Hi folks!
I’m a long time skulker in the Randi FOTL threads, and thought I would uncloak for a bit and offer what I hope is perhaps a different and interesting perspective on the FOTL community and generally associated groups of anti-government quasi-legal commentators – I’ll call that pool the “FOTLish persons”. And offer some very appreciative thanks. But I’ll get to that a little later.
I am a lawyer employed by one of the Canadian provincial superior courts and work directly with the judiciary in a number of roles. A couple years ago I became interested in the FOTLish persons we encounter, and since have become the in-house contact on the topic. That is more of a hobby than anything else and certainly isn’t the core of my work. I thought you might be interested in just how the FOTLish persons are viewed and understood by the judiciary, and our court infrastructure.
Before going further, the opinions here are simply and only my own, and certainly do not represent those of the judges with whom I work, my employer, general statements of policy, yadda yadda.
As a starting point, it is only very recently that courts in our jurisdiction have even perceived there was some kind of structure behind the FOTLish persons appearing in our courtrooms. To put things into perspective, a judge in a typical week will encounter quite a mix of litigants, some represented and some not, and among the latter category it is not unusual that a little digging is required to try to understand what that person is attempting to achieve. We also see a significant number of individuals with addictions, psychological issues, and those that are simply excruciatingly ‘inarticulate’. To this point, in our jurisdiction, FOTLish litigants are relatively uncommon. As a rough estimate, our judges seem to each encounter less than one a year.
That means the typical judge does not automatically develop any expertise in identifying FOTLish persons or an understanding of their schemes. Instead, FOTLish persons are submerged in a pool of people who say somewhat to exceptionally strange things in court, and for whom we do our best to help. And that IS our obligation. The person who argues their aboriginal rights are infringed in a landlord/tenancy dispute may have a very genuine complaint of another kind – but the court has to tease that out of them first so that a fair solution can be achieved.
The comparative rarity of FOTLish persons has had some interesting consequences. One thing that became apparent when I shared my research is that a significant number of these individuals were identified as having some kind of psychiatric issue and then sent of for assessment in the local mental care hospitals. The judges just didn’t know better – here was a person speaking in some pseudo-legal gibberish, presenting documents that could easily have been produced using Burroughesque ‘cut up’ techniques, asserting wild conspiracy theories – and who could not even begin to explain what they were saying/doing. The judges never imagined these individuals were using commercial products and trying to implement instructions given by paid gurus.
My discovery of this hidden world began when I was working on our complaint letters. It is not unusual that an unhappy litigant will write to our administrative judges and complain that some judge had made an error, there had been an administrative glitch in their file, or other institutional misstep. Among those letters I noticed a pattern. We were receiving these extremely odd bundles of documents from persons in the United States in response, typically, to traffic tickets they received in our province. These were classic sovereign citizens, for example members of the Republic of Texas. I was fascinated by these documents and their ideas, and noticed that even though these slap-dash cut and paste photocopies at times seemed to take entirely different approaches to (alleged) legal rights, there nevertheless were patterns in language, terminology, naming structures, for example the magic [firstname] - [middlename] : [lastname] motif. Or “Pete of the House of Blerb”.
I started researching these oddities and soon was spiraling down the rabbit hole. It was then, looking at our complaints, that I realized these ideas and motifs were appearing with some frequency. To my continued incredulity, a significant fraction of our complaints were not isolated eccentrics, but these documents were instead the product of an unrecognized subterranean industry. The judges had not picked up this pattern because they rarely see FOTLish persons and much FOTLish material is, on its surface, quite variable.
Our new appreciation of this movement has been helpful in a number of ways. In my experience judges go to great lengths to try to be fair. One of their long-standing concerns has been that an apparently nonsensical claim by a self-represented litigant may, in fact, represent an attempt to assert a real legal right by a person who simply has great difficulty in articulating their issue and what they want. We encounter that all the time – if anything the persons who are less educated, have limited language skills, addictions, or a troubled history are the ones who end up victimized, and the last thing the courts want to do is deny those persons their rights.
The consequence of that sensitivity is that judges would scrutinize FOTLish materials and argument with enormous care, trying to dissect out real issues from amongst the rubbish heap. With all these legal(ish) elements, surely there is something real hidden in there! One of the revelations for the judiciary was the discovery that not only were there no genuine legal issues in those FOTLish submissions, but that those submissions are either by design or evolution intended to be confusing gibberish.
The other shock was that the documents and ‘scripts’ followed by FOTLish persons were a commercial product. None of us could initially believe that was possible. It was only when we began to visit the sources for these materials and viewed the ubiquitous YouTube training videos (particularly those recorded in seminars), that the court staff and judges were convinced that the awful, incoherent idiocy we receive was something which movement gurus had sold to their customers. I show the Erwin Rommel School of Law, Winston Shrout’s material, and so on as examples when I do presentations on FOTLish persons and their community. I could probably turn those materials into a kind of stand-up comedy routine for judicial audiences – the audience just roars every time I pull up a poster I found for a number of David-Kevin: Lindsay seminars – particularly at the claim that styling one’s name in bold, italics, or even a different font will create a new person. And you can just imagine how the judges respond to A4V…
The raw amateurishness blindsided us. It still baffles me that anyone would pay for products that are so wretched, incoherent, and poorly presented. It says so much about the seductive appeal of getting something for nothing, and the desperation of the typical FOTLish person, that they could ever imagine adopting such ridiculous schemes, advanced by gurus who are not exactly wellsprings of coherence or charisma. Or who display ANY obvious signs of the affluence that they claim to have at their fingertips!
If has been a huge help to identify the spurious themes that drive FOTLish arguments, so that the courts can look past the irrelevant gibberish and try to find out if, in fact, the FOTLish person really does have some issue with which the court can help.
On a purely legal front, one of the curious issues in Canada is that while we have a substantial number of reported FOTLish cases, there is practically no coordination between those decisions. For example, the tax court has its collection of caselaw that addresses their frequent arguments, while B.C. has its lines of David-Kevin: Lindsay judgments. Judges rarely understood that the litigants they encountered were anything other than a one-off kook, and so it is only lately that we see a more integrated theoretical response to FOTLish concepts.
One piece of advice I give judges is that a written decision on a FOTLish argument is a powerful tool – that is something tangible that challenges the authority of and beliefs espoused by FOTLish gurus. We know they do a kind of legal research, particularly thanks to canlii, and a detailed judgment that identifies an argument as spurious is pretty hard to ignore. That same argument is almost certainly going to be encountered by another judge in the not too distant future. Locally, I am hoping for a suitable FOTLish litigant and scenario that could lead to a decision which is something of an omnibus response and explanation of the FOTLish movement and its ideas.
And now the reason I decided to comment in this forum. Speaking simply for myself, I very much appreciate the efforts of the persons who have and continue to call FOTLish fuddleduddle when they see it. For obvious reasons, the courts cannot venture into the ‘heart of dumbness’ and directly confront and challenge the persons who advance the legally, logically, and historically incorrect bases for the FOTLish movement. The courts can only react – and frankly by that time it is often too late. We cannot generally prevent ill-considered choices, but only respond to those.
But you can and do act in that manner. So thank you for fighting the rational fight. Your watchfulness is also very helpful. I pop into a number of online sources every so often to see the latest developments, personalities, websites, and caselaw. You folks are wonderful scouts, direct or collateral. Certainly, I would have never found David Icke by any other means…
So again, thank you.
I would be pleased to answer questions if you have any, though I should note that the nature of my work and the courts means I cannot comment in certain directions. Beyond that, I would be very happy to offer my thoughts and observations.
Chaetognath.
