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The Anti-Defamation League has been warning about this coalescence since January, with Lawrence and his cohort David Straight, who’ve been holding these seminars across the nation and, due to the contemporary enchantment of absorbing QAnon beliefs into the equally conspiracy-fueled worldview of sovereign residents, have more and more been packing them in.
As their backgrounder defined:
Lawrence teaches sovereignty with a QAnon bent, urging his followers to grow to be “American State Nationals” earlier than Trump is reinstated as president. “American State Nationwide” is considered one of many phrases that sovereign residents use to tell apart themselves from residents beneath the jurisdiction of the illegitimate, de facto authorities. “Trump is engaged on the ‘Fall of the Cabal’ which can permit our Constitutional Republic to Rise once more, nevertheless the newly partially restored Constitutional Republic will want We The Folks of restored standing by way of ‘The Nice Awakening’ to fill and performance within the newly partially restored Constitutional Republic,” Lawrence posted to Telegram in October 2021. “It will solely be completed by way of We The Folks reclaiming our Birthright by changing into American State Nationals… Because the variety of American State Nationals and one of many Folks will increase, so will the Perform of the [sic] our Constitutional Republic. It would begin on the absolute native stage (you and your neighbors) after which develop and develop and develop.”
Sovereign-citizen and QAnon beliefs meld collectively virtually seamlessly, because the ADL explains, as a result of their basic worldviews involving a large international cabal nefariously conspiring to enslave mankind are so related. The sovereign motion’s perception that the present U.S. authorities is illegitimate serves to assist their view of the Biden presidency as fraudulent, in addition to the means for “liberating” themselves from such “tyranny.”
Lawrence primarily promotes a model of sovereign-citizen beliefs known as “Redemption Concept,” which offers with the core idea that everybody who’s an American citizen is designated a “strawman” company entity at beginning, making them subsidiary properties of America Inc. “Redemption” is the method by which they cut up the strawman from the flesh-and-blood human, and its objective is two-fold. Because the Southern Poverty Legislation Heart (SPLC) explains:
As soon as separated from the company shell, the newly freed man is now exterior of the jurisdiction of all admiralty legal guidelines. Extra importantly, by submitting a sequence of advanced, legal-sounding paperwork, the sovereign can faucet into that secret Treasury account for his personal functions. During the last 30 years, there have been a whole lot of sovereign promoters packaging totally different mixtures of varieties and paperwork, trying to good the method. Whereas nobody has ever succeeded, in fact, they know with the spiritual certainty of a real cult believer that they’re shut. All it would take is the proper mixture of phrases, say the promoters of the redemption rip-off.
Lawrence repeatedly regales his audiences together with his model of the “redemption” rip-off, however with a robust QAnon taste. At an April 21 “Patriots Arise” event in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—the place he shared the stage with Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano—Lawrence launched to right into a rant that manifested that commingling two conspiracist universes produces twice the crackpottery.
He defined how fashionable births and the birth-certificate course of are literally satanic rituals:
Fred learn a quote from [Woodrow Wilson adviser] Edward Mandell Home the place they speak about this assemble, the place they’re gonna make slaves of us all, by a system of pledging, the place we pledge our youngsters as surety by one thing known as a beginning certificates, and a satanic ritual that takes place. …
So I’m gonna stroll you thru a satanic ritual that takes place, and it began with the beginning certificates, which was truly chartered beneath the Division of Transportation. And all the things is Admiralty. All of us reside beneath the water, and what’s regulation, and the place does regulation come from? The place does the phrase “regulation” come from? Land, air, and water. And the place the founders of this nation thought of what regulation was, was the Bible, the Geneva Bible, the King James Model 1611 version, the place we received the phrase regulation from. And land, air, and water was in Genesis Chapter 1, verse 24 by 28, “and God created the heaven and the earth.” And God giveth man dominion over the earth, and God giveth man dominion over the land, and all of the creatures that stroll and creepeth. And God giveth man dominion over the air, and all of the birds that fly, and God giveth man dominion over the water, and all of the fish that swimmeth. And that is regulation.
Lawrence then repeated inventory sovereign-citizen beliefs (all each bit as risibly false as his etymology for the phrase “regulation”) that there are three tiers of regulation: Canon regulation, widespread regulation, and Admiralty regulation, every reflecting rule over air, land, and water respectively. Then he went on:
So how do they get you to pledge your youngster, and the way did our mother and father and our grandparents pledge us as property, as surety, in our personification, all capital names? It was by an evil, satanic ritual known as the beginning of a kid.
You see, a mom goes right into a foundling middle, and he or she goes to see the doc—tor; a tor is a invoice of lading when a ship arrives on the dock—and the mom places her toes up on the stirrups and the mom’s water breaks, and the kid comes out of the water by the beginning canal, such as you berth a ship, into the air, into the palms of the dock—tor. After which, traditionally talking, a satanic ritual would happen—a toddler was smacked on the butt, turned the wrong way up, cried out in concern and ache. After which earlier than the kid might put their toes on the land and take the breath of God as a free creation of God, a authorized bond doc got here out. It’s on bond paper as a result of it’s a banking instrument, it’s a surety bond.
And the kid’s soul was taken on the again of that doc. It was known as the soul print. After which the umbilical twine and the afterbirth was thereby lifeless and deserted by the mom, as a result of that was a part of your beginning, a part of your being born. The assemble, the evil says that now that’s lifeless, part of you died and now you’re a lifeless vessel, you’re an all-capital authorized fiction. They known as you an individual. If you happen to take a look at your driver’s license, for those who take a look at each doc that authorities or any enterprise sends you, it’s in your all-capital identify. Your personification. Now the Bible tells us to not tackle the persona, to not tackle the particular person.
Lawrence additionally harkened to the inventory radicalization perception in “red-pilling”: “We live in Babylon proper now,” he stated. “It’s a company assemble. It’s a Matrix. Keanu Reeves has stated publicly that The Matrix is a documentary of how we live our lives. Your cash’s not actual, you don’t personal something.”
And close to the tip, he wrapped all of it up with a basic QAnon-style declare that Donald Trump is secretly One Of Them:
Sure, President Trump has achieved many issues for us. And I received’t go into quite a lot of them, as a result of fairly frankly quite a lot of of us aren’t prepared for it. And it’s onerous to confirm. However Donald Trump has informed you all, for those who return to his speeches, he’s informed you that when he comes again, he’s gonna be little letters, decrease case. Look to his speech in 2021 at CPAC in Texas. He stated after we return to the White Home this time it’s going to be in little letters. He informed you at one other rally that persons are sovereign. He informed you at one other rally that you simply’re all millionaires. He informed you in one other rally that you’re the elite. And they’re the scoundrels. He informed you at one other rally that the Bar Affiliation is corrupt. He tells you on and on—he would possibly speak for 2 hours, however solely 4 sentences are for individuals who are awake. And there’s an enormous distinction between being woke and awake, is it not?
Lawrence has fashioned shut associations with main QAnon influencers akin to Ann Vandersteel, Allen and Francine Fosdick, the Pennsylvania-based hosts of the QAnon present Up Entrance within the Prophetic, and David Straight.
Vandersteel posted proudly introduced on Gab that she was “formally an American State Nationwide,” that means she not was beholden to the U.S. authorities. She touted the supposed advantages of changing into an “American state nationwide,” akin to freedom from paying federal taxes to attending to “vote as a delegate, which has the facility of 4 votes,” in an look on “The Conservative Day by day Podcast,” hosted by Joe Oltmann and Max McGuire.
She stated she had been launched to those concepts by Lawrence, who ran for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania in 2018. Vandersteel indicated that Lawrence was radicalized afterward by his contacts with David Straight, a sovereign citizen activist who additionally promoted QAnon theories. Vandersteel claimed that Straight was a “commissioner on President Trump’s youngster sex-trafficking fee.”
ADL analyst Mark Pitcavage explained Lawrence’s rant on Twitter, noting that “redemption principle” originated with a sovereign-citizen guru named Roger Elvick again in 1999, and it turned widespread inside the motion.
“Fundamental redemption principle is one thing like this: In 1933, the US went off the gold normal and will subsequently not pay its money owed to the worldwide bankers. To get round this, the federal government turned people into collateral by changing beginning certificates into inventory,” he wrote. “They did this partly by creating fictional duplicates of each particular person (dubbed ‘strawmen’). You possibly can inform when a doc refers back to the straw man as an alternative of the flesh and blood particular person as a result of the identify can be in all caps, not higher and decrease case.”
He additionally famous that a lot of the speak is dedicated to explaining the sovereign-citizen perception that the conspiracy which infiltrated and subverted and changed the unique, legit authorities with a de facto tyrannical authorities had achieved so by changing constitutional regulation with inferior “maritime” or “admiralty” regulation.
“Lastly,” he famous, “the Satanic references thrown in there are derived from QAnon and presumably designed to make these theories extra palatable to QAnoners.”
Given the scale of Lawrence’s audiences now, and the regularity and breadth of “American State Nationalist” coaching classes, the ADL’s January warning—“Given the pliability of the sovereign citizen motion and its pseudo-legal techniques, it’s fairly attainable that growing numbers of QAnon adherents will discover sovereign citizen concepts enticing sooner or later”—appears greater than prescient. It could, in reality, show to be understated.
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