of certainty, one can say that their numbers have
grown in recent years, and an organization that
monitors them indicates that 50 extremist anti-
American government groups operated in 2008,
and then nearly 200 in 2010 (2010, p. 2).
Another monitoring group estimates that
100,000 “hard core” American sovereigns exist,
with another 200,000 people showing various
levels of involvement (Sovereign Citizens
Movement, 2013, p. 2). No general membership
figures exist for Canada, but a late 2010
Facebook page (which only is a crude indicator
of membership or interest) for one of the
antigovernment groups, the Freemen, listed
more than 2,000 members (Bell, 2010). A
growing body of research exists about these
movements in the United States and Canada
(see, for example, State Justice Institute, 1999)
less information is available about them in other
parts of the English-speaking world.
I provide an overview of the international
antigovernment movements related to the
Freemen and Sovereign Citizens, identifying key
arguments and tactics that adherents use
(especially in the United States and Canada).
Taking advantage of a growing body of articles,
reports, and court cases, I identify the probable
origins of the North American Freemen- and
Sovereign Citizen-related movements in the
hostility toward government that appeared in the
American Midwest in the late 1960s. This
hostility grew during the American farmers’
crash of the 1980s and the corresponding jump
in interest rates in the United States and Canada
in that same decade. Subsequent financial crises
involving mortgages and banking have occurred
in the closing years of the past century and the
opening ones of this century, any one of which
likely could have delegitimized government and
banks in the eyes of persons who felt victimized
by national and international political and
financial policies. Seen as victims of national
and international policies that developed within
poorly regulated capitalism, some members have
invented forms of resistance that have parallels
among relatively powerless peoples in various
cultures and historical periods who have
opposed social groups whom they perceived to
be their oppressors. Continuing in this vein, I
suggest that recent farm crises in the United
Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia might
contribute to the creation of extremist
antigovernment citizens in these countries. I
conclude with reflections upon antigovernment
extremism’s social, political, and economic
impact on the societies that they oppose. I
mention, however, a competing claim for these
movements’ origins, which lies in the
disordered, paranoid, or mentally ill minds of
people who project the causes of their own life
difficulties onto the state and its authorities.
A Classification of the Different
Antigovernment Movements
A partial, but useful, classification of some
extremist antigovernment groups appears in a
recent court decision written by a judge in
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada for a divorce and
matrimonial-property case in which the
respondent participated in one or more of the
groups. Focusing on the court implications of
these groups, Associate Chief Justice J. D.
Rooke of the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta
called the adherents to the groups “Organized
Pseudolegal Commercial Argument (OPCA)
Litigants” (Rooke, 2012, para. 1 see Cardwell,
2013). Rooke’s fivefold classification of the
different types of litigants provides a platform
from which to identify and discuss a select range
of antigovernmental beliefs and behaviors
associated with these people but we must keep
in mind that no belief or behavior is exclusive to
a particular litigant type. Particular adherents
move in and out of the fivefold litigant typology.
First, the “detaxers … focused almost entirely
on avoiding income tax obligations” (Rooke,
2012, para. 169). Politically, they came from
both left-wing and right-wing backgrounds,
(para. 170), and often were professionals or
business people who had significant incomes
(para. 171). The often-higher economic income
of many detaxers contrasts with the generally
“lower income and/or occupational and
employment context[s]” of people in the other
groups (para. 171).
In America, a history of tax resistance traces
back at least as far as Shays’ Rebellion in the
winter of 1786–1787, when poor farmers in the
western part of Massachusetts blocked county
courts from meeting (and hence, from
2 International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 6, 2015

collecting) debts, and then rose in open rebellion
(which the Massachusetts militia suppressed [see
Szatmary, 1980]). In the contemporary period,
[d]uring the 1970s, stagnant incomes,
resentment against poor and minorities
who received welfare, and inflation-
induced “bracket creep” that drove up
tax rates sharpened this traditional
[antitax] sentiment. By 1980, the
proportion of Americans who viewed
their federal income taxes as “too high”
reached a record level. In addition,
Social Security taxes and state and local
income and property taxes rose sharply
during the 1970s. Growing antitax
sentiment among Americans of modest
means dovetailed with the antitax beliefs
of supply siders and other economic
conservatives. The “tax revolt” that
began in California in 1978 put the
antitax agenda on the front burner of
American politics. (Schaller, 2007, p.
42)
Tax resistance became a movement unto itself,
but it also blended into the ideologies of groups
within the broader antigovernment movement.
Although other forms of the OPCA movement
are more prone to violence, detaxers committed
a vicious attack against a California court clerk
in the mid-1990s for refusing to accept self-
made court documents that numerous
antigovernment groups (especially Sovereign
Citizens) were submitting to courts. In 1997, the
court clerk, Karen Mathews, wrote about the
attack against her in a letter to The New York
Times:
“Lady, you would be so easy to kill.”
More than three years later, these words
still haunt me. My assailant growled this
threat as I lay in the darkness on the
floor of my garage, stunned and dazed
from being beaten, kicked and knifed.
Then he put a gun to my head and dry-
fired it several times.
This was no random attack or botched
burglary. The man who all but killed me
was a member of a disciplined
organization with a specific mission.
And bizarre as it may seem, I was a
target because of my job. I am the
elected clerk-recorder of Stanislaus
County in central California, a sleepy-
sounding title until paramilitary groups
discovered that harassing and
intimidating officials like me is a way to
attack the basic workings of
government. One of their tactics is to try
to file liens against the property of
Internal Revenue Service employees and
other officials they regard as the enemy.
In California alone, clerk-recorders in
49 of the state’s 58 counties have
reported incidents ranging from fist-
pounding intimidation to threats of
physical harm. This is part of a guerrilla
war against democracy going on far
below the level of an Oklahoma City
bombing. I often felt while following the
trial of Timothy McVeigh that the
events are related in spirit if not in fact.
It is difficult to comprehend or convey
the anger and crazy sense of misguided
patriotism embraced by these people.
For example, after I refused to record
one man’s illegal “common law” lien,
he told me, “You are guilty of treason.”
He then snarled, “I am a sovereign
citizen of the Republic of California, not
the corporate United States, and the laws
you enforce restrict my God-given
rights.”
I find it hard to discuss some of the
details of what happened to me. But I
feel an anger that won’t go away, not
only against the self-styled patriots who
harass us, but also against those who
express or tolerate a certain “populist”
support for anti-government extremism
(Mathews, 1997 reprinted 2010).
Nine persons, all of whom were associates or
members of a Christian-sounding radical
detaxing group called the Juris Christian
Assembly, were convicted of assaulting
Mathews and committing related crimes (Trott,
1999 see Hallissy, 1995). Soon we shall see that
the language and self-identification that
Mathews’s attacker used is common among
International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 6, 2015 3