The Family That Declared War on the Government — and Meant It

Jerry Kane had lost a child to sudden infant death syndrome and blamed the government when authorities insisted on an autopsy. That grievance sent him down a path that ended on a West Memphis highway with two police officers dead and a movement's capacity for murder on full display.

In the years before the shooting, Jerry Kane had become a sovereign citizen seminar instructor, traveling the country with his sixteen-year-old son Joseph, teaching others how to supposedly discharge mortgage debts through pseudolegal paperwork. Joseph had grown up inside the movement, taught from childhood that the government was an illegitimate enemy against which any force was justified.

When Sergeant Brandon Paudert and Officer Bill Evans pulled the Kanes over for an unusual license plate, Jerry got out to speak with the officers. While his father talked, Joseph reached for an assault rifle. He opened fire, killing both officers. The Kanes fled. They were killed hours later in a gunfire exchange with police.

The case was among the first to bring national attention to the lethal potential of the sovereign citizen movement. In 2013, a survey of law enforcement intelligence officers ranked sovereign citizens as the top domestic terrorist threat in the United States — higher than Islamic extremists. The Kane killings were a primary reason why. Researchers later traced the radicalization of Jerry Kane in detail, documenting how an initial grief over a bureaucratic intrusion became a consuming ideology that made violence feel not just permissible but righteous.

Gregory Lee Rodvelt believed his property was sovereign territory that no government agent had the right to enter. He spent considerable time and ingenuity ensuring that anyone who tried would pay for it.

When law enforcement arrived at his home in Williams, Oregon in September 2018, they approached the gate carefully. They noticed a circular hot tub spa rigged so that opening the gate would activate a mechanical trigger, propelling the heavy tub toward whoever was standing there. Investigators later compared the apparatus to a trap from the Indiana Jones film Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Overhead, on a garage door, they found a wooden mousetrap rigged to discharge a shotgun blast if the door were lifted. Inside, they were surprised by a wheelchair rolling toward them. It exploded, firing a shotgun shell that struck an FBI agent in the leg.

Rodvelt had designed his property as a series of lethal surprises for government agents he had long declared had no authority over him. The case illustrates a documented pattern in the sovereign citizen movement: the belief that property rights are absolute and that lethal defense of those rights is not just permitted but required. Rodvelt was convicted and sentenced to federal prison.

The plan was methodical. Curtis Wade Holley intentionally set his home on fire, then asked his neighbor to call 911. He positioned himself to intercept the first responders he knew would come. Deputy Chris Smith was the first on scene. He was shot immediately upon arrival. A second officer survived because of his bulletproof vest.

People who knew Holley told investigators afterward that he had talked openly and repeatedly about his desire to kill law enforcement officers. He was described as volatile, deeply anti-government, and consumed by extremist materials. An investigation revealed that two weeks before the shooting, Holley had explicitly threatened to shoot officers if they came to his property. The day before, his ex-girlfriend called local authorities to report his threats. None of that information was shared with the first responders who drove toward his burning house.

The Holley case represents one of the most premeditated forms of sovereign citizen violence — an entrapment ambush designed specifically to kill the government agents he regarded as enemies. He was convicted and sentenced to death.

Gavin Long was not an impulsive killer. In the weeks before the Baton Rouge ambush, he had been posting extensively online under the name Cosmo Setepenra, articulating a philosophy that drew heavily from sovereign citizen and black nationalist ideology and increasingly called for violent resistance to government authority. He had turned 29 years old three days before the attack. He drove from Kansas City to Baton Rouge with a purpose.

He opened fire on officers near a gas station, killing Montrell Jackson, Matthew Gerald, and Brad Garafola. Three other officers were wounded before Long was killed by a police sniper. Among his writings, Long expressed the belief that black Americans were sovereign beings outside the jurisdiction of American law enforcement — a core tenet of the Moorish sovereign citizen tradition — and that violence against police was a moral obligation. He wrote that "violence is not the answer" before concluding that it was, in fact, the only answer that worked.

Researchers who study the sovereign citizen movement describe the Baton Rouge ambush as one of the clearest documented cases of sovereign citizen ideology serving as the direct ideological framework for a premeditated mass killing of law enforcement officers.

It began with legal notices from something calling itself the "Al Moroccan Empire Consulate at New Jersey State Republic," claiming ownership of Little's home and giving her thirty days to surrender it. Her attorney told her it was a scam. To ignore it. She came home to find the locks changed.

What followed was documented in real time on TikTok — Little filming the men inside her home, arguing with them through the door, watching as one of them stepped over her and locked himself inside a house she owned. She later said of the sovereign citizen framing about ancestral land claims: "They're just thieves."

The case became national news, featured in the New York Times, partly because of the footage and partly because it illustrated with unusual clarity how the Moorish sovereign citizen property scheme works in practice. The movement holds that Moorish Americans have a prior claim to all American land under centuries-old treaties — a claim that has been universally rejected by every court that has considered it, but which provides sufficient ideological cover for groups to file fraudulent documents, change locks, and occupy properties that do not belong to them.

The men eventually left, except for one who was arrested and charged with criminal mischief, burglary, and terroristic threats. Little's case is not unusual. Property fraud schemes of this kind have been documented in at least fourteen states. The targets are frequently homeowners in Black communities — the same communities that Moorish sovereign citizen leaders claim their ideology is meant to empower.

The Rise of the Moors were traveling to Maine for a militia training exercise called "Operation Fountainhead." When their vehicles had trouble on Interstate 95 in Wakefield, Massachusetts, they did what sovereign citizens do: they refused to comply with law enforcement, asserted immunity from state law, and waited. Inside their vehicles, police found more than ten firearms, a thousand rounds of ammunition, two dozen magazines, and night vision goggles. None of the men had driver's licenses. None had proper firearm permits. None had registered their vehicles.

The group is led by Jamhal Talib Abdullah Bey, a former Marine who refers to all law enforcement as "domestic enemies" and teaches followers that they are members of a sovereign Moorish nation operating under a 1786 Moroccan-American treaty, and therefore not subject to American law. The Moorish Science Temple of America — the legitimate religious organization whose history the group claims — has explicitly disavowed the Rise of the Moors, calling them "identity thieves" and "lost souls."

The nine-hour standoff ended when police deployed a high-pitched sonic alarm. Two leaders of the group were ultimately sentenced to prison. The group subsequently sued the Massachusetts State Police, filed federal lawsuits challenging jurisdiction, and continued to assert that their detention had been an act of unlawful aggression against a sovereign foreign nation. Every lawsuit was dismissed.

The Matusiewicz family had spent years at war with Christine Belford. After her divorce from David Matusiewicz, the family had kidnapped their three children and taken them to Nicaragua for two years. When federal agents returned the children, the family pivoted: a sustained campaign of stalking, surveillance, fabricated abuse allegations, and pseudolegal harassment designed to destroy Belford's life. They created fake YouTube videos, built a defamation website, filed sovereign citizen-influenced legal documents, and recruited others to help surveil her. Multiple courts reviewed the abuse allegations and found them entirely without basis.

On February 11, 2013, Christine Belford and her companion Laura Mulford arrived at the courthouse for a child support hearing. The Matusiewicz men had arrived early. They brought ammunition, a bulletproof vest, knives, restraints, and photographs of their targets. Thomas Matusiewicz shot and killed both women in the lobby. He then took his own life.

David Matusiewicz, his mother Lenore, and his sister Amy Gonzalez were convicted of cyberstalking resulting in death — the first federal convictions of this kind in American history. They are serving life sentences. The case established that a sustained campaign of paper terrorism and digital abuse, conducted under the ideological cover of sovereign citizen pseudolaw, can be treated as a conspiracy to commit murder.

Researchers examining January 6th defendants have identified at least 23 individuals who used sovereign citizen tactics — either during the attack itself or in the legal proceedings that followed. That represents approximately 1.5 percent of the roughly 1,561 people charged, and more than eleven times the number identified in an initial 2022 Congressional report.

The most prominent sovereign citizen case among the defendants was Pauline Bauer, a Pennsylvania restaurant owner advised on legal strategy by Bobby Lawrence, a leader of the American State National movement. In the Rotunda, Bauer demanded officers bring out Nancy Pelosi and threatened that Congress members needed to hang. In the months before trial, she filed a 114-page jurisdictional challenge, referred to herself as a "Free living Soul" and a "vessel," and submitted documents purporting to prove her DNA predated the United States. She was incarcerated for refusing to recognize the court's authority. Convicted on all charges, she was sentenced to 27 months. She later blamed Lawrence for misleading her.

Other defendants submitted affidavits of truth, demanded proof of judges' surety bonds, claimed they were appearing only "under duress," and argued that because their names appeared in ALL CAPS on indictments, the person being charged was a separate corporate fiction unrelated to them. None of these arguments succeeded. Several defendants who tried them received more difficult proceedings as a result. James Beeks, acquitted on unrelated evidentiary grounds, submitted a 179-page post-acquittal petition demanding millions of dollars in silver for the inconvenience of having been charged — a petition the court had not responded to at the time of this writing.

The January 6th sovereign citizen cases add a new chapter to a long pattern: the movement uses moments of political and social crisis as recruitment opportunities, and courtrooms as stages. The arguments never succeed. The ideology never retreats.

The pitch is irresistible if you are desperate enough: for a few hundred dollars and a weekend, you can learn the secret techniques the government doesn't want you to know — techniques that will cancel debts, defeat criminal charges, protect property, and free you from a legal system designed to enslave you. Bobby Lawrence and David Straight have been selling this pitch for years through Telegram channels, in-person seminars priced between $150 and $1,300, online courses, merchandise stores, and layered paperwork packages called "Freedom Bundles."

None of it works. Courts have uniformly rejected every argument the American State National movement has advanced. Followers who tried using "noncitizen national passports" as identification during traffic stops were arrested. Followers who tried using "status correction" paperwork to defeat criminal charges were convicted. Followers who paid for services to liberate their vehicles from state registration requirements found the services were never delivered.

In April 2023, David Straight himself was arrested for driving without a license and displaying improper plates. His wife Bonnie was arrested the same day and later sentenced to five years in prison. The Johnson County Sheriff's Office posted about the arrests on Facebook: "His own seminars didn't keep him from going to jail." Bobby Lawrence announced in early 2024 that he was "closing shop" — then promised his most devoted followers one final seminar series, at increased cost, containing secrets he had never before revealed. The followers paid. New leaders are already emerging to replace the old ones.

The group calls itself the Gudalandet — the Land of God. They number approximately eight people. Their leader, Ditta Rietuma, 58, holds the titles of Queen, Emperor, and Supreme Judge of the Land of God. Her co-leader, Lars Rutger Solstråhle, 86, serves as the Prosecutor. In 2023, they sent threatening emails to approximately fifty employees of the local government in Gullspång, a small Swedish town. The emails included the address of the group's farm, where they had erected gallows, and a date for the hangings: April 13, 2023.

Their worldview combines sovereign citizen ideology with Viking-era political philosophy. They believe Sweden does not exist as a legitimate state. They want to replace its legal and financial systems with their own courts, councils, and homemade wooden coins. Courts found both leaders mentally competent — consistent with the research finding that the vast majority of sovereign citizens, however extreme their beliefs, are not diagnosably mentally ill. Both were convicted of threatening public officials in 2024 and sentenced to prison.

The case illustrates what researchers have documented across 35 countries: sovereign citizen ideology, born in American tax protest movements, has become a global phenomenon. Its ideological DNA travels via the internet, arrives in new countries, adapts to local grievances and mythologies — Viking law, Moroccan treaties, Soviet citizenship, Viking-era governance — and produces the same results. The Gudalandet did not invent these ideas. They imported them, adapted them to Norse mythology, and built gallows.

The Dutch government has been watching the sovereign citizen movement's growth with increasing alarm. Their intelligence services estimate that tens of thousands of people in the Netherlands now consider themselves sovereign citizens — including, they note, some active police officers and soldiers. In June 2025, that alarm became action. Eight members of the sovereign citizen network were arrested in connection with a suspected plot to use violence during a NATO summit. When authorities raided their homes, they found weapons, drugs, possible explosives, and unidentified substances.

Among those arrested were two leaders of Common Law Nederland Earth, an antigovernment group that has publicly stated its willingness to use violence to overthrow the Dutch state. Also arrested: an arms dealer and a lawyer who had been filing lawsuits against the NATO secretary-general over vaccine damages. The Dutch government had formally recognized the sovereign citizen threat in April 2024, warning that the movement "undermines the democratic rule of law." Four months before the NATO arrests, two prominent Dutch sovereign citizens had been sentenced to prison for threatening police officers — one for sending an email warning that masked men would corner a police car and open fire.

The Netherlands case illustrates what researchers have documented across dozens of countries: the sovereign citizen movement, born in American tax protest movements of the 1950s, has become a global phenomenon with a demonstrable capacity for organized violence against the institutions of democracy itself.