The Union Runner
Cryptic Ramblings
For all your random insane bullshit. or just media analysis when I feel like it.
!!!FIRST ARTICLE!!!
January 22nd, 2024: a review of munecat's Sovereign Citizens: Pseudolaw & Disorder and why the Video Essay is the future.
One of the most popular genres of YouTube content is the Long-Form Video Essay. Ranging from 30 Minutes to 2 hours in length, with some particularly in-depth examples stretching into 3 hours or beyond, Video Essays offer high-production value deep dives into various subjects to those with the attention span and time to spare. The video essay differs from its written counterparts in more ways than the media format of the essay. Video Essayists tend to employ a more informal style of presentation that combines humor, video snippets, music choice, and countless other stylistic additions to create engaging, informative, and entertaining content that is typically met with well-deserved praise for their creators. The video essay is a prevalent format for YouTubers who frequently discuss politics, media criticism, and philosophy. As an example, take "Sovereign Citizens: Pseudolaw & Disorder," published by the YouTuber munecat on May 11th, 2023, A 1 hour and 45-minute Video Essay discussing the History and Ideology of the Sovereign Citizens, a multitude of groups and individuals claiming to be able to live outside the jurisdiction of their national governments.
Munecat begins her video by examining the American origins of the Sovereign Citizens movement, breaking down the broad beliefs of many such organizations and individuals and how the leaders of these movements exploit their followers for money. She then discusses how the "SovCit" movements, based mainly on a misunderstanding of American Constitutional Law, could be adopted by largely Right-Wing (and some Left-Wing) radicals in the UK, the Countries Commonwealth, Ireland, and Germany. She describes how the UK branches of the movement justify their beliefs upon a wholly incorrect understanding of Common Law, which replicates itself in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. After highlighting the different legal justifications Sovereign Citizen Movements provide to "work" within their countries' constitutional framework, she highlights several other commonalities within the movements. These include an unreasonable obsession with how words are used and presented in official contexts, ties to Far-Right ideologies in many cases, and a tendency to resort to both physical violence and so-called "Paper Terrorism" (the use of fictitious legal proceedings such as false liens and frivolous lawsuits for harassment on a scale similar to conventional terrorism) to push for their aims. Discussing the psychology behind the growth and spread of the movement, she notes that Sovereign Citizen leaders tend to exploit individuals who have had recent negative experiences with their national governments, are involved in other conspiracy communities, or are resentful of systems that disproportionately benefit a wealthy elite over the masses. At the end of the video, she provides her musings, noting that the Sovereign Citizen Movement arose out of resentment towards valid critiques of how modern governments are structured, similar to many other conspiracy theories of an anti-government bent.
In her video, münecat utilizes dozens of sources she lists in a Google document in her Video description. Her sources include court proceedings involving sovereign citizens, news articles, videos of police interactions, and even content produced by actual sovereign citizen advocates. Her sources help build credibility for the information she says in the video. It is essential that when analyzing a movement, a researcher is aware of how the movement defines itself and not only how others define it. After all, how can somebody dismantle the arguments of a radical movement if they do not know what they actually believe? It is essential to understand that while a Sovereign Citizen Guru's blog is not a reliable source of information on most things, it is undoubtedly reliable if someone is trying to understand what the adherents of the ideology believe. It is also important to demonstrate the complete ineffectiveness of Sovereign Citizen Legal Arguments when applied in the Courtroom. Münecat uses multiple legal proceedings demonstrating how poorly attempted Sovereign Citizen Legal Defenses hold up in court, as people claiming to not belong to any country fail to understand that that does not make them exempt from the law. Lastly, the News Articles she cites help the viewer understand that the Sovereign Citizen Movement is more than a kooky conspiracy theory and has led to actual violence and harm in the real world. All in all, her Sources are effectively used to help build a credible summation of the goals, history, and ideology of the Sovereign Citizens Movement.
If Münecat were to submit her video in written form to a college professor, she would likely not receive a stunning grade. This is not because of the factual content within the essay but rather due to the informal style in which it is presented. The actual spoken work (that which would be written down in a script) contains several swear words, makes frequent jokes, and reads more like the script for an episode of "Last Week Tonight" than a serious work of Journalism. The video opens with a joke about how much research she had to do before making the video, and before starting the dive, she takes a swig of beer. She creates a short techno-style musical clip between sections and ends the video with a parody song about the movement. However, this blatant lack of adherence to formality does not detract from the Journalistic Quality of the work at all. If anything, it improves its effectiveness. Put simply (and informally), the Jokes are funny, the music is bopping, and the video can grab and keep the viewer's attention for the entirety of its almost 2-hour runtime. As previously established, the video is genuinely informative, with a list of sources encompassing nine Google Docs pages. With 1.3 Million views and counting, this video has a performance that dwarfs a similar documentary by PBS Frontline, 2021's "American Patriot: Inside the Armed Uprising Against the Federal Government," which sits at 246 Thousand views. The evidence seems to show that, at least on YouTube, formality is a worthy sacrifice in the name of creating engaging yet reliable educational content.
With the Internet Age well into its fourth decade, how we learn about complex social issues is no longer consolidated in Academia's Legacy Media or lecture halls. At the click of a button, the average internet user can learn about any topic from a reliable source of both information and entertainment. Some have raised the valid concern that this has led to a rise of misinformation online. However, as the many Video Essayists on YouTube demonstrate, it is possible to make exhaustive educational content, with runtimes longer than most College Lectures, without sacrificing entertainment value so long as the creators do their due diligence to ensure the information they push out into the world is accurate.