They have occasionally set up "common law courts" and issued bogus arrest warrants for US officials. Some have been arrested with fake car registration plates they have issued to themselves, or have even printed their own currency believing the dollar to be invalid. Mr Pitcavage says it's common to find European followers cite the US criminal code, which has no legal bearing there. Some followers believe it possible to access a secret government-held fund once they become sovereign.
The Internal Revenue Service IRS , which oversees federal tax payments in the US, says on its website that the notion of "secret accounts assigned to each citizen is pure fantasy". Some think that "by filing a series of complex, legal-sounding documents, the sovereign can tap into that secret Treasury account for his own purposes," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups.
Followers are often struggling financially or are people who cannot tolerate government bureaucracy, says Mr Pitcavage. And then offers them ways out.
Melbourne police 'attacked and baited' over curfew. Image source, Getty Images. A mass shooting at a Tennessee restaurant was committed by a mentally unstable believer.
Who are 'sovereign citizens'? Image source, FBI. Followers in the US have issued themselves fake car licence plates. Their ideas travel. Melbourne police 'attacked and baited' over curfew US pair 'plotted to murder police'. An officer enforcing Melbourne's lockdown had her head smashed into the ground by a 'sovereign citizen'. Who are Boogaloo Bois, antifa and Proud Boys? It is based on their reinterpretation of the law and there are many legal document templates on the internet for SovCit use to, for example, avoid paying fines or rates they see as unfair.
SovCits tend not to follow conventional legal argument. Some have engaged in repeated court action and even been declared vexatious litigants by the courts. The SovCit movement has many local variations but there are some key commonalities across the Australian SovCit movement.
A central belief, according to news reports , is that the Australian government, the police, and other government agencies are corporations. Believers feel they must be on guard to avoid entering into a contract with the corporation.
Some sovereigns plot a violent revenge, hoping to inspire others in the movement to reach their breaking point sooner. For example, after twenty years of attempting to persuade the IRS and the Tax Court that his blender salad of legal theories was accurate, in , private pilot Joseph Stack flew his airplane into an IRS building in Austin Texas, killing one tax collector, and injuring thirteen others.
I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let's try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.
Other such planned events have included bombings, shootings, murders, and armed standoff s. Some commit suicide, but for most of them, the final straw can be something as small as being pulled over by a highway patrolman for having a busted tail light or something as big as being evicted from their home when the bank forecloses on their property.
On the surface, sovereigns believe some pretty outrageous things , and to an outsider, their legal theories seem fairly silly. Up until the recent wave of violence , most police officers who encountered sovereigns found them more amusing than anything else. Following recent police shootings in Arkansas, Florida, Texas, and Pennsylvania, officers now need to rethink their opinion of this group.
She may then launch into a ten minute lecture about 18th century ideals of individual sovereignty. Perhaps the most difficult hurdle for law enforcement is dealing with stereotypes.
The first generation sovereign movement from to was comprised mostly of middle-aged, high-school educated, white men with some military background, and extreme-right, often racist values, located mostly in in rural communities west of the Mississippi. Today, the second sovereign wave to present can include anybody: black, white, rural, urban, Asian, Hispanic, young, old, armed, unarmed, male, female, conservative, liberal, semi-literate, college-educated, from any walk of life.
For example, dentists, chiropractors, and even police officers all seem drawn to the movement in recent years. Sovereigns are also difficult to identity because there is no membership group for them to join, no charismatic leader, no organization name, no master list of adherents, and no consistency in the schemes they promote and buy into. There are hundreds of sovereign legal theories being peddled in seminars, in books, and on the Internet, and many of these theories contradict each other.
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