Benjamin Glynn from Yorkshire is an expat previously working in Singapore as a recruiter. On May 7 2021, he was filmed on the MRT without his mask on during a pandemic when the wearing of masks was (and still is) mandatory. When confronted, Mr Glynn continued to refuse even when offered masks by members of the public, insisting “I will never wear a mask”.
When the police visited him two days later he threatened to “knock them down”. At court he still did not wear a mask and sought the help of unqualified legal counsels, one of whom was turned away from court for being inappropriately dressed.
The other claimed to be an “ambassador at large for and advocate of Kingdom Filipina Hacienda”, which is a cult with an office in Singapore that believe themselves to be an autocratic separatist Filipino kingdom whose queen has urged sovereign governments around the world to “turn over and relinquishment (sic)” and espouses “Omg! End of the World” on Facebook.
More worryingly, on their Singapore Facebook page they reveal their anti-vax stance, sharing numerous anti-vax memes
One of many anti-vax memes on KFH Singapore Facebook
Later on as we examine Mr Glynn’s legal strategy we will begin to understand why he had chosen this organisation for legal aid. We will also explore the background of the Sovereign-Citizen movement and analyse their arguments.
For my post I hope to achieve at least two points:
- Demonstrate how conspiracy theories lead to extremism
- Answer: What the hell are sovereign-citizens about?
Benjamin Glynn’s Twitter Account
A comment on personal info: Benjamin Glynn has made extensive efforts to self-promote using his real identity, as such I am merely subjecting his public persona and published tweets to scrutiny. All other private information is concealed. Considering that his case is already public news, obscuring his identity here would be ineffective and detrimental to the interest of the case.
I have also been careful to verify that the owner of this account is really his.
Ben Glynn’s Twitter Account (@Benglynn7) is a treasure trove of insights into his psyche and forms a basis of understanding for his strange behaviour. His own tweets will show that he is not the heroic freedom fighter he has made himself out to be but rather, a man driven by deluded thinking. His “cunning” plan to escape legal persecution will also be shown to be derived from his unhinged fantasies and bear no beneficial merit to the outcome of his case.
We see that in 2018 he makes only one tweet commenting on the McDelivery app. In 2019, he made only 5 tweets, all on mundane issues like long queues, events and holidays. From then till November 2020, his account was silent. Then something changed. The frequency of his tweeting ballooned and his tweets became more toxic and unhinged.
In the nine months from then till 5th August 2021 when he was remanded at the Institute of Mental Health, he had tweeted and replied over 1600 times, much of which concerned his obsession over secretly transgendered celebrities in the upper echelons of society.
Glynn's obsession with celebrities being secretly transgender
New reports show that his wife wrote to court about how his behaviour had changed over lockdown and this tracks with his own tweets. Glynn tweeted that he only started off as a “baby truther” and it took him three months over the lockdown period to become “wide awake”. During this time, he has strained the relationship with his wife and started to pull away from his parents because they did not conform to his new ideology.
A Disturbing Worldview
It will not surprise when Mr Glynn’s tweets reveal that he is an anti-vaxxer. His denial of vaccines efficacy might raise an eyebrow or even be considered warranted in more cautious circles if that were the sole issue of his concerns, but the depths of his denialism goes so much further.
Through his twitter, we discover that Mr Glynn does not just disbelieve in vaccines but also thinks that coronaviruses do not exist because he does not believe in viruses. As a “Truther” he has taken the extreme view that “virology is a cabal hoax”
Conspiracy theory about viruses not existing
Truthers are a movement with particular appeal in the West whereby people outright reject a rational worldview in order to assert their own set of fantasies as “the Truth”. This results in them slowly taking on extremist ideas based on conspiracy theories. Mr Glynn embodies this movement in such a complete way that in a quiz that asks “How hardcore of a truther are you?” which gives points for every statement one agrees with, he not only answers that he agrees with “all” statements, he suggests point 11 should be taken further.
From this basis we can start tracing through the themes of Mr Glynn’s belief system.
Truther quiz
To Glynn, the world around him as explained by science or common sense is farcical; a carefully designed ploy by a shadowy cabal that rules the world to cover up the “truth”. For example, he states that he does not believe that aeroplanes run on jet fuel but rather “compressed air that self-perpetuates” and dismisses gravity as a hoax.
Those beliefs were built upon a set of more foundational falsehoods, namely the Flat Earth “theory”. He mentions his adoption of Flat Earth theory as truth numerous times, goes into detail of it and even chastises people who teach the “heliocentric not geocentric model of earth” as “f*cking satanist!!”
Flat Earth Beliefs
But why would the shadowy cabal, which Mr Glynn fingers as “Jesuits” who “run the world through Freemason”, work so hard to lie about jet fuel, gravity, dinosaurs, germ theory etc? He explains that they do so as a means to both mock the “goy” and control the populace. “Goy'' is a derogatory term for non-Jews. Anti-Semites who perceive themselves as victims of Jewish designs use that term to project a feeling of animosity. We see Mr Glynn’s brand of anti-Semitism rife through his tweets when he claims that “the holocaust was a hoax”, or that there was “no such thing as Nazi” but instead was a “made up thing from the Zionists”.
Anti-Semitic streak
He absolves Nazi Germany of genocide by saying “the Bolsheviks slaughtered everyone not the German soldiers” and that “There wasn’t any gas chambers”. He further claims that “Auschwitz wasn’t a bad place until Stalin, hunger and disease arrived”, dismissing the Holocaust as “cabal nonsense”.
Holocaust denial
Mr Glynn bills Zionists as part of a cabal of Jesuits, Freemasons and Baphomet worshippers who run the world. He puts forward that the cabalists are not actually human but rather “a demonic parasite which go in through the eye” to control people. Their grand objective, according to Mr Glynn, is to “depopulate and enslave what is left of humanity” through operations like giving out Covid vaccines and installing 5G.
His greatest obsession over the cabalist elites however, is their alleged practice of infiltrating trans-people into positions of power. As mentioned previously, he has dedicated hundreds of tweets in the span of less than a year to this topic. Mr Glynn strives to identify, call-out and invent ludicrous stories about celebrities, athletes and politicians of secretly being “trannies”.
For example, Mr Glynn goes on to claim that major sports stars like Mike Tyson, Cornor McGregor, Tiger Woods and just about every famous footballer including David Beckham were actually born female. The Freemasons, he claims, made them in a lab and gave them testosterone to transition into males.
Even more bizarrely, he claims that the wives of these men are also trans who were born males but were turned into females. He calls the practice EGI or “Elite Gender Inversion”.
Trans obsession 2
The practice, he states, goes so far as to manufacture NBA players in laboratories where female babies get transformed into male basketballers.
Lab grown trans athletes
In his paranoid world, Ben Glynn believes that all musicians and actors are actually trans. He uses the derogatory term “trannybox” to describe his TV as a means to convey how widespread he believes “trannies” are in the media.
More strange and extreme is his belief that Prince Harry’s real mother is actually Elton John and that Princess Diana was his father. Mr Glynn invents a story where Princess Diana was not killed in 1997, as reported, but rather faked her death to transition back into a man named David Furnish, who is Elton John’s real world husband.
Princess Diana conspiracy theory
The Queen of England, Glynn says, is another transgendered “demon parasite infested creature” and “head of the committee of 300”, which according to him makes her “evil personified”.
Queen conspiracy theory
Even Singapore’s very own Master Mediator, Lela Kaur, from The Ministry of Law was accused of not being a born female by Glynn.
Lela conspiracy theory
The reason Ben Glynn gives for why secret trans-people are so widespread is threefold:
One: the cabal worships an androgynous demon named Baphomet which means all elites have to undergo sex change to honour it.
Two: the people in power are pushing a trans-agenda because somehow it feeds into the cabalist’s agenda that leads to the destruction of the world.
Cabal conspiracy theory
Three: perhaps most revealing of Mr Glynn’s inner anxiety is the claim that it is the cabal’s plan is to “make us men lust after trannies”.
Trans obsession 3
This is just the tip of the iceberg however because his unhinged beliefs go so much further than that. For example, he does not believe that the Titanic hit an iceberg because according to him, icebergs do not exist on the flat earth. Mr Glynn still has so many more crazy beliefs on twitter but we will move on to discuss other topics.
His belief system goes so far to incorporate every aspect of pseudoscience, denialism and conspiracy theory that he would be a fitting mascot for “crank magnetism”, a term coined by psychologist Mark Hoofnagle to describe how cranks tend to be attracted to claims made by other cranks. The crescendo of his beliefs culminates at the point where he prophesies that the demonic cabal will enact a “Great Reset” that will usher in “high-tech Fascism / Communism” in a depopulated prison world.
Given all this, it is no surprise that Mr Glynn had an outburst in court that resulted in him being remanded to the Institute of Mental Health.
Legal Strategy
The point where Benjamin Glynn’s fantasies will be tested in the real world will be in the court of law. This is where rubber meets the road. Just as with his belief that Mike Tyson was born a woman, his belief in his legal strategy is built on imaginary foundations
From his tweets Mr Glynn seems to think that Singapore’s courts and other courts worldwide are bound to his interpretation of “common law”.
Common Law
Believing to be untouchable by the law, he even encourages others in Australia and the UK to not comply with restrictions.
It is his belief that uttering a paragraph about how the laws of corporations cannot be applied to him as an individual will somehow magically make it true and that legal institutions everywhere will suddenly melt away and be rendered powerless to prosecute him.
Of course that is just made up nonsense he got from the internet. It is an idea that is as baseless as his belief in the flat earth. But let us take a closer look at what he actually means and untangle this “sovereign” phenomenon because it is quite funny when people here who invoke it do not seem to know what it really stands for nor where it comes from.
The Sovereign Citizen movement was born out of a paranoid right-wing militia called the Posse Comitatus in the 1970s. Their aim was to reject the authority and laws of the US Government so that they may skip on paying taxes, drive without a license, execute police officers and promote their racist white-supremist, conspiracy minded doctrines.
One of the methods they use to go about this is to invent and submit pseudo-legal documents rife with invented language and baseless assertions. We see this in Ben Glynn’s invocation of so-called “common law over maritime commercial law”, use of an “affidavit of status and Power of Attorney for his private trust”. This is a lot to unpack so I shall start from the top
Sovereign-Citizen logic
What sovereign-citizens believe is that there is a “common law” that refers to a universally applied ancient set of unwritten customs and laws from long ago that overrides modern laws today. They believe that only this set of laws apply to “living men and women”, and because those laws are unwritten, uncodified and undefined, sovereign-citizens are free to make it up as it suits them. Please note that this interpretation of “common law” is fundamentally nonsense, all cases brought before courts in the USA, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere have been rejected as frivolous.
From such a basis of misunderstanding, they refer to real laws practiced by nations as either “maritime commercial laws” or “admiralty law”. This comes from their belief that nation states are actually commercial corporations and that the laws they make are only limited to commercial entities and interests.
They claim that documents capitalising names or phrases specifically address corporate entities, an example would be "THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA". Because that title was capitalised, they believe that the document does not apply to “flesh and blood individuals”, only corporations.
The below screenshot is not from Mr Glynn but from a Facebook sovereign-citizen to illustrate the point:
a typical FACEBOOK Sovereign-Citizen
Sovereign citizens think that a shadowy cabal hijacked the real “common law” that is meant to be applied to citizens and substituted it with “maritime law” and hid the truth from the public as a means to enslave them. They believe that all judges secretly know this and so if they mention this “secret history” to the judge, the judges will be so scared of the truth coming out that they will acquiesce to the sovereign-citizen.
So when sovereign-citizens like Benjamin Glynn assert that “marine commercial law” does not apply to “flesh and blood” people like himself. He is acting on this logic to justify why he should be allowed to flout real national laws. He makes the point of becoming ungovernable and encourages people to “Refuse to pay tax of any kind and write off your loans and mortgage!”
While Mr Glynn’s legal defence is doomed to fail because it is built on a bed of falsehoods, we here in Singapore should be very worried at how stealthily this ideological bomb has infiltrated our society and should treat this threat as seriously as any other extremist movement.
In the USA, the FBI has classified sovereign citizen extremists as domestic terrorists and law enforcement there rank them to be of higher risk than other groups including Islamic extremists and neo-Nazis.
Kingdom Filipina Hacienda
When Benjamin Glynn reached out to seek legal representation from this group, he had inadvertently revealed an extremist cult within Singapore. Just like Mr Glynn, this group is anti-vax, believes in conspiracy theories and strongly purports to sovereign-citizen ideals.
KFH sharing conspiracy theories
What makes this group go beyond as a natural ideological ally and actually be perceived as useful to Mr Glynn may perhaps lie in the fact that they publish their own set of documents based on sovereign-citizen principals, ready to be submitted to courts.
In fact, the Kingdom Fillpina Hacienda goes so far as to print their own “gold-backed” money, issue business and drivers licenses; issue letters of “sovereign appointments''; and falsify documents in a bid to assert claims over sovereignty and file false liens.
KFH printing and exchanging currency, issuing documents
Such practices are common with sovereign-citizen entities in the US, the Kingdom Fillpina Hacienda no doubt has been deeply influenced by their original counterparts.
They have an office in Eunos and a Singaporean based Facebook page with over a thousand likes. It is in my opinion that such a group harbours and transmits extremist ideology and may attract others looking for ideological allies or vulnerable people. As such, authorities in Singapore should be compelled to investigate them and expel them if their franchise proves potentially harmful.
Conclusion
Benjamin Glynn, unafraid to “spit truth bombs”, uses the energy and time to push his ungrounded fantasies into the public sphere. Not only does he refuse to wear a mask because of his beliefs, he perpetuates his fictions into the public sphere and Singapore’s Court of Law.
Given how he brags that he had over 30,000 followers on linkedin, a platform where he was banned for airing hateful views to a wide audience; had a position over jobseekers, and held sway over others the company he worked for, Mr Glynn could easily have become a cultish high-priest of corrosive nonsense. This accusation is not without precedent for the sovereign-citizen movement is based around guru preachers that spread the ideology.
It is worrying that the news reports Mr Glynn as having supporters in court who loudly cheered for him, demonstrating that he is charismatic enough to gain a following outside of twitter. Equally worrying are requests on twitter by locals to learn more about his conspiracy beliefs.
Benjamin Glynn bills himself as a freedom fighter, but a freedom fighter against an imagined enemy. He seeks to lead people to the “truth” but what he really does is attempt to spread his delusions.
It would be an unfortunate thing if disgruntled members of our public, in search of ideological allies, latch onto Benjamin Glynn’s brand of nonsense and end up rejecting reality instead of seeking out workable solutions - real solutions - for their problems.
This case highlights the need for Singapore to be more stringent when it comes to filtering out radicals, especially those that will hold positions of influence and power. It also shows that our reliance on expats is a double-edged sword that may invite crazed radicals.
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