Costilla County | Land, water, race, and local governance | Part 2 of 3

This Three Percenter image was posted to the FaceBook page

of a resident of Alamosa advising the Costilla County colonists

Great Recession refugees, ‘off-the-griders’, & sovereign citizens

IS THE POLITICAL RECOMPOSITION OF COSTILLA COUNTY AT STAKE?

Devon G. Peña | Las Colonias de San Pablo, CO | October 13, 2015

We are residents who have come to live off the grid. It’s all our land…These are harsh economic times. We have nowhere to go.

— Paul Skinner. Colorado Public Radio interview cited in The Free Thought Project.

[We are]…modern day pioneers and Pilgrims. [A]merican[s] once did this. [L]oad up the wagons and head west. [I]t’s just modern with the rvs [RVs]. [E]veryone is leaveing [sic] the “left coast” and “sleaze coast” to find new independent land…I lived in CA, UT, TX. lost my job in TX and came back to UT but I want to go back to TX and live independently. [J]ust need a bit of money. [Brackets added]

—Scott Allen, Comments. Michael Morris interview.YouTube clip posted by Alex Ansary.

I have 18 years of service, in the U.S. Army. I am an ex-Ranger. I am here to fight for your rights. That’s kinda what we do.  Alright? We can’t do it without YOU doing it. Now nobody wants to see this place turn into a Bundy Ranch, am I correct?

— Unidentified Ex-Army Ranger. YouTube clip posted by A. Ansary.

I’ve got 10 acres. I’m a 3 Percenter. I’m a patriot. They will not run you off my property without me being dead first.

— Unidentified ‘3 Percenter.’ YouTube clip posted by A. Ansary.

White patriots and the never-ending war for ‘freedom’ on ‘independent land’

Sora Han (2006), a respected criminologist and legal scholar at the University of California-Irvine, recently observed that “the United States is not at war; the United States is war.”  Han is referring to the thesis that, from the beginning of its founding as a white settler colonial state, the U.S. has waged constant war against Indigenous and other marginalized people of color communities like the acequia and merced villages of Costilla County.

The use of “war” is more than a culture code for the unending cycles of violence and conflict that undergird the colonization and settlement of the Americas. We are also familiar with the use of the term as a central meme of other racialized and class conflicts, as in the “War on Drugs”, “War on Terrorism”, “War on Illegal [sic] Immigrants”, and so on.

Everything gets coded as war in the language of the extremist subcultures of the Tea Party, including the Sovereign Citizen, Patriot, 3 Percenter, and Free State movements comprised of ill-fitting libertarian, white supremacist, and armed militia memberships. In Costilla County we now face the “War on Private Property Rights”.

Another version of the war meme—one that is apparently ascendant in certain class and racial quarters of the detritus of three decades of neoliberal policies of privatization and disinvestment in the social sector—is the “War on Government’. From an Indigenous vantage point, this is filled with deep irony since Native peoples have been resisting the governmental forms of structural violence and genocide unleashed by the white settler colonial state for hundreds of years.

This image was posted to the same Facebook page with the quote:

“Vengence is mine sayeth the lord, and I shall repay.” 

The threat of violence being articulated by Sovereign Citizen activists against the people of Costilla County—on display in the YouTube clips embedded below—compels me to ask for public acknowledgement of the fact that the constant state of war against local government is today part of the nationwide white nationalist psyche and it is tied to well-funded and organized political projects for the reassertion of white racial and class domination. More importantly, this occurs at a time when historically disenfranchised people are finally on the verge of taking responsibility for the constituent power required for equitable and just local self-governance.

The various Patriot, Militia, 3 Percenter, and Sovereign Citizen projects are consciously targeting “under-populated” states and regions where new wave pioneers and Pilgrims [sic] can “find new independent land” to colonize. On the efforts by Libertarians, Sovereign Citizens, and Patriot militias to take control of under-populated states and regions see, for e.g., Maryland Reporter; Mother Jones; Telegraph.

The Sovereign Citizen movement is imbued with extremist Christian identity overtones, resulting in the subtext of such popular refrains as, “We need to take our country back”—presumably in order and restore it to some imagined original pristine state as a white Christian nation forged by rugged individualists who killed first and eliminated the number of questions afterwards.

This is, by the way, part of the deeply embedded racist mythology of white popular working-class culture that makes Trump’s hate-filled vitriol against immigrants and people of color so appealing to the average Tea Party mentality. This represents for me the latest version of a very old white Christian patriot identity formation that is xenophobic, nationalistic, misogynist, and dominionist.

Image from a Facebook page of a supporter of the

Costilla County Sovereign Citizens. These racist memes

are a common feature of these pages,

and they claim not to be racists.

As Native peoples we understand how the colonizer’s art of warfare is not always waged by official military forces and is instead often deployed through violent direct actions by volunteer militias, self-anointed patriots, and what are essentially private death squads. The notorious Pinkerton Detective Agency comes to mind. Of course, the Ku Klux Klan is historically among the most recognizable of these unofficial forces aligned with and enacting white settler colonial violence against Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. This is the actual threat posed to the Native Indo-Hispano inhabitants of Costilla County that is overlooked by current mainstream media accounts and that many of the newcomers naively fail to understand.

Beyond the old KKK, there are today literally hundreds of new mostly white male partisan organizations that are unleashing an ideology of violence in order to ‘purify’ the nation through organized politico-paramilitary practices against specified targets.

We can observe that these practices are still resulting in the displacement, murder, and grave injury of Native Americans, African Americans, Chicana/os, other Latina/os and other people of color across the nation including the uncounted, usually unarmed, Black people murdered by white police, some with proven ties to these same sovereign citizen groups.

According to a report in Public Eye, white supremacists and Sovereign Citizen groups are actively recruiting police and active military to their cause. One specific case involved the work of a former cop, the late Jack McLamb, who was the founder and director of the Arizona-based Patriot group called Police Against The New World Order (PATNWO) and published Aid and Abet, a newsletter directed towards recruiting police and active duty military personnel to the Patriot movement.

Confederate flag imagery is another common meme on

Costilla County sovereign citizen’s Facebook pages

This is the material and historical backdrop required to understand the proceeding analysis of the new white settler colonists of Costilla County and of the real public health, cultural, social, and environmental issues posed, ultimately, by the legacy of ruthless subdivision of the open spaces of Colorado and other Southwestern states.

New Wave settler colonists: ¿Quienes son, y por que les falta querencia?

Querencia is “love of place” and it is acquired through multiple generations of living and working in a heritage landscape like the acequia and merced communities of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. Love of place is hard earned in an environment with the ecological and political conditions that characterize Costilla County. Love of place requires respect for ecological limits and awareness and respect for local knowledge. I believe the newcomer white settlers of Costilla County lack both of these qualities, at this point.

Who are the new wave white settler colonists of Costilla County? The newcomers are a diverse group of people. Their regional origins are quite varied and include people with roots in well-known cities like Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, and Colorado Springs while others left homes in smaller towns and cities like Logan (Utah) and Meeker (CO) or fled low-waged jobs in places like Montrose (CO). Still others hail from the Deep South including rural and small town locales in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas. A few are military veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A scant few of the newcomers claim to be “natural born” Colorado “natives”, as if this somehow provides legitimacy for arrogant behavior that the locals cannot help but qualify as disrespectful interloping.

The newcomers have two ‘token’ African American men who seem willing and able to be paraded by Internet trolls and right-wing pundits as evidence that the newly arrived, mostly white Patriots and off-the-grid advocates are not racist and that the county is the guilty party attacking innocent people whose only crime is an honest search for ‘intentional’ community. 



The contradictions abound: In another interview posted to YouTube, we are told that the Hispanics [sic] of Costilla County do not want growth (which is probably true) and yet the same people making these statements are proponents of sustainable living. 



My question: What could be more sustainable than to recognize the ecological limits of a place, leading to the anti-growth posture of the Native citizens? Only this is not quite right: The Chicana/o community wants economic vitality but it must abide by the cultural and ecological qualities of Costilla County, and this reflects a view shared by counties across the State of Colorado. It only becomes a problem when this view is articulated by people that white settlers find threateningly Other. 

There are young, middle-aged, and older adults; single persons; partnered; married; some have arrived with families and have children who are attending local district public schools.

Research over the past two weeks has led me to the following understanding of the newcomer colonists, who fall into four distinct groupings; how’s this for reversing ‘the Gaze’?

(1) Refugees of the ‘Great Recession’ – These are mostly white working-class and Christian families and persons who have lost their homes, jobs, and income security, or who have tired of urban life and seek solace in more open spaces; they have fled to Costilla County to restart their lives as a result of the unscrupulous marketing of ‘dirt cheap’ land with huge hidden costs that many are ill-prepared to shoulder. 

(2) Off-the-grid, alternative lifestyle advocates – Mostly young and white, they are apparent true believers in sustainability but are afflicted by a naiveté born of near complete ignorance of the history, culture, and ecology of place; they have also shown a lack of judgment in aligning themselves with elements of the third group, the ‘Patriots’ and ‘Sovereign Citizens’.

(3) Patriots and Sovereign Citizens – These are the vocal minority within the Costilla County settler colonists and are mostly comprised of former military servicemen; all white males; many with active ties to organizations and groups that are the partisans of anti-government social movements spawned, most recently, by Tea Party hatred of the Obama Presidency. They are well armed; arrogant; delusional in their political and legal beliefs; and therefore highly dangerous.



There is a fourth subset, (4) the ‘professional’ Internet trolls, pundits, and social media activists that make a living from creating social media flash points seeking to justify the actions of the third group.

RV prairie dweller north of San Luis. Outhouse and

storage shed have been built over past two years.

Photo by D. Peña.

(1) The economic refugees

One thing is certain: Many, perhaps most, of the prairie dwellers are largely apolitical persons and families facing great economic and social distress. They offer largely untold stories of people like one displaced family that moved from Arkadelphia, Arkansas to the Costilla County desert prairie in 2007 after a catastrophic illness left the family bankrupt and in deep material poverty.  I met and befriended them in Ft. Garland well before the latest wave of newcomers arrived. They sought refuge from a world they rightly view as cruel, chaotic, and punitive.

The Arkadelphia family acquired a 5-acre sagebrush lot in northeastern Costilla County during ‘good times’ (2005); their homestead was in the vicinity of the southern approach from San Luis to the Sangre de Cristo Ranches subdivision at the turn on Road X, off the highway to Ft. Garland, by the so-called “A” House.

After a series of catastrophic illnesses among family members, this 5-acre lot was their only asset and the sole place left for them to go. On arrival, they lacked resources to build an adequately insulated home or to even install indoor plumbing or a septic tank, required under state health regulations, which are now delegated to counties for enforcement.

They could not afford the cost of installing the badly needed domestic water well and bought what water they could from local businesses or occasionally took it directly from the creeks and agricultural canals (ditches in the parlance of the north county), against my advice. Access to vital health care was always difficult and involved long and costly travel to the public health clinic in San Luis or the even more distant regional hospital in Alamosa.

After a particularly hard winter, the family suddenly left in the early spring of 2010, perhaps heading back to warmer climes in the South? I never found out. This family was not the target of over-zealous land use code enforcement officers. They left, like most people who share their abject circumstances, after challenging environmental conditions became more than they could weather or adapt to.

Illegal dump north of San Luis. All of the garbage

at this site is from the family that left Arkansas

in 2007 and then left Costilla County in 2010.

Photo by D. Peña.

The only imprint the Arkadelphia family left—strewn across an illegal garbage dump not far from their abandoned lot—is the broken shards of a harshly disrupted attempt at domesticity and the discarded yellowing paperwork of lives wrecked by neoliberal economic and social policies. This pattern happens more often than not. Living off-grid does not come so easily in our high altitude cold desert environment; with or without land use code enforcement officers.

This seems especially true for those who do not choose to pursue an off-the-grid lifestyle but are instead simply suffering from the effects of the poverty of deprivation, which is a consequence of a capitalist society’s incessant structural violence. Blaming county administrators for this tragedy is a demagogic ideological ruse by second-rate Internet trolls and pundits, the not so masterful prevaricators of right-wing social media.

In other words: An unknown number of the newcomers are people whose lives are as crushed and difficult as it was for the medical debt refugees of the Great Recession that arrived from Arkansas in 2007 and left by 2010. These are not off-the-grid advocates but rather people desperate to do everything they can to just survive, which makes them vulnerable as ideological fodder for the right-wing extremists.

This is the factually dominant pattern in Costilla County, and has been for decades: People buy land here; usually sight unseen; they harbor dreams of a home in the Rocky Mountains amidst antelope and elk herds that seldom appear and elusive mountains that are typically some 10 to 20 miles away and largely inaccessible due to private enclosures and our own locally-managed common lands. They are lured here by the devilishly misleading and perfectly legal advertisements for the sale of ‘dirt cheap’ land by speculators and unscrupulous realtors. In my estimation, that’s who ultimately holds blame for this chaos and suffering since land gets deceptively sold to people unaware of the very substantial hidden costs to the owners, their neighbors, and our environment.

The newly ‘landed’ arrive and find there is no water to be had – unless they have the $10-20,000 average required to pay a private company to drill a well into the San Luis Valley unconfined aquifer (depending on location); they may also have to secure a well permit from the State Water Conservation Board. In the meantime, the right-wing Internet trolls blame the county for the eviction that resulted after a more established white middle-class property owner filed suit alleging violations of the local land use code.

This has nothing to do with the county land use code and everything to do with the facts of the region’s extreme aridity and over-appropriated water rights regime. Combined with the limited resources of many newcomers and you get further displacement and conflict. None of the mainstream media reporting so far notes this essential set of facts beyond an occasional quote from County Administrator Ben Doon who correctly observes that all the water in the ditches, creeks, and rivers is already appropriated, and in the case of the Rio Grande is part of the deliveries Colorado must make under an interstate compact with downstream water users in New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico.

Beyond falling victims to the land speculators’ lust for easy profits, the refugees settling in Costilla County are also casualties of the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state. According to Costilla County records and officials, the newcomers represent 80 percent of all new cases for food stamp and family support assistance. This is definitely not the way to build an off-the-grid community.

Cheapdirt.com is an example of the type of misleading marketing that lures people to purchase “cheap land”

with huge hidden costs to the owners, neighbors and the environment.

The Sheriff’s Department also reports that for the first time in the history of the County, people from outside the Town of San Luis and the surrounding acequia villages comprise the majority of the county jail inmate population.  This has got to be a first: A predominantly Chicana/o county with a mostly white male populace of jailhouse inmates; unprecedented and troubling as a barometer of the chaotic social change occurring in the county.

There are also reports from concerned parents in the school district that the children of some of the newcomers are getting bullied at school because they are unwashed and local students find the odor offensive and disruptive to coursework and social interaction. Some concerned parents are now pressuring the superintendent and school board to expand the number of showers available to these children so they can attend more regularly to their personal hygiene and perhaps end this harassment.

This illustrates another painful fact: Costilla County is already an economically distressed area and is often cited as the “poorest county” in Colorado.  Most locals reject this characterization by noting how the area is rich in land, history, and culture even if it is “cash poor”.

Regardless, the failures of neoliberal capitalism have produced the largest mass of poor working-class families since the era of the Great Depression. Many of these poor white working-class people are moving to an area that is already economically impoverished.

Indeed, the bullying of newcomer children is exactly the kind of hidden cost that we all need to start acknowledging and addressing. It would ne nice to see Colorado Public Radio and the Denver Post acknowledge this underlying reality in something other than the shallow reporting thus far done that has actually exacerbated the situation by painting a misleading picture of our county as a wild west free of land regulations.

Chloe Everhart and Hyrum Jenson.

Photo courtesy of Dylan Minor | Colorado Public Radio

(2) The off-the-grid alternative lifestyle advocates

The second principal group of newcomers consists of mostly white young adults who envisioned an opportunity to build a community that seeks a sustainable lifestyle by living off-the-grid. It is a noble ambition but one that is obviously limited in this case by naiveté and a lack of sufficient knowledge, skill, or resources to establish a viable version of this alternative lifestyle in an arid environment framed by the politics and economics born of the underlying fact of over-appropriation of water rights.

One of the apparent leaders of this group is a 33-year old white woman by the name of Chloe Everhart, who hails from Portland, Oregon. Her partner, Hyrum Jenson, an Afghanistan War vet, is from Logan, Utah. The couple was featured in an article published October 1 by Colorado Public Radio, with the misleading and inaccurate headline, “Off-Grid Residents Claim Victory As Costilla County Backs Off Proposal.” The County did not back off; it decided that clarification of the code was unnecessary and that authorities have sufficient legal standing to enforce existing code regulations that reasonably require newcomers to, for e.g., install septic tanks to protect public health and sanitation, as required by State law.

I’ve seen Chloe at the Ventero Open Press coffee shop on two occasions but we have never been introduced much to my regret. She exudes the startled look of someone lost in a new place and lacking familiarity with local history, culture, ecology, and especially our long tradition of environmental justice struggles that define our community’s special relationship to place.

The naiveté on display among off-the-grid advocates like Ms. Everhart is troubling because they could very well become compatible and creative allies of the acequiahood in a relationship of mutual aid, which is our tradition. In the CPR interview, Ms. Everhart spoke of plans to construct a straw bale home. Unfortunately, this technique has been largely abandoned in the SLV for the simple reason that field mice and other rodents almost always find a way to make nests within the walls of straw-bale construction.  A better, more place appropriate, technique would involve construction of an adobe brick home, which includes the benefits of culturally respectful aesthetic values and improvements in insulation R-values.

Of course, the neoliberal market has driven the cost of adobe bricks through the roof. If only someone among the off-the-grid joined with people from the acequiahood community to figure out how to cooperatively produce adobes, then we would be well on our way to a creative solution that everyone could agree to and would strengthen the prospects for the emergence of a new community of neighbors living in healthy and safe conditions and without harming the interests and sensibilities of the older established residents.

Unfortunately, at this point, the newcomers’ lack of knowledge of the ecology and culture of place reveals itself in something of a quandary as illustrated by so simple a decision as choosing between straw-bale and adobe. I can envision Chloe befriending us by sitting down to a serious and respectful discussion of local knowledge about building a home in this environment.

This is precisely the root of the problem facing Chloe and her colleagues: To live off-the-grid in a manner that embraces social justice and not just ecological sustainability, the newcomers must respect and learn place-based ecology, culture, and history. Otherwise, this can quickly become another exercise in complicity with the arrogant dispossession of a Native peoples’ sense of place by white settler colonists, which is exactly the agenda of the third group.

Screenshot of Ex-Ranger active in the Costilla County

Sovereign Citizens mobilization.

(3) The ‘Sovereign Citizens’

The smallest subset of the newcomers is also the most vocal and most ‘networked’. They are using an active social media campaign to escalate this into a confrontation with local, state, and federal authorities as a test case for sovereign citizenry.

These activist newcomers, who claim to be struggling to live among others in the hardscrabble terrain of Costilla County’s colonias, embrace a distinctly resurgent thread of white settler colonial ideology that legitimizes itself by invoking the need for volunteer militia mobilization and the possible use of violence.  

For example, in the video clip below, a former Army Ranger who claims to own acreage in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, discusses the idea that sometimes the going gets rough in negotiations with governmental authorities. In the event that the clip is removed from the YouTube channel created by one of the Internet pundits and trolls that is behind this mobilization, I have transcribed the statements made by this unidentified ‘Patriot’ and the others present during an impromptu meeting that took place last Tuesday after the Costilla County Commissioners monthly public meeting.

EX-ARMY RANGER: I have 18 years of service, in the US Army. I am an ex-Ranger. I am here to fight for your rights. That's kinda what we do.  Alright? We can’t do it without YOU doing it. Now nobody wants to see this place turn into a Bundy Ranch, am I correct?  [Groans of agreement, nervous laughter]…  All right. Now, solutions need to become to in order for this to happen.  The solutions are not gonna be reached unless the people stick together and stand up for what they believe in. Now here’s what I want to know from each and every person standing here, Is: Do you believe in your Constitutional right to do what you want with your own land? [Yes! wide agreement] 

What we would like to do, is stay on top of the situation. and we would like your help,   each and every person, here, we would like your help in remedying the solution to this problem.



Now sometimes those solutions come easy through negotiation, sometimes they come a little rough…Everybody I am sure knows about Bundy Ranch and the stuff that happened there. Ah, we need to try and avoid those kinds of situations but at the same time you got to stand up for your Constitutional rights. What are your Constitutional rights? Does anyone know what your Constitutional Rights are? [Two different men display their knowledge of the Bill of Rights].

A lot of people don't understand that ‘code’ is not ‘law’. Code is code; law is law.

Woman: Then how does it get combined?

It is illegal for an officer of the law to enforce code on your property, okay? And those are the issues that we’re here, that’s the reason I am here, is to deal with it.

I have a personal involvement and a personal interest. I own 7 acres of land up here in the mountains. So, everything that you’re dealing with I’m going to have to deal with. So it is in my best interest that I take care of you. So, we’re looking for your support; we’re looking for your help, and if you guys are willing and ready, Operation Patriot Rally Point is willing and ready and we’re going to step, but we’re going to need each and every person’s help; okay it’s not simple.

Now last night I received a message, an urgent message, on Facebook, from one of my ninjas. Ninjas, that’s what we call ourselves, cause we work in the background, and I was advised to contact a United States Supreme Court judge, who wanted to speak to me, on this issue. Immediately, as soon as I got the message, I picked up the phone; I introduced myself; he introduced himself to me, and we talked; he’s up in Denver right now. Apparently Costillo [sic] County has grown the attention of the U.S. superior court and he notified me that US marshals are going to be brought in on this. For some reason, I can’t tell you who they are, I don’t know the details.

WOMAN [Penny Taylor]: I do. This started with me and my husband. We own 10 acres over on the plat by the A house, and our neighbor from Texas had a vacation home here, he came up four times a year; we were there about 9 months and he decided to sue us, he didn’t like how we were living but we ended up, a district judge told us we could stay on our land and build; and we went to court and they wouldn’t give us our permits again and the county judge ruled....the district judge said that Matt Valdez [County Land Use Administrator] was not authorized to give permits. I have this in writing and its underneath the court oath. Now, Martin Gonzalez was the district court judge. Now we are under Jim Woods, who is the county judge, who ruled over Martin’s ruling and kicked us off and made us take down our house.

EX-RANGER: The judge has asked me to speak to you guys and, ah, see if we can organize a meeting with the judge, and some assistant of his, and a couple of US Marshals I think, I can’t give thee full details cause my mind is a little foggy, but he would like to organize a meeting with the citizens that’s involved here. Ah, he’s requested Thursday or Friday….I don't know if that’s possible for you all….

This is not going to be easy, any time you try to take on local government or federal government, anything like that and any kind of issue, it’s not going to be easy. You have to be ready for a hard fight. You got to ruck up, balls up, get er done…that’s how it rolls…

ANOTHER MAN: Yea but there’s a problem here. A lot of these people are being kicked off of their property and they have nowhere to go and the winters here are extremely difficult….

SECOND MAN: I’ve got 10 acres. I’m a 3 Percenter; I’m a Patriot. They will not run you off my property without me being dead first.

THIRD MAN: That’s the thing about it, we all gotta stick together, because eventually its gonna come down to the point, where its going to be the people who are at our doors, we got to help or neighbors out so its not going to be us next time….

This is one clip among many posted to a YouTube channel created and administered by Alex Ansary. One recurring theme in the video clips is a set of variants of private property rights concepts that are central to Sovereign Citizen ideology. This includes the idea that ‘fee simple’ ownership conveys a divine right to do as one pleases with the land that is older than the U.S. Constitution and most certainly antecedent to local governmental authority at the county level.

The most notorious recent example of this was the Bundy Ranch last year in Nevada, which is frequently invoked by the Patriots and Sovereign Citizens in Costilla County. Commonly decreed among advocates of this ideology is the idea that individual sovereignty constitutes liberty from taxation or regulation of private property rights when vested in fee simple ownership.

(4) Internet Pundits and Trolls

Who is Alex Ansary? He fits the mold of the freelance writer and video documentarian trying to make it as another Internet sensation. He’s not having much luck with that. Ansary started his blogging as an irregular contributor to online conspiracy theory zines and unfiltered information clearinghouses like Rense.com, an agglomeration and self-promotion site spanning the whole spectrum of political thought including “conspiracy theory” reporting on topics such as UFOs, Chemtrails, and Mind Control. Among Ansary’s gems posted to Rense.com is a blog post about “Mind Control Through TV”. Ansary is actually the one doing ‘mind control’ because by allowing advertising on his many websites, including YouTube, he gets to make a penny or whatever every time you or I visit to take a peek.

His specialty for many years, before becoming a champion of private property rights in Costilla County, was a penchant for conspiracy theories related to the New World Order, the police state, and mass media indoctrination of the masses. Ansary must have missed the indoctrinated masses of #blacklivesmatter and #NotOneMore.

He has now taken his conspiracy theorizing from the realm of mind control to the complexities of a set of deeply rooted historical conflicts over land and water rights—including previous failed white settler enclosures that he has no knowledge of.  Instead, he merely seeks to apply his conspiracy theories to the case of Costilla County by asserting without a shred of evidence that land use administrators secretly and maliciously engineered a nefarious attack on the private property rights of the newcomers.

This not a new tactic but its application in our context is novel. Breitbart and his minions invented the ring wing’s notorious use of fabricated documentary evidence to serve libertarian, neoconservative, and anti-democratic agendas by deploying social media to systematically and incessantly present deception and prevarication masquerading as journalism. It’s not working very well in Ansary’s case as indicated by the abysmal number of hits on his YouTube channel.

One of the advocates of the Sovereign Citizen ideology in Costilla County is another newcomer by the name of Vince Edwards, a white male in his 30s who is featured in another Ansary YouTube post. Edwards’ particular narrative, clothed in awkward legalese, revolves around the familiar and delusional Sovereign Citizen misunderstanding of the concept of ‘fee simple’ in property rights:

The problem that we’re facing in this country and in this county is that most of the people just don’t now their rights and the fact of the matter is that our rights preexist the Constitution, eh, eh, preexist the forming of this county, ah, preexisted the regulations that they are trying to put together now. Every single warranty deed that I’ve ever looked at has the words ‘fee simple’ on it. Fee simple means absolute unconditional use of your property. That means I don’t have to pay taxes on it, I don’t have to get permission to do anything, I just exercise my rights.

This is much more than a misunderstanding of the legal concept of fee simple or the status of English or Anglo common law in the U.S. It reveals a great deal of ignorance about the Constitutional nature of this Republic of Property. More importantly, it also reveals a colonialist’s narrow self-centered and individualistic concept of rights, which is common among the Sovereign Citizen crowd who express little sense of community obligations or respect for Indigenous peoples’ established ways of being, knowing, and doing that are more resilient and just than settlers’ selfish norms and arrogant orientations.

These so-called Sovereign Citizens are considered a domestic terrorist threat; see the reports by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). That may very well be. But they are also a different kind of threat – that of our everyday lived experience bearing witness to  a colonizer’s heavy, selfish, overbearing presence and complete lack of humility in the face of Indigenous cultures and the limits imposed by ecological realities in our cherished watershed democracy of the acequia communities of the San Luis Valley.