If you were to ask the police and other law enforcement professionals about who the biggest threat to them and the rest of the US society is, you would probably be surprised to learn that they would not put ISIS or Al Qaeda as the number one threat. Instead, they would put the “sovereign citizen terrorist” on top of that list. And they did just that in a survey conducted in 2014.
The Department of Homeland Security has just come out with an intelligence assessment which focuses exactly on this type of terrorism. This assessment states clearly that the threat from such “internal” terrorist organizations and individuals is not to be ignored or marginalized.
This is something that many federal and local law enforcement agencies have known to be fact for quite some time; that the threat from these individuals and groups is equal, if not greater than that coming from the “usual suspects”, i.e. Islamic and other foreign terrorist groups and organizations.
These “sovereign citizen terrorists” are usually right-wing “enthusiasts” who believe that local and federal government have no right to govern their lives and limit their rights, which often produces very violent outbursts.
There are certain estimates that put the number of people involved in sovereign citizen extremism to be over 300,000 with around 100,000 constituting the core of the movement. Since 2010, 24 attacks on American soil have been attributed to such individuals and groups.
The numbers and the official report clearly show that this is a problem that needs to be talked about much more than it is at the moment, even if it raises some uncomfortable questions.
