Out Deep in High Country

On the Porepunkah shootings & sovereign citizens

Dandongadale Falls, Alpine National Park, Victoria.

It was a strange time, but it’s recalled uncertainly now like a distant dream. In Melbourne, there were nine months of accumulative lockdown. There were curfews and riots. Police installed mobile CCTV units in parks; local councils sealed off playgrounds with tape. In the city, lockdown protestors and anti-vaxxers pissed on shrines, spat on journalists and intimidated vaccine clinics into closure. They gathered on the stairs of Parliament House waving nooses and promising rough justice against the state’s premier. Death threats against elected officials increased.

There was a strange psychic humidity to those Covid years, and in the streets the defiant “patriot movement” was a strange confluence of white supremacists, professional troublemakers and suburban normies insulted by mandatory vaccinations and made half-mad by interminable home detention.

But if public life eventually returned to normal, not all intense hatred for authority – and its corresponding theories – evaporated. For a few years now, police and intelligence agencies have warned of the increasing danger of alt-right terror, a mix of neo-Nazis and radically hostile libertarians of a sort we might typically associate with backwoods militias of America.

One designation is that of the “sovereign citizen” – an exotic and antisocial lunacy conceived by William Potter Gale, an American white supremacist who died in 1988. Born in 1916 to a Jewish immigrant father, Gale served on General MacArthur’s staff during World War II before establishing a variety of Christian churches and terror squads. Gale had a vision of purging the land of all Jews, Blacks and immigrants, and encouraged “Christian patriots” to arm themselves in preparation for an inevitable and ultimately cleansing race war – victory in which would return the United States to the original vision of the Constitution’s authors (Gale was convinced that the founding fathers intended American citizenship to be exclusively granted to whites in perpetuity).

What’s more, Gale believed that all law and governance was a fiction – that citizens possess ultimate sovereignty and freedom from law, and that exemption from taxes, say, or other troublesome obligations of society, might be secured through an arcane use of legal filings and grammar (sovereign citizens obsess over the belief that quirky alterations to their name, via the inclusion of colons, say, liberates them from the laws of the land).

Towards the end of his life, Gale was under surveillance by the FBI – his file is almost 1000 pages long – for threatening the lives of various judges and their families. In one case, he promised to torch the house of one magistrate.

During 2008 and 2009, when the great financial crisis emerged and regular Americans began losing their homes, self-declared sovereign citizen Jerry Kane and his teenage son began touring the country giving a series of obscure and poorly attended lectures on how to defy taxes and property seizures. The lectures, which can be found online, were profoundly incoherent. In 2008, a then US assistant attorney general said that “we want to pull back the curtain and show the public that the promoters of these tax and bogus schemes are not some wizards that have revealed the tax-free universe to America, but instead are nothing more than garden variety hucksters and modern-day snake oil salesmen, peddling their bogus tax products”.

But Jerry Kane wasn’t merely a conman, and his lectures were as sinister as they were incoherent. In one from 2009 he says: “What we’re after here is not fighting, but conquering. I don’t want to have to kill anybody, but if they keep messing with me that’s what it’s going to come down to. And if I have to kill one then I’m not going to be able to stop, I just know it. I have an addictive personality.”

In 2010, while driving in Arkansas with his son, the two were pulled over by local police who noticed the unusual license plates on their van – altered or homemade plates being another quirk of their legal beliefs. As the father fought against being frisked, the son emerged from their car with an assault rifle and murdered the two officers. Later that day, the Kanes were killed in a shootout.

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In early 2022, a motley group comprised of Indigenous activists, anti-vaxxers and sovereign citizens torched the doors to Old Parliament House in Canberra. The same year, two police officers and a civilian were murdered on a rural property – ambushed by three radicalised and reclusive family members who’d come to believe in the inherent evil of government, the inevitability of Armageddon and their free status as sovereign citizens.

“We have seen a resurgence in the sovereign citizen movement in Australia, which has been significantly shaped by the Government response to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as international movements, particularly in the US and Europe,” the Australian Federal Police noted in a 2023 document. “In contrast to what came before, we are now seeing this movement take on a very different shape.”

For some uncountable sum of people, Covid was the breach in the matrix – a mass event that didn’t so much inspire state tyranny, but merely exposed it. Worse, it revealed a corresponding and pitiful docility among people (or “sheeple”). In other words, the historic application of state power during the Covid years was the “red pill” moment that woke many from their intellectual slumber. Aggrieved, scared, enraged – they found likeminded people online and began codifying their hatreds. It’s clear sovereign citizens also enjoy a feeling of superiority: a sense not only of their superior perception about how the world really works, but their moral courage to defy it.

They’re often querulous, unpleasant people and suffer from delusions of intelligence. They’re victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in other words, and carry personal grievances that they’ve licked and polished and then elevated into proof of universal injustice or personal martyrdom. This could be as simple as a speeding fine.

The typical sovereign citizen is a wizard of transferral: self-pity becomes wisdom; misanthropy becomes self-reliance; fever dreams become insight. And now, we have four police officers murdered in less than three years by these folks.

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At time of writing, the self-proclaimed sovereign citizen and alleged cop-killer Dezi Freeman, born Desmond Filby, remains at large in Victoria’s high country. Two police are dead; another hospitalised. From the facts at hand, the executions this week in Porepunkah resemble the 2022 Wieambilla killings.

The bush there is thick, and Freeman apparently prides himself on his knowledge of it. Perhaps he’s holding out; perhaps he’s travelling on foot; or perhaps he’s already ended it with one of the many guns he’s thought to possess. But the early psychological profile we have of this man is that he’s narcissistic, and suicide might seem to him like a repellent capitulation – one that denies him a final, self-martyring showdown.

It’s not known if the surrounding bush has been booby-trapped, or if shelters and stockpiles have been established. Online and in courtrooms, Freeman has for years made public his fierce contempt for cops, but we don’t yet know if this week’s shooting was planned or impulsive. He was being served an arrest warrant for child abuse when the alleged murders happened.

Detective Leading Senior Constable Neal Thompson and Senior Constable Vadim de Waart are dead. Thompson was 59 and just weeks from retirement. De Waart was 35 and began his police career less than seven years ago.

The murder of police is a shock that runs the whole fraternity round, and it would be difficult to exaggerate the nausea and fury that members of the force feel now. There will also be anxiety about policing certain fringes of society in the future. “We have seen a huge spike of sovereign citizens ever since Covid,” Scott Weber, chief executive of the Police Federation of Australia, told the ABC this week.

For now, attention rests upon the manhunt. But this won’t be the last we hear of sovereign citizens and their exotic lunacy, which is increasingly turning murderous.