The man allegedly refused to pull over
and claimed he’s a sovereign citizen.
They don’t recognize the government’s authority.
I don’t know what the hell law book you’re reading, man,
but it doesn’t apply to me.
-I’m going in. -No, you’re not going in.
Don’t touch me!
Why have your party allowed our Magna Carta,
our rights, our common law, to be ignored?
Resist! Defy! Do not comply!
My fellow Canadians,
I address you today as your queen,
commander in chief,
and head of government.
That’s not actually the queen of Canada.
In fact, she’s a woman named Romana Didulo,
a YouTuber and minor internet celebrity
who’s declared herself queen.
This might seem like just more delusional nonsense on the internet.
But Didulo has over 70,000 followers.
More worryingly, she’s tried to incite them into violence
against anyone facilitating COVID vaccinations for children.
But she’s not just some lone eccentric with a webcam.
She’s part of a fringe ideology
known as the sovereign citizen movement,
which has surged during the pandemic.
All of the evidence to prove that coronavirus
is an absolute pandemic hoax,
that you are operating illegally,
and you are committing crimes against humanity.
Their bizarre anti-government conspiracy theories
have spread like wildfire.
Sovereign citizens believe that they are above the law,
that their ideology is the key to fighting against
the so-called COVID plandemic,
and who are showing a dangerous potential for violence.
[DECADE OF HATE]
So we’re here at Edinburgh Castle. We’re taking our power back today.
We have seized the building.
We are here. We are peaceful. We are sovereign people.
In August 2021, a group of anti-lockdown protesters
stormed Edinburgh Castle in Scotland,
shouting that they were seizing the castle to fight tyranny
and restore the rule of law.
They claimed their justification for this was
article 61 of Magna Carta.
That’s a 13th-century legal document
that guaranteed the rights of a specific group of 25 English barons
to seek redress from the king
if they felt they were being governed unjustly.
This belongs to the people.
It’s in article 61 of the Magna Carta.
Article 61 itself was removed from the Magna Carta within a year.
And although Magna Carta
is a crucial part of how English law developed,
it’s not some magical document that supersedes laws of ownership,
taxation, or public order.
There’s only two things the government fears:
article 61 and unity of the people.
It seems like it’s almost a deliberate misreading
of the Magna Carta from history,
but also in the US of the rules around
the 1868 legislation as well.
This is very much the essence of sovereign citizen ideology.
They take random bits of legal and historical jargon
and spin it into an argument where,
by simply declaring themselves sovereign,
they supposedly become above the law,
operating under an entirely different set of rules to everyone else.
Sovereign citizens believe that they,
not judges, juries, or law enforcement,
get to decide which laws to follow and which to ignore.
And they don’t think they should have to pay taxes.
Based on these fraudulent arguments,
sovereign citizens try to claim the government is illegitimate
and insist that they themselves are the true source of authority,
often even issuing their own ID documents.
There’s everything you need here
to understand that I don’t need a license, registration,
or any documentation to travel from point A to point B.
It is a right that has been preserved by
the Supreme Court and the law of the land.
Pre-pandemic, it was quite a quaint conspiracy movement.
So it was a lot of people trying to, you know,
use this to get out of parking tickets, speeding fines.
What was once an obscure ideology
has become supercharged during the pandemic,
finding new followers in the conspiracy-obsessed
anti-lockdown movements that believe that coronavirus
is some kind of plot against the people.
The pandemic and COVID accelerated this movement
not because of the pandemic per se
but because of the government mandates
that came along with the pandemic.
And there was a certain segment of people
who did not want to follow the government mandates,
and the sovereign citizen ideology, the rhetoric,
the ideas within that movement served as, in their minds,
a good excuse to not have to follow the mandates.
From North America and Europe
to Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore,
extremists have latched onto the ideology
and the misguided belief that it gives them
the means to fight against vaccines, lockdowns,
and other COVID-related restrictions.
My dad died from COVID, by the way.
No, he didn’t.
My dad died as well. Death happens.
You ignorant fucking-- I’ll tell you what...
Hey! Hey!
In the UK, sovereign citizens have launched physical attacks
on COVID testing centers,
Stick your new world order up your arse!
forcibly shut down vaccination clinics,
and the leader of the opposition Labour Party
has been hounded on the street
by mobs screaming about COVID restrictions,
common law, and Magna Carta.
Why have your party
allowed our Magna Carta,
our rights, our common law, to be ignored?
Peace constables, peace officers, common law constables—
these are the names sovereign citizens
give their own self-appointed police forces,
whose authority they claim trumps that of the actual cops.
You are lawfully empowered to employ other members of the public
as peace officers
and can detain and arrest anyone you see breaching the public peace.
That means the movement calls on them
to enforce their own version of reality.
I’m going to have to arrest you, sir.
Anything you do say may be used in evidence against you.
OK, do you understand?
I understand what you’ve tried to say there.
Some are even taking their own zip ties to protests
to carry out arrests.
Can you explain to me what this is?
This is “P...
P-O,”
Peace Officer.
I have tie wraps...
in my car.
-You have hand ties? -Yeah, yeah.
Who gave you hand ties?
I brought them by myself.
-You brought them yourself? -Exactly.
Of course, none of these pretend constables
are actually police officers
any more than someone doing cosplay is actually a superhero.
But as tempting as it might be to dismiss the sovereign citizens
as a bunch of noisy but relatively harmless idiots,
that would only be half right.
Don't discount or ignore these people
because they are willing to kill and be killed for these beliefs.
Since late 2021, a group of hardliners within the movement
calling themselves Alpha Team Assemble
have been holding combat training sessions in the UK,
supposedly preparing themselves
for militant direct action against the state.
For anyone doubting the Alpha Men Assemble,
do not.
These people are true.
These people are fighting for our children and our futures.
This posturing has got the authorities concerned.
Sovereign citizens are routinely expressing violent fantasies
about a so-called Nuremberg 2.0 trial,
where the supposed architects of the plandemic
will be put on trial for treason, genocide,
or serious crimes against humanity
and executed.
Police working undercover since April
say they earned the trust of alleged anti-government sovereign citizens
and were able to foil their alleged plans to kill cops.
Once the first kidnapping and execution was accomplished,
they would be compelled to keep repeating their actions,
kidnapping and killing multiple officers.
I object to the entire proceedings of this court.
The sovereign citizen practice
of trying to enforce their own version of the law
can clearly lead in dangerous directions.
In 2010, police officers in Arkansas stopped a car driven by Jerry Kane,
a sovereign citizen who gave seminars
teaching people that they don’t need to pay tax.
Kane’s 16-year-old son drew an AK-47
and murdered the two officers.
Two cops are dead. The other one’s in a ditch.
They’re both dead, ma’am.
Law enforcement comes in contact with them fairly regularly
because a lot of the sovereigns aren’t following traffic laws,
and so they get pulled over.
And that can be an especially dangerous time for a police officer.
And Terry Nichols,
one of the masterminds of the Oklahoma bombing
which killed 168 people,
was heavily inspired by sovereign citizen ideas.
The FBI classes sovereign citizens
as one of the most serious domestic terrorism threats facing the US.
One estimate put the number of hardcore sovereigns at 100,000,
with three times that number in the broader movement.
This is something that law enforcement around the country
is worried about simply because,
again, they never know when they might encounter these people
just simply by doing their job.
The anti-vax sovereign citizens already have blood on their hands.
In September 2021,
a group of sovereign citizens in Ireland
burst into a hospital ICU ward to “rescue” an elderly patient,
a fellow sovereign citizen who had COVID-19.
-It’s all your choice, Joe. -Yes, I know.
If you stay here, they’re going to fucking kill you, Joe.
Yes.
These people here are not going to help you.
Mind the language here, please. Mind the language.
It’s OK, I have my right.
Because you are killing people.
Citing their usual arguments about common law,
they removed the man against the advice of medical staff.
Look, I’m very worried about you,
and I want you to stay.
What he’s saying is wrong and very dangerous.
And I think he’s endangering your life.
The man later died.
Here is a direct link between
someone motivated by sovereign citizen ideologies
and the blending of anti-vaccine ideologies as well
to kind of push someone towards making a decision that
in the end was fatal towards them.
So that really does show the danger of people being swayed
by those with sovereign citizen beliefs as well.
One of the trademark strategies
the sovereign citizens use to intimidate
and harass their perceived enemies
is a technique known as paper terrorism.
That’s where sovereign citizens inundate their targets
with a flood of threatening legal documents
in an attempt to bully them into submission.
Paper terrorism is essentially creating
members of the sovereign citizen movement creating their own writs,
creating their own kind of legal notices,
and serving people who they deem to be offenders.
Now, the new wave of sovereign citizens
have adopted this tactic
in their quest to fight the so-called plandemic.
So, the Nuremberg Code.
The UK Medical Alliance, which is all about
the other UK alliance of medical freedom of alliance.
The Declaration for the Protection of Children.
Motu proprio. You’ve probably not heard of this one.
Well, the pope is head of the businesses across the world.
With many embracing the strategy
as their great hope in stopping the COVID vaccine altogether.
This has led to them targeting schools,
courtrooms, and hospitals
along with scientists, government officials,
and other individuals associated with the vaccination rollout
with their bogus legal papers.
Paper terrorism is an old sovereign citizen tactic from the 90s,
where basically if you inundate people with enough phony
and fraudulent lawsuits,
it intimidates them into changing the law or changing rules.
And the only way this strategy of paper terrorism ever works
is by wearing down their opponents until they eventually give up.
But that’s clearly not going to happen
when it comes to their ultimate goal here
of stopping the global rollout of coronavirus vaccines.
Already, there are signs of growing frustration within the movement
at the failure of this paper terrorism to bear fruit,
fueling calls for militants for more radical action.
They see the world in a completely different way now.
It’s no longer just a case of single issues
such as vaccine mandates, mask mandates.
They now view that as one facet of a much larger problem
around the global masters who are pulling everyone’s strings.
So because these people
have had their worldview fundamentally changed,
they're not going to stop.
And with those lost down the rabbit hole of COVID conspiracies
becoming ever more detached from reality
and convinced that they’re a law unto themselves,
there are growing concerns about where all this is heading.