Have you heard of Sovereign Citizens? I bet you’ve seen videos of them even if you’re not sure of the name. They’re sort of like fantasy role-player people, except instead of a world full of wizards and elves and orcs and smurfs and shit, it’s a world of this strange, parallel bureaucracy where they all somehow don’t have to follow the rules of everyday life in a society, and can work around requirements like taxes and car registration or insurance by showing stacks of weird, complicated documents and speaking in a nearly-incomprehensible dense jargon of made-up legalese. In almost any interaction with actual authority figures or government officials, this never works. They’re also wildly, even fascinatingly annoying to watch in action.
I’m mentioning all of this because I just found out that Walmart – yes, that Walmart, the place where we get our car batteries and Fruity Pebbles – is happily selling not-legally-usable Sovereign Citizen Bullshit license plates for your car.
I know I should know better, but I’m sort of amazed that a mainstream retailer like Walmart is selling this stuff; I always assumed these idiots just got these from Etsy sellers or small private websites, I didn’t realize that one of the biggest retailers in America would be fine selling something that is really only used for illegal purposes. Why the hell else would you want a license plate that says “FREE MAN” and has “NOT FOR COMMERCE USE” and “TRAVELING, NOT DRIVING” printed on it? For novelty value?
It’s not novelty value. All those words are Sovereign Citizen bullshit buzzwords. Like “traveling” instead of driving, or other silly semantic games. And why is FREE MAN a buck more than the others? You’d think BUST ME would be the top-tier one, because it’s the most daring!
Here’s how the UNC School of Government describes Sovereign Citizen’s relationship with things like vehicle tags, from a 2013 report called A Quick Guide to Sovereign Citizens:
Sovereign citizens may issue their own driver’s licenses and vehicle tags, create and file their own liens against government officials who cross them, question judges about the validity of their oaths, challenge the applicability of traffic laws to them and, in extreme cases, resort to violence to protect their imagined rights. They speak an odd quasi-legal language and believe that by not capitalizing names and by writing in red and using certain catch phrases they can avoid any liability in our judicial system. They even think they can lay claim to vast sums of money held by the United States Treasury, based on the premise that the government has secretly pledged them as security for the country’s debts. Based on these beliefs, and a twisted understanding of the Uniform Commercial Code, they try various schemes that they think discharge them from responsibility for their debts.
It’s exhausting.
Here’s a video of a Sovereign Citizen traffic stop in action, in case you were morbidly curious:
There’s whole compilations of bodycam videos of police having to deal with Sovereign Citizens, if you feel like being annoyed even more:
They’re, um, a lot. And I realize my own hypocrisy as I type these words, as I hate dealing with registration and paperwork and all of that associated Kafkaesque tedium. I’ve also had my truck on FARM USE plates for far too long. But everything I drive has insurance and I have a valid license and I do understand the need for these things, because we do live in a society where we all have to work together. It’s imperfect, sure, but there are rules we all need to at least try to agree to, and making up a whole parallel inane legal system just isn’t going to make anything better for anyone.
I don’t think that if Walmart stopped selling these things that any of this would end; Sovereign Citizens would just find another source for these things. But at the same time, it is worth noting that Walmart is making a profit off items that will be used for illegal activity, and, in fact, can really only be used for that. You can buy a bow and arrow at Walmart and use it for illegal things, like holding up a convenience store with a lot more flair than some boring gun, but you can also use it for plenty of legal things, like poking holes in your aluminum siding from 20 yards away or attempting a more exciting way to make kebabs.
But these license plates? Their only use is for dummies who read too many maritime law textbooks to try and drive without insurance before they end up in jail.
It’s worth mentioning that Walmart is like Amazon in that they allow third-party sellers, which this definitely could be. That makes it a little less egregious, I suppose, but it’s still being sold via Walmart’s site, whether it comes from a third-party seller or not. Maybe that makes a difference? I don’t know.
Still, on some basic level, fundamentally, this is all fine for Walmart to sell. What a weird world.
(top image: Walmart, Renault)
Well, could be worse, they could be happily selling illegal smoke detectors. And even putting aside stuff like that…Amazon’s storefront is a mess and I never saw it improve when I occasionally saw it again after a long time away. I think they still have real products that spam tags in the title/description…
The obvious “conspiracy theory” is that a confusing, untrustworthy range of products on display will drive people to buy “Amazon Basics” much more often by decision fatigue alone.
FREE MAN is a dollar more because they know they’re also targeting the Half Life crowd.
What’s next? You’re gonna tell us walmart shouldn’t sell seatbelt shirts? https://www.walmart.com/ip/Seatbelt-Driver-Side-Costume-All-Over-Adult-T-Shirt-Medium/101189058
My favorite episodes of On Patrol Live or COPS is when they pull over one of the sovereign citizen types. The verbal jiu jitsu spewed by these whack jobs is highly entertaining.
I clerked for a federal judge who presided a criminal trial of a sovereign citizen a couple of decades ago. The Defendant managed to buy several BMWs using fake checks from his non-existent treasury account before the dealership caught on. His friends would hand out jury nullification fliers, hold loud “prayer” circles in the lobby, and even call in bomb threats in their desperation to intimidate the court and the jurors. One of his friends was detained for criminal contempt and eventually referred for a psych exam (the determination was that he was crazy as a bedbug). Another CS in their group, who was a disbarred lawyer, tried to serve the AUSA with a habeas petition on behalf of the crazy guy in the courtroom. The whole trial was a circus.
As a courtroom technology AV person, these cases do break up the day in and day out monotony of most of what goes on at the courthouse.
Except for any part where the defendant was allowed to talk. It was just an endless parade of cites from irrelevant cases from 100 years prior and these types of exchanges:
Defendant: “This is not a proper Article III court and you have no authority over me!”
Judge: “And yet here you are.”
I was once doing audits for a dealer group I worked for and ran across a deal where a SC bought a car from us, signed all this weird stuff. Googled it, sure enough, SC BS. Called the finance guy who did the deal and told him this will go bad, we need him back in. They called the guy and said they forgot one form he needed to sign, said they’d give him a free tank of gas and a car wash for coming in.
Once they had the car keys they told him sign it correctly or walk away. He walked away.
On a different note, thanks for the lede photo (a Renault?) with yellow headlamps. They help me fall asleep easier. Blue light and all that.
Back in 2017, I sold a 100% functional ’01 Jetta TDI 5M with 165K miles on it (and probably many more to give) in SE Texas to a friend that bought it for his brother who had gone all Sovereign Citizen. He didn’t register it, insure it and put some sort of stupid SC paper plates on it.
He got pulled over for blowing a stop sign and wouldn’t identify himself or get out of the car after trying to elude them until he turned into a cul-de-sac. (Not the sharpest tool in the shed.) The constabulary broke windows and pulled his butt out of the car. And then had it hauled to a salvage yard. Totaled due to the cost of replacement glass. His brother, my friend, hired a lawyer friend, for a couple of thousands of dollars to get charges (and prison time) minimalized.
That car deserved a better ending.
I don’t live down there anymore and I have no idea how Jimmy, the SC mess, is doing. And I don’t effing care.
There is a legal novelty use. Put them on the front in a state that does not require front license plates.
Torch… don’t you have a plate that says FARM USE on your pickup?
He acknowledges as much, don’t know if it was a retrofitted sentiment
Paging…. Sense of Humor…..
Walmart has its own 3rd party marketplace, similar to Amazon or Etsy, and I suspect that is why you’re seeing these. It is, however, a bit shocking that the moderators are letting these 3rd party sellers hawk products like this under Walmart’s brand umbrella.
Yeah I looked these up and cropped out of the pictures above (not sure if it’s on purpose?) is “Sold and shipped by FUN SALES AND SERVICE INTERNATIONAL, INC.” So this is a 3rd party seller, not walmart. You can get basically the same thing on Amazon, for what it’s worth.
But we sort of expect amazon to have shitty, scammy, 3rd party crap because it was a marketplace first and then an actual brand selling its own stuff second. Meanwhile, because walmart was brick-and-mortar first, you expect stuff on their website to actually be from walmart. I do wonder if the increased revenue from letting 3rd party sellers is worth the PR hit from customers thinking all the crap on there is coming directly from walmart.
you’d think it would have less of the shady products, but the third party sellers on walmart are just as shady, if not worse.
Amazon will at least sort of move those down to the bottom of the list for whatever your looking for, but Walmart will happily show it right at the top next to the real thing.
By the way, have you ever noticed the design similarities between the Renault 16 and the Daimler DS420? (of the only brand who had a car called the Soverign…)
Hey, if these guys aren’t paying insurance and registration, driving over the speed limit, and generally being irresponsible we with these potentially dangerous machines we all live with daily – I’m glad they have these plates, it’ll help the cops to find them!
Amazon has them too. And I’ve found fake temporary tags on eBay. In Texas at least, temporary tags were something anyone could print on a home printer. The state seems to have finally switched to real metal plates with visible TEMPORARY marking that would be a lot harder to counterfeit.
except they’re already being counterfeit. Serves the state right for moving away from stamped numbers and just doing the printed ones.
I’ve also noticed a few of the printed plates here in Idaho end up “accidentally” damaged in such a way as to scrape off the printing. I never see a scraped-off image on the special plates; it’s always the numbers. Stamped plates are definitely superior.
I’ve been enjoying watching police bodycam videos of sovcit stops simply to gauge the effectiveness of various window punch devices.