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Someone who beleaves that they can get out of some or all the obligations using some magic pseudo-legal phrases.
It started as people trying to imitate rich people exploiting legal loopholes, but then some grifter "guru" found them and decided to make a quick buck giving rather bad legal advice. This worked, causing in more grifters getting in, with depressing/hilarious results.
Assholes who appropriated the word "sovereign" and ruined it ior the rest of us. Like, how cryptocurrency ruined "crypto" and blockchain - you can't mention either without getting some kneejerk reaction about mining farms.
A cargo cult.
They see lawyers use big words to make rich people get what they want and they try to emulate that without understanding how it works.
The funny part is that the "how it works" is stupid simple: money. Rich people have it, sovereign citizens don't.
I'm so glad you asked. I had improperly assumed.it was referring to native or indigenous peoples from tribal land. I couldn't figure out why all the hate.
A nutcase.
Two different categories:
The best explanation (ever) for a sovereign citizen is found in a legal opinion by a Canadian judge. He spends about 176 pages delineating their beliefs, origins, and manner of interacting with the legal system.
https://www.canlii.org/en/ab/abqb/doc/2012/2012abqb571/2012abqb571.html
Someone who thinks they are above the law in every way and actively opposes authority at every instance they can. And I mean every instance. Literally will get pulled over for going 120 in a 30 and they will say "you can't do shit to me". They are literally considered terrorists by the government.
Don’t forget that they get mad when the government services they enjoy get taken away. Roads, electricity, you name it, they get mad about it.
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.
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.
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...
Cleopatra wasnt an egyptian, she was a macedonian greek. Alexander the Great conquered the "entire" world, then died and his general Ptolemy got the kingdom of Egypt. Egypt was ruled by the Ptolemy dynasty and was infamously isolated and incestuous. Their court was mostly greeks or hellenized(greekified) egyptians/jews. In fact, Cleopatra was the first(and last) Ptolemy ruler to even bother to learn egyptian, in 200 years of their rule.
Also egyptians arent black, even today they have all kinds of skin colours. Primarily they fucked other mediterranean people, greeks, carthaginians, romans, phoenicians, hittites. Most black people live(lived) below the Sahara desert, so while there was some trade traffic towards/from that direction, it was pretty limited in comparison. You did have things like the kingdom of Kush but for the most part Egypt had more to do with mediterranean(and middle east) states than with subsaharan ones(Sudan/Ethiopia).
So i dont think egyptians are black for the most part and i think most racists would agree.
Ah. Your average conspiracy schizo channel. Great
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/
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 ~~driving~~ travelling, not the corporation, and only the corporate self is beholden to the law. This same idea is applied to taxes...
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.
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.
A myth.
Basically a bunch of people who claim to not be citizens of any nation and will therefore try to claim they essentially have diplomatic immunity no matter where they go. Combine that with the personality and knowledge base of a meth fueled jailhouse lawyer. Actually, that's an insult to meth fueled jailhouse lawyers and I take that back...
But if they are not citizen of any nation, wouldn't that make them illegal immigrants in any country?
That's why they claim some strange pseudo diplomat status.
But then the country you are in needs to recognize the country you're a diplomat of and want those diplomats in their country. Diplomatic status is not a "I can go where I please" status. But it's that way to sovereign citizens, I guess.
Hey, you can't use things like facts and logic when discussing common laws with sovereign citizens.
Ignorant losers that are trying to grift their way through life thinking they’ve found loopholes that allow them to circumvent the laws that normal people follow.
Sovereign citizens are to civil lawyers as alchemists are to chemists.
They both invented their own lore to try to make the universe do what they want, except the alchemists actually strived to move towards more reliable and accurate science.
except the alchemists actually strived to move towards more reliable and accurate science
Forgive if I'm misunderstanding, but wouldn't that be chemists striving toward reliable and accurate science? Sovcits being alchemists or petty magi is a pretty great comparison, honestly.
chemistry is an evolution of alchemy, because they strived in that way. Whereas Sovcit belief is a degenerate form of practicing law, more like a cargo cult imo.