This seems to have massively taken off in Aus in the last few months, particularly after Dan Andrews one the Victorian election on a platform of “These people are the enemy, and I will make their lives hell”…
The sheeple/NPCs here call them “cookers”.
Essentially, not just SovCits, but anyone who doesn’t conform to/tow the party line…
To most of them, if they knew that I didn’t play along with their bullshit (acknowledgements of country, vaxx, not questioning stupid government/institutional decisions, etc), they would class me as a “cooker” and try to have me “cancelled”, too…
But yeah, the media campaign demonizing such people here is REALLY ramping up, and they’re no longer even bothering with facts - it’s just rumors and pulling unrelated things (opposition to the Covid bullshit, number plates, conspiracy theories, taxes) together to claim what “the enemy” believes…
I feel like they’re laying the groundwork for something much worse, but who knows, could just be a distraction, I guess…
The number of references in Australia to Waco, lately, and to Trump as some sort of “enemy figure” who will lead the breakup of the US/lead to another Civil War, is rather alarming…
TDS-by-proxy all over again…
Not that I can dispute your experience, but I have never heard that reputation of the sovereign citizen movement in the US. They are mostly quacks who think they can fight the IRS because "income tax is unconstitutional." Even the basic squatters are the rare variety.
To the extent that the public even know about the Waukesha tragedy beyond "an SUV suddenly attacked people on the street!", almost nobody knows he had any connection to those types.
I've honestly never heard of much blowback or reactions at all to sovereign citizens. Maybe it's a regional thing.
Maybe because I know them for being trigger happy and irrational.
Any SovCit would follow common law…which adheres to a non-aggression principle. If you are physically assaulting people you are not free from just punishment under common law.
The blowback is mostly institutional. Nobody even understood what the term "paper terrorism" meant until judges and police officers started getting harassed and threatened with eviction from false claims.
After that, there were several fairly notorious shootings and fights. One particular one occurred when a father-and-son duo got pulled over, and the son shot a cop to death with an AK after the cop walked his dad to the back of the cruiser.