How do people who believe they are “sovereign citizens” get into this way of thinking? Has there ever been a situation where what they claim turns out to be true and gets them out of legal trouble?

14 comments

1. Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.

2. Some people believe with great fervor preposterous things that just happen to coincide with their self interest.

3. Sovereign citizens are what happen when you treat twitter and instagram as legitimate sources of information.

4. Think of it in the same vein as conspiracy theorists. Their beliefs and how they justify them are either completely irrational or cherry picked to hell and back, but they found a community willing to tell them that they are right. They are special and deserve to be treated as such. Sovereign citizens usually start off as typical libertarians who start getting it in their head that, since they don’t like laws, you can just ignore them to claim your own “sovereignty”

5. Occasionally you hear of people winning cases against the IRS. That sort of thinking is sort of enshrined in the foundation of our nation, this idea that taxes are theft and the government has no right to collect them.

6. Disinformation campaigns from foreign powers.

7. It’s a combination of desperation and mental illness. But no, sovereign citizen legal shit does not work.

8. As with most conspiracy theories, it has to be satisfying on some level to think that you’re one of the special few who really understand what’s going on.

9. Insecure people cling to things that make them feel superior. It’s the same vein as Q-anon… it makes them feel like they’re the only ones who really know what’s going on, they’re deciphering the secret codes, they’re the heroes of freedom…

10. They don’t want to be told what to do, so they are easily persuaded when told that there are “legal” ways to be immune from having to do what they’re told.

11. 1. There are YT videos, podcasts and so on. There are also the sort of “Pay to see me at a conference room at a hotel” type of speakers who put on seminars. Total hucksters. I don’t think they believe it, tbh, they’re just making money off of people who do.

    As to why people buy into it.. the basic fantasy of the idea is that you can just say magic words and the law just *won’t apply to you* any more. There actually are people who can do this, but they’re terribly rich. (For instance, the ‘affluenza’ defense, or the time someone petitioned for their son to not go to prison because it wasn’t what he was used to).

    If you take the legal novice’s view of a corporation being a person, for example, deciding that (via “admiralty court”) we’re both an entity (like a vessel) and a person isn’t *that* absurd. It’s just incorrect and will never help you, is all.

    And, occasionally, “neat legal tricks” *do* work, just not the ones these people espouse. (Like, for example, I’ve heard of out-of-state college students being ordered to pay taxes or do jury duty “as a resident”, asking for a refund on the difference between out-of-state student rates and in-state student rates, and then finding the whole bureaucracy leaving them alone.) These sort of accrue into urban legends about how you can ‘beat’ the government.

    2) No. It *never* works. About the most you can do is annoy an individual officer until he decides it’s not worth the trouble to keep interacting with you. Courts have, on occasion, simultaneously charged “The person” and “the entity” of the defendant at the same time, just to cut the crap.

12. I imagine a good many of them have been fucked over by the government at some point, or seen a loved one fucked over. Or they *felt* fucked over, which amounts to the same thing for these purposes.

    Last year we got a huge tax bill – over 20K – due to a combination of a simple withholding error and my misunderstanding of a small but crucial detail of inheritance rules. All our fault, and not unfair – and I’m a very rational person and I was able to understand that and be at peace with it. But goddamn, did it hurt to write that check. That is not a trivial amount of money for us, not by a damn sight. It’s not hard for me to understand how a less-rationale, more self-absorbed and immature person, and maybe one who has trouble letting go of things, could choke on it and develop a malignant mass of resentment in their soul that ate at them forever and warped their thinking.

    Add internet and stir.

13. Glibly, stupidity.

    Less glibly, it appeals to a specific mindset. Some people *really* dislike the idea of having anyone anywhere ever tell them ‘No, you can’t actually do this’. For those people, the idea of a magical incantation that when spoken means no one can tell them that has a real pull.

14. I heard Sovereign Citizens described as kind of like a [cargo cult](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult); SCs hear lawyers say legal mumbo jumbo on TV very confidently and then people get away with obvious crimes. So then, as the logic goes, if they just find the right magic words then the whole legal system can be warded off like some kind of demon! Of course, the SC in question has 0 idea how the legal system or lawyers as a profession work at all which is good since if they did they’d realize the entire idea is stupid.