My daughter was getting over a bad breakup with a long-term girlfriend. I was happy when she said she had met someone new but surprised when she told me it was a guy, and that he was ‘kind of redneck’. Four years later, and that guy is engaged to my daughter. They will be married this spring. For this article, we’ll call him Jay.
It has been an odd journey, probably more so for him than for me. Though maybe not.
During that first dinner where daughter introduced Jay to the rest of the family, we tried to find some common ground, and it wasn’t hard.
I was actively looking for inexpensive property with a little land to do some small farming. Jay was very interested, and we talked global warming and food security and discussed whether GMO’s would impact natural genetic diversity. Every now and then he said something I didn’t agree with, and I know he bit his tongue a couple times too, but he seemed nice. Daughter was pleased at how well all got along.
Jay spent more and more time at our house. I found out he was semi-homeless. He couch-surfed at various friends houses. He was employed as a machinist and worked overtime when he could, but he had two children from an earlier relationship and half his check went to child support. He said that he had been told he could get the amount lowered through court, but he didn’t want his kids to have less, and he was very afraid of the legal system. It didn’t leave him with enough to get a place of his own.
He also had some pre-adult run-ins with the law, he told me. He’d run away from home at 15, and when he went back his dad and step-mom refused to let him back in. He got arrested for trying to break into his parents’ home and lived out of a car until he met a woman when he was 17. They quickly had two kids. He is good at math and 3 dimensional thinking, and she encouraged him to take classes to become a machinist. They were together for 6 years. Both he and my daughter were on the rebound when they met.
As Jay started to bond with the rest of the family, he started telling me that one day he would sue the government for money that was owed to him against his name, and that he would have enough money to help me buy the property I wanted. When I asked him what he meant, he told me that he had been on a train visiting his mother and step-father a few years ago, when a guy he was sitting next to gave him a pocket constitution, and told him that the US government had turned us all into corporations and used the human capital that each person represented to repay debts to China. That his birth certificate was actually a document of incorporation, and that each person was owed by the government for the value they represented. He said that the government had to surrender the land it owned to people who were willing to use it, like a perpetual homestead act, but that the government didn’t want anyone to claim their land because the government had borrowed against the mineral rights of public lands. He had a photocopied, self published book with all the information. It wasn’t a regular book ‘because the government wanted that information suppressed.’
Imagine being an 18 year old kid who has been in the system for a while, who is trying to support a girlfriend, a child and another on the way. Imagine being a guy that feels like he just can’t get the American Dream that apparently comes so easily to other people, and being told that you are secretly rich, and powerful, and that the reason you can’t get ahead isn’t because of your bad choices or being born into poverty, or any of that, but it is because of a vast conspiracy of the government.
He ate it up.
He researched online and found websites that told him that because he was white and male he had an inherent worth that was being denied to him by the government, and that he could access that if he could find the way to file the right paper work with the right words in the right time. He hoped for a time when he would be able to connect with some more knowledgeable sovereign citizens and claim his birthright.
I listened, and I worried. My daughter gently challenged his belief. Since my family is mixed race I challenged him on the racism that surrounds the Sovereign Citizen belief system.
Jay and Daughter told me they both seriously wanted to continue their relationship even though he is a right-wing sovereign citizen believer, and even though she identifies herself as a very liberal bisexual feminist.
My daughter and Jay got engaged, and I purchased 2 acres of land in Northern Ohio. I invited them to live with me and help me get my small farm up and running. We are all passionate about growing food, raising animals ethically, and living a simple, country lifestyle. Jay is good at keeping the ancient second hand tractor running, though he keeps bringing home chickens that are too old to lay because he feels sorry for them, and he spoils and overfeeds the ducks.
Jay is fortunate. He probably has above normal intelligence, and a willingness to see things from outside of his dogma. He started showing me things that he recognized as being crazy from some of the websites he was active on. I started showing him articles on the history of the constitution and lawmaking in the US. I wouldn’t say he is totally over his sovereign citizen ideology, but he is no longer a true believer. Maybe once he caught on that his inherent worth was because he is a good person, rather than on a conspiracy theory, he was able to let a lot of it go.
On Facebook, he posts articles from Fox News, and I post rebuttals. Oddly enough, we both like Bernie Sanders, though I’ll vote for Hillary if she is nominated, and he says he will write in a third party candidate. We meet in the middle at our mutual (and probably dogmatic and overblown) outrage at Monsanto, Tyson, and the brutality of the factory food system, and we rail at the lack of progress our country makes with food legislation. We fight over who gets to read the Mother Earth News first. Our dinner discussions are weird, animated and sometimes heated, but the food is excellent.
Out of respect for my daughter’s wishes, he now licenses his car, keeps his driver’s license up to date, pays taxes, and only owns a BB gun. He still pays 50% of his take home pay for child support, and his kids came and spent last summer with us. They made pickles and jam to take home to their mom.
We’ve been watching the standoff with the militants at Malheur. I’m tempted to mock them. They made this mess and seem dismayed that they have to pay the price. I rant about their twisted thinking that they are fighting what they say is a tyrannical government, and then are surprised when that same government wants to charge them with crimes. Hey, if they think the government is a tyranny wouldn’t it be a given that anyone who opposed it would be dealt with swiftly and severely? And when they aren’t can’t they see how it disproves their supposition? I have very little sympathy for them.
But Jay pities them. He tells me he knows just how they feel. How great it must have been to think they were going to be heroes. He says that being in a group like that is wonderful when you know your life is really looking hopeless because the group tells you that you can be like the founding fathers, and go down in history and be respected for taking a stand. He says that when you have screwed up so much in your life that you can never hope to get out of the hole you’ve dug, the group tells you that you can start over, and be a hero doing it. He also has no respect for Cliven Bundy. Jay knows that the Bundys sold those desperate men a false hope, and he says that there is no hell hot enough for them.
But then that’s how right wingers talk. They aren’t nice like us liberals.
Edited to Add: I wrote this because I think that at least some of the militants that got arrested at the Oregon standoff were into the Sovereign Citizen ideology, and I wanted to show that they might not be the idiots that they appear to be. Like Jay, they might just be desperate to have people see them as being worthy of respect. Sadly, it worked out to be just the opposite.