Marissa on the Record – Episode 006 – Mark Pitcavage Ph.D

Hello friends! The 6th episode of Marissa on the Record tackles a highly specialized topic… sovereign citizens, and how they intersect with the title and real estate industry. Ever heard of sovereign citizens? Fear not…this episode’s guest is the Anti-Defamation League’s Senior Research Fellow & Policy Advisor, Mark Pitcavage, Ph.D. Mark spoke at a Property Records Industry Association (PRIA) webinar in December 2025. His topic? The many ways that sovereign citizens can complicate things in the recorder’s office. I was intrigued by the information and insights he shared during the hour-long webinar. I knew I needed to reach out to him to learn more! 

Not familiar with the term?  Sovereign citizens are a small group of individuals in the United States who believe they are not subject to federal, state, or local laws, courts, or regulations. These individuals do not believe that our country’s government is legitimate or that its laws are enforceable. They reject governmental regulations across the board. That can mean refusing to pay taxes or maintain a driver’s license. Most importantly to readers of this blog, it can also mean filing bogus documents in the recorder’s office!

I am fascinated by this topic, and I have only scratched the surface of this movement. My particular personal interest involves Posse Comitatus, which is active in my neck of the woods in Wisconsin. Check out the book ‘In Pursuit of Justice: Memoirs of a Small-Town Sheriff’ by Dan Hintz if you’d like to dive into this topic yourself!  In our current day & age, we are constantly hearing about political extremism in the media, and truly, the sovereign citizen movement fits right in. I am thankful to host a conversation with Mark regarding this captivating topic and to help educate the public on sovereign citizens.  

**Please note: the information regarding sovereign citizens is shared for informational purposes only and does not reflect the views or opinions of Capitol Lien.

Mark Pitcavage, Ph. D., Senior Research Fellow and Policy Advisor

Center on Extremism, Anti-Defamation League

1. For professionals who encounter this term but may not fully understand it, how would you define the sovereign citizen movement?

The sovereign citizen movement is an anti-government extremist movement active in the U.S. and now in many other countries.  Its core belief is that long ago, a conspiracy infiltrated and subverted our original government, replacing it with a tyrannical, illegitimate one, and that illegitimate government conspired to get us to surrender our sovereignty to it through having us agree to fraudulent “contracts” such as social security, having a driver’s license, and so forth. They believe that if you take certain steps, you can divorce yourself from the “illegitimate” government and that once you’ve done so, that government (which is, of course, our government) no longer has any authority over you. You can ignore its laws, regulations, taxes, court orders, and everything else. The sovereign citizen movement may have as many as 450,000 or so adherents in the U.S. these days.

2. Walk us through your academic background and how your education prepared you for studying extremist movements.

My background is in history: I have a Ph.D. in military history. I don’t know how well that education prepared me to study extremists, beyond the natural investigative and analytical skills that all historians learn, but I can say it unintentionally catapulted me into studying them. I’ll explain how this happened in the next answer.

3. What initially drew you to researching anti-government extremism and sovereign citizen ideology?

I originally knew little more about U.S. extremists than the next person and had no intention of developing any expertise. But a weird thing happened in the mid-1990s. I was working on my dissertation on the U.S. state militia system (which eventually evolved into the National Guard).  At the same time, a new anti-government extremist movement arose, the militia movement, and people in that movement claimed (wrongly) that they were actually the descendants of the old state militias.  When I learned about this, I started looking into the militia movement to see what they were saying and to correct their misinterpretations. In so doing, I found them a pretty interesting movement, and I became curious about where they came from, what they were doing, and what other groups and movements were out there like them (such as their sister movement, the sovereign citizen movement, which I soon encountered).  Without ever making a true conscious decision about it, I got lured into studying these anti-government extremists and developing a whole additional area of expertise: far-right extremism.

I might have lost interest in it after a while except for two things. The first was the Oklahoma City bombing, committed by anti-government extremists (one of them a sovereign citizen), which was shocking to anyone who lived through it. I realized that there was a need for reliable information on the sorts of extremists that could generate this horrible terrorism, and that I was one of the few people in a position to help provide it.  The second thing was the Internet, or more specifically, the World Wide Web, which was brand new at that point. In the summer of 1995, I started a website called the Militia Watchdog, where I put up information about militia groups and related anti-government extremists. It was one of the very first anti-extremist sites on the internet.  I was doing all this on my own initiative, but it drew the attention of some people trying to organize a Justice Department anti-terrorism training program for law enforcement. Long story short, I ended up becoming research director and a lead trainer for that program. A few years later, when it looked like that program would be defunded, I came to ADL and have been continuing to work to understand and combat extremism ever since—more than 25 years at ADL.

4. What are the most common beliefs sovereign citizens hold about government authority, courts, and property ownership?

The key thing is that sovereign citizens do not acknowledge the authority of the government (federal, state, or even local) over them.  They claim to follow only “God’s law” and the common law, and they have peculiar interpretations of both.  As a result, they completely reject the court system.  With regard to property ownership, they essentially believe that they have an absolute right to property that no government (or lender) can interfere with.

5. How do sovereign citizen tactics most commonly show up in public records?

Ironically, even though sovereign citizens believe the government is illegitimate, they use it all the time in pursuit of their own agendas—the courts, filing agencies (county and state), and others.  Some of their tactics are what you could call “defensive” in nature, designed (or so they think) to protect their property from foreclosure, taxes, and so forth. So, for example, a sovereign citizen might file a document called an “allodial title,” which they might claim confers certain privileges or immunities on their property.  Others are more aggressive and target those they perceive as enemies.  This is called “paper terrorism.”  Paper terrorism is the use of bogus legal documents or filings, or the misuse of legitimate ones, to harass, intimidate, and retaliate against perceived enemies.  For example, say a state trooper pulled over a sovereign citizen and issued them a speeding ticket. If they were angry enough, they might craft a bogus lien claiming that the trooper owed them $35 million and try to file it. If successfully filed, that lien would sit there, clouding the title to that property, until the trooper became aware of it, hired an attorney, and eventually got it removed—which is a big hassle.

6. What types of filings or documents should raise immediate red flags for due diligence professionals?

The most concerning ones would be documents that purport to be a lien or that in any way affect the property of others (police, government officials, businesses, even private citizens); documents that pretend to be some sort of criminal complaint or other official proceeding; documents that contain copies of fictitious financial instruments (like “international bills of exchange”), or documents that contain threatening or intimidating language. There is endless variety in the types of documents sovereigns may file, or the names they give them, so I can’t really make a list, but the key thing is to see if the documents seem to be victimizing others in some way.

7. Why do sovereign citizens rely so heavily on recorded documents and pseudo-legal filings?

They like these tactics for several reasons.  First, something that is recorded becomes part of the public record and might have a real-world affect on someone—like preventing them from selling their home. Second, they seek legitimacy for their pseudo-legal arguments and tactics, and to them, having a document recorded gives it a seeming aura of legitimacy and authority. This is why some of them may try to record documents that have absolutely nothing to do with property.  They want that patina of legitimacy.

8. From your perspective, why is due diligence in public records such a critical defense against the impacts of sovereign citizen activity?

Agencies that handle public records actually play key roles in defending members of their community from being victimized by sovereign citizens.  If a harassing/intimidating document doesn’t get recorded, it doesn’t have an effect. If a bogus lien doesn’t get recorded, then no one gets harmed by it. Acknowledging that state laws, attorney general guidelines, county attorney policies, and office policies may all differ, I still urge recording agencies to use whatever tools are at their disposal to limit the recording of sovereign citizen filings.  That would mean sovereigns can do less harm.

9. How can thorough research help distinguish between legitimate legal disputes and ideologically driven filings?

Almost any attorney can distinguish between the actual legal arguments and the pseudo-legal contentions made by sovereign citizens. Judges routinely describe sovereign filings with terms such as “gibberish,” “nonsensical,” and “gobbledy-gook.”  One can also use common sense.  If a sovereign citizen tries to place a $100 million lien on the property of a local deputy sheriff, what are the odds that the deputy ever actually owed that person $100 million?

10. We all want efficiency, but when it comes to public records research, what are the benefits of an experienced researcher over an automated system?

I think that is something that may lie outside the realms of my expertise. 

11. What industries do you believe are most vulnerable to the tactics of this group of citizens?

Because many people are lured into the sovereign citizen movement out of financial desperation, all sorts of creditors and lenders may fall victim to sovereign tactics, though because of the resources at their disposal they may not be the most vulnerable. But government officials, law enforcement officers, small business owners, and all sorts of other groups—whether industries or not—are frequently victimized by sovereign citizens.  So too are others, such as ex-spouses.

12. Are you seeing an increase in sovereign citizen activity tied to economic stress, foreclosures, or regulatory changes?

Since the 1980s, sovereign citizens have been diligent in exploiting recessions and economic downturns.  They did so in the early-to-mid 1980s, for example, during the farm crisis and serious recession at that time, and the did it again in the late 2000s, during the Great Recession and the mortgage/foreclosure crisis. They did it once more during the pandemic in 2020-2021. In recent years, inflation, tariffs, and economic uncertainty have all been issues that sovereign citizens could exploit.

13. As it relates to sovereign citizen activity, are there training or awareness gaps among professionals who regularly interact with public records?

Because there are so many recording agencies across the entire country, it is hard to generalize in this regard. The amount of sovereign citizen activity can vary from region to region as well, so a recording agency that experiences relatively little sovereign activity may not feel the urgency for staff training that another recording agency that regularly encounters such individuals might have.  And of course, all agencies have turnover, so there is always a need for more training (or reminder trainings).  However, there aren’t many people out there who are knowledgeable enough about sovereign citizens to provide everybody with training. Still, there is more awareness, generally speaking, now than even a few years ago.

14. How can organizations better educate their teams without overreacting or mislabeling cases?

I think it is important to provide staff with a rudimentary understanding of what sovereign citizens are, and the sort of things they do, and to educate staff on some of the most common documentary identifiers that show a particular document may have been crafted by a sovereign citizen. Beyond that, staff need to understand clearly what the office’s policies and procedures are regarding sovereign citizens, as well as the office’s safety protocols.

15. How do you expect sovereign citizen tactics to evolve in the future?

As a historian, I am better at predicting the past than predicting the future!  Plus, sovereign citizens have repeatedly shown the capacity to surprise.  The movement is always looking for new audiences and new grievances to exploit, so I think we might see it discover one or more new audiences in the future. 

16. Professionally, your extensive experience studying sovereign citizens has provided valuable insights for the real estate industry. What do you like to do in your personal time?

One of my hobbies is driving the back roads and obscure byways of my home state, Ohio, and doing roadside photography (taking photographs from a vehicle of things visible from a road).  I’ve driven tens of thousands of miles around backcountry Ohio and seen far more of the state than most of my fellow residents.  My other main hobby is very geeky: I collect and play historical military simulation board games (often called “wargames”, for short).  Imagine a game like Risk, only on a subject like the Battle of Gettysburg, and a thousand times more complex and realistic.  That’s sort of what I play.  In different ways, both hobbies allow my mind to roam in areas very different from extremism, which allows my brain to clear and keeps me in it for the long run.

17. If you could have dinner with any historical figure, who would you choose and why?

Because my original background is in military history—a subject I still stay current in—I would probably want to have dinner (preferably pizza) with some of the past military leaders I find fascinating, such as Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene, guerrilla leader (in the Philippines in WW2) Russell Volckmann, and WW2 Bataan defender General Jonathan Wainwright.

About the Author

Marissa Berends is a Certified Abstractor and Industry Relations Coordinator at Capitol Lien, a nationwide due diligence and risk mitigation services provider. Since joining the company in September 2021, she has earned abstractor certifications in Minnesota, Nebraska, and North Dakota, and most recently graduated from the Wisconsin Land Title Association’s Title Examiner courses.

Marissa is involved with the following groups: Women in Title (WiT); Wisconsin Land Title Association’s (WLTA) Convention Committee, Membership Committee, and Young Title Professionals; Property Record Industry Association (PRIA) National Education Committee; Illinois Land Title Association’s (ILTA) Inclusion, Diversity, Equity & Acceptance (IDEA) Committee; Minnesota Land Title Association’s (MLTA) Education Committee, American Land Title Association’s (ALTA) Title Advisory Network (TAN), Michigan Land Title Association’s (MLTA) New Title Professionals, and the National Association of Land Title Examiners and Abstractors (NALTEA). 

About Capitol Lien

Capitol Lien empowers real estate and title professionals with trusted public record research and due diligence services nationwide. With over 30 years of experience, Capitol Lien specializes in fast, accurate property and title searches, lien reports, and document retrieval that help title agents, underwriters, and legal teams operate their businesses with confidence. The Capitol Lien team takes the hassle out of title research with local experts and innovative tools that make it easier to mitigate risk, stay on schedule, and keep your closings moving smoothly.

Learn more at capitollien.com. Ready to simplify your title research? Send your next order to Capitol Lien and experience the difference trusted diligence makes. Stay in touch with Capitol Lien on LinkedIn for industry updates and information. Reach out! contact@capitollien.com or 800-845-4077