A woman in Newark, New Jersey, who
suffered from homelessness finally
was able to save enough money
to buy her dream home in Newark,
New Jersey.
But unfortunately,
she was targeted by a member of
an extremist group known
as the Moorish sovereign citizens,
who broke into her home, literally
changed the locks and claimed that
the house belonged to them.
Let's take a look at the video,
which has some more details into
what happened.
[MUSIC]
>> Someone decided that they wanted
my house.
So they sawed off the locks,
put their own locks on, and
he's now occupying the home.
And we're out here, I've just been
waiting out here with the cops at
the neighbor's house while the SWAT
team plans to move in and
remove him.
Yeah, so that's been my day.
How's yours?
>> It's just insane.
So SWAT had to be called in as you
can see.
>> The woman in the video and
the victim
in this case is Shanetta Little.
And the SWAT team had to negotiate
with this guy,
get him to leave the home.
But this story did lead to people
want to know a little more about
this extremist group.
Because oftentimes when we talk
about extremist groups,
especially sovereign citizens,
we think of groups of white men.
But in this case,
we're talking about a group of
black men who feel that the laws
don't really apply to them.
And they have similar reasoning
that you get from sovereign
citizens who are white, but there's
a racial component to it as well.
So let me get to that.
So Little was a victim of a ploy
known as paper terrorism,
a favorite tactic of an extremist
group that is one of the fastest
growing, according to government
experts and watchdog organizations.
Known as the Moorish
sovereign citizen movement, and
loosely based around a theory that
Black people are foreign citizens
bound only by arcane legal systems.
It encourages followers to violate
existent laws in the name
of empowerment.
So by the way, as you guys could
see from the video,
Little herself is a black woman.
And she says that they claim to be
about black liberation and
opportunity and
uplifting black people.
But he is literally oppressing me
and taking what's mine as a black
woman.
So this story is just insane.
But this is clearly an issue
across the country, right,
the issue of sovereign citizens,
not just this particular group.
People who literally don't
think the law applies to them, and
they go around breaking the law.
And more often than not, the way
law enforcement responds to them
just obviously be very different
from the way law enforcement
responds to everyone else.
And I feel like they're almost in
a lot of cases enabled.
>> Yeah, well that's why I think
this story has an ironic twist,
which I want to get to in a second.
But so you guys know, sovereign
citizens was originally white,
has two different groups now.
And in fact, a lot of the sovereign
citizens were white supremacists.
And it was a nuclear case of white
entitlement.
We think because we're white,
none of the law should apply to us.
We should get to break any law, and
the laws are just for
minorities and other people.
>> Taxes don't apply to us,
that's another- >> Right,
I don't have to pay my taxes,
tax is for black people and stuff.
And so, now the reality is,
it's just a nuclear case of it,
but the core
of that is in the Republican Party.
The rich don't want to pay their
taxes, that's why the Republican
legislators cut the budget for
the IRS.
We've told you 1,000 stories
about that.
And now that the laws are being
applied evenly, especially during
the pandemic, that's why the right
wing is losing their mind.
They're like, what,
we thought the laws were for
other people.
Now you're going to arrest us for
breaking into Congress and
trying to execute people, now we
get non-political prisoners, right?
And I can give you
dozens of examples of that.
So that's a cancer that's within
the right wing in this
country to begin with.
Now, interestingly enough,
is jumped to this black group,
the Moorish folks.
Now none of this makes any sense,
the original movement didn't
make any sense.
The black version of it
makes no sense.
Okay, well, if you don't have
to follow any of the laws and
everything is your ancestral land,
why did you take her
particular house?
And by the way,
they have no connection.
They don't know each other at all,
the guy doesn't explain why
that's his ancestral land.
We know why,
because he's unbalanced, of course,
he's unbalanced.
None of this is true,
none of this is even remotely true.
And so, by either the white
supremacist or the black sovereign
citizens' logic, if there are any,
could we just all go and
take the homes in Beverly Hills?
Okay, that's it,
I'm just taking that.
>> Now, that sound pretty good.
>> [LAUGH] I mean,
how could you not know that doesn't
make any sense?
I'm just amazed by people,
but now here comes ironic twist.
If black folks start taking
people's homes, all of a sudden,
the law is going to apply >> Well,
okay, so that's what I wanted to
get to, right?
Because as I said earlier,
oftentimes with militia groups and
sovereign citizens,
the whole Bundy debacle, right?
There's a lot of negotiating going
on, guns are drawn and somehow,
it seems like,
the militias get off easy.
In this case, the man in question,
I'll tell you who he is in just
a minute did face prosecution and
some pretty serious criminal
charges.
The man who entered the house,
his name is Hubert A John of
Los Angeles,
long journey to Newark, New Jersey,
was arrested on June 17th and
charged with criminal mischief,
burglary, criminal trespass, and
making terroristic threats.
Prosecutors in New Jersey
are preparing to take
the case before a grand jury and
that's according to a spokesperson
with the prosecutor's
office in Essex County.
And so there are clearly some
pretty serious criminal charges for
this guy.
But going back to this particular
group of sovereign citizens,
the Moorish sovereign citizens.
Increasingly, across the country,
sovereign citizens have clashed
with the authorities, tied up
resources, and frazzled lives.
In their insistence that laws such
as the requirement to pay taxes,
obey speed limits, and even obtain
simple things like a license for
a pet dog do not apply for them.
Now, membership in the Moorish
sovereign citizen movement has been
driven by the Internet into
the hundreds of thousands,
the law center said.
On its website, rise of the Moors,
for example, that cited
reparations, part of a national
conversation about race and
equality as the driving factor for
its belief that its members can
claim things as their own.
>> Yeah, that's- >> So
this is their way of getting
the reparations that they feel
they're entitled to.
>> But as you can tell, none of it
is attached to a reality because
if you're going to do reparations,
why would you take it
from another black person?
That doesn't make any sense.
Why did you go all the way across
the country to
take that poor woman's house?
And so there's
a right way to do reparations.
You could go through political
channels, and we should,
by the way.
But to just randomly grab people's
house because of a treaty we signed
with the Moors, and we think that
were related to the Moorish people.
Well, even that doesn't make sense
because at the time, here we go.
The Moorish, that region was
occupied by the Ottoman Empire and
Ottoman law applied.
>> Of course, it was.
>> Of course, so
Moorish sovereign citizens, I got
both bad news and good news for
you, I am your new leader.
Okay, and I command you to actually
follow American law.
[LAUGH] I mean,
as long as we're doing nutso stuff,
right, Moorish law or
Ottoman law, who cares?
None of it makes any sense.
You can't just take
people's property,
you can't just ignore the law.
But look, guys,
this is small fringe group, and
they got to follow the laws in
there, etc, right?
But remember, the giant group
called Republicans are saying, it's
government tyranny to wear a mask,
it's government tyranny to ask for
the government to ask you to get
vaccinated.
>> They literally say taxation
is theft.
>> And they say taxation is theft.
>> Yeah. >> So it's like we're like
haha, hehe, that's so funny,
this radical group of black guys is
saying they don't have to follow
the law.
30% of the country's white guys who
say they don't have to
follow the law.