Re: Waffle House shooter was part of rightwing extremist movement
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Empire Wishitaw de Dugdahmoundya
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Date: April 23, 2018 11:09AM
The movement is growing, and spreading to new demographics. Based on IRS data on tax protesters, the Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that the sovereign movement has about 300,000 members. The SPLC has seen an uptick in participation since 2010, Lenz says, largely due to the housing crisis. Naturally, the ideology spreads quickly online, in chat rooms and YouTube comment sections. Newer recruits may be unaware of the movement’s racist roots; ideas espoused by Black sovereign citizen groups, Lenz says, “seem to affirm black personhood in the presence of a dominant white narrative.” And the anti-government sentiment often takes the form of leftist pan-Africanism and black separatism.
One strain of the ideology popular among black Americans is rooted in the Moorish Science Temple of America: It holds that blacks predated Native Americans in North America, and thus have indigenous rights. (Wesley Snipes, convicted of tax evasion in 2008, had ties to one of the first known black sovereign groups, the Nuwabians.) According to J. J. MacNab, an expert on sovereign citizens at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University, sovereign ideology is most common among blacks in East Coast cities such as Philadelphia and DC, and in the South—particularly Florida, Tennessee, and the New Orleans area. After the 2014 Ferguson protests, the St. Louis area also became a hotbed for black sovereign citizenship. “You’re going to find chiropractors and dentists and doctors and all kinds of wealthy professionals in this movement as well—not just poor,” MacNab says.
[Cop killer] Gavin Long hailed from Kansas City, Missouri. In Long’s county filings, MacNab told me, he declared that he was shedding the name associated with his legal shell—he’s “Cosmo Setepenra” in the YouTube videos—and that he was only subject to indigenous common law. Sovereign citizenry may have begun as a right-wing movement, she says, but “by the time you’re in the fringe, left-wing, right-wing doesn’t really matter anymore.”
Members of Long’s “Moorish” offshoot, the Empire Wishitaw de Dugdahmoundyah, insist that much of the land acquired by the United States in the Louisiana purchase belongs to their ancestors. (Fredrix Washington, an Empire leader, told me he does not consider it a sovereign citizen group, that the Empire no longer producers false identification documents, and that he denounced Long’s killing of police officers. The group sells bogus license plates on its website, however, and some of its members were investigated by the federal government in the late 1990s for money laundering, offshore banking fraud, and selling illegal license plates, which they said were justified under common law.)
Members of other black groups, such as the African American Homeland Association and the New Black Panther Party (not to be confused with the Black Panther Party for Self Defense) also express sovereign ideas, MacNab says, but so-called Moorish sovereigns probably represent just 5 to 10 percent of the overall movement. Many black Americans subscribe to “patriot” sovereign ideology, which has been around longer and is largely championed by whites. There are “hundreds of strains of thought as to what sovereign citizenry is,” Lenz notes.