Talk:Freeman on the land movement

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Necrothesp (talk | contribs) at 14:25, 21 December 2022 (→‎Requested move 14 December 2022). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Origin.

In the 70's there was a Canadian man selling audio tapes and later in the 80's and 90's VHS tapes teaching a 'silver bullet' course on 'American law' to get out of speeding fines, debts, etc. It's the earliest instance I can find with all this boat obsession and woowoo. Does anyone else know an earlier possible origin point? Vergilianae (talk) 13:33, 3 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

If you actually did some research into the law society and judge circuits in England, you would know that there was a time when it was illegal to have a lawyer represent you in court. You may also know that twice the judges have been purged en-masse, once in the late 800's AD - 44 judges were hung by King Alfred the great who looked poorly on incompetence and insolence. Also in approx 1200's AD all but 2 of the judges were fired and fined heavily for corruption/fraud.

TBH I can't see the wiki page - freeman on the land - being much use to the general public unless it is heavily edited and redacted, as it is currently very one-sided and biased, also it fails to mention that the worldwide law society is beholden to the crown and the Vatican, which clearly shows on the law societies heraldry and coat of arms. Also it should be mentioned that western common-law countries have a over riding common-law jurisdiction. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 163.47.104.124 (talk) 09:24, 23 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, it is a very one-sided view of the law. Rather than putting the article in the present tense, e.g., "Freemen on the land use spurious arguments," it would be better to write the article in terms of what judges of courts constituted by political bodies (USA, Canada, etc.) have said, e.g. "Judge X in case Y says that freemen on the land use spurious arguments." That is a fair statement, but taking any single judge's word for the present (or eternal) truth---take cases concerning slavery. Some would say slavery was legal until it was outlawed. Some would say it was never legal and that all judgments countenancing slavery were, in spite of their enforcement, unlawful. There is a difference between law as it is practied in a given court system (what precedents you can rely on judges accepting) and the discussion of what law ought to be. Freeman on the land is a straight forward term: everyone is free or bond, and everyone is some place, e.g. on the land, in the ocean, etc. The way that the bodies politic presume jurisdiction is by claiming the right to rule within their artificial metes and bounds, but, again, academically, physical geography is distinguished from political geography. That there is a river or a mountain or a tectonic plate is physical geography, that there is a "country" called "united states of america" is political geography. Someone who says "I am not on the land" when he is standing on the land is a fool. Someone who says "I am not in United States, that is purely a conceptual entity that exists only within your mind, and I don't accede to that" is perhaps another sort of fool, but he is not objectively incorrect. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:569:7A3C:9100:C933:9FEE:B86C:A50C (talk) 18:40, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 12 January 2020

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: page moved (non-admin closure) ~~ CAPTAIN MEDUSAtalk 07:03, 21 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Freemen on the land → Freeman on the land – Make the title singular WP:SINGULAR. Even as a collective, the singular is in use: [Calgary Herald: "More about the Freeman-on-the-land movement" http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/More+about+Freeman+land+movement/8969966/story.html], Footnote 2 indicates singular and plural are interchangeable. BiologicalMe (talk) 00:18, 12 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: Doesn't this fall into "the names of classes of objects" in WP:SINGULAR? I'm legitimately uncertain. --Yamla (talk) 13:23, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Possible sources (Canada)

There are some articles about “OPCA”, which is the designation Meads v. Meads uses for freeman on the land and related ideas, by Donald J Netolitzky, published in the Alberta Law Review and available on the CanLII website. In particular “The History of the Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Argument Phenomenon in Canada”, but the others should also be useful. Brunton (talk) 18:34, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Removed claim from lede

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States classifies freemen as sovereign citizen extremists and domestic terrorists.[1][2] This isn't supported by the cited articles. The first (which is nothing to do with the FBI) says that Freemen may embrace sovereign citizen ideology, while the second states '[Sovereign Citizens] may refer to themselves as “constitutionalists” or “freemen,” which is not necessarily a connection to a specific group, but, rather, an indication that they are free from government control'. That isn't the same as saying that the FBI "classifies" freemen as sovereign citizens or terrorists. I've also changed the caption on the first picture, which claimed it was a sovereign citizen billboard, but the cited source just said it was making claims similar to those of the Freemen of the Land and Sovereign Citizen movements. Iapetus (talk) 09:19, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ School of Government, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (September 2012), A Quick Guide to Sovereign Citizens (PDF), archived from the original (PDF) on 3 May 2015, retrieved 5 July 2015
  2. ^ "Sovereign Citizens A Growing Domestic Threat to Law Enforcement". Domestic Terrorism. Federal Bureau of Investigation. 11 September 2011. Archived from the original on 10 December 2011. Retrieved 3 May 2015.

Cestui Que Vie Act 1666

I removed the word “admiralty” from one of the court cases because rhe Cestui Que Vie Act is not, in fact, admiralty law and neither of the sources cited says that it is. The change was reverted with the edit summary, ‘“This facet of admiralty and maritime law is pervasive in F’s thinking”’. This is a quotation from paragraph 5 of the judgment, but it doesn’t refer to the Cestui Que Vie Act, it is in the statement “It is in this context that when a birth is registered, F considers this to be the equivalent of an ‘entry into a ship’s manifest’, in which the child becomes ‘an asset to the country which has boarded a vessel to sail on the high seas.’ This facet of admiralty and maritime law is pervasive in F’s thinking.” There is nothing about ships’ manifests in the act, and the quotations in the judgment are from F, not the act. The act just says that if someone is missing “beyond the seas” (i.e. outside Britain), or otherwise, for a certain amount of time they can be presumed dead. It is not admiralty law. Brunton (talk) 09:38, 12 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

"Maritime" is an core aspect. Freeman on the Land, tax protestors and sovereign citizen pseudolaw heavily rely upon that sort of thinking: that there is a secret false government they can remove themselves from, and escaping admiralty law is one of the mystical ways. I will refer to The USDOJ Criminal Tax Manual 40.00 -- ILLEGAL TAX PROTESTERS see Section: 40.05[4][b] The Gold-Fringed Flag ("The American Maritime Flag of War"). A central element that is not placed quite right should be moved to improve accuracy. I have floated one attempt to reword. BiologicalMe (talk) 16:38, 12 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It’s “an core aspect” of the conspiracy theory, but that doesn’t mean we take it as being valid. In fact it’s one of the reasons that the theory is nonsense. FOTLers may claim that statutes are “maritime law”, but per WP:FRINGE, we do not have to humour them, and we shouldn’t imply that the law can be “reinterpreted” in this way. Brunton (talk) 17:39, 12 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The subject is WP:FRINGE. We don't delete the article for that reason. We discuss the subject without treating it as valid. The purpose of incuding the maritime aspect is to illustrate the psuedolaw in action. I'll refer you to Netolitzky Organised Pseudolegal Commercial Arguments as Magic and Ceremony (footnote 185): "Registering a child abandons ownership of the child, who can then be seized 'under the laws of maritime salvage and it becomes their chattel property.' In this variant the 'legal entity' is the Record of Live Birth document, which is exchanged for a birth certificate." A simple "the court rejected his argument" can make it clear it didn't fly and still include the essence of the spurious reasoning. Would you prefer to use the word "misinterpreted" since the court rejected the argument? I didn't use it because I try to err in favor of a neutral tone, but for fringe topics there is a lot of leeway. BiologicalMe (talk) 18:25, 12 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I think that we absolutely should prefer “misinterpreted”. We don’t treat fringe claims as if they’re mainstream. But I’d rather avoid all this by simply omitting the word “maritime”. Brunton (talk) 18:36, 12 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree. The examples should be illustrative. This case illustrates several features of FOTL pseudolaw including the inapplicable maritime filter. The examples should not be an ever growing list, but a display of the salient features. If the case has all its features shown, it is more likely to make another case redundant. Unless it is moved to a specific section as an example, I encourage showing all the relevant aspects. BiologicalMe (talk) 19:34, 12 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The secondary source doesn’t actually mention “maritime” or “admiralty” law (or that he was putting a particular interpretation on the CQV Act). The judgment uses the term “maritime law” in the context of “F’s thinking” in connection with the idea that registering the child’s birth would be like entering it on a ship’s manifest; linking this back to the mention of the CQV Act in the previous paragraph is OR. We can use what the secondary source says, which is:
“The judge said the father regarded registering a birth as the equivalent of making an entry on to a ship’s manifest. He argued that registering the birth would make the child “an asset to the country, which has boarded a vessel to sail on the high seas”.”
but we shouldn’t go further than that. Brunton (talk) 20:23, 17 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Undue weight given to conspiracy claim

At the end of November, 2a02:c7f:18ae:4900:d11:f5a9:1f8f:ac1c added a claim that the subject is a conspiracy theory (without any details of who the conspirators are). I reverted it last Sunday with the summary "No allegations of conspiracy are maintained by adherents of the movement", but it restored today by Emeraude with the edit summary "How they describe it is irrelevant".

Out of the 31 sources currently present in the article, just 1, a blog entry by Adam Wagner, describes the subject as a conspiracy theory. That means that it is a fringe view on the subject, which should not be given the same weight as the other sources' take on the subject (see Wikipedia:Fringe theories#Parity of sources). Reliable sources cited in the article describe the group as adherents of pseudo-legal theories and misunderstandings, without any mention of conspiracies.

Being a blog does not necessarily mean that a source is unreliable; being controlled by barristers' chamber, the blog in queston would pass Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-published sources. However, that is still not enough to give its opinion undue weight compared to the other sources. The lead sentence should describe the subject in the same way the majority of sources do.

Ping: 2a02:c7f:18ae:4900:d11:f5a9:1f8f:ac1c, Emeraude

--Joshua Issac (talk) 16:08, 22 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There is no question of the conspiracy theory aspect of the movement is not it doubt. The conspirators vary from formulation to formulation, be it banks, governments, the New World Order (conspiracy theory), etc., but the conspiratorial element is a common theme. Netolitzky, Donald J. (2018). "Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Arguments as Magic and Ceremony" (currently reference 12) is abundantly clear on the matter: "These groups typically hold profoundly conspiratorial beliefs concerning the nature and illegitimacy of 'conventional' authorities, and are clearly attracted to the idea of another 'true' hidden law that can be accessed to escape from or retaliate against those who are perceived as enemies or wrongdoers."
Perhaps you would prefer a new source: "Lawyers have dismissed freemen's bizarre claims as a conspiracy theory and they are not known to have won a single case in court." Doncaster Free Press [1]
It is not ambiguous. BiologicalMe (talk) 16:56, 22 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) I had removed the statement as the source hung its "conspiracy theory" description on an excerpt from RationalWiki. A source citing RationalWiki ought to be treated as highly suspect, and as there don't seem to be any other sources for "conspiracy theory", it shouldn't be in our article. If there are better sources, then let's discuss. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 17:09, 22 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The Doncaster Free Press source a low-quality silly season article that also has a quotation that FMOTL is a conspiracy in itself, not just a conspiracy theory: "It is a fringe thing, and a conspiracy." Netolitzky's Alberta Law Review article on OPCAs, on the other hand, is a high-quality source (that I missed in my earlier check) written by a legal expert. The particular quotation above is about OPCAs in general (including Sovereign Citizens and others), but here is a quotation specifically about FMOTL:

Certain OPCA movements, and in particular the Sovereign Citizens and Freemen, are clearly improvisational millenialist conspiracy cultures. Barkun [...] identifies the Sovereign Citizens [...], but [...] the Freeman movement is an even better example [...] conspiracy of illegitimate government control mediated via the “Strawman” doppelganger.

Another good source is "Conspiracy Theories in American History" (p.275) by Peter Knight of the University of Manchester:

Freemen movement of Montana coalesced around a basic conspiracy-minded distrust of the government, the corporate banking industry, and the meaning of citizenship.

So the article should talk about the FMOTL belief in the conspiracy theory, as well as who the alleged conspirators are: (government conspiring to maintain illegitimate control via "strawmen"). The Dual identity section touches on this currently.
Another thing to note is that Netolitzky himself introduces FMOTL as:

Freemen-on-the-Land, a collection of Canadian, politically leftist, “Green,” anti-globalization, marijuana advocacy, and anti-government social activists who “opt out” of government control

He does not claim that FMOTL are a conspiracy theory themselves (as the disputed revision of the article and the Doncaster Free Press article claimed), but refers to them as a collection of activists, before saying what conspiracy theory they believe in. --Joshua Issac (talk) 13:43, 23 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Sovereign Citizens content and categories

One issue I noticed from reading the OPCAs article is that the source describes the subject as a broadly leftist movement with "diametrically opposite world views" to the right-wing American Sovereign citizen movement, but the article has been tagged with the following categories: Far-right politics, Far-right politics in the United States, Far-right politics in the United Kingdom, Tax resistance in the United States, Sovereign citizen movement. These categories would fit the Sovereign citizen movement, but not the FMOTL one, and should be replaced with those that better fit the activities of the group where they are active.

I have struck out the source in my earlier comment that mentioned the Montana Freemen because they are a different group to FMOTL ("A Pathogen Astride the Minds of Men: The Epidemiological History of Pseudolaw" by Netolitzky). FMOTL developed from a fusion of 1950s Canadian tax evasion movements and Sovereign Citizen ideas imported from the United States, and it spread from Canada to other Commonwealth countries, according to that article. --Joshua Issac (talk) 14:26, 23 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I concur. There exist right-wing groups and individuals that fall under the "Freeman" mantle rather than "Sovereign", but the origin is left-wing libertarian and many retain that. There is a lot of horizontal transmission in the memomes. The far-right labels are not appropriate. BiologicalMe (talk) 16:52, 23 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed, those categories are not supported by the article content. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 18:56, 23 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Anti-Authority and Militia Movements in Canada

@BiologicalMe: has added some information for Perry et al paper on "Anti-Authority and Militia Movements in Canada". I think this might be casting the scope of this article too widely. A quote from the abstract

Another shift in thinking that emerged over the course of our study was that the “movement” we were examining was slightly more diffuse than simply the FOTL bloc. It is, instead, a broadly-based anti-state or anti-authority movement consisting of many diverse and frequently contradictory arms.

So it seems the last edit was really discussing a wider phenomenon outside the scope of this article. --Salix alba (talk): 11:47, 30 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I am aware of the issue of scope. I am not trying to expand the scope of the article, but adding demarcation. In the previous edit, I tried to address that by pointing out that there are groups which are sometimes called "Freeman-on-the-Land" because of similar behaviors, but which have significantly different ideologies. For example, the detaxers are distinct, but also developed some of the ideas later integrated by FOTL. The classification scheme applicable to all the groups is applicable to the individual groups, and the examples are often drawn from FOTL-specific cases, such as "sympathizers" being active in the World Freeman Society and some of the specific gurus. The cited paper's broader scope is a function of distinguishing FOTL-like from FOTL, but it never excludes them. BiologicalMe (talk) 17:27, 30 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I restored the list and further qualified the header. The list seems relevant, and I share the concerns over scope being conserved. BiologicalMe (talk) 21:51, 30 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Canada-centric?

As a casual wanderer into this article, it seems to me very focused on Canada. I did a bit of restructuring which makes more sense to me, and to try to clarify which bits were only referring to Canada. I hope this makes sense to others, but I'm sure others will re-edit accordingly if I've gone wrong somewhere. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 03:57, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Laterthanyouthink, Canada seems to have the best developed jurisprudence about OPCA litigants. That is probably why there's a lot about Canada here. Guy (help! - typo?) 10:38, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, Guy, thanks. I thought this must be the case... But presumably there's some more history and background that could be dug up for the UK? A quick Google tells me that it's a more recent phenomenon in Australia, but it's also a thing in Ireland and New Zealand (and I also saw mention of some litigation in all of those). Also, re freemen in the UK, perhaps could contain a bit of explanation re some of the different terms (see Freeman DAB page - and as a side-issue, have just found that neither that page nor the Burgess DAB page seem to cover this use of the word... But I must not get side-tracked again!). I might get back to this article, if my curiosity overcomes my good sense, to fill in a bit more Aus stuff at some point, but I really don't have the time to dig deeper just now. :-) Laterthanyouthink (talk) 11:51, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Laterthanyouthink: I added elements pertaining to several other countries. Psychloppos (talk) 09:07, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Why Thammaruknon v Queensland Police Service should not be listed

The case Thammaruknon v Queensland Police Service had a bit of Freeman on the land for its background, but the case was argued on a mistaken guilty plea, and the judge actually granted the motion by the defendant. Techie3 (talk) 10:45, 14 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

More importantly, there is no real discussion that would suggest that there is something notable about the case. There is no coverage in the media (which are not great a picking relevant cases) and no analysis in legal journals which would help illuminate the topic of the article. The article should not devolve into an unmanaged list of cases which contain something that sounds like OPCA. BiologicalMe (talk) 15:22, 14 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The list of Australian cases is based on a law student's blog. Since it does not meet WP:RS, I would suggest removing entries which due not have third-party RS coverage. BiologicalMe (talk) 13:52, 16 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion

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Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 18:38, 18 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 14 December 2022

Freeman on the land → Freeman on the land movement Consistency with Sovereign citizen movement and Redemption movement. I think it would be better if the title made it clear that this is about a movement, which is not immediately understandable by people who have never heard of the subject. Psychloppos (talk) 20:44, 14 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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