Sovereign citizen is a term some people to describe themselves. They feel they should be allowed to live in and benefit from society without being subject to the rules or duties that go along with that. It is not a real status and has no legal basis. The groups like this person has joined are an echo chamber where they feed each other bad interpretations of laws and loopholes. When they inevitably end up in court they will agree the loophole applies. It never works.
They often have a very poor understanding of the law, they think lawyers are basically wizards and if they too say the right magic words (“the flag in this court has a gold fringe which means it’s an admiralty court and you don’t have jurisdiction”) then they won’t have to pay their traffic fine or taxes or whatever it is that they don’t want to pay for
There is some truth in their belief that “the Law” is a lot more flexible than the rest of us realize.
Look at the kid gloves the courts have used with Trump’s cronies and other right-wing kooks. Alex Jones is a great example; owes over a billion dollars in restitution and hasn’t paid one cent. The court’s response has been "lol, blood from a turnip ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ".
As an aside, sovcits are not an exclusively US phenomenon. Most Commonwealth nations have some version of “freemen on the land” which is basically the same thing, though the specific details they fixate on may be different. I’ve also heard there’s a German version as well.
Even in the US it’s not exclusively MAGA-ish militia types or super fundamentalists. There’s also the Moorish National strain, for example, which operates under the idea that the US Government is actually just a corporation operating under the sovereignty of an imaginary “Moorish Empire” in Africa, East India Company-style, whose existence is covered up by some kind of conspiracy
There are German, Austrian and Swiss versions, yes.
The biggest and best known groups are the “Reichsbürger” who in one way or another reject the legitimacy of the German state. Very popular is the conspiracy-narrative that the Reich still exists and that Germany is actually just a corporation working on the territory of the Reich, that you can simply quit or that there is no peace-treaty between the Allied Powers and Germany and so Germany is still occupied by the Allies.
Some of the so-called Reichsbürger are just a bit crazy, others are clearly right-wing extremists
- Head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in the federal state of Brandenburg
They are partly directed and supported by the Russian foreign intelligence service, have contacts to some SovCit movements in the US and Canada, QAnon and the Proud Boys and have been known to be violent, hoarding weapons and some have shot at police, so they are being cracked down on pretty hard right now.
Can someone explain to a non-usa person what is sovereign citizen ?
Sovereign citizen is a term some people to describe themselves. They feel they should be allowed to live in and benefit from society without being subject to the rules or duties that go along with that. It is not a real status and has no legal basis. The groups like this person has joined are an echo chamber where they feed each other bad interpretations of laws and loopholes. When they inevitably end up in court they will agree the loophole applies. It never works.
They often have a very poor understanding of the law, they think lawyers are basically wizards and if they too say the right magic words (“the flag in this court has a gold fringe which means it’s an admiralty court and you don’t have jurisdiction”) then they won’t have to pay their traffic fine or taxes or whatever it is that they don’t want to pay for
There is some truth in their belief that “the Law” is a lot more flexible than the rest of us realize.
Look at the kid gloves the courts have used with Trump’s cronies and other right-wing kooks. Alex Jones is a great example; owes over a billion dollars in restitution and hasn’t paid one cent. The court’s response has been "lol, blood from a turnip ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ".
The law is pretty much a sham.
That’s not magic though, that’s money.
As an aside, sovcits are not an exclusively US phenomenon. Most Commonwealth nations have some version of “freemen on the land” which is basically the same thing, though the specific details they fixate on may be different. I’ve also heard there’s a German version as well.
Even in the US it’s not exclusively MAGA-ish militia types or super fundamentalists. There’s also the Moorish National strain, for example, which operates under the idea that the US Government is actually just a corporation operating under the sovereignty of an imaginary “Moorish Empire” in Africa, East India Company-style, whose existence is covered up by some kind of conspiracy
There are German, Austrian and Swiss versions, yes.
The biggest and best known groups are the “Reichsbürger” who in one way or another reject the legitimacy of the German state. Very popular is the conspiracy-narrative that the Reich still exists and that Germany is actually just a corporation working on the territory of the Reich, that you can simply quit or that there is no peace-treaty between the Allied Powers and Germany and so Germany is still occupied by the Allies.
- Head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in the federal state of Brandenburg
They are partly directed and supported by the Russian foreign intelligence service, have contacts to some SovCit movements in the US and Canada, QAnon and the Proud Boys and have been known to be violent, hoarding weapons and some have shot at police, so they are being cracked down on pretty hard right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen_movement
Tl;dr is nutters/scammers who believe they can opt out of the laws/responsibilities of being a citizen.