#2718: Shawna Cox

We’ve already mentioned Ammon Bundy, but didn’t really pay much attention to his organization, the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom (C4CF), later also known as People for Constitutional Freedom (P4CF). The C4CF is certainly what one would call a colorful lot, even if their views and opinions tend toward the predictable. Shawna Cox, for instance, is a friend of the Bundys and was a participant in the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

Now, Cox was certainly not the only participant under the sway of sovereign citizen cult dogma (visitor and self-proclaimed judge Bruce Doucette, for instance, announced a “citizens grand jury” in true sovereign citizen style), but Cox was certainly among the more explicit among them; after having been arrested, she promptly filed a countersuit in which she explicitly claimed to be a “sovereign citizen” instead of “a subject of corporate United States of America” and accused any judge who is a member of a state bar association or the Federal Bar Association of being “Foreign Agents operating subversively within United States.” In fact, Cox had an extensive list of people she planned to subpoena (under what authority, one wonders), including ranchers in the western U.S., Oregon’s current and former governora, local and state police officers, FBI agents and “various law professors”, and she planned to ask a jury to deliver civil and criminal penalties against them on the putative reason that they have worked to subvert the constitutional government to impose “socialism, communism and imperialism types of government onto the people of the United States of America.” Her suit moreover demanded “damages from the works of the devil in excess $666,666,666,666.66.” The courts were, needless to say, not impressed.

More recently, Cox has been affiliated with Ammon Bundy’s People’s Rights Militia and been a part of numerous anti-government protests. Her daughter, Sindi Brown Vetere, was also a 2021 candidate for Kanab, Utah, Mayor after participating in the January 6th Insurrection – though we have no indication her participation had any legal repercussions, Vetere is one of those people who seems to land herself systematically in legal trouble.

Diagnosis: There are lots of these around; in the US, sovereign citizen nonsense seem to be something of a go-to solution in lieu of therapy for angry, paranoid people who struggle to understand what is going on around them. We’d like to feel somewhat sorry for them, but these people are sometimes genuinely dangerous, and not always just to themselves.