They time travelling Americans from the 18th and 19th century. Here is a good primer on their beliefs by one of them. https://www.cabaltimes.com/2023/10/05/secret_usa/

If you want a well written break down of them, a Canadian judge wrote a fantastic article:

https://learningcentre.lawsociety.ab.ca/mod/page/view.php?id=251

“Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Argument litigants”

People of inexplicably confident certainty that they alone have discovered legal loopholes enabling them to ignore laws they don’t like while benefitting from public services and infrastructure of a nation they assert they are not a citizen of. It’s delusional ignorance.

It’s an idiot who insists on inflicting their idiocy on everyone around them. Seriously they’re dumb af.

A moron who thinks the law does not apply to them.

They think their individual rights and freedumbs mean laws don’t apply to them.

Some of their grievances are true. The government is often guilty of overreach and trampling on individual rights (like Roe v Wade being overturned, declaring corporate money to be free speech, cops murdering people, cracking down on protests, etc).

However, sovereign citizens think they can use “constitutional logic” to basically do whatever they want. They often find themselves sitting in a cell with Pikachu face, asking for a real lawyer’s help.

Perhaps the most egregious (or successful, depending on your point of view) example would be constitutional sheriffs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_Sheriffs_and_Peace_Officers_Association?wprov=sfla1

In my opinion, they are basically domestic terrorists, or at least adjacent to that. The 3-letter federal agencies keep a close eye on these types of people.

People who…

A - Are wastes of oxygen. B - Should ask for refunds for any tuition they ever paid cause they never learned anything. C - Almost always drive travel without a license or registration. D - All of the above.

They are people who have fallen for and/or are grifting for a deeply unhinged conspiracy theory that national laws don’t apply to them if they do some certain set of pseudo legal things. What exactly those things are, as well as what laws don’t apply to them,vary widely, but are usually centered around driver’s licenses and car registration, tax evasion and not paying child support.

Past that it’s hard to explain what their beliefs are because it is so vague and ever changing.

That phrasing refers to a very broad set of movements and individuals. The usual core beliefs are:

• Legislation in their jurisdiction and the government’s authority to enforce it is in some way defective.
• People in their jurisdiction can opt out of laws and government, and live only under “natural law”.
• People have to perform a set of legal procedures (spells, effectively) in order to achieve that.

Exactly why and how law/government authority is defective, how they understand natural law, what the spells are that they have to cast - all of these are extremely variable both between jurisdictions and between individuals.
Primarily it’s a set of grifters charging money for courses and materials to learn about these beliefs from whoever they can convince. Sometimes, as in Germany, it’s a group of neo-Nazis plotting to reinstate the Kaiser.

You might enjoy münecat’s longer form explanation.

I watched münecats video on the topic. Very good and explanatory

It’s if you want to play Dungeons and Dragons IRL: you can be a wizard class by choosing specific colors of ink as spell components and invoking the power of “maritime law” to bend the world to your bidding.

Its a fringe group of people (mostly) in the US who believe that the law isn’t the law. They either believe that older legal systems are still active, such as the articles of confederation, OE that the usage of certain terms in legal documents constitutes a hidden system.

The most common manifestation is the belief that they can declare themselves immune to some it all of our existing legal code.

They get made fun of a lot because they are fundamentally a kind of decentralized cult, and they do a lot of strange and stupid things. Unfortunately, they also have a habit of doing terrorism, so they are a legitimate danger and not just some fun weirdos.

That being said, they mostly try to print their own license plates and assert that speed limits do not apply to them because they are “free men living upon the land” and they believe they have a right to “travel” unimpeded. That’s why you see them mostly in videos of some idiot arguing with a cop that they were “traveling” and not “driving”.

How the fuck can you not just Google this first? What an a-hole

There’s a belief that (I’m going to heavily paraphrase/over simplify here) when you’re born, there are two versions of you … The ‘corporation’, and the ‘real’ you.

Any document issued by the government i.e. birth certificates, social security etc is against the corporate version of you. And as a ‘real’ person, you are not part of a system you didn’t consent to.

So when you get pulled over for speeding, it was your real self who was driving travelling, not the corporation, and only the corporate self is beholden to the law. This same idea is applied to taxes…

Further to the other answers, “sovereign citizens” are an interesting variant on a “cargo cult” mindset.

The cargo cults, if you’ve not heard of them, came about after WWII. The Allied forces, advancing through the Pacific, set up airbases on various islands. These islands had tribes living on them. The tribes got a crash course in the wonders of modern society, American army style. Unfortunately, the gap between their experiences, and the world they were now exposed to was huge, and brief. A lot of misunderstandings were made (either due to insufficient background knowledge, or bored/malicious information from the troops involved).

When the allies upped stakes and left, the tribes were left a little shell shocked. They had the bright idea that if they recreated what the Americans had done, they too could summon the metal birds from the sky, full of a vast wealth of cargo! They then went about reproducing everything they had seen. They built runways, control towers, and fake planes, to bait down the cargo planes. But it never worked! They obviously weren’t doing it exactly right. So they tried harder, recreating all they could as closely as they could.

Now to us, this seems crazy. Of course you can’t summon a cargo plane by sitting in a wooden “control tower” talking into a coconut! We have a larger context however. We know that those planes were sent, not summoned etc.

“Sovereign Citizens” have a lot in common with these cults. However, they are focused on the legal system. Most legal systems are convoluted and arcane. They are less designed, than accreted over time. Lawyers, and the hyper rich who imply them, use this to run rings around the systems in place. They used complex legal entities to game the system to their advantage.

“Sovereign Citizens” see this and thought “why can’t we do that?”. Unfortunately, they didn’t understand what was actually happening. They tried to recreate it, but lacked fundamental information. Even worse, a number of grifters found them, and decided they were excellent marks. They fed them additional bullshit, and gave them ever more complex instructions to make their plans work. When they failed, it’s obviously because they did it wrong, or got out-spelled, not because the instructions were BS to begin with.

In short, “Sovereign Citizens” are a mix of the desperate, the stupid (not always the same thing!), the brainwashed and the grifters, all wrapped up in an almost religious cargo cult.