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ranging from murder and attempted murder to instruments—check-like documents labeled as money
planned acts of domestic terrorism to a variety of ille- orders, sight drafts, or comptrollers’ warrants. These
gal weapons and explosives charges. Militia groups were used to pay off debts, to purchase cars and boats,
frequently engaged in confrontations with law or were sometimes fraudulently sold to others for
enforcement, in which adherents would identify use as currency. Groups ranging from the Montana
“victims” of government and show up in numbers to Freemen to Family Farm Preservation to the Republic
“protect” those persons. These acts justified public of Texas put out several billion dollars (face value) of
concerns about the movement. these instruments. Following the Montana Freemen
The militia movement reached a peak of popular- standoff in 1996, in which about two dozen sovereign
ity after the Oklahoma City bombing. Although the citizens held off the FBI for 81 days before surrender-
event was initially linked to militia groups, the men ing, a nationwide crackdown on the bogus money
convicted of the bombing were not affiliated— orders temporarily put an end to the activity. However,
Timothy McVeigh, though part of the patriot move- within a few years another scheme, “Redemption,”
ment, didn’t belong to any particular group, and which involved the creation of bogus sight drafts,
Terry Lynn Nichols was essentially a sovereign citi- swept the sovereign citizen movement and as of 2002
zen. However, the multiple arrests in 1996 caused the is active in much of the country.
more timid to drop out of the movement, while at the Although paper terrorism tactics are the weapon of
same time the lack of militia response to standoffs in choice of sovereign citizens, violence is also com-
Montana and Texas in 1996 and 1997 caused many mon, as indicated by the 1997 Republic of Texas
radical members to leave because they felt the move- standoff in which members of the group took neigh-
ment was not aggressive enough, and the decline in bors hostage in retaliation for the arrest of a fellow
numbers continued after 2000. In some parts of the member. There have also been a number of violent
country, such as Florida, the movement collapsed, incidents stemming from traffic stops, where sover-
while in other areas, such as the Midwest, it remained eign citizens have shot or assaulted police officers
relatively healthy. Overall, levels of militia activity who pulled them over.
are much lower in 2002 than in 1996, but arrests and
incidents continue.
THE TAX PROTEST MOVEMENT

The tax protest movement is one of the most active
THE SOVEREIGN CITIZEN MOVEMENT
right-wing movements and is often a source of recruit-
Sovereign citizens (also called constitutionalists and ment for the extreme right with its lure of income tax
freemen) are the direct descendants of the Posse avoidance. Some of the largest patriot groups in the
Comitatus, imbibing its antigovernment ideology as past 20 years have been tax protest groups, including
well as its employment of paper terrorism tactics. Your Heritage Protection Association (YHPA), the
Sovereign citizens also believe in a twisted interpreta- Pilot Connection Society, and the Save-A-Patriot
tion of the Fourteenth Amendment that claims it Fellowship. The YHPA grew to nearly 19,000 mem-
created a new class of citizenship that people could bers in the early 1980s before its leader, Armen Condo,
voluntarily join, but only at the expense of all their was convicted of mail and tax fraud. A number of
rights. The government therefore “tricked” people tax protest groups have met similar fates for marketing
into becoming Fourteenth Amendment citizens by bogus trusts, fraudulent “untax kits,” or other tax
having them sign “contracts” (such as Social Security evasion devices.
cards, driver’s licenses, and birth certificates) to While most of the criminal activity associated with
receive privileges that would put them under the juris- the movement consists of tax evasion-related charges,
diction of the government. They also believe that the movement also generates a number of violent extre-
because these contracts were made without one’s mists. In the 1990s, tax protesters attacked Internal
knowledge, one can tear them up and no longer be Revenue Service (IRS) buildings and offices with
subject to the “illegitimate” federal or state govern- mortars, shotguns, bombs, and gas; several IRS offices
ments and thus any laws. have been burned down. In 1995, Charles Polk was
Throughout the 1990s, a common sovereign citi- arrested (and later convicted) for plotting to blow up an
zen activity was the creation of fictitious financial IRS office in Austin, Texas.