The shocking ambush murder of two police in Victoria this week has triggered exactly the responses you’d expect from exactly the usual suspects. The legacy media are shrieking about ‘the far-right’, while the online conspiracy networks are gibbering that ‘He wuz a good boy and dindu nuffin!’ Even worse, they’re trying to paint him as a modern Ned Kelly. (To which I must ask: You mean, the immigrant family of petty criminals who murdered police in cold blood and started a terrorist insurrection based on imported foreign ideology?)
Somewhere between these equal and opposite idiots is the truth. Strangely enough, this time the legacy media are closer to it than conspiracy nuts, which is not to say that the legacy media aren’t milking this for all it’s worth to push their agenda.
But it does mean that the online conspiracists need to take a long, hard, look at themselves and admit what they’ve been too willing to give a free pass to.
Of the past decade or so of terror incidents in Australia, Islam is still batting way ahead – but the ‘Sovereign Citizen’ loons are batting too high an average. With one ambush mass shooting in 2022, now another, it has to be admitted that there is a dangerously violent underbelly to what would otherwise be just another nutty online conspiracy theory. But what are Sovereign Citizens?
In Australia, sovereign citizens are not new. They have been active since federation in innocuous ways, such as Leonard Casley’s self-declared Principality of Hutt River in rural Western Australia. In their modern form, their views generally focus on a few key areas: the belief that they are not subject to the laws of the land and can thus “opt out” of authority, and theories such as foreign ownership of governments. While these beliefs are not strictly delusional, they are divorced from reality, and for some, they are held with a delusional and obsessional intensity.
Two things are immediately noticeable about your average ‘Sov Cit’: they often have a rudimentary education (killer ‘Dezi Freeman’ left school at 13) and they’re the worst sort of bush lawyer. In a classic case of the Dunning-Kruger effect, after fishing through a few legal dictionaries (most often an outdated edition of Black’s Law Dictionary), they decide they’ve exposed some massive truth that the entire legal-political establishment has either failed to notice or actively conspired to cover up.
Hence, if you watch any ‘Sov Cit Bingo’ video, you’ll find them trotting out the same ridiculous arguments against police. ‘I’m not driving, I’m travelling.’ ‘I’m not transporting goods, so I’m not driving.’ ‘This is a horseless carriage.’
But their biggie, their conspiracy trump card, the Lizard People of the Sov Cit movement, if you will, is that the government is illegal. Hence, they are not subject to the laws of the land. I’ve tried to understand their logic on this, but it’s as futile as trying to understand the ‘logic’ of your average Post-Modernist. Most particularly curious is how Sov Cits in Commonwealth countries have adopted precisely the same arguments they’ve inherited from their American thought leaders, despite the completely different Constitutional and Common Law traditions of each.
I guess it’s a one-size-fits-all foil hat.
While many people see sovereign citizens and others of their ilk as odd but not overtly threatening, this belies the real risk they may pose. It’s true that most are non-violent in nature, but their entrenched and extreme beliefs and their distrust of the state and authority renders them a group of interest for law enforcement due to the potential for escalation into anti-sociality and violence, especially when they link with other fringe right-wing extremists. More than a third of all counter-terror investigations in Australia now focus on extreme right-wing groups and individuals, including those associated with the sovereign citizen movement.
All this is true enough, but note how the author immediately tries to pivot away from exactly what I bet you’re thinking, right now: ‘Sounds just like Islam’.
Yes, it’s difficult to accept the threat on our own shore when we have been told for decades that the threat comes from overseas, but the Wieambilla murders were Australia’s first fundamentalist Christian terrorist attack, conducted by two men who were also sovereign citizens, and highlighted a new front in the war on terror, in which individual operators who hold extreme far-right beliefs are not affiliated with traditional transnational extremist religious groups such as Islamic State.
Leaving aside the obvious bias, here, she’s still not wrong about the Sov Cits. In fact, it’s just as much the beam in our own eyes: most of us have tended to either ignore the Sov Cits entirely or write them off as harmless nutters. Most especially, too many in the Covid Freedom Movement were not as vigilant as they should have been about some of their fellow travellers. The Sov Cits used the obvious government overreach and authoritarianism as an ‘in’ to a wider movement.
Well, many of us are prone to asking why the Islamic mainstream does so little to tackle the violent extremists in their midst. Sadly, murderous whackers like ‘Dezi Freeman’ turn the same blowtorch back on us.
It’s long past time we woke up to the cancer lurking in our midst – and do our best to excise it.
