CITIZENS OF NO COUNTRY
by
John Brant
Worth Magazine
September 1996
Are taxes actually
voluntary? Are licenses
unnecessary? Is
democracy itself illegal?
Yes, yes, and hell yes,
say the people who call
themselves sovereign.
Since I still choose to be enslaved, Richard McDonald suggests,
then I might as well drive. Actually, McDonald doesn't use the
word "drive." Sovereign citizens don't "drive." They "travel"
in their "personal property." The distinction is crucial,
McDonald insists; all words are crucial. It is by paying
fervid, hairsplitting, unending attention to words, he explains,
that sovereign citizens lift free of contractual entanglements
with the slave masters. Entanglements, such as paying income
taxes. Contracts, like a driver's license and license plates.
"The sheriff's deputies all know my car, but I don't get stopped
much anymore," McDonald says amiably, rising from one of his
house's two computer terminals. All around, stacked floor-to-
ceiling in this quirky, rambling compound in the rugged canyons
near Simi Valley in an unincorporated area of Ventura County,
California, are thousands of law and reference books. They give
off a pleasantly musty odor, which overpowers competing essences
of house cat. Symphony music issues from speakers wired above
the labyrinthine floors. Live oaks grow through the middle of
rooms. Jeremiads against gun control glower from the knotty-pine
walls.
"It's been a long time since they tried to give me a ticket,"
McDonald goes on, "but sometimes they like to get up real close
behind me and let me know they're there." He grins foxily. "So,
we might as well use your car."
We leave the dank gloom of the main building, crossing a rickety
foot bridge over a bone-dry gully. McDonald turns back to the
house. "Back in the '40s, a religious cult built this place as
their church," he explains. "Abbott and Costello and other
Hollywood stars used to come out here." He gestures beyond the
house, to the baked vacant hills swelling south toward Topanga
Canyon. "Charles Manson did his thing on Sharon Tate the next
canyon over," he says with a glimmer of proprietary pride.
"Sometimes I look up from my desk and see a bobcat walking
through the yard. At night we get coyotes. It's a nice quiet
place to study and do research."
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From early morning to late at night, 12 to 14 hours a day,
McDonald carries on his research. Sitting at his computers,
studying the old law books he buys by the lot at auctions and
estate sales, pouring out his interpretations in cranky,
obsessively referenced essays that run over the Internet, he
works at promulgating the radical, confounding, darkly seductive
concept of sovereign citizenship. "Once in a great while, I'll
call Richard at two in the morning with a question and catch him
playing solitaire," says Jeffrey Thayer, a sovereign-citizenship
advocate in Austin, Texas. "But mostly he's always working."
Sovereign, or state, citizenship is the fastest-growing,
potentially most far-reaching, yet least publicized arm of the
antigovernment patriots' movement. Sovereigns share the central
tenets of militant groups such as the Montana Freemen -- that the
federal government is inherently, premeditatively, and
malevolently corrupt and waging veiled but remorseless war
against the American people -- but differ sharply in their means
of resistance. Although sovereigns vehemently oppose any form of
gun control, and most own guns themselves, they deny affiliation
with paramilitary groups. They insist they are dedicated to
peaceful achievement of their aims. State citizenship draws its
adherents mainly from the cities and suburbs and appeals to
increasing numbers of women and minorities. It is the vehicle by
which thousands of disaffected yet engaged Americans -- most of
whom are considerably removed from the gun-nut, white-
supremacist stereotype -- wage jihad against the federal mammon.
Seen through the sovereign lens, each service, regulation,
enfranchisement, law, or levy the government offers or exacts is
not a term of the social contract but a gambit by which the
government deviously seeks to extend its power and subjugate the
individual to its criminal will. The sovereign citizen combats
this by severing virtually all ties to government and disclaiming
virtually all sources of official documentation. The struggle is
carried out publicly, first through exhaustive study of the legal
foundations of the perceived tyranny and then through the
exploitation of every loophole and means of redress that that
legal system offers. Due process is played out to the furthest
possible extent. A massive, ongoing battle of paperwork is
joined with federal, state, and local officials.
Most often working under the guidance of an experienced sovereign
mentor, the fledgling state citizen attempts to renounce income
taxes, a driver's license and license plates, vehicle
registration, zip codes, a Social Security number, voter
registration, credit cards, insurance policies, interest-bearing
bank accounts, Federal Reserve notes, "usurious" investments in
securities, even the common phrasing of names and addresses --
any conceivable wedge the government might drive into one's life.
Once these bonds are carefully broken, the argument runs, the
sovereign's civic identity resembles that envisioned by the
framers of the Constitution. His "status" has become that of a
"state" rather than a "U.S." citizen.
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Sovereign citizens defend their actions by citing a mountain of
generally obscure, dated, tortuously interpreted legal statutes.
Even the most modestly educated sovereign becomes a rabid, self-
styled legal scholar, tapping out voluminous, arcanely phrased
writs on his word processor and downloading fellow state
citizens' documents from the Internet. The most articulate and
closely reasoned of this research arouses increasingly frequent
headaches among judges, assessors, and prosecuting attorneys.
The great bulk of it, however, gets dismissed by those same
officials as unintelligible rant.
"I don't know of any U.S. Supreme Court decision that's upheld
anything they stand by," says Jesse Choper, the Earl Warren
Professor of Public Law at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the
University of California at Berkeley. "The opening lines of the
14th Amendment make it very clear: All native-born or
naturalized persons are citizens both of the nation and of the
state where they reside. Sure, it's possible for them to
renounce citizenship. They can even try to move to another
country, if another country would have them. But ultimately, so
what? What are the consequences of what they do? Whether alien
or not, they're still subject to the laws of the country."
But to an astonishing degree, sovereigns defy what they consider
the vain warnings and unlawful judgments of the establishment.
Resourcefully employing computer networks, self-published
newsletters and magazines, shortwave radio, and community-access
cable television, they completely bypass traditional media and
political institutions. State citizens inhabit a sprawling,
intellectually crude, but technologically sophisticated
underground, where far right meets far left, radical
environmentalists find common ground with radical gun-rights
advocates, and New Age healers research conspiracy theories
alongside evangelical home schoolers.
No accurate head count of sovereign citizens is available, but
sovereigns claim that "jural societies" -- self-governing state-
citizen communities -- are now chartered in every county in
California. Active communities of a thousand or more are
thriving in the Los Angeles area and in New York City. "Common-
law" courts -- self-styled juries of sovereigns passing judgment
on what they hold to be criminal incursions by government on
their rights -- have been established in 30 states.
"In California alone, I'd say there are over 100,000 people
actively practicing sovereignty," says Jeffrey Thayer. "I've
presented the material to groups in just about every part of the
country -- every place from Hopi reservations, to Amish farms, to
Marin County in the suburbs of San Francisco. I've turned down
several offers to franchise my instruction. Over the last year,
it has grown beyond my wildest expectations."
"We get all kinds," agrees McDonald as we continue down Box
Canyon toward lunch in a Canoga Park coffee shop. Carefully
braking down the switchback curves, I darkly imagine McDonald's
"status" to be infectious; I keep tensely checking the rearview
mirror for sheriff's deputies. "We get bankers, we get dentists,
we get computer programmers, we get long-haul truck drivers." He
shrugs, gazing absently down to the vast, smog-smudged plain of
the northern San Fernando Valley. "Everybody knows something's
wrong."
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In a few hours, McDonald will board a plane for Dallas, where he
is to conduct a weekend introductory seminar on state
citizenship. He appears regularly on a local cable-TV program.
He hosts radio shows, writes magazine articles, debates publicly,
and conducts a booming Internet business. In the Los Angeles
area alone, hundreds of people have paid nearly $800 a head for
his state-citizenship kits, which consist of a copy of the state
constitution, hundreds of pages of laws and statutes deemed
pertinent to the sovereign cause, dozens of essays and
commentaries on those laws, and copies of the scores of forms and
letters that the aspiring sovereign must file with various
government agencies. Unlike Thayer, McDonald has fashioned a
kind of franchise for his instruction, establishing a network of
20 "state-citizen service centers" staffed by former students in
California, Arizona, Indiana, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania,
Washington State, and Wyoming.
A gnome like, 67-year-old ex-security guard who dropped out of
school in the eighth grade, an autodidact from Chicago whose
conversation is larded with "ya know?'s" and "ya follow me?'s,"
McDonald makes an emphatically unlikely godfather to any
movement. One telling measure of sovereign citizenship's appeal
is that so many workaday folks are willing to look beyond this
raffish teacher, his Adams Family house, and his difficult,
convoluted pedagogy; that so many mall-wandering, Net-surfing,
freeway-cruising Americans hunger to enlist in an arduous,
unremitting war of attrition against their own government.
"The powers that be are infinitely intelligent," McDonald says.
"They know the American people are incredibly gullible and
sheeplike, but they also know there's a limit to how far they'll
be pushed. They know exactly how hard to tighten the screws and
still leave room to let off the pressure. That's why the laws
are written the way they are: to give people who want it an
avenue of escape. But you have to make the effort. Ignorance is
no excuse. Everything they tell you in the courtroom is true,"
McDonald concludes with a smirking grin. "They just don't tell
you the whole truth."
Other than signing up with the Austin board of realtors and a
support group for macrobiotic vegetarians, Cathy Leman had never
been much of a joiner. Growing up in Louisiana, she'd always
felt a little alienated, a little distanced from what her friends
were doing. Not that she wasn't popular or couldn't blend in
when she wanted to. She was smart, she was attractive in a dark-
eyed, leggy way, and she'd never been afraid of standing on her
own. She just always liked playing the edges.
Hitting the wild early '70's in her wild early 20's, Leman moved
to Texas and took a job dancing at an exclusive gentlemen's club.
Her first week she made $1,100, with nothing withheld, nothing
declared. The IRS seemed as irrelevant to her as the Campfire
Girls, as distant as the day she'd collect Social Security. And
the job didn't scare her, not even that endless moment before the
music started, when she stood alone on the stage, sensing all
those men's eyes raking her. She always liked playing the edges.
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Before long she left the club, but she never got around to paying
her income taxes. She always meant to, but could never quite
pull it together. She moved a lot -- San Antonio, Dallas, then
Austin. She began to settle down. She got her real-estate
license and was doing okay, moving houses in the booming Texas
hill country, but she still never got to those 1040s. Each day,
she went to her mailbox with a wiggle of anxiety. But her luck
held. They hadn't caught up with her. She kept working, kept
vaguely worrying, kept looking around and thinking. Gradually,
her anxiety over taxes boiled into anger.
Something had gone terribly wrong with America. It was so
obvious her hard-earned dollars wouldn't go to pay for anything
real; they would just go to pay the interest on the debt
criminally created by the Federal Reserve, none of whose members
any American citizen had ever voted into power and which was
really run by a secret group of international bankers. Leman
understood how it worked. Back in her club days, she'd watched
the local cops roust the girls. She remembered the look in the
cops' eyes, knowing that these little dancers in G-strings were
making twice as much money as they ever would. So the cops had
helped themselves to the girls' cash. Who was going to stop
them? That was how it worked. If it was happening on the local
level, Leman thought, imagine what was going on in Washington.
She started looking into conspiracy theories. She read the
Constitution and saw how the nation was designed to be a republic
in which individual rights were always paramount and
representatives served at the will of the electorate -- not a
democracy, in which majority rule inevitably slid into mob rule
and demagogues found the masses easy to manipulate and subjugate.
Democracy had been foisted on America by the illuminati. The
illuminati were this secret society of European bankers who at
the time of the American Revolution saw that something powerful
and dangerous was happening in the colonies and sent this German,
Adam Weishaupt, over to subvert it .... She didn't sweat the
details, but it had all been fully researched and documented.
She learned how things really headed down the tubes around the
time of the Civil War. The 14th Amendment, supposedly giving the
former slaves citizenship, was really a setup, a power grab by
the federal government and the same international bankers -- the
Rothschilds, most prominently -- who'd been pulling the strings
all along. After the 14th Amendment, it was just one sorry
development after another: going off the gold standard, which
doomed the nation to eventual bankruptcy; the Federal Reserve
Act; income tax; the Social Security Act; the Buck Act; the
United Nations; gun control. They just kept tightening the
screws. It was all there in the books, if anybody looked up from
their TV's long enough to bother reading them.
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But what scared her the most was how they had everybody off doing
their little jobs in their little boxes. No one person had the
consciousness to see the whole picture. Why not? Because the
corporation, the state, wouldn't let them. People got into this
machine state of mind. No one really looked at one another
anymore; no one really listened. Everybody was caught in the
steel jaws of the machine.
Leman decided to dance clear of those jaws. She started
attending de-taxing meetings at Rocky Bruno's house. Rocky was a
kindred spirit, a New Age healer, into colonic irrigation. Rocky
had had a moment of clarity when a neighbor called child
protective services on him and his wife, saying they had withheld
medical treatment from their kid. There was nothing to the
charge. Rocky started holding meetings at his house. A lot of
good people came from all over the Austin area.
There were the Lusks, Tom and LaVerne, who were totally committed
to the movement. Tom was a veteran airline pilot, LaVerne a
flight attendant with 20 years' seniority. It would have been
easy for the Lusks to shut their eyes and pay their taxes, but
for years they'd refused to play along with the IRS. Now they
were facing foreclosure on their lovely home in northwest Austin.
"I've been to the Libertarian meetings," Tom would say in
disgust. "The Libertarians want to work within the system and
fix it. The only thing I want to do is take the system out
around back and shoot it."
And there were the Murrills: James Willard, Lucille, and their
grown son James Reginald. The group's only black family, they
were churchgoing, spiritual people. James Willard had worked for
the government all his life -- an Air Force career man, then the
post office and the prison system. He'd seen all the waste and
deceit firsthand. "Divide and conquer," James Willard would say.
"That's what they're always putting over on us. White against
black, man against woman, Democrat against Republican. Why is
that?, you wonder."
Leman could share her outrage at the system with these people.
They'd discuss principled, constructive ways to resist. They
were maybe a shade too straight and old-time religious for her
taste -- she was more into Native American-style spirituality --
but they were definitely on the beam as far as the government was
concerned. Most important, they weren't a bunch of macho jerks,
running around the hills with guns, talking about overthrowing
the government when they didn't even have the brains to complete
their own tax forms, let alone figure out that income taxes were
illegal in the first place.
The group would get together at Rocky's and talk, kick around
ideas. But it all might have just stayed talk, and they might
have all fragged off into their own little worlds, if Jeffrey
Thayer hadn't arrived in Austin in the summer of 1994.
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Thayer was one of the hottest speakers on the sovereign lecture
circuit. It was Thayer, a Dartmouth grad and former top gun
lawyer in L.A., who'd helped formulate the elaborate language
state citizens use to ward off the feds. "Jeffrey ben-Richard,
House of Thayer, Sui Juris, Ingenuitas juris et de jure" was how
his business card read. It might be flowery and stilted, he
explained, but in the shadowy world of laws and contracts, the
specific meaning of each word, each letter, was crucial. The so-
called normal phrasing of names and addresses and zip codes was
in fact a lure to suck unwitting U.S. citizens deeper into a web
of lies, deceit, control, and slavery. This language explicitly,
unequivocally declared your status to be sovereign. It served
notice to the authorities that you weren't buying into their word
games.
Thayer had also helped devise the idea of jural societies or
townships, chartered communities of sovereigns that were totally
self-governing and truly republican -- all decisions were made by
unanimous vote. In 1992, he'd left L.A. for Santa Fe, New
Mexico, where he'd organized one of the country's most successful
jural societies. Ultra-enlightened, cosmic-muffin Santa Fe was
the furthest possible psychic distance from Bo Gritz territory.
Now Thayer wanted to start a township in similarly progressive
Austin.
Leman and the group went to hear him talk. He looked like an
Austin guitar player, with his long gray-streaked brown hair tied
back in a neat ponytail, his well kept spade of a goatee, his hip
vest, and his easy manner. Thayer started out by attacking the
stereotypes. "We're not gun nuts," he said. "We're not white
supremacists. We're not woman-haters or -subjugators. We're not
evangelical Christians. We're not even America-firsters. Is a
black kid in South Africa sovereign? You bet he is. I'm not
interested in continuing something that isn't more inclusive.
I'm not interested in being angry or confrontational. I'm not
interested in running around waving guns. There are too many
people waving guns around already.
"Have you ever noticed that it's the men who are all gung ho on
state citizenship, who make a show of giving up their license
plates?" Thayer said. "But that it's usually the wife driving
home with a bunch of screaming kids who gets stopped by the
police and has the car towed out from under her?"
Talk like that persuaded Leman to spend $2,000 on Thayer's House
of Common Law course. He handed out a six-inch-thick stack of
laws to read, letters to write, forms to file. Thayer said that
if it looked difficult and imposing, good. It was imposing. It
was difficult and could even be dangerous, if you made a mistake,
if you left an opening for the government to come and get you.
Sovereign citizenship wasn't for everybody, he warned. He quoted
Carlos Castenada: You had to be impeccable. A warrior. You had
to follow a path with heart. You had to adopt a different state
of mind. You had to realize that you weren't disobeying any
laws. You were simply declaring that, through a careful reading
of the government's own codes and statutes, you had determined
that the laws duplicitously enslaving 14th Amendment, corporate,
U.S. citizens simply didn't apply to you. By rejecting a Social
Security card, voter registration, a driver's license, a marriage
license, a regular bank account, a credit card -- all of it --
you were declaring yourself beyond them.
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But it was frightening, the idea of cutting loose -- although
Leman, of course, was much less hooked in than others in the
group. She was single, had no kids, was not paying income taxes,
and had never vested herself in the Social Security scam. She
wasn't like the Lusks with their house and legal troubles, or
Rocky with his family, or the Murrills with their disability
pensions and advancing age. If they had the guts to do it, why
shouldn't she?
She found the sovereign life in general exhilarating and
interesting. It was like a knob had turned in her brain, and
every thing that had been murky and confusing suddenly snapped
into focus. Oklahoma City, for example. There was no question
in her mind that Oklahoma City was a giant, ghastly setup by the
feds. How else could you explain all the FBI and Treasury
agents' being "out of the office" that morning? It had all been
orchestrated to discredit the movement, to make the mainstream
think that they were all gun nuts. Leman still wasn't drawn
toward the militia, but the idea didn't intimidate her either.
She wasn't afraid of guns. She owned guns herself, a shotgun and
a pistol. If more people had guns, like in Switzerland, then
people would act better toward one another. They'd show more
respect.
So now, on a cold Friday evening in early spring, Leman sits in
an office-park conference room with Rocky and the Lusks and the
Murrills and Jeff Thayer and the other 20 members of the Austin
township. They've reached a crucial point in the community's
development: their first common-law jury trial. A common-law
jury, Thayer explains, is a rightful function of a free-standing
township. It's a jury of peers -- real peers, personal
acquaintances of the party involved, not the sullen, sad-sack
crew of distracted strangers that lawyers stacked in supposedly
legitimate courtrooms.
Their first case involves the Lusks. Over the past year, the
Lusks' legal problems have deepened. The IRS foreclosed on their
house and sold it at auction. They impounded Tom's car. These
actions were blatant crimes against the jural society's common
law, of course -- theft and trespassing, as clear as cable
reception or a baby's conscience. The IRS had no jurisdiction,
because the Lusks weren't U.S. citizens. They'd declared
themselves outside the federal district.
Of course, so had the Freemen in Montana. The Lusks were in the
same situation as those cowboys, really: rightfully occupying
property unlawfully foreclosed. Unlike the Freemen, however, the
Austin township wasn't going to seize TV cameras or frighten
reporters -- as much as those lying lackeys deserved it -- or
antagonize their neighbors. No, they were going to respond in a
principled manner, according to the Old Testament Mosaic law, in
the true spirit of the Constitution. They would use words as
weapons.
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For hours on end, the words flow. Computer engineers, yoga
teachers, a former attorney, a retired civil servant, a real-
estate agent all weighing and parsing and polishing and chiseling
the words, hammering out unanimously agreed upon republican
truths instead of coerced, diluted, democratic "justice." Leman,
characteristically, sits at the edge of the room, away from the
table, letting Thayer and the others do most of the talking.
Every now and then, she chips in with a bit of real-estate
expertise.
Break times come and go, and not until Rocky's kid comes in with
a pizza does Leman realize nobody's bothered with dinner. Now
they're discussing damages -- to be paid out by the criminal
government in troy ounces of gold, not the Monopoly money printed
by the Federal Reserve -- when suddenly Leman remembers her early
days as a sovereign, when she was still haunted by doubts about
the path she'd chosen.
For an instant, she even imagines how this trial might appear to
an outsider: a bunch of lunatics arguing about what Solomon
would've done if his house had been foreclosed on. Grown women
and men demanding with straight faces that the government own up
to its sins and pay for them in gold. Who are they trying to
kid? Some bought-and-paid-for judge would take one glance at
this writ they were slaving over, laugh, and toss it into the
trash. They might as well be home with the rest of the losers in
front of their V-chipped TV's.
What's going to happen to the Lusks? What's going to happen to
all of us?
But Thayer keeps taking them through the writ, word by word. "If
the judge refuses us, we'll just take it to the Court of
Appeals," he says quietly. "If Appellate won't hear us, we'll
take it to the Supreme Court. And if the Supreme Court refuses
to hear us, we'll just keep going. We'll go to the World Court
at the Hague, if we have to. We have the law on our side. We
will be heard."
Leman relaxes, letting herself fall back under the spell of the
words. For a fleeting moment, it's as if she were back at the
club, waiting to step onto the stage, sensing the eyes raking
her, pushing the edges, tasting pure freedom building into pure
energy, no one else to hang onto, no one else to blame.
A bitter, massive, mutual denial fuels the war between the
sovereigns and the government. Just as sovereign citizens refuse
to acknowledge the legitimacy of the federal government, so the
government refuses to acknowledge the sovereigns' very existence.
In the taxonomy of the IRS, for example, state citizens don't
rate their own category but are lumped in with the larger
classification of tax protesters. And tax protesters, IRS
spokesman Anthony Burke insists, raise barely a blip on the
agency's screen.
"Over and over, the courts have held that the tax protesters'
arguments are spurious and without merit," Burke says. "And
traditionally, tax protesters have represented a very small,
almost minuscule percentage of the tax gap -- the difference
between what taxpayers owe and what the service collects."
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When I describe the extent of the sovereign operations in Austin
and Los Angeles and how rapidly the movement appears to be
growing, Burke seems unimpressed. "You can lose perspective," he
cautions. "It even happens with our own agents sometimes. They
get wrapped up in an especially challenging case, and they come
running to tell us we've got to put together a task force to deal
with this huge, urgent, nationwide problem. But then they calm
down and examine the facts. They see that, when you take a
national perspective, as the service must, their case isn't
really such a huge problem after all."
Sovereigns respond to the government's seeming dismissal with
increasing boldness. In general, state citizens regard
government representatives less as bogeymen to be feared than as
symbols of a beleaguered, fraying, surprisingly ineffectual
empire. A rapidly widening gulf separates the sovereign island
from the establishment mainland. "One of my big challenges,"
says Steve Jones, a state citizen who works closely with Richard
McDonald in Los Angeles, "is not to be too condescending toward
people who, whether out of ignorance or fear, still choose to be
U.S. citizens."
This growing contempt, ironically, has led to a decline in what
has been state citizens' signature characteristic: paranoia.
Sovereigns, for instance, despise reporters nearly as much as
they do IRS auditors. They assume that mainstream journalists
serve as direct mouthpieces for the establishment and that if by
some miracle an unbiased story got written -- if a reporter told
"truth" -- it would never get published or broadcast. Yet,
throughout my travels in sovereign country, sources spoke with
unvarying candor about their flouting of the law. In dozens of
interviews, my credentials as a journalist were challenged only
once.
"I never lock my doors," Richard McDonald says. "Why should I?
I've got nothing to hide. Everything we're doing is perfectly
lawful. I'd say the same thing to you whether you're an
undercover agent or a reporter or someone who's really interested
in becoming a state citizen."
"We don't waste a lot of energy looking up in the sky for black
helicopters," agrees Alan Bird, a close associate of McDonald's
in Los Angeles County. "Personally, I've gotten away from
worrying about conspiracies or trying to puzzle out the big
picture. I don't know if we're in this mess due to people being
deliberately evil or if it's just been a matter of business as
usual, of people in power naturally wanting to perpetuate their
power. What difference does it make? I'm not concerned about how
well organized the cabal is. I'm just concerned about my own
response."
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Alan Bird is a 39-year-old husband and father of three young
children. He is crisply articulate and has a sharp, analytic
turn of mind. The rigidity in his character is softened by his
surfer's dirty-blond hair and the offhand ease of a longtime
Californian. In 1993, he abandoned a prosperous career in
mortgage banking to commit himself to the sovereign movement.
Bird graduated from Pepperdine University and worked in the
aerospace industry before moving into mortgage banking. He
married and started a family. All the while he felt a political
restlessness, a dissatisfaction that led him to study but
ultimately reject mainstream conservatism, the John Birch
Society, and the Libertarian Party. "I swore to myself if I ever
found a system of beliefs that answered all my questions, that
provided a legal basis for effective action, that I knew in my
heart to be true, then I would follow it completely, no matter
what the consequences," Bird says. "I've found that system in
state citizenship."
Bird began studying with Richard McDonald. He quickly became
fascinated by the intricate workings of the law and by McDonald's
rough-hewn but seemingly brilliant grasp of it. He even
developed a fondness for McDonald's ornery style. When Bird had
a question, McDonald would answer by throwing a law book at him
and snarling, "Here, look it up yourself!" Undaunted, Bird kept
grilling his mentor. He felt at times like a squirrel gathering
nuts. But the nuts, Bird soon became convinced, had sprouted
into a towering forest of deceit, coercion, and encroaching
enslavement.
Bird makes his specific stand on the most hallowed of Southern
California ground: the highway. In 1992, he mailed his driver's
license and plates back to the Department of Motor Vehicles. For
two years, he roamed the roads and freeways like a sovereign
Flying Dutchman, with a bill of sale displayed in the window of
his '65 Mustang in lieu of license plates. He says he was
stopped twice by the authorities but never ticketed or arrested.
Finally, in September 1994, Bird was driving in Ventura County.
In his rear view mirror, he watched a patrol car do a U-turn,
hustle up on his tail, and follow him for seven miles. Finally,
the siren blipped and the roof light began to spin.
"Sorry, I don't have one," Bird said when the deputy asked for
his license. "I sent it back to the DMV. Would you like to see
the documentation?"
The deputy smiled as he wrote out the citation. "No thanks." He
ripped off the ticket and handed it to Bird "Sign this, please."
"If I don't, will you take me to jail?"
The deputy's eyes flickered as he checked the angles of the
windows and the positioning of hands, trying to guess Bird's
intent. "If it comes to that, sir."
"Very well. I'll affix my seal to it" -- only unwitting United
States citizens "sign" documents, thereby surrendering their
rights -- "but I am only doing so under duress."
The deputy relaxed. "Tell it to the judge, sir."
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Bird, who had studied every California motor-vehicle law dating
from the turn of the century, did so. He argued that the state
required a Social Security number for an individual to be issued
a driver's license, but that the Social Security system was
voluntary. Therefore, if he declined a Social Security number
because of his political and religious convictions, it was a
legal impossibility for him to be penalized for not carrying a
driver's license. To his amazement and delight, the court
agreed. After a half-day trial, Ventura Municipal Court judge
Thomas Hutchins found Bird not guilty -- on grounds of
insufficient evidence -- of driving without a license, driving
without registration, and having no registration in his
possession. The acquittal made news throughout Southern
California and raised jubilation in state-citizen communities
nationwide.
"The district attorney tried to shrug it off, saying that an
inexperienced, overworked prosecutor got sandbagged and made a
technical error," says Bird proudly. "They wanted to contain the
damage by writing me off as a loose cannon, a guy with too much
time on his hands. They tried to trivialize what had happened.
But that prosecutor never proved I needed a license. The truth
was I simply argued my case better."
Four months later, Bird was again cited. This time he was
convicted of failing to display front and rear license plates,
and his car was impounded. Heartened by his earlier victory and
still flushed from facing down the prosecutor in his own
courtroom, Bird appealed the judgment. He lost again. He is
appealing to a higher court.
Alan Bird's existential leap against the Power seems in some ways
admirable; his dedication, high-mindedness, and rigor represents
whatever good sovereign citizenship might have to offer. But, at
the same time, he represents what's most pernicious and wildly
wrongheaded about the movement. Bird claims little interest in
conspiracies, for instance, when in fact his tacit faith in the
Big Evil informs all his actions. For without that evil -- the
existence of which can ultimately be neither proved nor disproved
-- Bird's resistance loses all honor and validity. He becomes
just another cranky citizen with a grievance, taking easy,
constitutionally guaranteed shots at a sprawling system deeply,
perhaps inherently, but not criminally flawed.
As with fundamentalist Christians whose love of God is rooted in
hatred of the devil, state citizens stake their salvation on the
presence of a shadow. And, as with many fundamentalists, the
sovereigns' image of hell is far more vivid than their conception
of heaven. State citizens spit out rapid, well-prepared ripostes
to every challenge I threw at their teachings. When I asked what
the world would look like if they prevailed, however, they turned
strangely tongue-tied. Some stammered platitudes about small
utopian communities in which untrammeled personal freedom would
be balanced by unending personal responsibility. They were
clearly relieved, however, when the conversation returned to the
abominations of government, against which they were pitted in a
grim yet glorious holy war. Hell seemed infinitely more
familiar, authentic, and interesting.
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Jared Held, a 42-year-old recording engineer and Internet
consultant in Studio City, California, tells a state-citizen
bedtime story.
A genially schizoid blend of music industry longhair and
practicing Mormon, Held claims not to have paid federal taxes
since 1974. The story starts with Held sitting in his apartment
one day in 1993, talking with a friend. Suddenly his door buzzer
sounds.
"I press the intercom, and it's officer so-and-so from the
Internal Revenue Service," recalls Held with a gleeful glint.
"My friend says, `I better go,' but I tell him, `No, no, it's
okay.' I say into the intercom, `Please state your business in
writing and mail it properly. I will read it and make a timely
and appropriate response.'
"A minute later, the buzzer rings again. I push the button.
`Mr. Held, I am here on extremely urgent IRS business, and it
would be very much within your best interest if you come down and
discuss it with me.' I say no again. But by now, my friend is
getting really uncomfortable and wants to leave.
"So we're walking downstairs, and there's this agent. The
building manager has buzzed him in. My friend leaves. The
agent's confident, he's coming on strong. I tell him I want to
tape-record our conversation. He says, `You have to notify us
ten days in advance if you want to tape-record our
conversation.'"
Held slaps his knees and rocks forward, laughing. "So, of
course, I answer, `How can I notify you ten days in advance if
you show up unannounced?' Then he changes his tack. `Is that
your Volvo parked in front?' I say, yes, that's my Volvo, but
it's not registered in my name. That quiets him down. Then I
start playing with him a little.
"'You've sworn to uphold and defend democracy, right?' The guy
puffs up his chest and says, yeah, sure, damn straight. And I
say, `Have you read the Constitution lately? Our form of
government is a republic, not a democracy. It looks like you've
been defending the wrong government.' The guy backed off after
that. Before he left, he told me that I'd be dealing with
another agent from then on. He said he was going to resign from
the service. I haven't heard a word from the IRS since."
A sovereign citizen could delightedly imagine the loutish evil
revenuer and Jared Held as Grasshopper. The evil man attacks,
and Grasshopper, the sovereign, uses nifty kung-fu moves to
induce the revenuer to defeat himself with his own dark energy.
Afterward, Grasshopper kindly and humorously instructs his
vanquished opponent. The revenuer goes away enlightened.
Grasshopper bows and walks back upstairs to his computer.
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A burdened, tax paying, fully licensed, and insured U.S. citizen
might envision a different script. In this version, the action
is ongoing. Jared Held is still living on borrowed -- more
accurately, stolen -- time. A better-prepared IRS agent simply
hasn't gotten around to him yet. The story ends not with
Grasshopper bowing and heading back up to his computer but with a
tax chiseler being led off in handcuffs, watching his Volvo
slowly rise on the tow-truck hook.
"Our government's gotten so big," says Gail Reese, deputy
secretary of taxation and revenue for the state of New Mexico,
"that if you decide you don't want to play along with it, you can
go for a long time before anybody catches on."
Reese has recently begun the protracted, delicate, and difficult
process of settling New Mexico's business with the Santa Fe
jural-society township. She explains that she's received a
respectful letter from the township requesting a "dialogue" with
her agency.
"Maybe the most sincere and ethical of these people really
consider themselves utopians, not so different from the Amish or
Quakers," she muses. "They picture themselves living out on the
frontier, taking care of themselves and each other, neither
expecting anything from the government nor owing it anything. A
nice picture. Except where's the frontier today? America used
to have all this room. We just don't have that much room
anymore."
Kristi Daniell, a 40-year-old telemarketing executive for a major
West Coast bank, drives up Box Canyon Road on a bright Sunday
morning in midwinter, bound for the weekly state citizens'
introductory meeting at Richard McDonald's house. The gleaming
flagships of the great retail chains are just opening for
business on Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Along the arroyos and dry
washes, soft-bellied middle-aged men in blinding shades of Lycra
pedal thousand-dollar mountain bikes. High above, hawks drift
the thermals, and coyotes drowse on ridgelines in the early sun.
Daniell drives distractedly, trying to follow the cryptic
directions she scribbled down the day before. Follow Box Canyon
Road to the carcass of the old school bus parked on the right
....
There's the bus, and there's the rutted dirt road, the oak trees
tucked into a cleavage between steep brown bluffs. A long, low
stone-and-beam building pokes out from the trees. Daniell's
throat tightens as she climbs out of her car. The enormity of
what she's considering -- giving up the taxes, the licenses, the
Social Security, the whole tangled nest of plastic and
accreditation and identification that she knows is the problem,
but from which she also draws such comfort, such deep American
confidence that everything ultimately will be all right --
suddenly strikes.
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In her mind's eye, she jumps back into her car, cranks into
reverse, and fishtails away from this whole creepy scene.
Tomorrow morning it'll all just be a funny story she can tell her
friends at the office.
Daniell shakes off the vision and continues walking tentatively
across the dry creek bed to the spooky sign -- YOU ARE ENTERING A
SACRED PLACE -- and into the, well, compound. She keeps walking
because everything isn't all right. Because the Stars and
Stripes that John Wayne died for in all those late shows flies,
in fact, over a land of shadows.
Daniell enters the dark book-lined house to meet Citizen Richard
J. McDonald, Sui Juris -- to take her first free, halting steps
toward certainty and sovereignty.
# # #
[This essay was sent by Richard McDonald to Paul Andrew
Mitchell, who edited the essay for punctuation and spelling by
carefully comparing the electronic version with the hard-copy
original as found in Worth magazine, September 1996 issue.
Citizens of No Country:
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# # #
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