There’s a lot to unpack about the sovereign citizens and how that fits in with grift and crank magnetism. Even excluding this prelude this is likely going to take two full length posts about it.
Since the cranks deliberately misinterpret things part of the planned order of posting the other ideas in the collection of bad ideas we start here with an unsaid point from where I left off with the previous post.
As a non-conspiracy theorist you are allowed to be angry about about the things wrong with the world. If you’re like me, a dedicated agnostic, you can realize that in the realm of confirmation biased based topics, there are some things that aren’t too bad, at least at times. Namely religion. I would much rather have a church member calmly talk to me about God’s Love than someone spouting off material that ends up being the kind of things that get mentally I’ll people fired up to go to a school and start shooting. I will go to a church as a social function, never trying to convert anyone to my side. If, however, you start calling Sandy Hook a false flag and make baseless claims about crisis actors, I may counterattack.
What Alex did with Sandy Hook and subsequent shootings was marketing with psychological tricks. Eliciting an emotional reaction and targeting the audience to with whatever it took to bypass anything resembling critical thinking. He used two of the most hotly debated topics - the US constitutional rights of self defense and guns plus free speech.
I consider my desire to live in a world where children living in fear of being shot at school an infringement of my rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Now, lying on the internet is so normalized, it creeps into all aspects of our lives- the workplace, the schools, interactions with neighbors. Misinformation on the internet has short circuited peoples ability to see that lots of people, quite simply, lie there asses off.
Fortunately we have a few signs of hope. Maybe some of these big lawsuits (Jones defamation, Fox News defamation, Trump’s myriad problems) will produce a long overdue wake up call that there are consequences to promoting bad ideas. And to be clear, in the circles of people I follow they mostly recognize that both sides (liberals as well as conservatives) engage in a lot of activity simply as fundraising instead of actual intelligent policy decisions. The first rule to remember, social media was never and never will be a good source of factual news coverage.
Whether by accident or design, gematria merged into the grift magnetism cultural as something like “conspiracy theory light”. A youngster that may finally get fed up with the at times laughably wrong sports predictions has been exposed to some other bad ideas. And some of them make gematria look like a blessing instead of the waste of time that it is. That’s where things like sovereign citizens fit in.
The concept has been around forever. The financial hook is that you don’t have to pay taxes. Sovereign citizens have a good chance of joining a militia type organization. (Type…not an actual militia that has any intention of defending the country when invaded by a foreign power.)
So that’s enough prologue for now. Some more specific and historical background to come.
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