removed by mod

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.

That phrasing refers to a very broad set of movements and individuals. The usual core beliefs are:

• Legislation in their jurisdiction and the government’s authority to enforce it is in some way defective.
• People in their jurisdiction can opt out of laws and government, and live only under “natural law”.
• People have to perform a set of legal procedures (spells, effectively) in order to achieve that.

Exactly why and how law/government authority is defective, how they understand natural law, what the spells are that they have to cast - all of these are extremely variable both between jurisdictions and between individuals.
Primarily it’s a set of grifters charging money for courses and materials to learn about these beliefs from whoever they can convince. Sometimes, as in Germany, it’s a group of neo-Nazis plotting to reinstate the Kaiser.

You might enjoy münecat’s longer form explanation.

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.

Two different categories:

1. People who believe they found the real world equivalent to the ‘lower wanted level’ cheats in GTA, and can do illegal shit freely as long as they say the right words to the cops when they are inevitably caught
2. Grifters who take advantage of those people, who may or may not be true believers.

The core belief of sovereign citizens – initially, anyway – is the notion that since government exists at the consent of the governed they can “opt out” of being subject to the laws of wherever they are.

This has a tiny grain of legitimate logic to it, in that not a single person on Earth is given a choice of society and/or country to be born into. Governments attempt to exert absolute authority over everyone within their spheres of influence regardless of what those people may happen to think of the matter, and the feasibility of them physically leaving said society/country notwithstanding. All laws are just words on paper, after all, and from a certain perspective completely artificial, arbitrary, and transient.

Where it all breaks down is that these people typically arrive at the above conclusion by being absolutely stark raving loony, and typically want to have their cake and eat it, too – they don’t want to be subject to obeying laws, or paying taxes, or having to register their vehicles and get driver’s licenses, pay child support, etc., but they still somehow feel entitled to the use of public infrastructure like roads and bridges, police and fire services, municipal water and sewer use, and so forth. In modern times a simple “no gubmint can tell me what to do and I’m answerable only to myself” outlook has mutated into this arcane and nebulous pseudo-religious willful misinterpretation on the wording of laws, what is and is not printed CAPITALIZED on various government documents, and fixation on “contract law,” treating every interaction between everyone and every thing as a “transaction” which the sovereign citizen believes is inherently negotiable (always in their favor, of course).

This is furthered by shucksters who sell books and seminars to idiots the types of people who have the right type of chip on their shoulders, which purportedly contain the secret knowledge and legal incantations to make all this work but are, of course, just bullshit. Usually people who entangle themselves in SovCit bullshit are trying to weasel out of of some particular financial obligation. Not wanting to pay child support seems to be a very popular one, as are taxes in general, fines, loans, and liens.

The whole thing is just fascinatingly whacked the more you look into it. Here’s the RationalWiki article on it, for instance:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen

If you want a well written break down of them, a Canadian judge wrote a fantastic article:

https://learningcentre.lawsociety.ab.ca/mod/page/view.php?id=251

“Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Argument litigants”

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.

Are you familiar with the term “dumbass”?

They are people who have fallen for and/or are grifting for a deeply unhinged conspiracy theory that national laws don’t apply to them if they do some certain set of pseudo legal things. What exactly those things are, as well as what laws don’t apply to them,vary widely, but are usually centered around driver’s licenses and car registration, tax evasion and not paying child support.

Past that it’s hard to explain what their beliefs are because it is so vague and ever changing.

Dumb.

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…

A moron who thinks the law does not apply to them.

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.

removed by mod