(FBI Seal courtesy of DonkeyHotey, via Flikr)
When is it time to take something the FBI says seriously? It is more that a little tragic that one has to ask that question, but after the way that the criminal Bush administration used pronouncements from various government agencies to keep fear alive as a political force it is legitimate.
Still when they warn, in a general way, about a movement that has been violent in the past, and there is an uptick the violence from its adherents recently, that is probably something worth paying attention to.
The movement that the FBI is concerned about is the “Sovereign Citizen” movement. You might have heard something here and there about them, but let me lay it out for you.
Sovereign Citizens are anti-government in the extreme. They believe (well they believe a lot of crazy crap) at the core that the United States government is not legitimate. The premise is that prior to the 14th Amendment people living in the United States were not US citizens but rather citizens of their individual states.
They also believe that the enactment of the 16th Amendment and leaving the gold standard effectively bankrupted the United States and that taxes of any kind are illegitimate.
Now, I could go on for 10 paragraphs about how wrong all that is, but to paraphrase Rep. Barney Frank, arguing these points is like arguing with the dinning room table.
But what these beliefs do is often lead to a kind of paranoid lawlessness that can erupt into violence against police or government officials. One of their favorite schemes is so-called Redemption. This is from the FBI briefing about them:
The Redemption Theory belief leads to their most prevalent method to defraud banks, credit institutions, and the U.S. government: the Redemption Scheme. Sovereign citizens believe that when the U.S. government removed itself from the gold standard, it rendered U.S. currency as a valueless credit note, exchanging one credit document (such as a dollar bill) for another.
They assert that the U.S. government now uses citizens as collateral, issuing social security numbers and birth certificates to register people in trade agreements with other countries. Each citizen has a monetary net worth, which they believe is kept in a U.S. Treasury Direct account, valued from $630,000 to more than $3 million. These accounts, they claim, are in a third-party’s name, a “strawman,” that they can access, which they commonly refer to as “freeing money from the strawman.” In essence, it is extorting money from the U.S. Treasury Department. Sovereign citizens file legitimate IRS and Uniform Commercial Code forms for illegitimate purposes, believing that doing so correctly will compel the U.S. Treasury to fulfill its debts, such as credit card debts, taxes, and mortgages.
In addition to this scam the Sovereign Citizens often create their own drivers licenses and license plates. This practice is based on the idea that they have a Right to Travel, which asserts that a free citizen on a freeway is not subject to traffic or automobile laws.
So, the folks who follow this ideology are whacky, but are they really dangerous? Well they have been in the past. From the Anti-Defamation League's blurb on Sovereign Citizens:
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, constitutionalists, 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."
Of course there have not been anymore attacks like the Oklahoma City bombing, but that does not mean that there have not been violent interactions between Sovereign Citizens and police recently.
Talking Points Memo has been doing a great job of covering this: like the guy who opened fire on a restaurant because there was no crayfish, and claimed he didn’t have to follow the laws or the “free citizen on a free highway” or the Alaska Sovereign Citizens who were indicted for conspiracy to murder county officials.
All of those events happened in just the last year.
Of course Rightwing bloggers are getting up in arms about this. Their general meme is this is just the FBI demonizing “average citizen’s” by warning they might become violent.
Now I am somewhat sympathetic the idea that there is far too much surveillance of protest groups and that there certainly have been some sting operations that probably crossed the line in terms on egging the targets on to the point of breaking the law, but there is a big difference.
First off, I don’t see anyone who claims that that they do not have to follow any laws or can create their own money as an average citizen. As problematic as our system is, we have very specific ways of changing laws we don’t like and generally it works.
Laws are the glue that bind our nation together and a philosophy that says one can disregard them at will is inherently dangerous. It is the antithesis of civil disobedience, which is breaking the law, peacefully, and then paying the consequences to make ones point.
While I am generally inclined to view these kinds of warnings with a jaundiced eye there might be something to it.
Given the past history of groups with this ideology, and the fact that they tend to become more active and more violent in times of economic trouble, I am willing to give the FBI the benefit of the doubt on this one. There are as many as 100,000 people in the US who are following this ideology. That is a big enough group that there can be some really fringy people out there.
So, keep your eyes peeled, you may very well see a lot more news about Sovereign Citizens.
The floor is yours