I’ve seen quite a few SovCit videos, and they all say similar things. The throw around terms like “beneficiary of the estate” and “special appearance” and yada yada. This nonsense has to come from somewhere — these people are too stupid to come up with it themselves, so they have to have found some SovCity Playbook on the interwebs, or somewhere.
To start, I am NOT a sovereign citizen. I’ve been here long enough I think that is clear but there’s the short version.
As such, I cannot say with certainty where it all comes from. I do not think there is a single handbook they all use but clearly they tend to parrot each other.
Check out Anna Von Reitz, Brandon Joe Williams, and the self-proclaimed “Queen of Canada” Romana Didulo. Also look at Freedom Forums - Index page
I think those are good places as a beginning point. Doubtless there is more.
ISTM it is less a single playbook and more an echo chamber.
Just Google “sovereign citizen” and you’ll be presented with countless manifestos, ranging from fairly bonkers to utterly incoherent ramblings of someone clearly under going some kind of psychotic episode. They will all be liberally sprinkled with those terms.
Presumably you could trace them back to a couple of works which originated those terms, no idea what those documents would be, and who wrote them, though. AFAIK there is no canonical founding document of the movement like Mein Kampf or Das Capital.
Isn’t this also one of the areas that hucksters and scammers make a lot of money selling “foolproof” SovCit “systems” for lots of money? “Buy my 3-volume atlas of Sooper Secrits they don’t want you to know about!”
So sovereign citizens often get their scripts by being preyed on by swindlers.
I imagine that you could construct your own script now a days just by watching SovCit stops on Youtube if you ignore the fact they never work.
Amazon also has this:
Note that it’s sarcastic, not meant to be serious, but it pokes fun at how much of what SC folks do is a virtual copy-and-paste of garbage they see on the internet.
My favorite one star review:
I tried all the signs and spells. Nothing worked. Next time I’ll learn and use Jedi mind tricks.
There are people known as “gurus” who sell collections of pseudolegal arguments, known as “kits”.
The movement has no defining text, established doctrine, or centralized leadership[9][69] but there are common themes, generally implying that the legitimate government and legal system have been somehow replaced and that the current authorities are illegitimate. Taxes and licenses are likewise thought to be illegitimate. A number of leaders, commonly called “gurus”, develop their own variations.[9][41] The movement’s theories include influences from a variety of sources, some of them decades old, resulting in often confusing and incoherent narratives of U.S. history.
Litigants who use pseudolaw frequently rely on techniques and arguments promoted and sold – sometimes as “kits” – by amateur legal theorists, who are commonly called “gurus” by courts, scholars and media.[2][7] People offering unorthodox and unlicensed legal services are likely to be charlatans or scammers.[
It should be noted that the “gurus” themselves virtually never show up in court and use their own arguments.
Bingo!
In the Meads decision from the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench, which is an extensive analysis of the entire sovereign citizen movement, one of the points that Justice Rooks makes is that there is a pattern of “prophets” and “disciples”. The “prophet” holds meetings, offers materials online, etc, to help the “disciples” free themseves from the oppresive state.
Of course, running meetings and providing materials costs money, so it’s expected that the “disciples” will chip in a bit, just to ensure that the wisdom of the “prophet” continues to be available. Just for cost recovery, you understand…
I used to be able to tell if a new “prophet” had set up shop in my province because I would start to see sov-cit stuff being cited in courts in a particular area. If that prophet moved on, the traffic from that area tended to drop off.
Now with the internet, it’s not so localised, but as others have commented, you can get loads of stuff off the internet.
I can tell that a lot of the stuff being filed in Canadian courts comes from American precedents; sometimes they are citing the US Constitution. (One court registrar told me that she got into a major debate with a sov-cit when she told him that the Uniform Commercial Code has no application in Canada. He immediately realised that she was part of the conspiracy, trying to hide the truth with a spurious technicality!)
There is some home-grown stuff, of course. One popular argument is that Her Majesty’s Ship Canada was abandoned by the British Crown in the Statute of Westminster and is without a government, and individuals who realise this can use the law of salvage to reclaim parts of HMS Canada for their own advantage.
The sad thing is that a lot of sov-cit stuf comes from people who are in some sort of trouble in their lives: spouse is divorcing them; business failed; lost their job; got charged with an offence; and so on. They’re often desperate and are trying to make sense of it all, and get some order back in their lives. And they get scammed, which doesn’t help.
He’s certainly not the originator of the SovCit movement — which probably began shortly after Alley Oop was chosen leader of the cave — but Irwin Schiff (mentioned in the “gurus” link above) is, or used to be, one of its guiding lights. He was certainly prolific when it came to producing books on escaping the clutches of the Delaware corporation which calls itself the US government; unfortunately, his arguments failed to keep him out of said clutches.
(There’s also a somewhat dated website which deals with a related conspiracy theory about how insidious the Corporation is when it comes to ensnaring the unwary. It’s long and may make your head hurt, but I found it informative as to how deep the rabbit hole goes.)
I’m not really familiar with the term ‘sovereign citizen’… is this a US movement? Maybe related to Libertarianism? Is there any concensus among them, or are they all making up their own versions?
This says it better than I could and I think answers your question:
The Sovereign citizen movement (SovCits)[1][2] is a loose group of anti-government activists, conspiracy theorists, vexatious litigants, tax protesters and financial scammers found mainly in English-speaking common law countries—the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. Sovereign citizens have a pseudolegal belief system based on misinterpretations of common law, and claim not to be subject to any government statutes unless they consent to them.[3][4] The movement appeared in the U.S. in the early 1970s and has since expanded to other countries; the similar freeman on the land movement emerged during the 2000s in Canada before spreading to other Commonwealth countries.[5] Sovereign citizen ideas have also been incorporated by other fringe movements in the United States and abroad, such as the Reichsbürgers in Germany and Austria. The FBI has called sovereign citizens “anti-government extremists who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or ‘sovereign’ from the United States”.[6] - SOURCE
The one that always gets me is, “I am not driving. I am traveling.”
And since they’re not driving, they don’t need a driver’s license. 
I think the script also says that only commercial vehicles need a driver with a driver’s license. Or something like that.
Based on what I’ve seen from YouTube, SivCits come in three stripes.
- People who genuinely believe the law doesn’t apply to them. They identify themselves as “Moroccan Nationals” who believe they are nations unto themselves because something something Morocco was the first country to recognize the USA, and wear fez to court and identify themselves as [Name] Bey. Or they identify themselves as a “Living Man/Woman” who never entered into a contract with the State, so they’re not accountable to it. Or the State is some “fictitious corporate entity.”
- Those who would obfuscate the matter at hand and believe that, with the right combination of magic words, will convince the judge that the case against them is invalid. Because something something UCC-138 Section B Subsection 420…
- Those who believe some picayune technicality invalidates the case against them. The name on the summons is all caps and their name is not the all-caps fictitious person the court sent mail to. Or the fringe on the flag indicates that the court is an admiralty court. Or whatever.*
*I was saw a defendant insist that the entire case against her should be dismissed because the police report said that the first cop on the scene called for backup, and two officers came to assist. But actually only one showed up, so the police report was invalid and thus, no case.
We don’t get the Moroccans in Canada. But the “living man / living woman” thing is very big in sov-cit circles.
Another variant is the birth certificate thing: that the birth certificate is a form of indenturing by the government. When your poor deluded parents applied for a birth certificate for you, that indentured you to the horrible government™, which is why the horrible government™ can tax you.
If you return your birth certificate to the horrible government™, with magic words like “returned for value” written on it in red, then you have freed yourself from the horrible government™, no longer have to pay income tax, and are entitled to the secret fund of your earnings that the horrible government™ has been accumulating all your life.
I am not making this up.
Well of course not. Morocco wasn’t the first country to recognize Canada. That would be the US, so your SovCits are American Nationals.
Nor am I, but I got accused of being one once, on another message board. We were discussing the police showing up at a poster’s home, asking questions and wanting to “just take a look around.” I said that, if the police show up at your door, the ONLY words you should say to them are “come back with a warrant or go kick rocks.”* And another poster was like, “sovereign citizen much?” Um, no. Knowing my Constitutional rights does not make me a SovCit.
*OK, so Protestant/Midwestern notions of politeness may compel us to speak more diplomatically. But that’s culture, not law.
The other person was clearly confused on the term.
The poster exercised their legitimate rights as the laws are written (as you rightly pointed out).
A SovCit thinks no laws apply to them.
But laws apply to most everyone else. It’s a very convenient doctrine.
In fairness that’s being very generous to SovCits. The idea that all government authority, including laws, is inherently illegitimate, is a perfectly consistent well thought out political philosophy with a long history (if a very naive one that’s not very useful IRL).
SovCits believe that government authority and laws don’t apply to them in particular, because they know some kind of secret cheatcode that’s hidden in the system, and by repeating those magic phrases that will mean the laws don’t apply to them and just them. All those other chumps that are the victims of government oppression are getting what they deserve, they are special cos they know the magical password they read online.
Your first item refer to themselves as Moorish Sovereign Citizens or Moorish Nationals, and they represent the African American version of the movement. Their beliefs overlap with mainstream Sovereign citizens mostly.