OPCA members. Perhaps as many as 500,000
tax protesters fight with the Internal Revenue
Service over payment issues, but by no means
are all of them related to extremist, violent
antigovernment OPCA litigants (Sovereign
Citizens Movement, 2013, p. 2).
Second, the Freemen-on-the-Land movement is
“strongly antigovernment, and has libertarian
and right-wing overtones. Christian rhetoric is
common” (Rooke, 2012, para. 171), and
(according to Rooke) it is a Canadian creation
that “spread to other common-law jurisdictions,”
which include the United Kingdom, Australia,
and New Zealand” (para. 173). Adherents
believe that “they can ‘opt out’ of societal
obligations and do as they like” (para. 174).
Many claim that “they have an unrestricted right
to possess and use firearms” (para. 175 see
O’Flanagan, 2012) and the Canadians
…parallel the American Sovereign Man
community. Both engage in a broad
range of OPCA activities directed
towards almost any government or
social obligation. Both habitually use
‘fee schedules’, and advance claims and
liens against state, police, and court
actors. Many apply the ‘everything is a
contract’ approach and so are extremely
uncooperative in and out of court.
(Rooke, 2012, para. 175)
“Fee schedules” are similar to fines that
Freemen and others attempt to impose upon
“state, government, and court actors” if “a
certain legal procedure or result occurs, or law
enforcement personnel engage in certain
conduct” (Rooke, 2012, para. 505). Claims that
“everything is a contract” refer to the argument
that an OPCA litigant may use, which claims
that “he or she has no obligation unless the
litigant has explicitly formed a contract for that
obligation” (para. 388).
Third, the “Sovereign Men/Sovereign Citizen
movement is the chief U.S. OPCA community,”
but they have appeared in the Canadian province
of Ontario (Rooke, 2012, para. 176). Sometimes
they call themselves “‘constitutionalists,’
‘freemen,’ and ‘state citizens’” (Anti-
Defamation League, 2010, p. 4). For these
people, governments are mere corporations
attempting to entangle them in unwanted
contracts (see Rooke, 2012, para. 178). They can
be violent (see Kent &Willey, 2013, pp. 320–
330), and they are noted for flooding courts with
their own pseudolegal documents—a technique
called “paper terrorism” (Fleishman, 2004
Rooke, 2012, para. 181 see Rosenfeld, 2011,
pp. 97–98).
Fourth, an Edmonton, Alberta religious group
called The Church of Ecumenical Redemption
International (CERI) claims a religious right to
use marijuana, and uses religious language to
justify its exemption from governmental and
court authority (Rooke, 2012, para. 183–186).
For example, in 2006, court officials had to drag
church member Karen Ponto out of a
Saskatchewan provincial court for refusing to
participate in a case involving two counts of her
violation of a child-custody order, after which
church members accused the judge of having
committed treason (Christian faith…, 2006).
Fifth and finally, some followers of the Moorish
Law community (in groups such as the Moorish
Nation,4 the United Mawshakh Nation of
Nuurs,5 and the Washitaw Nation6) exempt
themselves from governmental authority (Anti-
Defamation League, 2005, p. 8), and permit
themselves the right to engage in fraudulent
4 “The Moorish Nation is a collection of sovereign citizen
organizations, espousing the Islam religion, from the Moorish
Science Temple of America…. These organizations make up what
members refer to as the ‘Moorish Divine and National Movement
of the World.’ Members consider themselves a free people under
English ‘common law.’ Members of the Moorish Nation use this
perceived immunity to justify refusal to pay taxes, buy auto
insurance, and defraud banks” (ROCIC Special Research Report,
2009, p. 2).
5 I cannot find any information on this group other than a passing
reference to it that implies it borrows from “various New Age
philosophies” (Anti-Defamation League, 2005, p. 7).
6 The Washitaw Nation/Empire “emerged in Louisiana and Texas
in the mid-1990s and was most popular during that decade. It is
one of several sovereign citizen groups that are essentially Moorish
in nature but also claim ‘native’ status. Washitaw members claim
they are descendants of the ancient mound-builders of the
Mississippi Valley. Members have created license plates,
diplomatic identification cards and similar fictitious sovereign
citizen documents” (Anti-Defamation League, 2010, p. 23, see p.
28 on the fictitious tribe, the Little Shell Pembina Band of North
America, that both American and Canadian authorities shut down
for running a pyramid scheme). Sovereign Citizens exist within the
Asian, Hispanic, and native Hawaiian communities (Anti-
Defamation League, 2010, p. 11).
4 International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 6, 2015

financial and property schemes (see Calabrese,
2012). Essentially, these schemes promise
followers that they can obtain housing (and in
other instances, eliminate their debts or make
money) by following bogus programs and
procedures and filing meaningless documents
with courts. This community
…is a predominately American offshoot
of urban American black [M]uslim
churches such as the Nation of Islam.7
They claim that black [M]uslims who
self-identify as “Moors” are not subject
to state or court authority because they
are governed by separate law, or are the
original inhabitants of North and South
America. (Rooke, 2012, para. 190, 311)
In 2013, a media report indicated that a Moorish
national had moved into a large mansion in
Bethesda, Maryland (which is a suburb of
Washington, DC) that was for sale for nearly $6
million, using documents from the so-called
“Moorish National Republic” to substantiate his
actions. Eventually the Moorish national,
Lamont Butler/Lamont Maurice El, moved out,
but he was facing burglary, theft, and fraud
charges for his actions (Moorish Nationals,
2013).
Squatting is not limited to people in or related to
the Moorish movement—Freemen-on-the-Land
adherents sometimes do it, too. In February
2012, two people in North Bay, Ontario who had
become involved with the Freemen received
suspended sentences for moving into a house
that they did not own. Prospective buyers found
7 As worded, one might get the incorrect impression that the
original Moorish Nation Temple of Science (soon called the
Moorish Science Temple of America) was an offshoot of the
Nation of Islam/Black Muslims. It was not, although it began only
a few years before the Nation of Islam’s founding and held to
similar goals. “The Moorish Science Temple of America
(originally the Moorish Temple of Science) was organized in 1925
in Chicago and was legally incorporated in Illinois on November
29, 1926. Noble Drew Ali (born Timothy Drew, d. 1929) was the
founding prophet and ultimate authority of the movement…. In
Ali’s teachings, Islam became a means by which black Americans
could strip themselves of the stigma associated with the color of
their skin so that they could play a greater role in society”
(GhaneaBassiri, 2010, p. 218–219. Regarding the Black Muslims,
a man "known variously as David Ford, Wallace D. Fard, and Fard
Muhammad, went to Detroit in 1930 where he began to preach his
own version of Islam. This led to the formation of the Nation of
Islam” (GhaneaBassiri, 2010, p. 223).
the man and woman living in the property with
“no trespassing” signs on the outside, and the
couple had given “notice to ‘Agents and Officers
under Foreign Jurisdiction’ [that] claimed the
property and content were held under ‘claim of
right’ and warned of a $5,000 fee for entering”
(Calabrese, 2012, p. 1). By the time of the trial,
the couple had disassociated themselves from
the Freeman movement, with one of them
describing their indoctrination into the
movement as brainwashing (p. 1).
Origins of the Extremist Antigovernment
Movement
We have numerous studies of the
antigovernment movement from various social
agencies and legal writers what we now need
are ethnographies of members in more of these
movements, in which they speak about when
and why they became involved.8 Until we have
this additional information, discussions about
the origins of the OPCA antigovernment
movements remain speculative. What we can do,
however, is identify any preceding movements
whose doctrines and teachings resemble what
appears in the current situation.
The one preceding organization whose doctrines
bore striking resemblance to ones held by the
contemporary OPCA antigovernment groups is
the Posse Comitatus, founded in Portland,
Oregon in 1969 by Henry Beach, who had been
a member of the pro-Hitler Silver Shirts in the
United States during the 1930s (Stern, 1996,
p. 50). The doctrines that his group developed
combined antitaxation with government
takeover conspiracies, anti-Semitism, and a
virulent hatred of officials above a county level.
(The term posse comitatus meant “power to the
county,” so even federal park rangers were
illegal agents in Posse members’ eyes.) Posse
literature contained discussions about building a
scaffold for lynching government officials who
committed “unconstitutional” acts (p. 51). Many
members prepared for war through training
8 I have no illusions, however, about how difficult it may be to
obtain firsthand accounts. A graduate student of mine attempted to
solicit anonymous information from people who posted in an
online Freemen chat group, and only one person sent her detailed
information.
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