Are “sovereign citizens” a thing anymore? I’m not sure. But if you’ve heard of this phrase, then it was probably in the context of farcical internet videos featuring grown adults mutually harassing one another until the annoying one (the sovereign citizen) loses to the one with a gun (the cop).
Although it’s not really my style, I understand that there’s no small amount of schadenfreude to be derived from such videos. Sovereign citizens are undoubtedly goons, and watching goons get their goonuppance is virtually a genre in its own right.
But for a certain segment of the onlooking population — the politically/ideologically‐inclined — the sovereign citizen (henceforth sov‐cit) represents more than just the object of their schadenfreude. The citizen is also the target of ideological ridicule.
Fortune cookies are not Chinese. At best, they’re Japanese, & really the modern form that we know is an American invention. The transfer in association from Japanese to Chinese (or rather, from Japanese‐American to Chinese‐American) seems to largely boil down to the gastronomic preferences of Americans at the time (viz. the first half of the 20th c.):
“A lot of Chinese restaurants were owned by Japanese,” Stephen said, noting that there wasn’t a lot of demand for sushi back then. “They opened Chinese restaurants as a means to an income.”
