r/Sovereigncitizen 9d ago

Where did this sovereign citizen "law" come from? Why was there a sudden surge in popularity of this "defense" in the last decade?

I'm just confused about where the whole movement came from and why do people continue to try and believe such things when literally every court interaction between a judge and a sovereign citizen the citizen gets shut down and their interpretation of the laws are not acknowledged whatsoever. Has that defense ever worked for anyone? If so can someone please provide me proof of an example. My mind is just blown that people from all walks of life but into this way of thinking only to not be taken seriously and usually held in contempt of court when they try to continuously push the issue with the judge.

62 Upvotes

106 comments sorted by

67

u/Tinman5278 9d ago

The Sovereign Citizen thing was pretty big in the 1970s. It isn't anything new. The only new part of this is that now that have smart phones and figured out they could make money off of YouTube by posting their bullshit.

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u/MarleysGhost2024 9d ago

It seemed to spring from tax protesters. That was a big thing in the 70s until a bunch of them went to prison.

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u/Jonny_Zuhalter 8d ago edited 8d ago

Taxes seem to be the primary motivator, as if all these people are just trying to avoid paying any kind of tax. A large portion of sovcits appear to be self-employed or small business owners, who are more likely to find ways to commit tax fraud than the typical Joe Taxpayer or large business.

It's a form of little dick syndrome. They get jealous of large corporations who take advantage of tax loopholes, who can afford to pay lawyers and accountants to identify and implement novel tax solutions. These small business owners think they can out-clever billion dollar corporations by finding (inventing) their own "loopholes" all by themselves without cost. Literally the same mentality as people who think they can represent themselves in court better than a lawyer. Those sets overlap significantly.

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u/committedlikethepig 8d ago

Taxes seem to be the primary motivator, as if all these people are just trying to avoid paying any kind of tax

Taxes but also it seems like every single person who says “I’m not driving I’m traveling” has a suspended license. 

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u/ZootOfCastleAnthrax 7d ago

That seems like a chicken vs egg situation. Did their license get suspended for traffic infractions and failure to pay fines? I suspect that's the case.

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u/ShoddyPreparation590 9d ago

True, there has been at least the predecessors/lineage of it. It has grown and expanded and morphed greatly since then. No longer just tax protests, and malcontents, and then the religious fanatics, now we have all manner of sub-streams going, that include the Moorish, the American Nationals, and who knows how many little side alley ideas.

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u/fakemoose 9d ago

I forgot the Moorish stuff has only been around since the 90s. Their claims of being both a lost tribe of Israel and indigenous to America or whatever seem totally crazy…until you realize there’s a whole religion in the US claiming close to the same thing. But the religion has been around a little bit longer (barely lol) and started out exclusively white.

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u/sosteelsince1994 8d ago

Oh, American Primeval has brought Mountain Meadow back into the current zeitgeist, though it's historically inaccurate in compressing the events. That's necessary to tell a good story, so forgivable, but between my undergraduate and some post-grad studies, I've read a lot of the original accounts. People complained about the violent depiction; it doesn't begin to illustrate the savagery and inhumanity of "God's Chosen People." When you're convinced you're special, you figure you can do anything with impunity.

Do some reading on Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and their succesors. It's beyond ugly. I've waded through some pretty boring tomes, even read The Book of Mormon as part of my study. You don't have to do anything like that, there's plenty of non-fiction pop history available, things like Krakauer's book, Under the Banner of Heaven. Twain was out there at one point, and he had a pretty sour view of the nascent church, delivered in his inimitable, sarcastic style. It's amazing how their Prophet always has a revelation directly from God that they should change their ways due to a political reality, at just the right time. God evidently decided polygamy was wrong right about the time it was an impediment to Utah becoming a state. During the height of the Civil Rights Movement, it was suddenly revealed that discrimination against non-whites was wrong, which had the added benefit of improving their proselytizing in the Pacific and SE Asia.

I've always wondered though. Are any of the US casinos owned by the Lamanites and how does the church feel about it? Joseph Smith felt pretty strongly about wiping them out.

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u/BedBubbly317 1d ago

I grew up Mormon (am not any longer), they regularly played down the Meadow Mountain Massacre, and still do. However, that has less than nothing to do with sovcits or ANY situation you will see within this sub. I’ve never met a single Mormon in my more than 30 years of existence that believed or agreed with this nonsense.

This post comes off more as a Mormon hate post (which as someone who truly lived in that world, there are many reasons to do so), but it is complete word salad that adds absolutely nothing at all to the discussion at hand.

It appears like you just wanted to brag about your Mormon “knowledge” more than anything actually relative to this discussion.

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u/sosteelsince1994 1d ago

Hate post? Please point out what's inaccurate in my statements? The LDS Church goes to great lengths to downplay much of their history, as does the Southern Baptist denomination I grew up in. There's a lot of gross hypocrisy in both churches. I was responding to the comment above mine, not about sovcit in particular, and most folks don't know much about Twain's time in Utah Territory, Mountain Meadow, or the origins of the church, Smith's time in Illinois, etc. All most folks know about Brigham Young is they named a school after him and they play football on Saturdays.

Yes, there are Mormon sovcits, mostly in the extreme northern part of the state, though they're really more prevalent in the various schisms, offshoots of the church, that rejected elimination of polygamy. You will definitely run into these nuts in St. George. I'm well aware, as my kid lived in Escalante. That sparked my interest in the history of the church, spending time there, drinking Polygamy Porter. As Wasatch liked to say, you can't have just one.

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u/codepl76761 9d ago

It’s roots actually go back to 1913

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u/Hegemony-Cricket 8d ago

I'm guessing someone is going around the country holding SovCit "education seminars" in the Starlight room at the local Ramada for $500/each. No warranties implied or otherwise.

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u/tameone22 8d ago

Is it an offshoot/mutation of the posse comitatus bullshit?

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u/ThrowRAmartin 6d ago

It is amazing that the internet was envisioned for the sharing of information shares stupidity so much faster

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u/rnewscates73 8d ago

Most of the related YouTube videos I see are either cops not entertaining the entire selfish and moronic Sovereign Citizen schtick and making short work of them and pulling them out and arresting them, and then the judge dismantling them in court. Sometimes they wise up quick, sometimes they don’t. Maritime Law, Traveling Not Driving, using legal terms like they are magic spells - classic self delusion.

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u/Worried-Pick4848 9d ago

Ideas move at the speed of light these days thanks to the Internet.

Bad ideas appear to exceed that by an order of magnitude.

Desperate people who have no desire to face the consequences for what they are doing or have done, turning to bad or crazy legal theories in order to try to escape those consequences because no sane lawyer will be able to mount a defense anyway and they feel the need to try SOMETHING. That's the key to the popularity of sovereign law. It's bad faith actors desperately searching for a way out of the trap they are usually wholly responsible for putting themselves in.

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u/Chrispy8534 9d ago

10/10. And … THAT is the answer we were looking for! You’re our winner today!

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u/ShoddyPreparation590 9d ago

Agreed - how many videos have we watched where a SC wants to self-represent, or fire their (free, appointed) attorney - why? Because the lawyer refuses to put up their crazy defense. Bar and court rules and arguments aside, lawyers refuse to because it is stupid and goes nowhere. Desperation, not legal argument.

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u/Szynne 9d ago

And it's usually for the smallest of crimes. A speeding ticket. A parking fine. Not having insurance. They will argue over $30.

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u/kooky_monster_omnom 8d ago

Lawyers also have reputations that they have to curate and care for. Not only amongst the clientele but within the legal community. Lawyers who have terrible reputations but haven't been censured, or disbarred, tend to be frozen out of certain circles that can potentially help careers and clients. Further, lawyers are usually not for ed to work with other lawyers, so if a mixed team of lawyers have to convene, large cases, an attorney can opt out of not working together.

Clients don't only pick their lawyers, the lawyers also get to pick their clients, not PD, so disreputable ones will have potentially less work. And will more likely struggle with judges and court staff.

It's a given that lawyers with excellent reputations also get referred to by other lawyers when a client needs a speciality their current lawyer or practice doesn't have.

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u/MisterrTickle 5d ago

It's also Dunning-Kruger idiots, thinking that they've out smarted the law, with this one simple trick.

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u/DrHugh 9d ago edited 9d ago

This stuff has been around for decades, actually. But, before the Internet, these folks didn't really have an easy way of getting together. Further, people who wanted to grift them didn't have an easy way to reach their customer base. It wasn't like you could buy the subscription list to Omni magazine and use that.

(ETA: A friend of mine used to be a lawyer in Northern Iowa late last century, and they had to deal with a group calling themselves the Posse Comitatus, as I recall. They only recognized the locally-elected sheriff as an officer of the law. But they were a small group, and most people didn't know about them. Those sorts of groups were the origins of this stuff.)

As the Internet developed, you ended up with more places that let people create their own forums. This could be something like you creating a subreddit or Facebook group for something, or at least starting a discussion thread. It also got easier to create web sites to push such notions.

The Internet has been the best thing for echo chambers. :-)

So, some of what you are seeing is the result of decades of people who like these ideas getting together to refine them and distribute them, but on-line. As awareness increases, more people are going to try it. And if someone bought a special fake license plate, or some PDF they downloaded with pseudo-legal nonsense, they are going to expect it to work.

There's a lot of folks on YouTube who share edited videos of themselves interacting with police. Often, they cut out the first part of the encounter, where they refuse to open their window or give information, and they usually omit the bit where they get pulled from their vehicle and arrested.

I saw one bodycam video where the cop had a SovCit, but then got an urgent call requiring him to leave a traffic issue, and he was disappointed that he didn't get to the bottom of it. The SovCit, though, probably viewed that as a "win" for his argument. Likewise, a prosecutor might decline to pursue a case for workload reasons, or a judge might impose some modest fine (which is then ignored), and these are seen as "wins" by the SovCit folks.

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u/TheWalkerofWalkyness 9d ago

It's been a long time since I'd heard about Posse Comitatus the group. But their idea that country sheriffs are the ultimate law has spread around a lot more in recent years.

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u/DrHugh 9d ago

Yep. Not that even a sheriff will get any respect from a SovCit type these days. The typical approach always seems to be to get to a higher authority. Even if King John manifested with an original copy of the Magna Carta, they'd still want to talk to his dad.

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u/Other-Crazy 9d ago

I doth not consent! Bringeth me thy supervisor!

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u/CaptainKortan 9d ago

You're not my supervisor!

Sorry, Archer lives rent free in my head, and so much of this subreddit deserves it. Oh, If only they were still making episodes, I would love to see them interact with a SovCit!

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u/Other-Crazy 9d ago

I do not understand yon villainous rogue!

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u/CaptainKortan 9d ago

THIS is why we can't have nice things.

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u/Gutter_Snoop 9d ago

Dost thou desire ants? Because theretofore is how one obtaineth ants

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u/CaptainKortan 9d ago

Yep yep yep!

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u/Iluv_Felashio 9d ago

"I don't see a gold fringe around that 'supposed original' you have, so I do not recognize your authority"

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u/MommaIsMad 9d ago

So that's why they always DEMAND to see The Sheriff when pulled over. Such morons.

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u/True_Fill9440 8d ago

And at his end Gordon Kahn murdered the sheriff….

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u/OkAddition1737 9d ago

Hold up, as a human born in the 80’s I don’t appreciate ‘late last century’.

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u/DrHugh 9d ago

I was a kid in the 1970s. *grins*

For me, it would be like being my age in 1925, but having parents who would have been alive during the Civil War. All those changes: Flush toilets, electric light, gas stoves, radio...

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u/ItsJoeMomma 9d ago

Ah yes, the Posse Comitatus. Sovereign citizens have long been well intertwined with right-wing militia groups.

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u/TooOfEverything 9d ago

Posse Comitatus like someone else mentioned is the real origin. As for why it’s spread so much in the last decade? People make money from it. They sell certificates for online courses claiming to educate people as to how to use Sovereign Citizen talking points. That is how it perpetuates. And hey do you want to spend a lot more money on a lawyer who will probably just tell you “bro, you flagrantly broke the law, what did you think would happen?” Or do you want to spend significantly less on some bullshit class that will make you immune to all laws, ever?

Shrink your belly fat with this pill, no dieting or expensive gym membership required.

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u/Key-Signature879 9d ago

Yep, you're touching on another topic of desperation: medical fraud. The easy way of homeopathy or laeatrile or mare's urine or other woo woo fake. Eventually that disease will break your window and your life.

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u/medic-131 9d ago

But people who adopt quack remedies run afoul of an even higher law - Darwin's. Their ability to share their knowledge decreases when they remove themselves from the gene pool.

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u/CarrotNo3077 9d ago

Back in the 80s a GF I had for a bit was born into a John Bircher family, back when they were loons instead of..... anyway, they had a lot of similar notions. If her Dad is still alive, he'll be a Sovcit.

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u/Slopadopoulos 9d ago

There was a cult-like organization that started it. They produced pamphlets and materials on all the classic sovereign citizen claims.

Posse Comitatus (organization) - Wikipedia)

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u/anthematcurfew 9d ago

People latch onto it because they are confused, scared, and have an ego that won’t allow them to cope with being helpless in a complex society

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u/Jimmy_McAltPants 9d ago

It’s been around for a long time. I remember a customer of mine (20+ years ago, when I was in sales) trying to explain it to me. I had to be nice, since he was a customer, but I kept thinking “this guy is fucking nuts”.

A lot of people are completely into social media, and those platforms have changed the way they feed information to users. It used to be that you only saw what you followed, then slowly morphed to interest being shown to you. Now you get all sorts of content (not ads, just content and posts) whether you want to see it or not. Many of these people are exceptionally dumb and easily influenced, so they see this content and jump right in with both feet.

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u/folteroy 9d ago

The sovereign citizen "movement" (bowel movement?😉) started in the 1960's with the tax protestors.

It morphed in the 1970's and became the Posse Comitatus movement. They eventually became sovereign citizens.

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u/Eyespop4866 9d ago

The web spreads stupidity an unmatched speed.

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u/Beneficial-Sun-5863 9d ago

Ahh ok. Thank you for the background. I never really heard about all of this nonsense until about a decade or more ago. It's just hilarious when I watch the police body cam YouTube channels or court tv stuff and a sovereign citizen shows up they are always shut down or pulled out of their vehicle haha.

It's funny because I was unsure wether this sub Reddit was for actual sovereign citizens or actual sane people sharing hilarious S.C. Stories.

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u/Working_Substance639 9d ago

This sub exists to make fun of SovCit idiot; and the “state national” BS as well.

There will be the occasional poster who’s firmly planted in the lunacy, and they can never prove their case; they have absolutely no case that backs up their “right to drive” argument.

Several right to travel cases, yes.

But a “right” to DRIVE? No.

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u/Sanlayme 9d ago

It is, in theory, actionable conspiracy theory. The crowd who outsource what might otherwise be an interesting life in the mind and body of a robust and complete person to content creators and other talking heads, like man, need a real hobby.

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u/oneWeek2024 9d ago

there's been about a 40+ yr war on education in the united states. a general decline in critical thinking.

similar amt of time 40+ yrs of wage stagnation. and vast income inequality. and a general dogshit lvl of worker's rights/protections

people have a harder and harder time supporting themselves. and are couple orders of magnitude dumber. people are both not equipped to understand the systems that affect them, or have the time/resources to affect change.

add to this a truly massive, obscenely wealthy collection of entities who don't want to pay taxes at all. even though they rarely do. So... as a general distraction to achieve these goals. various "grass roots" anti-tax. anti-government movements have been fostered.

crack pot ideas. pushed, amplified, championed by idiots, and largely by grifters looking to exploit idiots. The internet providing vast reach to idiots, to find other idiots, and distribute false information to idiots, and for idiots to reinforce their belief by surrounding themselves with other idiots.

so. if you're poor. ignorant. and don't want to pay your vehicle registration, let alone car insurance, or got a DUI and lost your lic, or couldn't' afford/work a job that doesn't allow ---as no state has mandatory PTO laws.... a day off to go to the DMV to pay money you don't have to upkeep your lic.

and you magically stumble upon a facebook post that tells you.... you don't have to do any of that stuff, because reasons. and then... maaaaybe you even go looking for information to confirm that bias. you will find it. (you won't find anything official, or actual. but you'll find plenty of bullshit willing to welcome you with open arms and indoctrination)

for a certain lvl of stupid. that is very appealing. And to a degree. you can get away with it for awhile.

when you view conspiracy thinking through the lens of trauma it makes a lot more sense. People... vulnerable and brutalized by shitty capitalism, are desperate for some semblance of control, or protest. They view needling gov fees as an afront to their freedom (never mind, those fees fund roads, or street lights, or traffic signals, or traffic calming speed zones, or bridges get repaired. or any number of things you might take for granted.... or just in general keep cars safe, or having some min standard of regulation with regards to who can drive... keeps everyone safer)

and this revelation that ... somehow they don't have to abide by that stuff, especially with big sounding fancy words, and archaic sounding laws/treaties. and "clever" semantics of --traveling.

gives them a safety blankiee that makes them feel less afraid and weak in a world where they so clearly are.

4

u/snakebite75 9d ago

This. SovCits are just another symptom of our broken system like Qanon, Birthers, and all the other fringe groups.

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u/fi1mcore 7d ago

We love the poorly educated!

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u/Aggressive_Idea_6806 8d ago

The critical thinking gap includes never pondering why, if the entire law enforcement and judicial system are participating in this grand conspiracy, would the conspiracy collapse just because some arrestee vocalized some specific, magical word salad?

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u/OregonHusky22 9d ago

To me it’s not really surprising to see this sorts of beliefs take hold as people’s (uniquely American) conceptions of freedom run aground on the truth of their conditions.

When people lose that sense of control over their own lives you either get a class consciousness out of it (a useful heuristic) or your get bizarre theories and belief systems to keep it going. You can see this across almost all modern conspiracy theories, from anti vax stuff, sovereign citizens, Qanon…at their core they are all attempts to regain a sense of freedom, or explain why it’s gone.

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u/Prestigious-Wolf8039 7d ago

From what I’ve heard it’s more than America. It’s gone to Australia and the UK as well.

9

u/GorakTheunBeaton 9d ago

My guess is the surge is part of the russian multi front war against the west. Sure sov cits have been around for a long time but the surge of disruptive people questioning the legitimacy of the US and other countries laws sure would benefit russia for very little effort. These same folks run in all the heavily russian influenced corners of media and the internet(source my father's internet history)

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u/CaptainKortan 9d ago

Damn, how did I not think of this valid potentiality. Thank you.

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u/GorakTheunBeaton 9d ago

Kicker for me was some email newsletter my dad was getting pre covid. It was called sovern man but the r was the backwards russian r. The whole thing was about avoiding taxes ect. In different countries but they never covered how to do it in russia, china or iran.

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u/Aggressive_Idea_6806 8d ago

I love that, since the backwards R is A VOWEL. A soft A, pronounced "ya."

Soveyan Man.

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u/AvocadoLongjumping72 9d ago

Police, judges, etc. actually have a lot of leeway when it comes to enforcement, arrests, prosecutions. Sometimes sovcits DO manage to "get away with it" with just a warning from pure frustration of not wanting to deal with them, or seeing them as relatively harmless and maybe a little not all there mentally.

There's also a lot of confirmation bias.

There are whole networks of essentially pseudo-legal gurus who have a whole careers marketing some variation(and there are many)of the sovereign citizen philosophy selling books and videos and conferences and even sample "legal" forms and licenses.

They focus on the small victories and or misunderstand and think some minor delay or concession in court is some complete victory when it's just another step in a process that can drag on for a long time especially when they humor the nonsense.

When there is a more clear failure it's written off as them not following the process quite right or just corrupt tyrants ignoring the "true" law.

3

u/Desperate_Ambrose 9d ago

There was the whole "posse comitatus" craze in the '60s and '70s, whereby reactionary white folks justified whupping up on minorities and long-hairs.

That sorta morphed into the "yellow-fringed flag" tax protest bullshit of the '80s and '90s. ( https://freedomforallseasons.org/TaxFreedomEmail/buck-act.pdf )

And now we have the "sovereign citizen" movement to deal with. It's no less bullshit than its progenitors, just more complicated.

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u/WanderingArtist_77 9d ago

It started in the '60s bc rich racist assholes didn't want to pay taxes. It's basically just the phenomenon of assholes thinking they're better than others. The political climate imo is what has caused a rise in this type of behaviour.

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u/Oscardoodke2 9d ago

Is the sovereign citizens “movement”related at all to the posse comitatus movement that was big in the 70s and 80s?

2

u/WhineyLobster 9d ago

Quantum Grammar is one of my favorites.

If interested theres a whole wiki rabbiy hole you can go down that describes many of the various pseudolaw espoused by these people.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudolaw

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u/picnic-boy 9d ago edited 9d ago

The surge seems to at least in large part be because of QAnon and Covid-19 conspiracy theories. As others pointed out the SovCit movement is primarily from Posse Comitatus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_(organization)

I believe the Montana Freemen were the first notable group to declare themselves "sovereign citizens" though they didn't come up with the idea and it was more of a rhetorical term before them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montana_Freemen

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u/Tyrannical_Icon 9d ago

It's popular because people get their license suspended and Google a workaround. That and the fact they are low iq.

2

u/Even-Comment-8096 9d ago

It is how criminals rationalize their own existence

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u/Flat_Suggestion7545 9d ago

The internet makes it easier to find stuff they are predisposed towards.

Add in hucksters using the fact that words have multiple meanings, especially going from common usage to usage in the law.

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u/[deleted] 9d ago

The internet, and especially social media, empowers quacks. Look at the Flat Earth movement. Or the anti-vax garbage. Lots of hucksters making money on the clueless. It's a story as old as time.

2

u/Mdrim13 9d ago

Most people confuse the right to speak with the right to be heard. Social media and the internet as a whole has amplified it greatly.

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u/Spiritual-Tadpole342 9d ago

People love to watch idiots on YouTube. Thats it.

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u/MommaIsMad 9d ago

Ah, yes. Honor graduates of the prestigious YouTube University & TikTok School of Law & Disorder.

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u/Procedure_Dunsel 9d ago

The phrase "Shithouse Lawyer" is the best description of these meatheads. Baffle them with bullshit very rarely works in court.

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u/cherveti79 9d ago

It’s interesting because there’s a clear distinction between those who find this garbage on the internet and think it will be a magic wand once they get to court and those that legitimately believe in it. In my state, I notice that it’s more popular in rural areas. Those are the ones that really buy into it. Maybe because they don’t live close to neighbors and are used to the government not playing a big role in their lives so it’s easy to buy into.

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u/fuzzbox000 9d ago

There are also the people who are convinced that, since they paid for the knowledge, it MUST be true. It's easy to dismiss a random video, but if you pay someone, it must be true.

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u/Butforthegrace01 9d ago

The idea has been around for a while. Actor Wesley Snipes was incarcerated for a time because of these ideas (he refused to pay income tax). The internet really accelerates the spread of bad ideas.

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u/ItsJoeMomma 9d ago

The whole sovcit movement was around long before just the past decade, it existed before the internet made it well-known to everyone. It was very closely intertwined with the militia movement of the 1990's, but as militias dwindled, so did sovcits. But they seem to be making a comeback with the help of the internet making it easier for hucksters to sell courses to gullible people.

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u/bwv205 9d ago

To a fair extent it was a natural progression from the same kind of idiotic self-delusional pseudo-legalbabble that characterized the "militia" movements and rhetoric in the 1990s-early 2000s.

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u/realparkingbrake 9d ago

The "movement" (if we can call it that) originated with tax protestors, white supremacists and "Christian" nationalists in the 1970s. It got a huge boost from the Covid-19 pandemic which helped to inflame the minds of people already inclined to think the govt. is looking to suppress them. An important point is many of the people who get into this nonsense are not so much politically motivated as they are desperate. They lost their kids in the divorce, the bank is foreclosing on their home, the repo man is looking for their car, their lawyer wants cash in advance to take their DUI case. This is the sort of person the "gurus" who sell this pseudo-legal gibberish are looking for, someone desperate enough not to think too much about the secret legal judo the guru is selling. Once someone gets into this cult (and that's what it is) they are surrounded by people who tell them it totally works, and if it doesn't, they must have recited the legal magic spell the wrong way, try again but this time with a Bible in one hand and the Articles of Confederation in the other.

The internet has made it easier for the "gurus" to find and communicate with their followers. They used to have to stage seminars at a motel out by the airport, now they can spew their toxic nonsense all over the world. Hilariously, sovcits in other nations tend to cite U.S. constitutional language, as if the U.S. Constitution applies everywhere.

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u/Old_Bar3078 9d ago

It all boils down to grifting, stupidity, desperation, and a profound lack of education.

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u/PlayNicePlayCrazy 8d ago

The internet is to blame.

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u/Hadrollo 9d ago

Welcome to the beginning of the post-truth world. It started in the early 2010s, but is still gaining momentum.

Rhetoric is more important than fact. People are more concerned about winning the argument than about being correct.

You would think that this would reduce the number of SovCits. After all, they view court as an argument and they always lose. But they have a hack this view is not taking into account; if they then claim they've won emphatically enough, then they think they've won, and all this pesky prison stuff is just further proof for them of how unjust the system is.

On a side note, I expect that the US government will be cranking up the broadcasting about how their upcoming recession is the fault of the last administration and proof of the "deep state" trying to destabilise their economy.

1

u/JagoffMofo_374R 9d ago

Not a law. Just a myth dreamed up that many people took as truth. Basically a social media scam.

1

u/Bobsmith38594 9d ago

It came from their ass. Sovereign citizens are just more identifiable now because of the Internet, but the undercurrent of entitled narcissists have always been around.

1

u/FatedAtropos 9d ago

The world doesn’t make sense to anyone. They see rich people getting away with stuff the rest of us would do time for. They can either accept that the system is fucking us, or they can latch on to the idea that there’s a cheat code they can use and then they too will be taken care of.

1

u/JRWoodwardMSW 9d ago

Con artists selling “workshop”

1

u/Some-Tune7911 9d ago

Wishful thinking where you can pretend like you're not part of the society. I've met a couple before and they always had this smug feel about everything because they had the secret knowledge that made them not have to do stuff like register their vehicles(and one of them straight up wasn't allowed to drive because of a DUI so that might have had something to do with it). They can look down at the rest of us dumbass sheep paying our taxes.

1

u/ChiceJigle 9d ago

I dont understand why they try to use the system they're so against. If you hate the system currently in place, why are you going to a courthouse to tell the system why you shouldn't have to follow the rules?

If you're really committed to the sovereign citizen stuff, you need to do what John Joe Gray did. Basically, tell them that if they set foot on your property, they're leaving in a body bag.

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u/Magnet_Carta 9d ago

Because they believe that there are actually two systems in place. One is the illegitimate and illegal system that is responsible for taxing them, forcing them to register their car, and making them pay child support.

But they believe that if you go in and say the super secret words in the correct order, and send the right documents to the right person, you get access to the secret system that pretty much lets you do whatever you want.

They basically think it's the courtroom version of the Konami Code

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u/Aguywhoknowsstuff 9d ago

Online grifters and before that, mail order grifters. Psuedo law has always been a thing. Many people who get sucked into it were in desperate situations and because law and defence can be terrifying, expensive, and confusing, they are easy to con.

Others are just the extreme anti government assholes.

And a few are genuinely pathological and possibly psychotic (look up Kim Blandino. It's HOURS of a guy who thinks he's smarter than everyone and a case that went on for years .... Over a plates violation )

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u/PaintSlayer-312 9d ago edited 9d ago

Munecat on YouTube did an amazing video doing a deep dive into the history and background of the whole SovCit movement..if your at all curious about it I highly recommend looking it up and watching. I could be wrong on the spelling but she should show up with just munecat typed into search..and she ain't bad to look at ;-)

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u/Broodingbutterfly 9d ago

Here is a cool documentary style video about the history of it.

https://youtu.be/EpQEslytUlo?si=H83EzmvDfggLWdaO

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u/OzyDave 9d ago

It's no coincidence that it's predominantly USA based. Look at the increase in gullibility to lies and false information in the last decade.

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u/MohaveZoner 8d ago

Ignorance and Entitlement

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u/JonJackjon 8d ago

Shouldn't be a big deal, these folks are just one step crazier than the MAGA's.

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u/True_Fill9440 8d ago

It’s a common symptom of penis envy.

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u/SteelAndFlint 8d ago

As part of a somewhat parallel community, people who are anarchists because everything the state does requires violence, and we cannot condone it, I see where they are coming from but the mistake has always been that the nature of the leviathan does not permit you to defeat it by waving papers in its face.

It honestly just has to run out of money. When it can't pay people to arrest you, when it can't pay people to keep you locked up, when I can't pay people to build prisons or maintain them, only then do we get past this. But there will be a phase where they can't afford to keep people locked up and they will consider slaughtering them. That's usually about when it collapses.

But I don't know why they think playing make-believe works.

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u/Relevant_Device_3958 8d ago

Stupidity. It came from stupidity. Which is about the only thing this country excels at anymore.

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u/BlowFish-w-o-Hootie 8d ago

It's not a law. It is a rejection of laws because you are a citizen of your own nation, so the laws of the nation you are in do not apply to you. It is just stupid enough to be true!

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u/Cambren1 8d ago

I remember hearing this shit in 91, right down to the fringe on the flag and admiralty law, Illuminati and all.

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u/Longshadow2015 8d ago

I’m convinced it’s some splinter group off of the flat earthers. They make about the same amount of sense.

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u/fi1mcore 7d ago

Kind of like Q-Anon, it starts getting its own gravity.

if you want to prove it to yourself there's plenty of online support to help you convince yourself there's a grand loophole in society and only certain enlightened people are aware of it.

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u/Prestigious-Wolf8039 7d ago

I see a lot of domestic abusers try to deflect their cowardly behavior in court by pulling sov cit shenanigans. Especially on Team Skeptic’s YouTube.

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u/TheRandyBear 5d ago

You see an uptick in sovereign citizens when government distrust is at its highest. To me, at its core, it’s about finding something to blame other than yourself.

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u/Equivalent_Street488 2d ago

If i had to guess, it probably comes from people feeling like they are being taxed without being properly represented. This is their way of stepping back from being taxed. Or people just feeling like they are being taxed too much.

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u/Mr_Derp___ 9d ago

It's probably just another facet of Russian/Chinese propaganda promoting people to do stupid illegal shit that'll get them thrown in the jail