sovereign citizen movement
What is the sovereign citizen movement?
What are the origins of the sovereign citizen movement?
What beliefs do sovereign citizens hold?
How do sovereign citizens view the Fourteenth Amendment?
What is the Moorish movement?
The sovereign citizen movement consists of a heterogeneous collection of groups and unaffiliated individuals in the United States and other English-speaking common-law countries who believe that they are not subject to the rule of law above the county level and that corresponding government institutions are illegitimate. Members of the movement share an extremist political ideology that justifies (in their view) unlawful activities or at least the intentional disregard of federal laws. There is significant overlap between sovereign citizens and members of right-wing militias and white supremacist groups.
Sovereign citizens have committed and been associated with acts of violence, often against government employees and law enforcement officers, as well as fraud and other financial crimes. Since at least 2010, when a teenage American sovereign citizen killed two Arkansas police officers during a traffic stop, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has considered the sovereign citizen movement to be a domestic terrorist threat.
Origins
The sovereign citizen movement arose in the 1970s in the United States, and its origins are traced to Posse Comitatus, a white supremacist Christian Identity group founded by William Potter Gale in 1971. Posse groups believed that counties and local sheriffs held ultimate legal authority. They spread from California to the Pacific Northwest in the early 1970s and through the farm belt in the late ’70s and early ’80s. As an ongoing farm crisis increased economic precarity in rural communities, they employed tactics such as refusing to pay taxes or apply for driver’s licenses. They also filed false liens, other government forms, and paperwork. In the 1990s the sovereign citizen ideology influenced members of the primarily African American religious sect the Moorish Science Temple of America, leading to the birth of the Moorish movement, a group of African Americans who believe that their special religious background makes them immune to government authority.
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Beliefs
Sovereign citizens reject the legitimacy of government above the county level and believe that they cannot be compelled to obey state or federal civil or criminal laws.
American sovereigns often have alternative understandings of U.S. history, especially regarding the meaning and significance of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) to the U.S. Constitution, which granted citizenship and equal civil and legal rights to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” Sovereigns understand the amendment to have created a new kind of second-class citizenship more subject to the federal government and subordinate to the state-based citizenship articulated in the Constitution.
Many sovereigns believe that about the time of the Fourteenth Amendment the common-law system of government instituted by the Founding Fathers was secretly supplanted by a corporate form of government imposed by corrupt bankers, thus rendering federal authority illegitimate. Many sovereigns also believe that when the U.S. government abandoned the gold standard in 1933, it used its citizens as collateral to secure national debts and enter into international trade agreements, setting up a treasury account in each citizen’s name with a balance representing the monetary net worth of the individual, often quoted as $630,000. Referring to the legal identity under which this alleged bank account is registered as a “strawman,” sovereigns believe that through filing the right forms or legal documents they can compel the federal government to forfeit money in these accounts to the named account holders. Some sovereigns have succeeded in extracting millions of dollars in refunds from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) by filing false tax forms.
It is a common sovereign belief that many aspects of everyday life, such as possessing a driver’s license or using a ZIP code in one’s mailing address, constitute contracts with the federal government by which individuals forfeit their rights or consent to have their identity used to secure national debts. For this reason, the manner in which one signs official documents is of great significance in this ideology. Many claim that government documents on which a person’s name is written in all capital letters, such as a birth certificate, refer exclusively to the strawman registered under the sovereign’s name and not the flesh-and-blood individual in question. Some sovereigns may insert punctuation marks, such as colons or semicolons, into their signature or printed name or add specific terms or phrases after their name in order to indicate their sovereign status or to disavow governmental jurisdiction. Indeed, sovereigns commonly file many false or fake legal documents as a means of bullying or retaliating against enemies in a manner known as “paper terrorism.”
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Contemporary manifestations
The COVID-19 pandemic and opposition to government attempts to limit the spread of the disease contributed to the increased popularity of sovereign citizen ideology, especially beyond the borders of the United States. Anti-vaccine ideology, QAnon, and the MAGA movement have also provided a pathway for Americans to the sovereign citizen mindset. As of 2025 the Southern Poverty Law Center of the United States had identified more than 30 active sovereign citizen groups.