UncommonSense wrote a diary on a news piece noting the increased use of the 'Sovereign Citizen' phrasing and ideas in the Indiana teabagger group. He made the comment "This would be adorable if it wasn't so insane and sad." which is what it is indeed if you are unaware of the fact that the Sovereign Citizen craziness predates the teabaggers: It's a deeply held conspiracy theory of the Christian Identity/Posse Comitatus neo-nazi groups and their offspring.
In April 1992, an angry resident of Sanilac County, Michigan, wrote a letter to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources stating he was no longer a "citizen of the corrupt political corporate State of Michigan and the United States of America" and was answerable only to the "Common Laws." He therefore expressly revoked his signature on any hunting or fishing licenses, which he viewed as contracts that fraudulently bound him to the illegitimate government of Michigan.
That obscure Michigan hunter would, three years later, become known to the entire world. He was Terry Nichols, friend and accomplice of Oklahoma City Federal Building bomber Timothy McVeigh. Nichols subscribed to an unusual right-wing anti-government ideo-logy whose adherents have in recent years increasingly plagued public officials, law enforcement officers and private citizens with a variety of tactics designed to attack the government and other forms of authority. Its members call themselves, variously, consti-tutionalists, freemen, preamble citizens, common law citizens and non-foreign/non-resident aliens (Nichols used several of these), but most commonly refer to themselves as "sovereign citizens."
It's present in the writings of Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols. Recent murderer of Dr. Tiller Scott Roeder was associated with several SC groups. Von Brunn, who last year opened fire in the holocaust museum killing a guard, professed his belief in the Soverign Citizen idea on his website. And who can forget the Montana Freeman?
So what exactly is this nefarious belief breaking out on the Fringe Right?
The Sovereign Citizen Movement has its roots in the Posse Comitatus organization. Posse Comitatus can be viewed as the predecessor to the militia/survivalism movement of the 90's. Founded by a former member of the 'Silver Shirts', an American fascist group that was founded in 1933 after the success of Hitler in Germany, Posse Comitatus was the most visible right-wing extremism group of the 1970's.
The core of the belief is an absolute certainty that the government is illegitimate. ZOG, or Zionist Occupied Government, was the reason of choice in the 70's and 80's, being used extensively by Posse Comitatus and other groups in the Christian Identity movement, such as the Aryan Nations. Posse had alternate phrasings as well, such as "Our nation is now completely under the control of the International Invisible government of the World Jewry". Jews weren't the only targets of the hate, Sovereigns have a deep belief that since Black's did not gain citizenship until the 14th Amendment was passed that they possess fewer rights then whites. They also believe lawyers have been constitutionally barred from citizenship, but a conspiracy has resulted in the hiding of the amendment that did this:
Sovereign citizen ideology justifies these goals by claiming that at one time there was an American utopia governed by English "common law," a utopia in which every citizen was a "sovereign," and there were no oppressive laws, taxes, regulations or court orders. However, a conspiracy gradually subverted this system, replacing it with an illegitimate successor. Different sovereign citizen theorists have varying versions of this progression, but most include the following elements: the alleged suppression of a "missing" 13th Amendment that would have disallowed citizenship for attorneys; the Reconstruction amendments; the 16th Amendment (allowing an income tax); the 17th Amendment (allowing popular election of senators); the Federal Reserve Act and the 1933 removal of United States currency from the gold standard. By that time, many sovereign citizen theorists agree, the United States government was completely illegitimate, using emergency war powers and other unlawful measures to rule unconstitutionally.
The argument is so well known to the courts that "The argument that a person's income is not taxed when the person rejects or renounces United States citizenship because the person claims to be a citizen exclusively of a state, and variations of this argument, have been officially identified as legally frivolous federal tax return positions for purposes of the $5,000 frivolous tax return penalty".
In an effort to free themselves from this false government, the groups concocted a bizarre series of guides to becoming 'Sovereign Citizens', subject only to 'common law courts' and printing fake diplomatic ID's while refusing to get Drivers Licenses, pay taxes, get hunting permits, or any other government provided documents.
To obtain this status, various complicated legal rituals are invisioned, often including specifics on spelling, capitalization and placement of extra punctuation marks in their names when pulled into court in the belief that the right combination 'forces' the courts to recognize their status. I'm not kidding.
And the times, well they are a-changing. This Neo-Nazi conspiracy theory is being spread farther then it has since the 70's. Taken from a Kook Right message board where a poster asking for help escaping a credit debt being brought to court:
yup. check out the difference between unlawful and illegal....look up the definition of a SOVERIGN...
learn the difference between a democracy and a REPUBLIC...figure out how a state citizen (you) is being bled dry by the federal/fraud government.
why is their such an emphasis on everyone APPLYING for a SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER...and what the fuck does NEXUS mean??
look at what is printed on the early FEDERAL RESERVE PAPERS and what words they removed which, in one fell swoop, bankrupted an entire country of its wealth in the greatest fraud in the history of the world.
americans may be the dumbest people in the history of the world...but i believe there is an awakening at hand
http://www.thesovereigncitizen.com/ Has videos explaining how (they believe) you can become one, as well as 'Soldiers in the Army of God' videos where they share messages from convicted terrorists detailing why they joined the movement and what makes it worth it.
It's a phenomenal danger, and this is a wedding made of hate now that it's beginning to fuse with the teabagging set.