complicated and cockamamie theories that all draw the same conclusion: we are not subject to your “laws.” And they are becoming an increasing headache for cops, public defenders, prosecutors, bailiffs, and judges all over the U.S., because when they inevitably land in court for driving without a license or failing to pay taxes, they clog up the system with reams of nonsensical paperwork. Their obfuscatory filings are so inundating that harried prosecutors often drop the charges against them—a victory for the sovereigns’ otherwise quixotic cause.
Members of this group refuse to get driver’s licenses or any other documentation from the government, instead carrying meaningless ID cards declaring themselves to be citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven. They also refuse to buy car insurance. Their attorney is Glen Stoll, who used to represent Kent Hovind. It was on that basis that Hovind refused to pay taxes, claiming that all of his income belonged to God and the federal government had no authority over him. He’s currently finding out otherwise in a federal prison.
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shouldbeworking
January 2, 2013 at 1:46 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
We have those nuts in Canada as well. They’re causing the same problems for our courts and police.
Brett McCoy
January 2, 2013 at 1:47 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
SPLC “Hate Watch” follows these loonies quite a bit. They have a bunch of articles on the movement, too:
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/ideology/sovereign-citizens-movement
They seem to enjoy bogging down court cases in reams and reams of paperwork and use outlandish language to make their “case” even more befuddling. All kinds of juicy stuff in this movement — racism, conspiracy theories, “patriot” movement… you name it!
Zeno
January 2, 2013 at 1:53 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Back in the seventies there was a “posse comitatus” movement in California that sought to exercise its divine right of citizenship sovereignty by taking over a county (Alpine, with a tiny resident population) and creating a paranoid paradise prepared to repulse any incursions by the federal government (which most of them thought was controlled by Zionists or communists or liberals or something — it’s hard to tell). Fortunately, they vastly overrated the number of nutcases willing to move there. The “sovereign citizens” are sprinkled throughout the country these days and are usually mere headaches for local officials rather than actual dangers, but I think their potential for violence is real and insufficiently recognized. People need to keep a watchful eye on them.
TGAP Dad
January 2, 2013 at 1:54 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I really don’t believe Kent Hovind is actually “finding out otherwise.” He probably blames the guv’mint for wrongly taking his liberty and money.
jamessweet
January 2, 2013 at 1:58 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ah hahaha, it seems he badly misunderstood the intention of that whole Caesar-rendering quote… Not that there is any great wisdom contained in the Bible, but that’s pretty much the opposite intention of what was being said there.
“Jesus said that when someone strikes you, you should turn your other cheek…into a thermonuclear weapon!”
Bronze Dog
January 2, 2013 at 1:58 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I suppose it’s better to have anarchists bogging down the system with convoluted paperwork rather than taking the alternatives other fundies like. Of course, I’d still be worried about that situation deteriorating.
hexidecima
January 2, 2013 at 2:07 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
so, if we find one of these idiots, can we kick them out of emergency rooms since they are sure that no laws apply to them?
Richard Bartholomew
January 2, 2013 at 2:16 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Glad to see you revisit this subject – I recently came across a 2010 article about Bradlee Dean’s background which links into this scene, and a post you wrote in 2004 was included in the links:
http://www.rippleinstillwater.com/2010/12/did-you-can-run-but-you-cannot-hide-get.html
Dalillama, Schmott Guy
January 2, 2013 at 2:24 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
A couple of years back some of these dipshits were arrested for coming down to the courthouse with guns to ‘arrest’ a court clerk for his alleged infringements of their alleged rights. ISTR that there was another one who had a ‘plan’ to assassinate Obama, and he got busted too. The scarequotes are because the plan consisted of ‘grab my guns, drive from Kentucky to DC and then walk into the white house and shoot him. He didn’t even make it over the state line, I don’t think.
Josh, Exasperated SpokesGay
January 2, 2013 at 2:27 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ed—I’m sorry to post this here but FtB doesn’t appear to have any “contact us” or “site support” section (would you consider adding that?). I’ve been having numerous problems with the layout losing formatting randomly and failing to load. It may be me, it may be my browser, but it may be FtB and I wanted to make someone aware of it in case it’s a system problem.
How would you like people to do so?
Thanks!
scott
January 2, 2013 at 2:28 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It would seem to me that we have a perfectly good word for members of a foreign sovereignty that enter a nation’s borders without adhering to its laws and threaten the use of violence against that nation’s legitimate representatives: invaders.
It further occurs that we have a Cabinet-level department of the national government charged with dealing with this problem.
Cathy W
January 2, 2013 at 2:33 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Doesn’t that “Render unto Caesar” thing, in context, kind of work out to “Pay your taxes and obey the just laws of your society?” Or does it not apply because we aren’t subjects of the Roman Empire anymore?
peterh
January 2, 2013 at 2:37 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@ #11:
The flaw being we don’t seem to have any Cabinet-level personnel willing or even able to cope with very much of anything, much less a lunatic fringe group.
scott
January 2, 2013 at 2:39 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
But, more seriously, what weirds me out about this movement is just the incoherence of their legal theories. They’ll assert that the laws and courts are all corrupt works of the evil government, but if you make just the right legal argument, say the right Latin phrase, or point out that the flag has fringe or your name is all caps, the judge will just have to say “Well, huh. That’s absolutely right. This court is clearly illegal. You can go. Bailiff, you’re fired, and I quit.”
baal
January 2, 2013 at 2:48 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It’s worth noting that the sovereignty types rarely win in court with their types of arguments. The occasional problem does happen when the police come to enforce the judgments, however.
Moggie
January 2, 2013 at 2:55 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
If I were to move to the US and got a green card, I couldn’t claim immunity from all US legal requirements. For example, if I failed to pay income tax, I could lose my residence status and be tossed out.
If I could claim diplomatic immunity, I’d be in a stronger position. But, firstly, my home country has to be recognised by the host government, and, secondly, under the Vienna Convention, the host government can declare me persona non grata, and my home country must recall me, or I lose immunity.
So, these bums are citizens of heaven? Then deport them back there!
lautreamont
January 2, 2013 at 2:59 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Surprisingly, we have those loons in Germany, too. Now, since this is Germany and not the US, they do not form the Sovereign Citizen Movement, but the (various) Kommissarische Reichsregierungen, or Provisional Reich Governments.
Their key premise is that the Reich did not formally end its existence with the end of WW2 and that the Federal Republic is a non-entity (or a corporation or whatever). Of course, this comes with the usual bogus arguments, like claiming that German citizens are in fact not citizens, but employees of the FRG, because the German word for “ID card” is “Personalausweis” and “Personal” roughly translates into business English as “HR”. And of course, this is to imply that the FRG has no jurisdiction over them.
Needless to say, that bunch consists of roughly one third neo-Nazis, one third fraudsters who make money issuing Reich ID cards and driving licences, and one third people gullible enough to fall for those.
Raging Bee
January 2, 2013 at 3:12 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
If courts are dropping charges just to avoid the trouble of dealing with them, that that’s a victory for some really unstable and dangerous people. This is not a good precedent, and it’s not good for public safety either.
jasonspaceman
January 2, 2013 at 3:14 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
There was an article in the National Post a few days ago about this movement in Canada.
Gretchen
January 2, 2013 at 3:38 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Zeno said:
Are you familiar with the Free State Project?
d.c.wilson
January 2, 2013 at 3:40 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Cathy W@12:
Paul also wrote pretty extensively that all government authority comes from the man in the sky and Christians should therefore, recognize and obey them. But why expect these idiots to understand their own magic book?
eric
January 2, 2013 at 3:41 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’m kind of surprised this is (still) an issue. I’d have thought that there were enough precedents dealing with these people that prosecutors could mount a fairly template-based attack. Faced with reams and reams of obfuscatory paperwork, you just cite USA vs. Kent Hovind and a few other cases and say they apply to all that obfuscatory paperwork. You don’t try and address the crap individual point by individual point, you argue the whole thing is the same pile of crap the government has seen before, and it should be treated just like earlier identical piles of crap.
But, IANAL, so hopefully someone who is can explain why this is still an issue.
inquisitiveraven
January 2, 2013 at 3:50 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Josh@10: I can state definitively that it’s not you because I have the same problem. I suppose it might be the browser. I’m using Firefox 17. However, I’m inclined to suspect FTB myself.
ArtK
January 2, 2013 at 3:52 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
On the browser issue. I have the problem with FF 17, but also with Safari on my iPhone. It switches from the normal style to what looks like some kind of mobile style. Randomly.
sisu
January 2, 2013 at 3:55 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Definitely a spinoff of the posse comitatus loonies, at least in the forms I’ve dealt with them. “Reams” is not an exaggeration – the amount of paperwork these guys manage to generate is insane. I feel for those poor clerks who have to wade through all of it.
And yes to the threats of violence… one guy I dealt with was met with armed marshals at the courthouse after he included “I’m a child of God and He will smite my enemies” in a motion memorandum.
Nick Gotts (formerly KG)
January 2, 2013 at 3:59 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The videos of Jared Lee Loughner, who murdered several people while attempting to assassinate Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, apparently echo the bizarre scribblings of David Wynn Miller, one of the, er, theorists of the sovereign citizen movement.
d.c.wilson
January 2, 2013 at 4:12 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
In that way, they’re a lot like the birthers, who are convinced that one day, they will find the rght words to say to the right judge, and the Kenyan usurper will be carried out of the White House. In the meantime, they’ll continue to file their rambling, incoherent briefs that are more political diatribes than legal arguments.
John Pieret
January 2, 2013 at 4:21 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I think their potential for violence is real and insufficiently recognized. People need to keep a watchful eye on them.
They are already pretty violent. The article Ed linked to says that, since 2000, such sovereign-citizen extremists have killed six law enforcement officers.
gshevlin
January 2, 2013 at 4:41 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
There is a lot of overlap between the Birthers and the SovCits, both in terms of their memberships and their tactics. The blizzard of quasi-legal paper being unleashed in the court system by the likes of Orly Taitz comes straight out of the SovCit playbook of what is euphemistically known as “paper terrrorism”.
ArtK
January 2, 2013 at 4:44 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@ Scott
It’s the same sort of thing that produced the Cargo Cults. They follow rituals that they believe will bring about results, based on the “rituals” (in this case, legal filings) of others. They concoct elaborate “logical” structures to explain why these rituals should work, all without a whit of understanding of how the real world operates. They’re impossible to educate because dealing with reality would mean giving up their main desire. For the “Sovereign Citizens” this desire roughly translates to “you’re not the boss of meeeeee!”
I can excuse the people of New Guinea falling for this, because the reality that they didn’t understand was so far removed from their previous existence. I can excuse a 5yo for not liking being told what to do, and for wanting some magical way of getting control over their life. For an adult in 21st century America, it’s not excusable.
John Hinkle
January 2, 2013 at 4:58 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I hope they went all the way and created their own legal tender as well. Right? I wonder if their local grocery store accepts Bozobucks.
shouldbeworking
January 2, 2013 at 5:07 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The bozo bucks better be gold. From what I read of their fiscal ‘policies’ gold is the only true currency.
Modusoperandi
January 2, 2013 at 5:20 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
lautreamont “…Kommissarische Reichsregierungen…Personalausweis…”
People say that French, Italian or Spanish are the languages of romance, but German, truly, is the language of love (doubly so if you yell it).
Dalillama, Schmott Guy
January 2, 2013 at 5:29 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Many of them do indeed issue dipshit dollars, and insist on trying to pay for houses and the like with drafts drawn on them.
Azkyroth, Former Growing Toaster Oven
January 2, 2013 at 5:48 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Or bottle caps.
jayarrrr
January 2, 2013 at 6:11 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I used to work with one of these crazies. In addition to being a “Sovereign Citizen” he was also involved in Christian Identity, was forbidden from driving company vehicles by virtue of his lack of a driver’s license, married his 4th wive by forming a corporation, the purpose of which was to “practice matrimony” (story was that he never filed the papers with the SoS, which his shack-mate/”wife” found out when she sued to have the corporation dissolved 4 years later) And was CERTAIN that the Beech Grove AMTRAK shops were going to be a UN internment camp because the barbed wire supports on the top of the pre-war vintage fence pointed in instead of out…
He had some wild theories about Waco and Ruby Ridge, too… His retained attorney was famed militia nut Linda Thompson.
Gretchen
January 2, 2013 at 6:43 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
— http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/us/liberty-dollar-creator-awaits-his-fate-behind-bars.html
It might be loony to mint your own money, but I sure don’t think you should go to prison for it.
Area Man
January 2, 2013 at 7:20 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
<"so, if we find one of these idiots, can we kick them out of emergency rooms since they are sure that no laws apply to them?”
By their own reasoning, we should be allowed to kill them without threat of prosecution. After all, the laws don’t apply to them.
Not that anyone accuses them of consistency.
Area Man
January 2, 2013 at 7:26 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
And that was where I stopped reading.
joachim
January 2, 2013 at 7:31 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“The power to tax is the power to destroy>”
Modusoperandi
January 2, 2013 at 7:50 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
joachim “’The power to tax is the power to destroy>’”
Obviously. Also, it pays for civilization.
Azkyroth, Former Growing Toaster Oven
January 2, 2013 at 7:55 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Would you like a moist towelette?
frankb
January 2, 2013 at 8:09 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I have an older Firefox version at home and I occasional get that mobile like format when opening FTB.
atheist
January 2, 2013 at 8:19 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ah, the Sovereign Citizens! Their worldview is certainly interestingly loony. I think what I enjoy most about them is their “redemption” myth they apparently use to explain their place in the world:
I find the worldview to be affecting on a certain level, though obviously quite mad. I feel that a crack team of sociologists needs to be created in order to study them. Also, apparently the belief is spreading beyond the usual Militia types to, for instance, urban blacks, who after all have much more realistic reasons to feel they are being oppressed by the government.
atheist
January 2, 2013 at 8:27 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@ lautreamont – January 2, 2013 at 2:59 pm (UTC -5)
Also, thank you for the perspective from Germany lautremont. And thanks to @ jasonspaceman for the info about Canada’s version, the “Freemen”. I suppose that more advanced nations than we know about may have similar groups. It’s almost like a mini-cancer on the body politic, or something like that.
Moon Jaguar
January 2, 2013 at 8:50 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I have similar browser issues with Firefox 17.0.1 and Safari on iPhone 5. FtB loads an image-free home page randomly.
evilDoug
January 2, 2013 at 10:22 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
That would make them jam nuts. Wing nuts are readily removed.
Thumbscrews await misusers of fastener metaphors.
thecalmone
January 2, 2013 at 11:24 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@46. Moon Jaguar – I have exactly the same problem and with the same version (17.0.1) of Firefox.
Modusoperandi
January 3, 2013 at 12:18 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’m using Netscape Navigator and it works just fine. Of course, I entered a Star Trekian vortex and am living in 1996. Do you know how hard it is to get wifi through a portal?
abb3w
January 3, 2013 at 12:38 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@30, ArtK
Bingo. My usual way of putting it is that it’s like there’s a species of moron that believes Legalese is a magic language, and that if they can only find the proper charms and incantations to speak and rituals to perform, they will be granted the power to summon and to command, to loose and to bind, and the wish of their heart’s desire will magically be granted.
Original cargo cults were cargo cult logistics. Sovereign citizens do cargo cult law. Richard Feynman made some observations about Cargo Cult Science. They each fail to grasp the most essential elements of the methodology, confuse ritual conventions for those essentials, and thus their Shamanic Mediation tends to fizzle… while annoying (to various degrees) actual practitioners of the real thing.
Marie the Bookwyrm
January 3, 2013 at 1:47 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Gretchen@37–If he got them into circulation, wouldn’t that be counterfeiting?
martinc
January 3, 2013 at 2:59 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Gretchen @ 37: Was Mr. von NotHaus born with that name? He lived “without a car or electric power in a commune of like-minded dropouts in a nameless village on the Big Island in Hawaii” and now lives “in a mansion, in the hills above the ocean, that was lent to him by a friend”.
Rather delightfully, his name, loosely translated from the German, means “Bernard from emergency housing”.
davidct
January 3, 2013 at 7:23 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Same problem as Josh. There is no way to report non-discussion problems with the site.
matty1
January 3, 2013 at 7:23 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Would you mind placing a few bets on my behalf?
Ben P
January 3, 2013 at 7:26 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
We had a book. Well…a booklet. That gave responses and case cites to quickly refute most of the usual sovreign BS. We also had a nicely written out response brief or two, because most judges we appeared before only really needed to be educated on the topic once. Then a summary response would do and we’d have a quick and easy response.
Then again, working in northern rural Arkansas we saw more than a couple sovereigns a year. I can well imagine how a junior prosecutor suddenly recieving a stack of near incomprehensible motions asserting the court lacks subject matter jurisdiction (it’s an admiralty court you see….), personal jurisdiction (the sovereign rejects the social contract,) that the police officers who arrested him were not authorized under law (somehow only sherrifs are legal…).
But where they do cause problems is when they resort to “paper terrorism.” Filing false liens against various public officials, police officers etc. These really are a pain to deal with because you have to file a petition for each one to remove it and get a court hearing.
dingojack
January 3, 2013 at 7:29 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Try bookmarking, then commenting here.
Hope that helps
Dingo
democommie
January 3, 2013 at 8:06 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
IANAL (like that ever stopped me from giving medical advice) but isn’t there some mechanism in place that would allow prosecutors in various states to compare notes when these assholes try to baffle ‘em with the bullshit blizzard?
I used to work in Verizon’s State Regulatory office for New England and we routinely filed HUGE wads of paper (often using the same set of numbers to argue for/against some rule being promulgated/enforced. I once had to call a courier to deliver something like 7 copies of document to the MA Dept of Telecom & Energy–each copy weighed around 70 pounds, about 8K pages of material. The majority of the stuff was not anything that they hadn’t seen before. I used to call these idiotic filings, “doorstops”. Around the time I left to “pursue other interests” the MA DTE decided a couple of paper copies and a CD/DVD would do nicely.
atheist
January 3, 2013 at 8:10 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@ lautreamont – January 2, 2013 at 2:59 pm (UTC -5)
The leftist in me thinks this sounds like an inchoate rebellion against the alienation created by neoliberalism, which does in fact tend to view the state as a giant corporation, and citizens as employees. The liberal in me wonders what one could say to such people. The cynic in me responds that any attempt to find common ground with such groups would be dangerous and probably doomed.
Nick Gotts (formerly KG)
January 3, 2013 at 8:24 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I think that’s joachim’s objection to it.
fifthdentist
January 3, 2013 at 9:21 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
There’s a Bob (Odenkirk) and Dave (Cross) HBO Mr. Show episode that deals with these nutcases.
In one scene the sole inhabitant of his own “sovereign nation” buys goods from himself using rocks and twigs as currency.
At the end there’s a parade of the flags of the “Sovereign Nations Olympics.”
Good stuff.
But can you imagine the massive freak-out Fox “news” and Glenn Beck would be having if some liberal group had killed six cops?
Why, Rush Limbaugh would be demanding that liberals be disarmed and have their free-speech rights taken away. Oh, wait, he’s already done that.
Gretchen
January 3, 2013 at 9:29 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@51
No; not if they’re not disguised as federal reserve notes. You can’t be a counterfeit of something if you’re not pretending to be that thing in the first place.
savagemutt
January 3, 2013 at 9:45 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Awesome. Could you do us a favor and stop Bill Clinton from getting a blowjob? It would really save a lot of time and trouble.
flyingsquidwithgoggles
January 3, 2013 at 10:36 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Seems that the guy who’s creating Liberty Dollars may have been able to take advantage of the fact that his currency was called ‘dollars,’ and the confusion that causes, but the NY Times article is unclear on that. It says he set up a toll-free number and a URL to help people distinguish between US Dollars and Liberty Dollars, but setting up a toll-free number and creating a URL doesn’t really imply a lot of effort.
Area Man
January 3, 2013 at 1:08 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“Was Mr. von NotHaus born with that name?”
I imagine he got that name from the native Hawaiians he was constantly irritating. He just had a hard time with “bum Nut House” because of their accents.
criticaldragon1177
January 4, 2013 at 12:25 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ed Brayton,
Off course anyone practicing the Sovereign Citizen philosophy is likely to end up in prison. One wonders what it is that makes these people think they can get away with ignoring the law like this, and than claiming immunity when they’re caught? Do they really think any court in the land will buy into their bizarre excuses as to why the law shouldn’t apply to them?
atheist
January 4, 2013 at 8:25 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
criticaldragon1177: You’re asking a very pragmatic question about what appears to be a very ideological movement. I don’t know exactly what these folks think, but suspect their concerns are less about whether the court will buy their excuses, more about how can they show the utter fraud of the justice system. On a personal level, they may have lifestyles that will land them in court sooner or later, and they may wish to turn a humiliating chore into more of an entertaining game, who knows? In general, folks who join movements are motivated both by “a sense of material grievance and moral injury” *. Probably to the Sov. Citizens, this is a more than pragmatic question.
* Tom Hayden, “A Model of Social Movements and Change“
criticaldragon1177
January 4, 2013 at 10:49 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
#66. Atheist,
That would explain it, I guess.
leftwingfox
January 4, 2013 at 11:52 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Yeah I know a couple folks like this too. Good guy and a hard worker for the most part, but a combination of Bush-era government and pot sent him straight into the arms of the Sovereign Citizen thinking. This will not end well if Revenue Canada ever gets around to auditing him.
» Bradlee Dean and the Sovereign Citizens Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion
January 3, 2013 at 6:02 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
[...] Brayton draws attention to an article in the Daily Beast by Winston Ross, about the so-called “Sovereign [...]