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‘Sovereign Citizen’ Scammers Add QAnon's Fascist Ideology To Their Grift

‘Sovereign Citizen’ Scammers Add QAnon's Fascist Ideology To Their Grift

The “sovereign citizen” movement—comprising scam artists and their gullible followers who claim that, by filling reams of documents full of pseudo-legal babble, ordinary citizens can declare themselves free of government rule at any level, thus becoming the law unto themselves—seems to have figured out how, after a couple of decades of mostly lurking on the fringes of the extreme right, to expand its reach and revive (if not entirely rebrand) itself: Go full QAnon.

Last weekend, onetime Pennsylvania Republican candidate Bobby Lawrence boasted that he and his “American State Nationals” operation filled a room in Keene, Texas, with 650 people who paid $120 each to take their special “training”—which teaches that birth certificates are satanic documents that enslave people by subsuming them under a corporation, but they can free themselves by filing their prescribed “redemption” documents. They also ardently promote Qanon conspiracy theories, including the claim that John F. Kennedy Jr. was secretly Trump’s real vice president.


The Anti-Defamation League has been warning about this coalescence since January, with Lawrence and his cohort David Straight, who have been holding these seminars around the country and, thanks to the fresh appeal of absorbing QAnon beliefs into the similarly conspiracy-fueled worldview of sovereign citizens, have increasingly been packing them in.

As their backgrounder explained:

Lawrence teaches sovereignty with a QAnon bent, urging his followers to become “American State Nationals” before Trump is reinstated as president. “American State National” is one of many terms that sovereign citizens use to distinguish themselves from citizens under the jurisdiction of the illegitimate, de facto government. “Trump is working on the ‘Fall of the Cabal’ which will allow our Constitutional Republic to Rise again, however the newly partially restored Constitutional Republic will need We The People of restored status via ‘The Great Awakening’ to fill and function in the newly partially restored Constitutional Republic,” Lawrence posted to Telegram in October 2021. “This will only be accomplished via We The People reclaiming our Birthright by becoming American State Nationals... As the number of American State Nationals and one of the People increases, so will the Function of the [sic] our Constitutional Republic. It will start at the absolute local level (you and your neighbors) and then grow and grow and grow.”


Sovereign-citizen and QAnon beliefs meld together almost seamlessly, as the ADL explains, because their fundamental worldviews involving a massive global cabal nefariously conspiring to enslave mankind are so similar. The sovereign movement’s belief that the current U.S. government is illegitimate serves to support their view of the Biden presidency as fraudulent, as well as the means for “freeing” themselves from such “tyranny.”

Lawrence primarily promotes a version of sovereign-citizen beliefs called “Redemption Theory,” which deals with the core concept that everyone who is an American citizen is designated a “strawman” corporate entity at birth, making them subsidiary properties of America Inc. “Redemption” is the process by which they split the strawman from the flesh-and-blood human, and its purpose is two-fold. As the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) explains:

Once separated from the corporate shell, the newly freed man is now outside of the jurisdiction of all admiralty laws. More importantly, by filing a series of complex, legal-sounding documents, the sovereign can tap into that secret Treasury account for his own purposes. Over the last 30 years, there have been hundreds of sovereign promoters packaging different combinations of forms and paperwork, attempting to perfect the process. While no one has ever succeeded, of course, they know with the religious certainty of a true cult believer that they’re close. All it will take is the right combination of words, say the promoters of the redemption scam.

Lawrence regularly regales his audiences with his version of the “redemption” scam, but with a powerful QAnon flavor. At an April 21 “Patriots Arise” event in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—where he shared the stage with Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano—Lawrence launched to into a rant that manifested that commingling two conspiracist universes produces twice the crackpottery.

He explained how modern births and the birth-certificate process are actually satanic rituals:

Fred read a quote from [Woodrow Wilson adviser] Edward Mandell House where they talk about this construct, where they’re gonna make slaves of us all, through a system of pledging, where we pledge our children as surety through something called a birth certificate, and a satanic ritual that takes place. …


So I’m gonna walk you through a satanic ritual that takes place, and it started with the birth certificate, which was actually chartered under the Department of Transportation. And everything is Admiralty. We all live under the water, and what is law, and where does law come from? Where does the word “law” come from? Land, air, and water. And where the founders of this nation thought about what law was, was the Bible, the Geneva Bible, the King James Version 1611 edition, where we got the word law from. And land, air, and water was in Genesis Chapter 1, verse 24 through 28, “and God created the heaven and the earth.” And God giveth man dominion over the earth, and God giveth man dominion over the land, and all the creatures that walk and creepeth. And God giveth man dominion over the air, and all the birds that fly, and God giveth man dominion over the water, and all the fish that swimmeth. And this is law.

Lawrence then repeated stock sovereign-citizen beliefs (all every bit as risibly false as his etymology for the word “law”) that there are three tiers of law: Canon law, common law, and Admiralty law, each reflecting rule over air, land, and water respectively. Then he went on:

So how do they get you to pledge your child, and how did our parents and our grandparents pledge us as property, as surety, in our personification, all capital names? It was through an evil, satanic ritual called the birth of a child.

You see, a mother goes into a foundling center, and she goes to see the doc—tor; a tor is a bill of lading when a ship arrives at the dock—and the mother puts her feet up on the stirrups and the mother’s water breaks, and the child comes out of the water through the birth canal, like you berth a ship, into the air, into the hands of the dock—tor. And then, historically speaking, a satanic ritual would take place—a child was smacked on the butt, turned upside down, cried out in fear and pain. And then before the child could put their feet on the land and take the breath of God as a free creation of God, a legal bond document came out. It’s on bond paper because it’s a banking instrument, it’s a surety bond.

And the child’s soul was taken on the back of that document. It was called the soul print. And then the umbilical cord and the afterbirth was thereby dead and abandoned by the mother, because that was part of your birth, part of your being born. The construct, the evil says that now that is dead, a part of you died and now you are a dead vessel, you are an all-capital legal fiction. They called you a person. If you look at your driver’s license, if you look at every document that government or any business sends you, it’s in your all-capital name. Your personification. Now the Bible tells us not to take on the persona, not to take on the person.

Lawrence also harkened to the stock radicalization belief in “red-pilling”: “We are living in Babylon right now,” he said. “It’s a corporate construct. It’s a Matrix. Keanu Reeves has said publicly that The Matrix is a documentary of how we are living our lives. Your money’s not real, you don’t own anything.”

And near the end, he wrapped it all up with a classic QAnon-style claim that Donald Trump is secretly One Of Them:

Yes, President Trump has done many things for us. And I won’t go into a lot of them, because quite frankly a lot of folks aren’t ready for it. And it’s hard to verify. But Donald Trump has told you all, if you go back to his speeches, he’s told you that when he comes back, he’s gonna be little letters, lower case. Look to his speech in 2021 at CPAC in Texas. He said when we go back to the White House this time it’s going to be in little letters. He told you at another rally that people are sovereign. He told you at another rally that you’re all millionaires. He told you in another rally that you’re the elite. And they’re the scoundrels. He told you at another rally that the Bar Association is corrupt. He tells you on and on—he might talk for two hours, but only four sentences are for those who are awake. And there’s a huge difference between being woke and awake, is it not?

Lawrence has formed close associations with leading QAnon influencers such as Ann Vandersteel, Allen and Francine Fosdick, the Pennsylvania-based hosts of the QAnon show Up Front in the Prophetic, and David Straight.

Vandersteel posted proudly on Gab that she was “officially an American State National,” meaning she no longer was beholden to the U.S. government. She touted the supposed benefits of becoming an “American state national,” such as freedom from paying federal taxes to getting to “vote as a delegate, which has the power of four votes,” in an appearance on The Conservative Daily Podcast, hosted by Joe Oltmann and Max McGuire.

She said she had been introduced to these ideas by Lawrence, who ran for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania in 2018. Vandersteel indicated that Lawrence was radicalized afterward through his contacts with David Straight, a sovereign citizen activist who also promoted QAnon theories. Vandersteel claimed that Straight was a “commissioner on President Trump’s child sex-trafficking commission.”

ADL analyst Mark Pitcavage explained Lawrence’s rant on Twitter, noting that “redemption theory” originated with a sovereign-citizen guru named Roger Elvick back in 1999, and it became widespread within the movement.

“Basic redemption theory is something like this: In 1933, the US went off the gold standard and could therefore no longer pay its debts to the international bankers. To get around this, the government turned humans into collateral by converting birth certificates into stock,” he wrote. “They did this in part by creating fictional duplicates of every person (dubbed ‘strawmen’). You can tell when a document refers to the straw man instead of the flesh and blood person because the name will be in all caps, not upper and lower case.”

He also noted that much of the talk is devoted to explaining the sovereign-citizen belief that the conspiracy which infiltrated and subverted and replaced the original, legitimate government with a de facto tyrannical government had done so by replacing constitutional law with inferior “maritime” or “admiralty” law.

“Finally,” he noted, “the Satanic references thrown in there are derived from QAnon and presumably designed to make these theories more palatable to QAnoners.”

With the size of Lawrence’s audiences now, and the regularity and breadth of “American State Nationalist” training sessions, the ADL issued January warning: “Given the flexibility of the sovereign citizen movement and its pseudo-legal tactics, it is quite possible that increasing numbers of QAnon adherents will find sovereign citizen ideas attractive in the future.” That seems more than prescient. It may, in fact, prove to be understated.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Southern Poverty Law Center: The Sovereign Citizen Takeover Of St. Marie, Montana

Southern Poverty Law Center: The Sovereign Citizen Takeover Of St. Marie, Montana

The Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupation finally came to an end just over a week ago, when the remaining holdouts of Ammon Bundy’s armed gang turned themselves in to law enforcement. But the occupation was not the first instance of a sovereign citizen takeover, according to an annual report released by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In the same remote corner of the American West, the town of St. Marie, Montana was taken over by sovereign citizens in 2013 using state tax laws to buy up abandoned properties.

These sovereign citizens are led by Terry Lee Brauner, according to a feature written as part of the non-profit legal advocacy group’s report, who accused the government of letting the land around St. Marie go to waste. Just like the Oregon occupiers, Brauner was upset that he cannot use public land, located near North Dakota’s Bakken shale oil field, for his own private gain.

“They don’t want to see any development,” he said. “They have cost the county and state of Montana over $10 million in lost property tax revenues because they stop every movement of guys like me coming in here to develop the place.”

He arrived to the community of 264 — located 20 miles from the nearest sizable inhabitation — with a pair of accomplices in 2012, claiming to represent Washington-based DTM Enterprises and looking to buy up property. After several aborted attempts to rehabilitate St. Marie, which was built in the ’60s as a base for Strategic Air Command bombers, Brauner bought up abandoned properties all over town, using a state tax law that prevented the sale of abandoned homes until the last legal owners paid the taxes they owed, or found someone who was willing to.

With the shale oil boom in neighboring North Dakota, Brauner predicted that the boom was heading in St. Marie’s direction. “We come in there as businessmen, just regular, ordinary businessmen, with a million dollars in our pocket,” he said. “We assumed that the oil boom was going to come all the way over.”

While he awaited for the arrival of a black gold rush, signs with abrasive legalese began popping across town:

“NO TRESPASS,” the posters warned. “YOU ARE HEREBY NOTIFIED, THAT THE OWNER OR TENANT OF THIS PROPERTY REQUIRES ALL PUBLIC OFFICIALS, AGENTS, OR PERSON(S) TO ABIDE BY ‘THE SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND,’ THE CONSTITUTION FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND THE RATIFIED AMENDMENTS THERETO. … ALLEGED ZONING OR CODE NON- COMPLIANCES DO NOT ESTABLISH CONSTITUTIONAL REASONS FOR ENTERING THIS PROPERTY. VIOLATORS WILL BE TREATED AS INTRUDERS.”

The sovereign citizen movement is an odd one in the American political scene. In an short but exhaustive explanation of the movement, the Southern Poverty Law Center states that their ideology stems from a conspiratorial theory that the common law legal system established just after independence was secretly replaced by an admiralty law.

They believe that admiralty law condemns them to being slaves, while under common law they are freemen. They also believe that, as a result of the 14th Amendment, black Americans are not freemen, as their citizenship was given to them via constitutional amendment. But even within the movement, adherents aren’t sure when or which nefarious, unidentified forces replaced common law with admiralty law. Some say it occurred during the Civil War, others say it took place when the United States moved off the Gold Standard in 1933 — when, presumably, American citizens began to be used as collateral, rather than gold.

Brauner has had numerous run-ins with the government that reveal his sovereign ideology. In 1991, he battled with the IRS over the $1 million in owed taxes. More recently, he spent a couple weeks in jail and had to pay an $800 fine for driving without a license, because the application form required that he affirmatively answer whether or not he was a U.S. citizen. In 2013, he sent a rambling 25 page explanation to local law enforcement officials explaining why he was opposed to having to get a license.

Local residents were worried about the presence of Brauner and his sovereign citizen comrades. “Researching them,” said Pat Kelly, a former Air Force officer, “you find that they’re big in the [sovereign] movement.” Kelly attempted to build a retirement community for military veterans during the 80s by buying up hundreds of homes, but the effort failed. And with the arrival of Brauner and his millions, Kelly lost 371 of the homes he owned to Brauner, who paid nearly $200,00 in back taxes.

But in 2015, the Bakken field’s expansion was halted by the collapse of oil prices. “It got within 50 miles of [St. Marie] and stopped,” Brauner said. With the contraction of the oil industry in the Bakken field, it was unclear what the sovereign citizen was going to do with the town he bought at the height of the shale oil boom.

Meanwhile, Kelly sounded the alarm in an opinion piece in the Glasgow Courier. “I [heard] that a member of DTM said he plans on teaching the sovereign citizen theory at St. Marie,” he said. “I believe everyone needs to be aware of what I have written and submit here for publication.”

Endorse This: A Texas Cop You’ll Like

Endorse This: A Texas Cop You’ll Like

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What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? Or in this case, what happens during a routine traffic stop when a Texas police officer comes face to face with a “sovereign citizen” — a member of a right-wing fringe movement that denies the government holds any authority over them.

Click above to watch as the “sovereign” man repeatedly challenges the cop’s authority — refusing to even show any identification. But nothing — not even the car window he wouldn’t open — can shield him from the full force of the law.

Video via Southern Poverty Law Center.

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Florida Became ‘Hotbed’ For Sovereign Citizens, Called Domestic Terrorists By FBI

Florida Became ‘Hotbed’ For Sovereign Citizens, Called Domestic Terrorists By FBI

By Henry Pierson Curtis, Orlando Sentinel (TNS)

ORLANDO, Fla. — Joseph Paffen died with a 9-mm Smith & Wesson pistol in his hand.

His empty shoulder holster had two magazines holding 34 bullets.

A pack on his belt held four more magazines with 68 bullets.

Paffen, 46, who called himself a sovereign citizen, was killed Feb. 8 in a gun battle with Orange County deputies outside a supermarket in Orlando.

Paffen’s death is the latest deadly confrontation between a sovereign citizen and U.S. law enforcement, according to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office.

A day after the shooting, Sheriff Jerry Demings said Paffen “fancied himself a sovereign citizen … whatever that means to him.”

The FBI identifies sovereign citizens as domestic terrorists who do not recognize the authority of state and federal governments, or the court system. They create their own driver’s licenses and other documents. This has led to frequent confrontations with law-enforcement officials.

Over the past decade, more than a dozen police officers and members of the anti-government movement have died nationwide in gun battles.

“That’s why every Orange County deputy is trained in recognizing sovereign citizens,” said Deputy Chief Brett Meade of the University of Central Florida Police Department. “From a law-enforcement perspective we have to treat every sovereign the same because we don’t know their level of commitment. … It’s an officer safety issue.”

Meade helped design the training program when he headed the sheriff’s Intelligence Unit that investigates hate and organized crime groups. The training program is credited with the recent response by deputies that may have saved their lives during the shootout with Paffen.

At about 5 p.m. on Feb. 8, Paffen’s ex-girlfriend called 911 saying he had violated a protection order by demanding to see her outside the supermarket.

The woman identified Paffen as well-armed and violent, according to records and interviews. When Paffen’s name was entered into the agency’s computer system, it responded with a warning that he belonged to the violent sovereign citizen movement, according to interviews with the sheriff’s office.

Using extra precaution, the sheriff’s office sent seven deputies to the supermarket, including four in an SUV, instead of one or two for a more routine call, according to interviews.

Paffen opened fire when the SUV entered the parking lot, wounding one deputy in the leg and injuring a second deputy with flying glass. Three deputies returned fire, killing him, according to the sheriff’s office.

Three weeks earlier, Paffen was accused of using a baseball bat to break the left arm and jaw of his ex-girlfriend’s husband, according to the protection order.

“He is also very angry with the government (and) has stockpiles of guns, ammunition food, water, medications and first-aid items,” she wrote in late January for her protection order. “I’m in fear of what he will do next ’cause he has made statements that he could take on the entire police force, SWAT or any other law enforcement (and) that he will kill.”

Last year, a study on what U.S. police officers consider their greatest threat identified sovereign citizens first among 18 extremist groups. Islamic extremists ranked second, according to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.

Sovereign Citizens’ ideological roots stem from the early 1970s when anti-government movements started what became known as “paper terrorism” by filing lawsuits and liens without merit against public officials. That spread with the early 1980s recession and farm crisis.

And by the 1990s, the St. Petersburg-Tampa-Orlando corridor became a “hotbed” for the sovereign citizen movement, according to Mark Pitcavage, director of research for the Anti-Defamation League.

The earliest ambush of a police officer linked to sovereign citizens involved an Orlando couple, George Sibley Jr. and Linda Lyon-Block, who gunned down an Alabama police officer in 1993 after fleeing criminal charges in Florida, Pitcavage said.

In a 1993 letter to the Orlando Sentinel, Sibley and Lyon-Block wrote they fled with her 9-year-old son to avoid being tried by evil judges in a “fraudulent and unconstitutional court… We will not live as slaves, but would rather die as free Americans.”

Both were executed in Alabama for the murder of Opelika Police Sgt. Roger Motley.

Much remains unknown about Paffen’s life and beliefs.

Pitcavage said it’s possible Paffen could have been a follower of various Patriot Movement groups including tax protesters, constitutionalists and militia members. Such groups spread rapidly after 2007 with the foreclosure crisis and recession, he said.

Recently obtained records do show one thing about Paffen: He was never far from firearms.

A master machinist who worked in Brevard County and was known as “Joey,” Paffen claimed he was a former member of an elite U.S. Army Ranger regiment. That could not be confirmed this past week.

His interactions with Florida law enforcement began in 1990 when he was charged with burglary and grand theft and escalated by 1995 to convictions for fleeing from police and carrying a concealed weapon in Brevard County.

After that he frequently went armed, records show.

Records show Paffen was arrested in 2007 for several traffic violations by an Orange County deputy after being stopped for blocking an intersection and having an expired temporary tag on his vehicle. At the time of the traffic stop, Paffen had in his possession two pistols, 45 rounds of 9 mm and two rounds of .22-caliber ammunition.

By 2010, the first statewide advisory warning Florida police officers about Paffen was released.

On Aug. 10 of that year, Paffen was stopped by the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department while driving a motorcycle without a license. He had a backpack with a loaded 9 mm pistol, eight loaded 15-shot magazines and three sheath knives, records show.

In February 2014, a verbal encounter between Paffen and an Orange County deputy sheriff prompted the agency’s Intelligence Unit to classify him as a sovereign citizen, spokesman Capt. Angelo Nieves said. What Paffen said has not been disclosed but he was not arrested.

By then, Paffen was living at the Ventura Country Club, a gated community with 24-hour security in south Orlando.

On Oct. 27, 2014, he was stopped by Palm Bay police for traffic violations in southern Brevard County that led to the most recent officer-safety advisory before his death.

Paffen worked nearby at Diamond Precision Machine and was pulled over for driving with a suspended license after failing to use his turn signal and driving 49 mph in a 45-mph zone.

When asked if he had any guns in his pickup, Paffen said there was one in his backpack but none on him. After Paffen was told to get out of the truck, a second Palm Bay police officer noticed a small pistol in his right rear pants pocket while he held his right hand inches away, records show. The cops grabbed Paffen and handcuffed him.

The pistol turned out to be a cocked 9 mm Sig Sauer with six cartridges. He had three more loaded magazines in his other pockets, records show. The backpack contained a .45-caliber Kimber pistol with 11 magazines and 145 cartridges, records show. A loaded AR-15 assault rifle was found within reach of the driver’s seat along with 32 extra magazines and about 1,100 cartridges, records show. And police found a handcuff key in his wallet.

Paffen told police he forgot about the palm-size pistol and magazines in his pockets. He was charged with carrying a concealed weapon and driving with a suspended license and his pickup was seized for civil forfeiture. The case was pending when Paffen died.

Photo: UCF Deputy Police Chief Brett Meade describes the Sovereign Citizen, an anti-government group that remains active in Florida and across the U.S. (Joshua Cruey/Orlando Sentinel/TNS)