The fact that she leads the witness after she objected earlier to the prosecutor leading the witness without cause is actually *Chef's kiss.* While I also believe that the government is illegitimate, I'm not under the delusion that if I say the right combination of magic words, the state will leave me alone.

How do you feel about it?

As I’ve said.

You’re permitted to lead on cross.

To your second point, that really is the thing that bothers me, the belief in magic words. My heart breaks for folks that think there are magic words. Literally has never worked and you’d think considering they are getting all this stuff from the internet, they would see the myriad examples where it also doesn’t work.

My heart breaks for people like you that don't understand the power of their own mind and the power to create.

What?

Where? What?

Here. That.

Interesting, is there some kind of rationale behind why you can on cross but not when it's your witness?

I'm an idiot. I'm not following at all.

I know, Im sorry, I’m being a dick. I’ve talked about it at length on here, you’d have to search my npub with keywords like “magic” or “sovereign” shit like that.

Ok. I am interested in your view as a lawyer.

Ya I mean if you can find the posts, I’ve gone on at length. The super TLDR is that unfortunately the SovCit folks think there are magic words they can invoke that will basically invalidate the court’s authority; they rely heavily on the the primacy of the common law over statutory law; and believe that there is some kind of conspiracy to conceal the real law from the people but if they just say the right things the “jig will be up” the court will have to admit they are right and dismiss their cases. They fail to take the additional logical step and ask themselves, if the conspiracy is that deep, then even if they are right, they will lose. It’s like, ok they are completely right about the law as they see it, and the Judge, the Cops, and the authorities generally are not adhering to the one true law. Ok, if that’s true then why do they think by revealing the truth to them something will change. Imagine the scenario you’re in the Congo and you go to a warlord and say “hey btw, before you castrate me and rape my wife, you should know you are violating international law?” (Btw, I repudiate international law and think it’s fake and gay but I digress). Ok, how do we imagine that will go? The warlord will obviously go “hey you’re right im not following the law, I’ll stop all this violation of law.” No: you get castrated and your wife gets raped.

I’m sure there is some ancient reasoning for it that has become custom, but one way to understand it is that on direct the presumption is that the witness is friendly to the questioner so we shouldn’t permit the questioner to feed the answers to the witness, whereas on cross there is an adversarial relationship which reduces the likelihood of that kind of improper influence over the witnesses testimony.

That's always been my impression, but you hear these guys go on podcasts and talk about how they haven't paid taxes in years.

The tax thing is a whole other bag of worms, separate from this in-court stuff. Where I’ve landed on the tax issue is that there might be some validity to the using the administrative systems of the US tax apparatus to basically get your file marked such that the goons in the tax offices aren’t alerted to your file to send you notices, but I’ve seen nothing that suggests you are legitimately relieved of your obligation to pay your taxes, just aren’t targeted for enforcement. But to me these are two very different things that I look at differently. But, if it were true that there was “this one trick” to not pay your taxes in a legitimate way that was being pushed by anyone who isn’t trying to sell you a PDF package on the internet for a “low low fee”, I assure you that the giga brain tax attorney’s I know would be aware of it.

Thank you. That's actually very elucidating.

Although I wonder, does that set up a perverse incentive when there is an equally beneficial witness for one side or the other to allow the other side to be direct, to gain advantage in questioning?

It happens but cross exam is typically confined the subject matters that were already raised on direct, so it constrains what you can do on cross and if you try to like completely change the witnesses’ testimony by leading on cross, it won’t go well and the Court/jury will weigh the credibility of the answers that are in conflict with each other. it can get complicated but like imagine on cross the question is “what happened when you went into the building” answer “I admit to attacking Mr. Johnson without provocation” and on cross Im like “isn’t it true when you walked into the building Mr. Johnson actually pointed a gun at you and you were defending yourself” answer “oh ya, that’s what happened. Yes, it was self defense” Well…this is where the credibility gets tested. Which answer do you think a judge or jury will find more credible?

See, if this was a strategy video game, I would be all over this, but since the state uses it as a means to legitimize their authority, I'm less inclined.

Isn't the tax thing a big part of the self-sovereignty argument, or is this more concerned with the idea that we somehow aren't under the courts' jurisdiction?

I mean taxation is theft, but I distinguish justifications for violating the law from things you can actually do to get around the law. You might refuse to pay taxes because it shouldn’t be legal but thats different from filling out the right forms so the gov’t basically forgets to enforce tax laws against you.

Neat. Im going through an eviction case myself. July 1st is the court date. Think I could send you a timeliness of events and get your thoughts for sats?

If you DM me the the State/County and some basic info I can see if I can point you in the right direction, don’t do it publicly in a thread. If its out of my state I can’t really touch it but I might know a lawyer in your Jurisdiction who could give you a few minutes of time in any case.

🫂💜 Sent

Ok give me 24 hours probably Tomorrow morning