Men of No Country
https://www.thefp.com/p/sovereign-citize...tm_medium=email
Hundreds of thousands of citizens are busy figuring out how to disobey the courts, avoid taxes, and find ways to circumvent the U.S. government. They say they are the real Americans…
By Adam Popescu
July 3, 2023



Silvina Salcedo hands me her smartphone and points to a pyramid-shaped diagram titled la elite mundial.

“I know it sounds like conspiracy theories but this is who is in charge,” she says.

The chart contains a who’s who of the global elite. There are the usual suspects—secret societies like the Illuminati and the Freemasons, and famous families like the Rothschilds—but also eyebrow-raisers like the lizard people who Salcedo and others claim are taking over the planet.

“We’re being controlled by corporations,” Salcedo says, scrolling to an image of Google companies, then a flowchart of Facebook subsidiaries, and another linking Kraft, Nestlé, and Fortune 500s. “That’s why I’m here.”

Here is Rudy’s Bar-B-Q in Denton, Texas, a stone’s throw from a spaghetti junction of freeways outside Dallas. Every third Saturday, Rudy’s doubles as a town hall for the Republic of Texas, a sovereign citizen group that’s been around since the mid-1990s and claims to have around 10,000 members. The FBI estimates there are around 300,000 U.S. citizens who claim no allegiance to the elected government in any form—and their numbers are rising.

For some members of the Republic, their goal is to meet and vent at town halls like this one. Others want a full secession. In the meantime, they’re busy figuring out how to disobey the courts, avoid taxes, and generally find ways to circumvent the U.S. government.

Salcedo discovered the Republic just a few months ago after a long soul search. She began to lose hope in the American dream in 2012 when her family restaurant near Sacramento failed. When her father died of Covid-19 just days after getting the jab, she says she gave up on medicine, too. By then she was working at a hospital kitchen, and when she was asked to get vaccinated, she quit.

She started studying alternative medicine and cryptocurrency as well as self-published texts like the Common Law Handbook. Then online channels claiming the government is hiding the truth from its citizens led her to the sovereign citizen movement.

“I had to lose everything to see clearly,” says Salcedo, who’s 46 and divorced.

The Republic of Texas was founded by winemaker Rick McLaren in 1995. Not long after, he took rival members hostage over a leadership dispute and shot it out with the law, and is now serving a 99-year prison sentence. In 1998, another Republic group schemed to kill President Clinton with a cigarette lighter that shot cactus thorns dipped in HIV and rabies. The plan never came to fruition, and the plotters were jailed.

But the vibe at Rudy’s today is more angry PTA than hardcore militant as folks with gray beards and grandma glasses trade concerns about government overreach before breaking for pulled pork. Linda Capuano, the Republic’s local congresswoman who is running the town hall meeting, calls freedom “a mindset change.” She looks like a school principal in a pantsuit and speaks calmly, telling those who are lied to “to do something.”

After a retiree in HOKA sneakers quotes Thomas Paine and another in boots hawks a miracle fertilizer, swallowing some to show how safe it is, Salcedo whispers, “This is great.”

Members of the Republic prefer to be known as “Texians,” an old term for people who lived in Texas before it became part of the U.S. They claim that the state was never legally annexed in 1845, which makes them a legitimate authority exempt from U.S. laws and taxes. They use 1800s-era maps to define their boundaries from Montana to New Mexico, and have established their own parallel government with common law courts that elect sheriffs, congresspeople, senators, and presidents.-- excerpt, rest at link above --