A couple of weeks ago, I confessed to one of my less dignified hobbies: I love watching sovereign citizens get arrested.
The recipe rarely changes.
A police officer asks for a driver's license. Our hero explains that he's not "driving"; he's "traveling." The officer asks again. Ten minutes later, somebody is shouting about maritime jurisdiction through a window that's about to become considerably less window-shaped.
ICYMI: I Admit It: I Love Watching Sovereign Citizens Get Arrested
I thought I understood these people. Then I started wondering where all this came from.
Follow the rabbit hole far enough, and it leads surprisingly close to home.
There wasn't one Sovereign Citizen Founding Convention where somebody banged a gavel and declared driver's licenses unconstitutional. The movement grew from the tax-protest movement of the late 1960s and an anti-government movement called Posse Comitatus. Around 1969, Henry Beach in Oregon and William Potter Gale in California separately organized early Posse groups.
Gale was also a Christian Identity preacher. The early movement carried ugly racist and antisemitic beliefs alongside its anti-tax and anti-federal-government ideology.
The Posse believed legitimate government ended largely at the county line. The county sheriff, in their worldview, represented the highest lawful authority. Federal taxation, much federal law, and large portions of modern government were supposedly illegitimate.
Then the farm crisis hit.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, high interest rates, debt, falling land values, and foreclosures devastated rural communities. Men offering desperate farmers a way to declare debts and taxes illegitimate suddenly had an audience.
One of those men was James Wickstrom.
And it's with a heavy heart that I tell you that Wisconsin enters our story.
Wickstrom became a major Posse organizer and operated from Tigerton Dells in Shawano County, one county over from where I live. After losing an election for chairman of the town of Fairbanks, he helped create something called the "Constitutional Township of Tigerton Dells."
Wickstrom declared himself town clerk and municipal judge and began issuing things like liquor licenses.
Apparently losing an election becomes considerably less disappointing if you simply invent your own government afterward.
Tigerton became a Posse stronghold. Wickstrom traveled the Farm Belt preaching that taxes and debts were illegitimate while the compound hosted paramilitary training. The movement eventually faded, but many of its ideas survived.
By the 1980s and 1990s, those ideas were evolving into the modern sovereign citizen movement. Roger Elvick supplied perhaps its greatest contribution to roadside entertainment: redemption and "strawman" theory.
The theory claims the government created a separate legal version of you, often identified by YOUR NAME IN CAPITAL LETTERS, when your birth was registered. Some versions claim this fictional person has a secret Treasury account worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. File the proper documents, say the proper words, and separate yourself from your "strawman," and supposedly debt, taxes, licenses, and government authority begin disappearing.
They don't.
Still, the beliefs perfectly explain those videos. The obsession with exact wording, Uniform Commercial Code filings, refusing to "contract" with police, demanding proof of jurisdiction, distinguishing "traveling" from "driving," and insisting that a flesh-and-blood human is somehow separate from the name printed on a citation all grow from this strange family tree.
The movement is no longer simply the white, rural phenomenon from which much of it emerged. Modern adherents include black "Moorish" sovereign citizens and people using labels such as American State National, constitutionalist, state citizen, or freeman.
Nobody can count them precisely because there is no national headquarters, membership roster, or annual convention. The Anti-Defamation League estimates there may be roughly 350,000 to 400,000 adherents nationwide, with vastly different levels of involvement.
That's hundreds of thousands of Americans who may believe some portion of this.
Which brings me back to the traffic stop.
I used to watch the videos and wonder how somebody could sit beside a highway, surrounded by flashing lights, and remain absolutely convinced that one more sentence about jurisdiction would turn everything around.
Now I understand where the words came from.
More than half a century of tax protesters, economic desperation, fringe theology, Wisconsin compounds, homemade governments, secret Treasury accounts, and pseudolegal seminars eventually arrived on YouTube.
The history isn't nearly as funny as the traffic stops.
But it certainly explains why the window keeps breaking.
