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there are two classes of citizens within the United States. One class is sovereign or “de jure” citizens or
“original citizens of the states.” The second class, first created by the Fourteenth Amendment, is federal
or U.S. citizens. Sovereign citizens enjoy all the rights of the constitution, but federal citizens do not.
Federal citizens, the sovereigns believe, have bargained away their freedoms by accepting benefits from
the United States government. Much of what sovereigns do is intended to rescind or denounce that
federal citizenship and reclaim their common law sovereign citizen status with all its rights. That helps
explain why they refuse to get drivers’ licenses or register vehicles, reject Social Security, avoid using ZIP
codes, and may not pay taxes, because those are all forms of contracting with the government and
accepting the lesser class of federal citizenship.
Reconstruction history is important to many sovereign citizens. Their view is that the
governments established in southern states after the Civil War were imposed against the will of and
without the consent of the citizens and are not lawful. These sovereigns distinguish between the original
state, of which they are citizens, and the false and illegitimate state that occupies the same territory.
And, as already mentioned, they view the Fourteenth Amendment as the source of the new separate
class of federal citizenship.
A second significant tenet for sovereign citizens, blending with the distinction between
sovereign and federal citizens, is that when the federal government abandoned the gold standard in the
1930s it substituted its citizens as collateral for the country’s debts by pledging each citizen’s future
earnings to foreign investors. As with all other aspects of sovereign ideology, the details can vary
considerably, but generally the explanation for how this happens is that a secret United States Treasury
account is set up for each citizen at birth, some large sum of money placed in it or pledged to it, ranging
from hundreds of thousands of dollars — $630,000 is a common number — to millions depending on
which sovereign citizen group’s version you hear. As a consequence, they say, two separate identities
are created. The corporate shell account, the one pledged as security, is the “strawman” to which
sovereign citizens refer and, in their view, is separate and distinct from their true flesh and blood
identity.
In sovereign citizens’ view, the government-controlled and enslaved strawman is evidenced by
documents showing the person’s name in all capital letters. Birth certificates, social security cards,
driver’s licenses, tax forms, etc., therefore, represent only the shell corporate identity, the strawman,
because they are written in all caps.
A sovereign citizen avoids inadvertent subjection to this false government, and avoids being
mistaken for a federal citizen, by signing documents in a certain manner — for example, by identifying
oneself as “John Doe, Executive Trustee for the Private Contract Trust known as JOHN DOE.” Or by
identifying oneself as executor for the strawman, or using a copyright symbol with the name, or saying
“John Doe, Secured Party, Authorized Representative, Attorney-in-Fact in behalf of JOHN DOE ©,” or
interspersing colons or hyphens or other odd punctuation in the name, or using the prefix “Noble” or
the suffix “Bey” or “El Bey” with one’s name. And so on.
To further avoid inadvertent submission to the false government, the sovereign citizen may use
red ink, add thumbprints to documents, put the zip code in brackets or say “near” as part of the address.
There are innumerable varieties of this queer view of the law, but all are intended by the sovereign