Came across this recently and I can barely understand what’s about.
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.
I kinda wish the government would recognize their sovereignty, and make them pass through customs every time they leave their property, cut off their public utilities, make them apply for a work visa…you know, give them the full experience.
Don’t worry…they already get their public utilities cut when the stop paying for them, and they pulled over and charged when driving an unregistered vehicle. Plus many don’t have a social security number, so can’t apply for most jobs anyways. That’s what gives them the opportunity to complain that they are being oppressed and they are fighting for a righteous cause. It also gives us entertainment when they post their latest attempt to say the secret words that will let them get away with all these things that inevitably fails.
The sad thing is that their kids usually don’t have a social security number or birth certificate either, so the kids end up screwed over when they leave their parents and try to get a job or place to live. It’s not an easy process to get those documents.
People of inexplicably confident certainty that they alone have discovered YOUTUBE VIDEOS THAT DISCUSS 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.
FTFY
You know, there are probably some in the mountains of West Virginia that might as well be sovereign citizens. They’re living in the woods off the land, not using public infrastructure, trading with their neighbors, and being self sufficient.
Hell, I’ve got a buddy who has a little shack. He pays his taxes, has a registered vehicle, and obeys the laws. He’ll work the oilfield or do odd jobs a few months of the year, pay what he needs to pay, then go live in the woods with his dog until he needs more money. He hunts, fishes, and forages. We check on his property while he’s gone.
He owns almost nothing and is basically on the most hardcore camping trip you can imagine for half the year. I wish I had that mindset and skill set. He’s one of the happiest guys I know.
The skill set to live like that is wild. I’ve got a couple of acres in the swamp where I hike and shoot and camp, generally act like a redneck. You could drop me off naked in January, I’d be fine in 20-minutes. But I wouldn’t last more than 3-weeks!
Most people have no concept of living off the land like your buddy. Wish I could hang with him and learn!
Right?!? I go for a week and I’m done. I can’t fathom what that takes.
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.
Perhaps the most egregious (or successful, depending on your point of view) example would be constitutional sheriffs.
Shit, this went from harmless nutcases to completely terrifying.
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to fear monger. We do live in “interesting” times.
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
drivetravel 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.
I can explain everything in detail for a modest fee /s
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.
“natural law”.
Wait, is that what that lunatic was ranting and raving about the other day??
(If you saw the thread you’d know exactly who I’m talking about)
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”.
These ideas has expanded to europe recently. There are several groups operating in slovakia, and czechia.
One of the group is arguing that the czechoslovakia never split up, and the existing republics are just private corporations. They issue their own “czechoslovak” ID cards. You can order one online.
The other group involves quite a lot of fantasy and scifi in their believes. They declare themselves as mebers of one of the several alien civilizations backed by the millions of space warriors. One of their members has become infamous after the police stopped her for using a license plate issued by the galactic civilization. Then she tried to identify herself by presenting the ID card issued by the same institution.
that sounds almost exactly like the Reichsbürger in Germany. They also claim the current German state is actually just a corporation and the laws of the German empire are somehow still applicable. They also create their own passports. And of course they are deeply interconnected with Neo-nazis.
How the fuck can you not just Google this first? What an a-hole
Did you read the name of the sub before you replied?
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
drivingtravelling, 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.
That’s a really good analogy and I had no idea cargo cults were a thing but it makes sense in a way
Heres a good video on the OG cargo cult https://youtu.be/x5jbHDMeDFE
It’s pretty good, but then at 11:42 a bombshell drops. Guy starts to complain about Netflix adaptation of Cleopatra, and how the ancient egyptians weren’t really black. Any connection between those 2 topics seems to be a mystery…
But the mystery clears up, when you open his profile…
Ah. Your average conspiracy schizo channel. Great
I like the allegory to magic you’re implying at some points because it really seems like an apt comparison for the way an SS uses the legal/government system. Like it’s some sort of arcane power and they can harness it for their own gains with certain incantations (“I comprehend”), runes (writing legal codes on your envelope to get out of paying postage), or crafted artefacts (fake IDs and license plates).
The modern world runs on magic spells. The average retiree doesn’t know how their TV works, or even the remote. They do, however, know that if they perform an arcane set of actions, their preferred soap appears on the magic box.
Even as a techie, this still applies. Just because I could build a TV remote, doesn’t mean I know, or care how this particular one works. I just perform my magic spell to make the magic box work.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” - Arthur C Clark.
“Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.” - Terry Pratchett.
Cynar is an underrated beverage. Just wanted to mention that.