A Feb. 12 WorldNetDaily article by Aaron Klein begins with as much ominous fearmongering as he could muster:
With almost no media coverage, the White House last week announced its new Interagency Working Group to Counter Online Radicalization to Violence that will target not only Islamic terrorists but so-called violent “sovereign citizens.”
“So-called violent”?
While Klein went on to note that “The FBI warned that sovereign citizens commit murder and physical assault,” he essentially dismissed this by adding “Because of the troubling ideology of some Obama officials, the question arises as to exactly which citizens are considered threats by the government” and repeating distorted claims about former Obama adviser Cass Sunstein.
But it’s an indisputable fact that “sovereign citizens” have engaged in acts of violence, including murder. The FBI states:
If someone challenges (e.g., a standard traffic stop for false license plates) their ideology, the behavior of these sovereign-citizen extremists quickly can escalate to violence. Since 2000, lone-offender sovereign-citizen extremists have killed six law enforcement officers. In 2010, two Arkansas police officers stopped sovereign-citizen extremists Jerry Kane and his 16-year-old son Joseph during a routine traffic stop on Interstate 40. Joseph Kane jumped out of the vehicle and opened fire with an AK-47 assault rifle, killing both officers.
Curiously, Klein failed to note any examples of “sovereign citizens” engaging in violence in his article, despite dredging up his old attacks against Sunstein.