Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Much has been made about alleged Waffle House killer, Travis Reinking’s claim that he’s a sovereign citizen. The general description of that movement is that it’s a movement that’s quirky, fringe, and anti-government. The anti-government part of the description of the sovereign citizen movement is that its adherents hate government rules, regulations and paying taxes. They consider themselves not bound by any of the norms of government. In Reiking’s case, the anti-government, Sovereign Citizen tag was reinforced by a lot of ink on the guns that he had, and that were taken away from him, and then given back to him by his father. Toss in the anti-government talk, rants against religion being taken out of the schools, and tout of home schooling, by his parents, and you have the composite picture of a young guy, and his family, who are at best a bit eccentric and at worst kooks and nut cases. This latter point is no small point. It fits in with the media narrative of him as a young man with severe emotional challenges—after all he believed he was being stalked by Taylor Swift and tried to jump the White House fence and meet with Trump.
There’s one, actually three, glaring problems with this tidy narrative. The first is that it’s a tired, worn narrative that has been played so often after a mass shooting or bombing that it can practically be mailed in. The shooter is almost always a young white male. The instant news breaks about his horror attack the search begins with a vengeance to paint him as “troubled,” “distraught,” “someone in need of help.” His family is depicted as solid, middle-class, good upstanding parents and neighbors, sometimes even pillars of the community. They are always shocked by their off-spring’s heinous actions. The sympathy hankies are waved fast and furious for the family, and by extension the mass murderer. That narrative was being spun about Reinking even as he was on the lamb after the slaying and almost certainly even more so with his capture.
The second problem with this stock narrative is that Reinking didn’t shoot up an armory, a police station, or an IRS office. He shot up a Waffle House. His victims weren’t government agents or employees. His victims were African-Americans and Hispanic. Not one of them could even remotely be considered a government operative of any sort. Now whether, he deliberately chose Blacks and Hispanics as his targets, or not, will have to be determined. But the brutal fact is that the only ones dead or wounded were Black and Hispanic. One would think that a true Sovereign Citizen who reviles the government so much would have picked his targets more carefully and calculatedly that satisfied his anti-government hatred.
The other problem with the pat narrative is the Sovereign Citizen movement he reportedly claims adherence to. It’s a deeply racist, anti-Semitic movement. It’s been that way from the day the bunch of loose hinged hate mongers that then styled themselves the Posse Comitatus first attracted public notice in the 1970s. The Southern Poverty Law Center which tracks hate groups noted that even more bizarrely that some of its adherent don’t think that Blacks only got their legal rights with the passage of the 14th Amendment. Therefore, they have only fewer rights than whites. One can draw the appropriate conclusion from that about just those who spout that lien thin about African-Americans.
Although a few Blacks have at times laid claim to the Sovereign Citizen tag, it doesn’t change that its mostly white male adherents espouse the most virulent racist and anti-Semitic rants. They don’t just preach hate. They are dangerous. They have engaged in shoot-outs with law enforcement in several states. It’s hard to get a handle on just how many of them there are since there is no formal state or national organization that goes by the name “Sovereign Citizen.” But the best guess is that there are tens of thousands of them.
In 2014, the FBI made it official. In a bulletin to law enforcement agencies nationally it flatly called he Sovereign Citizen movement a “domestic terrorist” movement. It detailed the ideology and motivation of the individuals that adhere to it as one of violence, hate and paranoia. It pointedly warned that these individuals have access to stockpiles of weapons and that heightened the threat they posed.
Reinking certainly proved that. He had ready access to the heavy-duty weapons of mass destruction. He was armed with a philosophy of screwy government hate, driven by personal demons, and almost certainly an underlay of racial terrorism. His victims were not government targets, but young Black and Hispanic men and women. They paid the price for his Sovereign Citizenship. That’s the only narrative that should be heard.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book is, The Russia Probe: What Trump Knew, and When Did He Know It? (Middle Passage Press). He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.