‘I don’t consent to being policed’: The rise of the pseudolaw phenomenon

Few people actively enjoy traffic stops, or paying for council or bank services, or having to go through the court system – but some are taking it a step further by telling those who are trying to enforce the law that the law simply doesn’t apply to them.

The police officer has heard enough. She angrily hits the car window with a closed fist and leans into the narrow gap to speak to the driver. ‘‘Stop being a dick,’’ she growls. ‘‘Are you off your face or something?’’ ‘‘I’m not,’’ the man responds defensively.

‘‘I have all the adequate paperwork here... I’m no longer a person under the corporation you guys are under.’’

Cody, from Masterton, has been pulled over.

It’s not the first time.

His car is splashed with a decal suggesting he is a ‘Ma¯ ori ranger’ and displays a sticker claiming he travels under diplomatic immunity.

He does not carry a driving licence. Sometimes, Cody records his interactions with police and shares the videos online, where they are dissected for an eager audience.

Similar videos have become a hallmark of overseas Sovereign Citizen (SovCit) movements.

They typically feature someone sealed in their car, speaking through a small gap in the window, reading from a prepared script.

But much like a global TV show adapted for different audiences, the local version has a distinctly Kiwi twist.

Cody describes himself as a ‘‘kaitiaki diplomat’’: a group that believes they are under the jurisdiction of Te Moana-Nuia-Kiwa, meaning they have diplomatic immunity and don’t have to comply with New Zealand law.

It’s one of several arguments he deploys in the space of five minutes. Each has supporting documents, which he thrusts through the window. Cody is nervous.

His knee shakes; the officer has told him he risks being arrested if he refuses to provide his details.

But he persists.

The police are a corporation, and he doesn’t want to enter a contract; you can’t commit a crime if there’s no identifiable victim.

One officer politely reads the documents while the other takes a more direct approach.

‘‘Cody, stop being a dickhead and give your licence,’’ she says.

‘‘I’m under common law,’’ he responds. ‘‘I. Am. Under. Common. Law.’’

After a pointless back and forth, he begrudgingly gives his name and address. It was all he needed to do, the officer tells him.

‘‘Yeah, well, I’m not under your guys’ jurisdiction any more,’’ he says, begrudgingly.

‘‘I’m not a corporate entity. I’m a living man.’’

These encounters are becoming more common in New Zealand.

They don’t just apply to traffic stops; similar interactions happen in council offices, banks, and courtrooms. They involve one person trying to enforce the law and the other insisting they are exempt from it, reaching for arcane arguments crafted after copious amounts of online research.

Researchers have described this phenomenon as ‘‘pseudolaw’’: a parallel legal system with rules and practices that vaguely resemble the actual legal system.

Pseudolaw is powerful. Not because it works – it doesn’t – but because it can sound vaguely plausible to a layperson and offers solutions to common problems.

‘‘Pseudolaw follows the rituals and makes citation to legal instruments, but not in any way a legal practitioner would recognise as legally authoritative,’’ says Dr Stephen Young, a law lecturer at the University of Otago researching pseudolaw.

‘‘It looks like law, it smells like law, but it just is not law.’’

There has been a notable uptick in pseudolaw cases reaching the court since the pandemic, Young says.

Many were easily-resolved disputes that instead escalated into doomed legal gambits.

In one case, a Whanganui man refused to pay a $50 dog registration fee. Instead, he announced in the local newspaper that his dog was a ‘‘legal person’’ and appealed to the High Court, where his argument was rejected.

Another man sought to have himself and his five children declared legally dead.

A prisoner convicted of sexual violence claimed he was wrongfully imprisoned because he disagreed with the authority of the court that convicted him. Nganga, an owner of an anti-vax cafe in Motueka, argued in court that the law does not apply to him.

‘‘These pseudolaw arguments do not work,’’ Young says.

‘‘There’s no legal authority from them. Police aren’t going to listen to them, judges aren’t going to listen to them, tax assessors, people from Inland Revenue... They’re not going to deal with it.’’

These failures have not hampered the movement.

After Cody posted the video of his police encounter online, it was shared in a popular Facebook group called ‘‘Starve the Beast’’.

It has nearly 13,000 members and is devoted to workshopping ideas for withholding money and services from the state to shrink its power.

Did you get a speeding ticket? There’s a template letter rejecting police jurisdiction of the roads. Mortgage repayments too high? Tell the bank you withdraw power of attorney and stop paying. Don’t want to pay tax? The Government is a corporation, and you didn’t sign a contract with it.

Whatever the problem, there’s a nifty, pseudolegal workaround.

While much of this activity is harmless, its growing popularity risks having knock-on effects.

‘‘In my discussions with people, it seems like there’s enough concern amongst judges, registrars, people that are working in the courts that are dealing with this, that they see it as a problem,’’ Young says.

‘‘There is a sense that the increase in this activity is quite bad for courts and the smooth administration of justice.’’

If you want to ward off the debt collectors, Kerre Ann Brogden has an idea. ‘‘This entity/name is dead’’, a sign on the front door would say. ‘‘It doesn’t live here. ‘‘It can’t live here. ‘‘It has no soul. ‘‘It doesn’t exist.’’ Brogden does indeed exist. None are more aware of this than the council staff, parking wardens, bank workers and police officers who have been sucked into her orbit.

She does not pay taxes, rates, loan repayments, parking fines, speeding tickets, or registration for her three dogs, which has left her owing many thousands of dollars.

When she receives a letter of outstanding debt, she returns it to the sender with written annotations; perhaps two diagonal lines drawn in pen, meant to represent a sword slashing the page, or a custom stamp designating Brogden as ‘‘postmaster’’, a position she does not legally hold.

It makes requesting payment from her a fraught and seemingly pointless exercise.

The sender will likely become embroiled in a monthslong back and forth, wading through baroque arguments that Brogden has not signed a contract, does not exist, is spiritually dead.

Those brave enough to try might arrive at her rural property high above the Rangitı¯kei River, where they’ll be met with a sign promising that any lingerers shall ‘‘face the wrath of the occupant’’. If they manage to speak to her, they might be surreptitiously recorded, and the exchange posted online as training for Brogden’s legions of followers.

In one video, Brogden is inside a police station, recording her conversation with a police officer seemingly without his knowledge (‘‘I’m a non-resident sett-lor, so I can SET the LAW,’’ she explains before reading him his ‘‘rights’’).

In another, she secretly records a council worker about her refusal to pay for dog registration.

Her disposition is always the same: cheerful, friendly and confident. She is armed with technical and specific references to the common law, which lets her slash through the supposedly fraudulent legal system and watch her bamboozled opponent swim against a verbal whirlpool, unable to refute her mastery of the ‘actual’ legal system, the one they don’t want us to know about. ‘‘I’m a lawyer,’’ Brogden explains to a council staffer in one video. ‘‘Not a lawyer, lawyer. But I’ve been studying law for a long time.’’

Many aspiring pseudolaw practitioners have sought out Brogden – who did not respond to a request for comment – and her techniques.

She runs the Starve the Beast Facebook group and has held workshops around the North Island, leaving a small network of obstinate

‘‘Pseudolaw follows the rituals and makes citation to legal instruments, but not in any way a legal practitioner would recognise as legally authoritative. It looks like law, it smells like law, but it just is not law.’’ Dr Stephen Young

Law lecturer at the University of Otago

pseudolawyers in her wake.

While much of this activity is annoying rather than threatening, it can be a fine line.

Brogden is part of a group of selfproclaimed ‘sheriffs’ that issued arrest warrants for public figures.

The warrants were signed by an elderly Justice of the Peace in Eketa¯ huna who later said she felt intimidated into doing so.

One person who has dealt with Brogden said they received lengthy emails and letters packed with legal jargon.

In one letter, Brogden said if her demands were not met, the person ‘‘will pay dearly’’. Brogden has appealed for a ‘‘debt collector’’ to help retrieve up to $10m in compensation from this person (the two have not had any financial dealings).

‘‘I’d probably describe her as eccentric but not in a good way,’’ the person said.

In another incident, Brogden – citing ‘‘allodial title’’ – occupied a historical homestead in a council reserve. She buried cabbages in the lawn, pulled down the sign, and erected a flag, renaming it ‘Candle in the Dark’.

Internal emails from the Manawatu¯ District Council show concerns about aggressive behaviour from a group of ‘security guards’ who accompanied Brogden to take over the reserve.

Much of this behaviour blurs the boundary between comedy and tragedy. The behaviour and rhetoric can be intimidating, but its pure outlandishness makes it hard to take seriously.

Overseas, the results have tipped towards tragedy.

In the US, both police officers and SovCits have been killed during encounters that have escalated.

‘‘They (SovCits) have shown violence towards the police. They have attempted to kill, and have killed, police officers,’’ says Dr Christine Sarteschi, a professor of social work and criminology at Chatham University who has studied the global spread of SovCit ideology.

‘‘Even without weapons, their instincts are the same. They believe they are right... They have very strong beliefs and react emotionally with anger and aggression.’’

These remain rare cases. Most pseudolaw believers, particularly in New Zealand, are non-violent, even if their behaviour can be belligerent or intimidating.

‘‘It is like any fringe subculture,’’ says Donna Carson, a security advisor and PhD researcher studying extremism, including pseudolaw.

‘‘Most can be loud, and even active, on or offline. However, several longstanding researchers in terrorism still caution that the majority in these subcultures do not move that rhetoric into actual real-world action.’’

Carson has advised businesses and agencies on dealing with pseudolaw. She emphasises the need to follow normal processes, even when they receive pushback, and to have health and safety policies that accommodate these beliefs.

Extremist movements emerge in times of disruption, and the pandemic has been no different, Carson says. For some people, it induced fear, isolation, and instability, which led to growth in these communities.

‘‘If we look at the research about the historical roots of pseudolaw in America and globally, these belief systems surge at times of societal crisis, which the pandemic has delivered,’’ Carson says.

‘‘Extremist rhetoric and ideas, alongside or without conspiracy narratives, offer hollow but easy answers to soothe concerns about uncertain futures or unsettling realities.

‘‘The pandemic increased or created a sense of instability, and research shows instability in the pandemic often included fears about losing something or having it taken.’’

‘‘I’m a non-resident sett-lor, so I can SET the LAW.’’

On the Starve the Beast page, users continue workshopping ways to avoid debt. Brogden says one way to remove all debt – citing an obscure theory involving the Reserve Bank – is to pay with a novelty $10 coin.

It leads to a rush on the coins, which briefly spike in value; Brogden sends them off to her debtors, believing her debt no longer exists.

In another post, a user is about to lose their driver’s licence due to unpaid fines (they don’t need a licence – they’re a ‘‘traveller’’, several commenters note). A former police officer who is ‘‘sick of the bullshit’’ chronicles their interactions with the court system, which include barraging court staff with documents and questions.

Someone asks how not to register the birth of their child – hundreds of comments flood in, many from people who have done so themselves or want to know more.

There is a powerful sense of belonging; they are united by their dislike of a system they feel has failed them, working together to construct a new one.

‘‘There are people who are feeling some of the coercive powers of the state for the first time in terms of lockdowns or masking or vaccination public health measures, and they don’t like it,’’ says Stephen Young, from Otago.

‘‘They’re going online and finding people that also don’t like it. And it turns out, there’s an entire realm of pseudolaw that sort of cropped up around this, so they start to learn this language. And the more support they get from each other in using this language, the more emboldened they feel to use it in other aspects of their life, and it grows.’’

Six months after his earlier police encounter, Cody was, inevitably, pulled over again. It’s night; the police siren strobes through his rear window.

‘‘I’m actually under a bit of a different jurisdiction than you guys claim over me,’’ Cody explains to the officer. ‘‘Oh, is that right?

‘‘Yeah, I don’t consent to being policed at the moment.’’

Again, he retrieves his folder of documents, flicking through the arguments.

This cop had heard it all before; he had pulled Cody over just the other week.

‘‘Is this not tiring for you?’’ he asks Cody after a lengthy back and forward.

‘‘This is not tiring for me, my friend,’’ Cody replies. ‘‘This is my God-given right.’’

‘‘I’m a lawyer. Not a lawyer, lawyer. But I’ve been studying law for a long time.’’

Quotes from videos of Kerre Anne Brogden, left

Starve the Beast Facebook group administrator