Militias and Sovereign Citizens | 2024 Year in Hate & Extremism

The militia and sovereign citizen movements continued their efforts to be a substitute for government in 2024, all the while threatening public workers and democracy.

Militias sought to frame themselves as emergency-preparedness groups or auxiliary law enforcement, while sovereign citizens continued trying to establish U.S. shadow governments and courts. Both movements continued to make local communities unsafe, whether by interfering with hurricane relief or getting into shootouts with law enforcement officers. While they shared ideological similarities, militias tended to focus on local structures, while sovereign citizens continued forming or following national organizations.

Going local: Militias return to their roots

The consequences national militias faced in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection served as a catalyst for the militia movement to reorganize. The connections inherent in a national organization model like the Oath Keepers proved to be a liability for members in the law enforcement crackdown following the insurrection. Local militia groups have grown in the vacuum left by the fracturing of national organizations. The Southern Poverty Law Center documented 52 militias in 2024, which was the same total as in 2023. However, the growth of local militias, which operate with more secrecy and deception, is difficult to locate and track post-2021.

52Number of militias the SPLC documented in 2024

Local militias have taken various forms. In recent years, the SPLC has tracked numerous antigovernment groups that have lobbied county governments to recognize local militias through official resolutions, despite counties not having the constitutional authority to take such action. These debates and resolutions have occurred mostly in Virginia, but they have also been proposed in New York, Illinois and Michigan. Supporters of creating county militias often describe the role they could play responding to emergencies, assisting law enforcement or both. Some county militias held “musters” or training and planning drills in 2024, including those in Southampton County and Lynchburg, Virginia.

Another local-minded trend, similar to the tactic used by Three Percenter groups, is the use of the word “minutemen” in group names, which is an attempt to compare themselves to the minutemen of the American Revolution. These militias engage in paramilitary training while framing themselves as preparedness groups. While they try to sanitize their public-facing social media, a deeper look into posts by individual minutemen finds them sharing many of the hard-right political and conspiratorial beliefs that have long ignited the militia movement.

Minutemen ties to white supremacy

The growing local structure of militias harks back to the modern militia movement’s roots in the 1990s. Many militias of that era presented themselves as benign entities to help with law enforcement or emergency preparedness, all the while engaging in paramilitary training for what they viewed as imminent war with the federal government. Many minutemen militia members play this same public relations game, while also exhibiting white supremacist connections similar to their predecessors.

2024
Year in Hate & Extremism

On social media, militia activists in the minutemen network espouse antigovernment conspiracy theories, anti-immigrant rhetoric and white supremacist beliefs. The Mid-Missouri Minutemen chat on Telegram included the account Prairie Nationalist, the point of contact for the white nationalist Heartland Active Club, as a member. When an interested recruit lived outside the range of the Mid-Missouri Minutemen, other chat members, including Prairie Nationalist, encouraged the recruit to go through the vetting process to attend Heartland Active Club events instead.

The 1st New England Minutemen’s extremist beliefs are hidden in plain sight. The group’s mission statement reads, “To develop, train, and sustain a citizen’s militia comprised of men throughout New England focused on service, fraternity, and traditional values to secure and defend a brighter future for our children.” The end of the mission statement closely resembles the white supremacist “14 Words” slogan, which calls to secure “a future for White children.”

Minutemen militias and active clubs also share a similar organizing structure. Both sets of groups are independent but will use the same symbols and follow a common political ideology. For example, several minutemen groups use a common symbol to represent their militias. It references the Revolution-era minutemen emblem but replaces the musket with an AR-style rifle. Both minutemen and active clubs attract younger men who get together in small groups and train, with active clubs engaging in strength training and sparring while minutemen conduct paramilitary drills. Both are built on loose networks of small groups interconnected by a larger hard-right ideological movement.

Minutemen on the ground

In 2024, members of the River Valley Minutemen and the Central Ohio Minutemen performed multiple multiday training exercises with one another, almost exclusively related to combat scenarios. Individual minutemen militias may seem small, sometimes with only five to 10 members. Yet, because of their online network, they are effectively part of a more prominent militia. Social media accounts from different groups can be seen interacting with one another. As a result, groups and individuals are in constant contact with one another and can organize in-person field training exercises alongside each other.

Many minutemen groups use this symbol, either alone or incorporating it into their logos. The symbol is a reference to the minutemen of the American Revolution, but with an assault rifle in place of a musket — an apparent attempt to connect these modern groups with the colonial-era militia.

Many minutemen groups the SPLC tracked had Instagram accounts. They appear to have escaped deplatforming by framing themselves as preparedness groups. Embracing the far right’s perception of X.com as a platform for free speech, some militias and followers have announced they were leaving Instagram due to its perceived targeted moderation of right-wing opinions. Regardless of the outreach method, minutemen seem to be careful to present a very apolitical façade for their training.

In October 2024, following the destruction caused by Hurricane Helene, militia groups traveled to western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, claiming to provide disaster relief for those affected by the storm. One example was the Nantahala Reconnaissance Group, which set up a GoFundMe page. River Valley Minutemen claimed to have both raised almost $9,500 in donations and transported over 10,000 pounds in goods. These efforts reinforced militia claims of being community-focused and helped them try to gain traction with locals.

At the same time, some militias and their members shared misinformation, heightening tensions in the areas they claimed to be helping. On Instagram, accounts for minutemen militias and their members shared conspiracy theories about the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response and, in some cases, posted threats against government employees. In an Instagram post targeting FEMA’s response, Clandestine Operations Group stated, “You are at war with your government, right now,” and now is “a good time to load mags & build a fucking guillotine.” The rhetoric promoted by these groups contributed to aid work being stopped in certain areas for the safety of workers.

Militia response to Hurricane Helene shows that while the militia movement has become much more localized and, in turn, harder to track, groups will still come together and insert themselves into current events. While many local militias are positioning themselves as harmless preparedness groups, their tactical paramilitary training strongly suggests that their concern is not clearing roads of debris, filling sandbags, or rebuilding structures. Instead, they train for the same reason their predecessors did in the 1990s — preparing for what they consider to be imminent war.

Shadow governments and courts

For decades, sovereign citizen groups organized as disparate local entities that shared ideologies and materials across the country by way of the internet or traveling seminars. In that way, their structure was similar to the minutemen militias. However, in recent years, national organizations have supplanted local sovereign citizen groups.

91Number of sovereign citizen groups the SPLC documented in 2024

Some of these organizations use the term “American State Nationals” in a bid to separate themselves from the term “sovereign citizen,” which has a negative public connotation, particularly among law enforcement. These national sovereign citizen groups have a top-down hierarchical structure, with leaders who are often treated as all-knowing, infallible figures. These national leaders worked in 2024 at building and branding local chapters underneath their control and in developing materials and rules used universally throughout their organizations.

This evolution is part of an effort by sovereign leaders to further their nationwide agenda. Their plan is to create shadow governments and courts, often called assemblies. The groups are composed of conspiracy theorists unhappy with the U.S. economic and political environment. They believe our current government will fail, and they can install their own in the resulting power vacuum.

Their attempts to install their own governments as a replacement to U.S. democracy is a danger to both local communities and the country. Leaders in the movement have sold followers on the idea that by declaring sovereign citizenship, they have separated from the government and don’t need to follow state or national laws. This has caused volatile altercations with police that have led to the death of law officers and sovereign citizen adherents. Some sovereign citizen groups continue to engage in “paper terrorism,” whereby sovereign citizens retaliate against public officials or other perceived enemies by filing fraudulent liens or other fake “legal” documents.

The SPLC documented 91 sovereign citizen groups in 2024. Organizations facilitating the creation of fake sovereign governments, from largest in chapters to smallest, include but aren’t limited to the following:

American States Assembly
National Assembly
Restore-America.org
Republic for the united States of America [sic]
Life Force Network
National Liberty Alliance
Statewide Common Law Grand Jury
United States of America Republic Government
Reign of the Heavens Society
The California Assembly

Many of these groups’ leaders have networked or coordinated, but they have also tended to become easily mired in drama with each other.

Fake “judge” Anna von Reitz, who now leads the American States Assembly, claimed the Reign of the Heavens Society’s “Government of The United States of America” was planning to invade the Continental United States of America, a now-defunct group to which von Reitz previously belonged. Reign of the Heavens Society struck back by issuing an international arrest warrant signed by its fake government against von Reitz, her partner James Clinton Belcher, and current National Assembly co-leader Destry Payne. The warrant declared that “any and all are hereby authorized to detain, incarcerate, and in the case of violent resistance, use deadly force against” these individuals.

In 2024, National Assembly was plagued by internal struggles that resulted in multiple state chapters leaving the organization and forming Restore-America.org to build “general jural assemblies” through online promotions and a billboard in Georgia.

This trend has ballooned the number of organizations forming fake governments, creating more options from which new recruits can pick.

These new recruits have shifted sovereign citizen demographics. The sovereign citizen movement was first developed by militant, male white supremacists under the leadership of William Potter Gale, but has begun attracting more women and people of color.

The merger between sovereign and QAnon philosophies in the last three years, which brought new, younger faces into the movement, was followed shortly thereafter by the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought in antivaxxers who found common cause with sovereign citizens against the government.

Most recently, demographics have shifted even more to include current and retired white-collar professionals, from accountants to coroners to talent agents, and a former Air Force lieutenant colonel as the volunteer coordinator and fake “governor of Texas” for the Republic for the united States of America organization.

Violence and coordination with the hard right

In 2024, there was an uptick in violence by sovereign citizens, mainly against police. From the SPLC’s tracking, these incidents involved sovereign citizens who weren’t members of faux courts or governments, but movement adherents whose conspiratorial ideas and rhetoric led to volatile encounters.

Sovereign citizens collaborated with other hard-right extremists. In early 2024, sovereign citizens from the Republic of Texas and People’s Operation Restoration helped coordinate the “Take Our Border Back” convoy events, which brought together a cross section of the hard right, from sovereign citizens and white nationalists to neo-Nazis and border vigilantes.

Like some militias, the American States Assembly got involved with targeting federal personnel following Hurricane Helene. It issued a notice to county sheriffs in early October which stated that “any Federal Personnel” who might be “offering to encumber, delay or restrict civilian rescue and recovery efforts” or “confiscating relief supplies” should be arrested. It also declared that “federal personnel failing to render immediate aid and assistance must be arrested, shot or hung on the spot as the situation demands.” Calls for or acts of violence like these, against government workers, public safety officers and others, are likely a harbinger of things to come as these fake governments and courts continue to grow in 2025.

Illustrations by Joan Wong.