Amway Without the Soap

If you’ve been hiding under a rock lo these many years, everything depicted in this video might be news to you. If so, I’d like the address of your rock, and want to sublet part of the shadow from you. Even if you are clued in, the refresher course they put under all these videos on RubeTube with a link to Wikipedia won’t do you any harm:

Sovereign citizen movement
Wikipedia • The sovereign citizen movement is a loose group of anti-government activists, conspiracy theorists, vexatious litigants, tax protesters and financial scammers found mainly in English-speaking common law countries—the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand.

If you’re wondering what Mexicans like to watch on TV, wonder no further. Most everyone here likes to watch Americans getting arrested. There are about a zillion YouTube channels that mimic the hoary original TV show, Cops, and I swear my friends in Yucatan watch all of them. In the first AirBnB we rented a couple of years ago, if you turned on the TV without subscription logins in hand, all you got was Cops dubbed in Spanish as the single default channel. As far as Mexico goes, there are no home grown versions of these arrest videos, because people don’t act like that here, and are mystified and modestly entertained by watching Americans fling their poo at the popo.

All the entertainment and commentary in these videos are the downstream effect of demanding that police wear body cameras all the time. It didn’t work out like they planned. Everyone still tries the I can’t breathe dindu nuthin’ dodge. No one’s buying it anymore, because there’s an almost unlimited supply of bodycam depictions of diddo everythin’. They show that American police are generally polite and professional, to the point of being overly deferential to raging a-holes, if you ask me. The cops seem mostly resigned to the “catch and release” program of the judiciary, and plod along, wearily asking, over and over, if any driver has a valid driver’s license, a current registration, and paid up insurance. They’re all hoping to someday find that single, elusive driver, every traffic cop’s white whale, someone who can answer, “Yes.”

So my Mexican friends are quite well versed in the art of PIT maneuvers, window breakage, generous applications of pepper spray, wobbly straight line walking, jerking eye motions, and fighting with the cops while declaiming, “I’m not resisting.” But they were all mystified by Sovereign Citizens. The Spanish subtitles are of no use to a Spanish speaker, because the English being spouted is of no use to an English speaker. The people are plain nuts, but they don’t appear to be like the usual meth-addled impromptu Grand Theft Auto contestants that the Arkansas state troopers are currently ramming at 120 MPH. So they ask me, “¿Qué onda?” What gives?

After some cogitation, I realized I had seen this sort of behavior before, but not where you might have expected to find it. Sovereign Citizenry is just Amway without the soap. I’ll explain.

Both sets of people construct an alternate reality, live in it, and expect the world to conform to them. IYKYK is the INRI nailed to the top of the cross they’ve fashioned for themselves. Amway people, and their MLM ilk, reject the fundamental laws of economics, entrepreneurship, success, and social relationships. SovCits reject the fundamental laws of, well, laws, along with all sorts of government authority, contracts, jurisdiction, and identity.

Common sense isn’t common, as they say, but it’s much, much less common in both sets of cults than among the genpop. For instance, common sense tells you that when two burly uniformed men carrying handcuffs, mace, pistols, tasers, batons, and a paystub from the local police station say, “You’re under arrest,” the appropriate response is not, “No I’m not.”

Both groups trump common sense with their indomitable adherence to Hidden Knowledge. They believe that ordinary people are trapped by their slavish idolatry of obvious rules, and the only way out is to learn The Secret Rules. Back in the Pleistocene Era before the internet, when people learned about things like this only by word of mouth, everyone eventually had a “friend” at work who invited you to a gathering at their house that was totally social, trust me, but somehow instantly devolved into a guy scribbling on a whiteboard telling you how much money you could make by signing up everyone you know by telling them how much money they could make, by signing up everyone they knew…. Then you all sold soap to each other to get rich. Or Tupperware. Or timeshares. Or whatever.

Now we have the internet, and hooboy, it’s the equivalent of a bosh cropduster. Not only can someone in Arkansas convince someone in Arizona that Black’s Law Dictionary is the new Holy Bible, they can sell them stuff directly and make money off it. Fictitious license plates. Weird ID cards. Books and reams of mimeographed law-talking-guy drivel to clutch while you explain to a judge why you’re not a person, you’re a Moorish National, even though you’ve lived in Oklahoma since the doctor slapped you, apparently much too vigorously.

It’s the ritualized documentation that both groups adore that makes their Venn diagrams completely overlap. Sovereign Citizens produce blizzards of pseudo-legal filings, affidavits, notices, stamps, and citations. You’ll often see their latest victims literally reading off a script while the cops roll their eyes and call for backup. MLMs are about the same, and produce plans, scripts, motivational systems, charts, seminars, books, and endless “training materials” that are little more than business plans for bothering your friends, neighbors, and co-workers. The worst of these people, which is generally a 100% tie for first place, drag their children into it, too, like the woman in the video. And when it fails (it always does), they’ll tell you that you didn’t do it hard enough, or maybe it’s just proof that the system is totally corrupt, man, and by the way, would you like to buy my book that exposes the totally corrupt system?

Both worlds generally operate best when they catch people who are having some sort of personal crisis. The SovCits quote every crazy pseudo-legalism they can dream up, but eventually the cops find out they simply have four DUIs, or fourteen speeding tickets they forgot to pay, or some other impetus to declare to cops, like Obi-Wan Kenobi in a trucker’s cap, that these are not the laws you’re looking for.

The MLMs appeal mostly to people who’ve run aground on the shores of regular commerce. Financial stress and loneliness is a powerful motivator to listen to someone who says they have the cheat code to that Sandals Vacation you’ve been dreaming of since you got laid off with no severance.

So it’s kinda fun to see a SovCit tell a policeman that he’s allowed to drive 90 mph in a school zone because he’s not driving in a car, he’s traveling in his vessel under maritime law. It’s less fun to try to explain it to Mexicans.

And for some reason, they never want to drive anywhere with me.