Originally published on Forbes.com.
Kent Hovind’s half -billion dollar lawsuit against the federal government and others has him back preaching, if not practicing the sort of arguments that got him in trouble back in the day. Here you can hear him many years ago bragging that he had not filed Form 1040 in 28 years.
(See this pre-2006 video around the 2:10 mark)
That sort of bold statement that the law properly understood does not require most ordinary Americans to file tax returns has been absent from Kent’s presentations for a long time, but, as he went public with the lawsuit, he is back at it, if somewhat passively. He started in on a June 10, 2020 video around the 9:37 mark.
I note that the video has since been taken down. So it goes.
Hovind believes that “The tax laws are fine. Everybody should obey them including the government. I didn’t break any of them.”
That sort of statement is commonplace in his videos as is his comment “I have never been a tax protester. I’m a tax advocate.” Then he hands off to Paul Hansen who, with unintentional irony starts in on what are commonly referred to as “tax protester” arguments.
“And the truth is any American except a US citizen, which is an immigrant that comes in – all they have to do is ask the IRS to fill out the tax assessment for them and they do not have to fill out a 1040 tax form. Very few Americans have to fill out a 1040 tax form – very few. ………………. They extract billions and billions of dollars from people illegally”
After some yucking it up on what they will spend the money on. Hovind needs new tires and Hansen needs a new pair of glasses. Hansen continues:
“We have an excellent chance of winning because they have to come to court now and prove that you had a legal duty to withhold.”
Later Hansen says that the lawyers that are helping them in the case believe that it is going to be a major changer in American life – a very important case. Well yeah. I mean I will have to go back to work filing refund claims for just about everybody who has paid income taxes.
Paul John Hansen
So it is really Hansen that is the legal brain behind Kent Hovind’s current lawsuit. Kent has another legal adviser, Brady Byrum working on the parallel track of obtaining a Presidential pardon for the 2006 convictions. I would not rate that as entirely impossible. Our President is nothing if not unpredictable.
Hovind and Hansen have a long history. Hansen was one of the trustees of the original Creation Science Evangelism, a trust. I refer to that entity as Old CSE to distinguish it from Creation Science Evangelism Ministries Inc (New CSE) which owns the new Dinosaur Adventure Land in Lenox, AL.
When I spoke to Hansen this week he told me that he has over one thousand clients and generally charges between $35 to $75 per hour. I inferred that the thousand clients are cumulative rather than currently active, but did not clarify that. Here is Paul’s website. There is a lot of material there. My personal advice is don’t try any of it at home, but you can make your own judgment. I don’t know whether he is charging Hovind as, in his capacity as trustee of Old CSE, he is also a plaintiff in the case.
The Biggest Claim
There are other issues in the litigation (Kent seems fond of the “verified complaint” which I discussed here), but the overarching issue that seems to permeate Hansen jurisprudence is territorial jurisdiction. He mentions it prominently in the About Paul Hansen section of his website.
“I believe that most all US written law is constitutional, but most all of that same law is misapplied upon jurisdictions where it has no force and effect of law and the bar association has perfected a system of keeping the people from knowing its true application. Order my 5$ presentation ‘Free Inhabitant One A’, for the truth in limited jurisdiction of all US written law.”
“US written law” includes state and local statutes. Hansen told me that several attorneys have told him in confidence that they agree with his views, but that if they made those arguments they would be disbarred and the entire judiciary is pretty much corrupt. They also know the truth but suppress it.
According to Hansen there have been instances of people winning multi-million dollar judgments from having made successful claims based on territorial jurisdiction, but the decisions are sealed. A number of times he has prevailed as prosecuting attorneys have resigned once they realized the commercial liability they would be under from having violated Hansen’s common law rights.
This Land Ain’t Their Land
The territorial jurisdiction argument is based, in part, on a reading, most people familiar with it would say a misreading, of Article One, Section 8, Paragraph 17 of the Constitution which gives the United States exclusive jurisdiction over the then not yet named District of Columbia and “Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards and other needful Buildings”.
Hansen estimates that in about 74% of the territory of the country, written law does not apply to the majority of Americans who, like Hansen and Hovind, are not United States citizens. The way you defend yourself from the abuse is to demand that law enforcement people you encounter demonstrate the territorial jurisdiction that makes you subject to the written law.
Hansen has a warrant outstanding (4570589-MC) from the Omaha Police Department for driving without a valid registration. It does not seem to bother him much. He might end up spending a little time in jail until he intimidates them by demanding that they prove their jurisdiction and they back down.
Cliven and Ammon Bundy
The Hovind/Hansen prosecution in 2015 gave the right-wing alternative media something to chew on between the Bundy Standoff in 2014 and the Malheur Occupation in 2016. A connecting link was Pete Santilli, who was an embedded reporter of sorts at Malheur. His threatening phone call to Judge Rodgers on behalf of Hovind was held against him when he was charged in relation to Malheur although the charges were ultimately dropped.
The Bundy events were both very much keyed into the “enclave” argument that is the basis of Hansen’s territorial jurisdiction claims. So I asked Hansen about them.
He was not familiar with Santilli but had this to say about Cliven and Ammon’s cases:
“Bundy acts were on federal lands, but the U.S. is not allowed to own land that is not used for military purpose more than 5 years. I contacted them and am sure they gave notice to the U.S. of such potential challenge, which is likely a part of why the case went the way it did. “
Shadowlands
Spending some time immersed in Hansen Legal Theory reminded me a lot of Shadowlands by Anthony McCann. McCann spent a lot of time with Ammon Bundy and others involved in Malheur and covered the trial. McCann is a poet and teaches creative writing so he can get to the essence of the enclave argument much more lyrically than I can.
The misreading of the property clause helps to slingshot Ammon and all his friends and family well beyond the wicked perversions they see in the recent federal government’s misuse of the Constitution into something much grander: the secret American formula for the creation of Freedom.
….. The SovCit underground is rich with veins of such convergence. There, constitutionalism and the old common law rediscover their origins in theological magic, while the millenarian Christian antinomianism of centuries past meets the enduring American faith in get-rich-quick tricks and the more mundane wizardry of the legal loophole. What Sovereign Citizens do with all this, more than anything else, is write and file documents—motion after motion after motion—….. Indeed, the fatigue and dismay of the court seems to be one of the main goals of Sovereign practice of counter-magic against the official jargon of law and governance. Both magic and the law are spaces where one can be “hanged on a comma,” and the SovCit thing always comes down to words, to using the right words, the right sequence of phrases, in the practitioner’s quest to separate the living flesh-and-blood body from its subjection to the power of the State.”
I really recommend Shadowlands, although McCann misses how the ideology plays out in the tax arena.
Where The Far Ends Meet
The other intriguing piece in Shadowlands is the way in which the far right and the far left converge in their views on law enforcement. Kent Hovind’s account of his arrest, in his view entirely arbitrary, with his then wife Jo not being permitted to dress properly before being dragged away in handcuffs is a tale of abusive police. And he actually wrote a pretty good critique of the prison industrial complex in The Kennel. Among the reforms suggested by Kent Hovind are:
Make abuse of prisoners, by prison staff, a felony, not a misdemeanor.
Restore all of the rights of ex-felons. When their sentence is served, their punishment should end
Prohibit all lawmakers, law enforcement, judges, and their spouses from owning stock in prison or prison industries, or from profiting in any way from prisoners.
Make stiff penalties for police or prosecutors who lie on the witness stand, plant evidence, or bribe witnesses in any way, even promising “time off” for testifying.
Legalize the possession and use of drugs, and release those inmates held solely for that charge. Provide restrictions on the sale and manufacture of drugs equal to that of alcohol and tobacco, which is to persons age 21 and older.
A Matter Of Priorities
I confirmed with Hansen that there are serious differences between Hansen and the board of New CSE as indicated in my interview with Ernie Land, Kent’s longest running spokesman. The New CSE board wants Kent to focus on preaching and teaching.
Hansen filed a similar complaint against the State of Nebraska and several individuals in regard to his objections to their enforcement of automobile registration laws on June 3. Judge Richard Kopf made short work of it dismissing the complaint as frivolous on June 11.
“The premise of all of Plaintiff’s claims—that he is a man “with no election of United States citizenship” who is not subject to state law or authority—has been repeatedly rejected as frivolous. United States v. Simonson, 563 F. App’x 514 (8th Cir. 2014)”
Hansen wrote me on that:
“It does not surprise me, they do not want any airing of such foundational distinctions of independence from legislative authority v. the American Peoples common law jurisdiction as enumerated in the 7th Amendment (Bill of Rights). How is it that a man that does not contract with the U.S. has less standing for relief for damages than he who has elected to become a U.S. citizen. Looks to me that some are intent on not allowing a hearing/trial on the issues.”
It appears that some references to the case are disappearing from Hovind’s videos including the entirety of the video I cited earlier in this piece, which has taken me a few days. I’ll take that as a sign that Ernie is winning the battle for Kent’s heart and mind which is probably a good thing.
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