What Sovereign Citizens Actually Believe
On 20 May 2010, on Interstate 40 near West Memphis, Arkansas, two police officers stopped a white minivan with unusual Ohio plates. Sixteen-year-old Joe Kane stepped out of the passenger door with an AK-pattern rifle and killed them both. His father, Jerry Kane, ran debt-elimination seminars and had renounced his driving licence years earlier. Both were sovereign citizens. Neither would have described himself as a criminal.
What Sovereign Citizens Actually Believe is the full account of the movement behind that traffic stop and behind every viral sovcit video posted since. It runs from the postwar tax protest movement and the founding of the Posse Comitatus in 1971, through the farm crisis that gave the doctrine its first mass audience, to the assemblies and online gurus recruiting today.
Inside, the beliefs are set out exactly as their adherents state them, and then measured against the record. The claim that the United States went bankrupt in 1933 and pledged its citizens as collateral. The strawman theory, and why your name appears in capital letters on a summons. The secret Treasury account said to hold six hundred and thirty thousand dollars in your name. The Uniform Commercial Code misread as a master key to the law. Without prejudice, UCC 1-308. Admiralty jurisdiction and the gold-fringed flag. Travelling versus driving. The Fourteenth Amendment and the two classes of citizens. Red thumbprints, colons in names, and the ritual of the signature.
The consequences occupy the second half of the book. Paper terrorism, and the hundred-billion-dollar liens Cherron Phillips filed against four federal judges and a United States Attorney. Timothy Pate, sentenced to twenty-five years in Georgia for retaliatory filings against public officials. The guru economy, from Roger Elvick's redemption package to Winston Shrout's hundred trillion dollars in fake bills of exchange and David Wynn Miller's Quantum Grammar. House theft through forged deeds and adverse possession scams. The Moorish sovereigns and the 1787 treaty with Morocco. The eighty-one day siege at Justus Ranch in Montana and the week-long standoff at Fort Davis, Texas. The murder of Dallas officer Darron Burks in 2024.
The book also examines what the government has done about it: the FBI's classification of sovereign citizen violent extremism as a domestic terrorism category, the roll call bulletins that followed West Memphis, the IRS frivolous positions list and its five thousand dollar penalty, and the impossibility of counting a movement that refuses to register.
This is not a book about people who are stupid. Adherents have included nurses, engineers, real estate agents, a former mathematics teacher and practising attorneys. What they had in common was debt, a court date and no lawyer, at the moment they encountered a body of material that has been refined over fifty years to sound exactly like law. Every argument in it has failed in every reported American case since 1990, and the packets are still selling.
For anyone who has watched a sovereign citizen traffic stop video and wondered what on earth is going on, this is the explanation, from the Posse Comitatus to the present.
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