Denialisms Are About Moral Authority, Not Truth

Sovereign citizens (sovcits) stick out among the various species of denialists.  Other denialisms are at least about matters of fact - even if the denialists demonstrate poor critical thinking, at least their core assertion is a truth claim.  The Earth is round, or it is flat.  Vaccines cause autism, or they do not.  9/11 was an inside job, or it was not. 

But sovcits extend their beliefs into having a kind of power of their own; that their legal pronouncements have some kind of magic power to them. When surfing Youtube for "sovereign citizen" you won't have to look long for Youtube videos of the form:

1. Sovcit gets pulled over, stopped, or otherwise detained by police.
   
   
2. Sovcit recites their legal incantation.
   
   
3. Sovcit, quite amazingly, somehow manages to be shocked when the police break their window, tase them, arrest them, etc. (Here is a perfect example, but don't watch it unless you are ready to see police violence.)

Creationists and Flat Earthers mostly agree with the same basic observations of the world, and they mostly don't make different decisions about how to live in the world based on their claims. I've never seen a creationist argue against the existence of island gigantism or dwarfism, or a flat Earther against the existence of the horizon - they just have a different explanation.

You might make the argument that as a denialism, the "theories" of sovreign citizens have domain-specific characteristics. After all, law requires a belief in its legitimacy to work, and they just claim legitimacy for a different set of rules, rules which affect our behavior on a daily basis. But this still doesn't really address the way in which sovcits seem different from the rest. Imagine that an evil neuroscientist plants in your head the belief that vaccines cause autism. Once under the spell of that denialism, you can predict that you would act the same way as other anti-vaxxers, avoiding immunizations, attending anti-vaccine protests, etc. But the thought experiment doesn't work for sovcits. The evil neuroscientist puts the belief in your head that the current American government is illegitimate. You STILL wouldn't think that you could Jedi-mind-trick your way out of a traffic stop, even though you would be frustrated by living under the thumb of the current regime. In fact we don't need an evil neuroscientist to demonstrate this - assuming you believe the Russian invasion of Ukraine is illegitimate, then you consider the political authority of the Russian government in the occupied territories to be similarly illegitimate. If you found yourself in Ukraine, would you go walking across an open field into the occupied territories loudly reciting "The U.N. says this is an illegal war and you can't be here" and then adding with surprise "Hey, you shot me!" No, because you recognize the physical reality even if you disagree as to who the legitimate authority is. But that's exactly what these sovereign citizens are doing.

And there, exactly, we see what DOES unite all these denialisms. In all of them, including the sovereign citizens, the core aspect is a disagreement as to the true source of moral authority. The different truth claims are a symptom of that underlying disagreement, and only in the sovereign citizens is the root cause so exposed.

A lot of other seemingly unrelated aspects of denialism start to snap into place now. Creationists believe the source of authority on the story of our origin is the Bible (or Quran), and by undermining religious cosmogony, ultimately we undermine religious morality (hence why creationists are overwhelmingly religious, hence their bizarre non sequiturs that teaching evolution leads to drug culture and promiscuity.) And I'm not sure who the moon landing people or 9/11 truthers think is a good moral authority, but I'm damn sure they do NOT think it's the United States government. And if you think the people telling you to wear a mask and get vaccinated are the same immoral elites making your favorite President look bad by calling attention to the pandemic, then no mask and no vaccines for me! Some people have a psychological makeup that is so polarized toward respect for authority that not only does it dominate truth, it becomes conflated with it. Sovereign citizens think that objective truth equals objective and irresistible authority, which is why they're inevitably shocked when physical reality disagrees with their perceived moral authority.

We neglect and misunderstand the complicated and ancient relationship between truth and authority at our peril.