The federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles is a towering cube of spotless glass and mile-high white walls, designed to instill awe and good behavior. On the tenth floor, sunlight sends tiger-stripe shadows across the walls. Birds manage to enter the building periodically and fly around the rafters, making confused circles. Sitting alone on a cool, ash-blond bench outside the courtrooms is like waiting in Heaven’s administrative wing.
Sean David Morton was out of his element. Whenever I had seen him in the past, he was always among his people, greeting his adoring fans or getting his cheek pinched by the delighted ladies at the Conscious Life Expo. Hustling through the courthouse halls in a tan blazer with an unidentifiable crest on the pocket, wearing thick tan orthopedic shoes, he looked shabby, befuddled. His wife, Melissa, leaned heavily on a cane, her blond hair pulled into a low ponytail and secured with a headband. A few months later, one of them would be a fugitive on the run and the other angrily selling off his beloved comic-book collection.
It was April 2017, and the Mortons were going to trial for conspiracy to defraud the government, filing false claims, and creating “fictitious financial instruments.” In English: they were accused of falsifying their tax returns and submitting fake bonds to credit card companies and the federal government to pay off various debts, taxes, and fines. Sean faces a whopping maximum of six hundred fifty years in prison, while Melissa faces six hundred twenty-five.
The things the Mortons were accused of doing were a direct result of their conspiratorial beliefs and also, according to them, their friendship with a man named Brandon Adams, who was himself, at the time of their trial, serving a substantial prison sentence. Their story is a window into a tiny corner of conspiracy culture, one that has resisted every attempt by the federal government to strangle it with fines and jail time. Until the feds put a stop to it, the couple were practitioners of redemption theory, a set of beliefs according to which the government is hoarding secret money, there are secret loopholes for accessing that money, and a canny citizen using the right combination of words and little-known tax maneuvers can find it. Redemption theory rests on three peculiarly American things: a desire not to pay taxes, the conviction that the government doesn’t have the right to boss you around, and a willingness to spend vast amounts of time in court to back up those beliefs.
Redemption theorists are a subset of the sovereign citizen movement, which, according to estimates by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has some three hundred thousand adherents, one hundred thousand of whom are described as “hard-core.” The SPLC admits that’s a very rough number, since sovereigns, as they are called, mostly prefer to hide from view—until they get arrested. Broadly, sovereign citizens believe they are not subject to federal law and that swaths of the federal government are acting illegally, in ways the framers of the Constitution never intended.
Sovereigns have been known to create their own driver’s licenses, form their own police force, attempt to carry out citizens’ arrests, and, more optimistically, try to prise their members out of jail with the use of pseudo-legal reasoning. Sovereigns have also tried using their antifederal stance to evade paying child support or reclaim their children from foster care—this one by filing pseudo-legal documents claiming their children as private property, illegally seized by the state. Their best-known and most recent moment in the spotlight was the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016, seized by Ammon Bundy with the help of homegrown militias and various ragtag sovereign groups, who contested the federal government’s right to own land and argued they had a legal obligation to turn it over to the states.
Redemption theorists will sometimes deny that they are sovereign citizens and express contempt for them, but the two groups indisputably share some DNA. At its core, sovereignty is about trying to do an end run around the more unpleasant aspects of living under state control. But the Mortons aren’t violent or dangerous. They’re not armed occupiers holed up in a bird refuge. And their quest against taxation is part of a long American tradition.
There have been tax protesters in the United States since our founders angrily dumped tea into a harbor, but the tax denier movement really took hold in the 1950s. In 1951, a Kansas building contractor named Arthur Julius Porth sued the federal government to return his taxes of $135, claiming they were taken from him illegally. Porth held that the Sixteenth Amendment, which gives the United States the power to levy an income tax, subjected him to “involuntary servitude.” He even got specific about who was doing the enslaving, claiming that the Sixteenth Amendment “put Americans into economic bondage to the international bankers,” which is, as the SPLC points out, a classic, barely disguised anti-Semitic trope.
Porth’s demand for his money was not a success, but he kept his one-man protest going throughout the 1950s and 1960s, eventually pleading the Fifth Amendment (by writing “I plead the Fifth”) on a blank tax return; he also refused to deduct taxes from his employees’ paychecks. After a prolonged court battle, in 1967 he was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation.
Despite its lack of success—a recurring theme with redemption theory’s star players—Porth’s crusade won him a number of ardent fans. After serving his sentence, he spent much of his life speaking against taxes, distributing a book called A Manual for Those Who Think That They Must Pay an Income Tax. He even attempted—also unsuccessfully—to issue arrest warrants against government employees who he believed were violating the Constitution.
One of Porth’s biggest fans was William Potter Gale, the founder of the racist and anti-Semitic Ministry of Christ Church, itself a part of the (racist and anti-Semitic) Christian Identity movement, which teaches that Europeans are descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel. Everyone else is a vile mud person, worthy of destruction. Jews in particular are described as the literal children of Satan. In 1971, Gale created Posse Comitatus, the earliest modern sovereign movement in the United States. Its members pioneered a lot of the tactics used by sovereign citizens today, like refusing to get a driver’s license, declaring themselves exempt from federal citizenship, and filing liens against individual employees of the IRS, claiming ownership of their homes or cars or other property as payment for nonexistent debts (and as a form of revenge for those IRS employees trying to collect their taxes: the liens aren’t legal and don’t stand up in court, but they are a serious nuisance). One Posse Comitatus member, Gordon Kahl, managed to fuse some early tax-protester ideas with his own special brand of hatred, calling his tax dollars “tithes to the synagogue of Satan.” In 1983, Kahl killed two federal marshals before going fugitive for four months, eventually dying in a shootout with the FBI.
Posse Comitatus started to fragment in the early 1980s, but an Ohio man named Roger Elvick was on hand to help Gale found the Committee of the States, another white supremacist organization in which tax denial and sovereign citizenry fused with overwhelming anti-government hostility. The Committee of the States was quite explicitly focused on the overthrow of the US government; at a 1987 meeting, the organization’s founders drew up an “indictment” of Congress for “malfeasance in office,” directing those lawmakers to be replaced by the committee. Somehow, that didn’t work. Instead, Gale and other committee members were convicted of sending threats to IRS agents and their families.
Elvick, meanwhile, set down his own impossibly strange yet determined path. He focused his fight against the federal government on another front, creating the concept of redemption theory.
After the United States stopped using the gold standard in 1933, the government, according to Elvick, secretly began using a different form of insurance to back our currency: human lives. His theory holds that with the birth of each new citizen and the issue of each birth certificate, the federal government deposits $630,000 into a secret bank account. That action, he claims, creates a “strawman” persona, used by the government as collateral to back our monetary system the way gold used to do.
In Elvick’s conception, each citizen is little more than a slave to a tyrannical currency system, the financial equivalent of unconscious fetal beings floating in vats in the vast lab in the famous scene from The Matrix. But he believed that, by using little-known aspects of the Uniform Commercial Code—the laws governing commercial transactions—US citizens could “reclaim” their straw-man persona, access their secret bank account, and start spending that $630,000.
While still acting as spokesperson for the Committee of the States, Elvick began advising aspiring redemption theorists across the country, selling a booklet called The Redemption Package. The SPLC says he focused on people such as “desperate farmers” trying to keep their land, but the ideas were aimed at anyone with money problems.
The track record of success for those ideas was, to put it mildly, feeble: in 1990, a federal judge in North Dakota convicted Elvick and two other men of conspiracy to impede justice by filing false tax documents. He ended up serving time in prison and was, like Porth, ordered to undergo psychiatric testing. Elvick was charged with conspiracy again even while incarcerated, and after his release promptly began peddling redemption ideas in his home state of Ohio; new forgery, extortion, and corruption convictions followed. As of 2017, he was a free man, but did not respond to attempts to contact him. (In fairness, I may have been calling old numbers: Elvick has a dizzying number of past and possible addresses across the Midwest.)
Of course, suspicion of the IRS is not limited to conspiracy theorists or sovereign citizens, and many of the claims of redemption theorists are echoed by mainstream right-wing media. Conservative groups argued that the Obama administration’s IRS audited them unfairly because of their political leanings; talk show host Rush Limbaugh, too, claimed to have been audited twelve years in a row, implicitly tying that to his status as a brave, shouty truth teller. (In a legal settlement in 2017, under conservative Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Justice Department apologized for auditing conservative groups, saying, “There is no excuse for this conduct. Hundreds of organizations were affected by these actions, and they deserve an apology from the IRS. We hope that today’s settlement makes clear that this abuse of power will not be tolerated.”)
These days, redemption theory has fragmented: it’s no longer just about reclaiming your straw man, but a thousand other far-fetched legal and financial ideas, peddled by just as many would-be redemption experts. It’s become a tidy little cottage industry, despite an irritable statement from the IRS rebutting “the notion of secret accounts assigned to each citizen” as “pure fantasy” (to redemption theorists, though, the IRS would say that, to throw everyone off the truth).
Redemption theory is all but invisible if you don’t know where to look. Yet once you start to see it, the signs are easy to spot: there are redemption theory explainers on YouTube (“Reclaim your straw man!” chirps a perky black-and-white cartoon) and online experts selling DVDs and booklets and seminars full of guaranteed get-out-of-debt-quick information. The style is fairly uniform: the designs often look antiquated, the material dotted with incongruously happy clip-art people, and the text full of abstruse, close-typed legalistic nonsense.
In fact, an eccentric use of language is one of the biggest flags for both sovereign citizens in general and redemption theory in particular. Court filings submitted by sovereigns, such as homemade habeas corpus petitions or demands claiming that the IRS owes them $2 million, tend to contain some common grammatical elements. To redemption theorists, a name typed all in upper case indicates the straw-man persona, whereas the name in lower case refers to the real, flesh-and-blood person, or “natural man.” Sometimes hyphenation or creative colons and semicolons are used to distinguish the true self from their government-made golem. The labels vary: one of the Malheur occupiers, Ryan Bundy, when awaiting trial on conspiracy and firearms charges, described himself as “an idiot,” writing in a filing: “I, ryan c, man, am an idiot of the ‘Legal Society’; and; am an idiot (layman, outsider) of the ‘Bar Association’; and; i am incompetent; and; am not required by any law to be competent.” (Bundy and his brother Ammon were both acquitted, along with several other occupiers.)
The SPLC points out that redemption theory, like sovereign citizenry, has proved very popular in prison, particularly with people who think that accessing their straw man will help them get out of the clink. There are also numerous black nationalist sovereign groups and redemption theorists, despite the movement’s explicit roots as a white supremacist enterprise. The Moorish Nation includes black sovereign citizens, who distinguish themselves from the population as Moors and use the last name el-Bey; as noted, the Washitaw Nation in Louisiana, also a branch of sovereign citizens, describes itself as a Native American tribe to bolster its claim to sovereignty and gain tribal rights.
Unsurprisingly, the court system seems to be even more impatient with black sovereigns. The SPLC recounts the fate of one man, Frederick R. James of East St. Louis, Missouri, who went by Nkosi Niyahuman-Dey and was charged in the early 2000s with selling marijuana. James claimed to be a member of the Cahokia Great Seal Moors and refused to answer questions in court; he denied that he was subject to the court’s jurisdiction and sent the judge a bill for $151 million—“half a million for each time the judge mentioned his name, which James said was copyrighted,” according to the SPLC. James’s tactic was also unsuccessful: he was convicted on drug charges, with two counts of contempt of court piled on for his trouble.
To his eternal misfortune and that of his clients, Sean David Morton became deeply involved in redemption theory sometime around 2006. For much of his life, Morton had focused on celestial matters: his switch to the earthly came with a heavy cost. His story neatly illustrates the nature of the redemption movement and the point where conspiracy theories meet New Age ideas; it also pinpoints the line where the federal government stops ignoring conspiracy theorists and comes down on them with all its might.
As I’ve heard it told, Morton’s origin story goes like this: He was born on October 1, 1959, in Texas but spent much of his life in California. His parents, like him, were colorful crusaders for unusual ideas: his mother, Maureen Kennedy Salaman—the same Maureen Kennedy Salaman who fought to make laetrile available to all—was a well-known natural-health author in the 1970s and 1980s, a time when those ideas were less acceptable in the mainstream.
In old photos, Maureen Salaman has the glossy, tightly updoed beauty of Nancy Reagan. Morton’s younger sister, Colleen Morton Anderson (estranged from her brother “probably since birth, in a way,” she said in an interview), describes growing up with their mother as “the strangest childhood ever.” Both Maureen and the siblings’ stepfather, Frank, were devoted members of the John Birch Society. In Colleen’s telling, they were militantly prepared for showdowns with Russians, the feds, or both. “We went to John Birch camp,” she remembers. “And apparently there was a property my dad bought in Marysville that had a bomb shelter.” At home, she says, “We had Uzis and hand grenades and food stores, and the government was out to get us.”
All of this seemed unremarkable at the time. “For me, it seemed normal to have an Uzi in the house.” In the den, she says, Frank positioned a skeleton with a bullet hole through its head, claiming he’d brought it back as a spoil from fighting in the Japanese theater in World War II.
Communists loomed large. “The Russians were taking over,” Colleen explains. At the same time, the family “didn’t have to abide by the law.” If it wasn’t the Russians, then the government was going to take over, becoming a totalitarian state, and, as she puts it, in either case, “you needed to arm yourself, you needed to stock up food.” She pauses. “Yet my mom went shopping every day. If we’re going to become a Communist country, what do you need the clothes for? It was an interesting philosophy.”
Though he was deeply shaped by his parents’ conservative views, their devout Christianity, and their attitude toward the federal government, Morton took a different path, shaped by his psychic abilities. “I started developing them when I was very young,” he told me in an interview. “My grandmother was Irish and could see around a few corners, as they say. Also, I worked very hard to open myself.” Morton became fascinated with the paranormal in 1985, when he traveled to England and Ireland and discovered the “Green Stone saga,” as he called it, a mystic jewel supposedly set into a sword belonging to King Arthur, held by the Knights Templar, and owned by Mary, Queen of Scots. True believers claim that the stone is hidden somewhere in a country manor in the Scottish highlands, and Morton said that he was part of the quest to find it. (One website claims the stone was discovered in 2005, but it’s unclear where it’s gone to since.)
Morton says that after his travels through England and Ireland, he went to India and met the Dalai Lama. From there, he holed up in a Nepalese Buddhist monastery, where monks taught him the secrets of time travel and a particular type of extrasensory perception known as remote viewing. “Viewers” are able to use their ESP abilities to gain images and impressions of faraway objects and situations. Morton wasn’t the only one intrigued by remote viewing: in the mid-1990s, declassified government documents revealed that the United States spent $20 million or so funding Project Stargate, in which the armed forces and later the CIA tried to determine whether remote viewing had any military applications (and whether it was real, which all available scientific evidence shows it’s not).
When she finished laughing, Colleen offered her version of Morton’s biography: “He was a DJ at Houlihan’s,” she said.
Whatever version of his background is accurate, Morton did spend much of the 1990s making documentaries about UFOs and extraterrestrial experiences, including one called UFO Contactees. He said that he worked for Paramount, had been a producer for the TV news show Hard Copy, and, in his words, was “a freelance producer and pitching stuff and working behind the scenes on Unsolved Mysteries,” a deliciously creepy show that was popular in the mid-1990s.
Morton’s greatest supposed claim to fame is that he is the person who shone a national spotlight on Area 51, a remote and restricted Air Force base in Nevada that conspiracists believe to be a hub of extraterrestrial activity. “I … found the hilltop that looked down on the base and put it on the front page of the L.A. Times,” he said. “And that turned Area 51 into a global phenomenon. It was already locally known in Las Vegas, and that made it a national deal.”
There are plenty of UFO buffs who would dispute that history, but there’s no doubting Morton’s passion. He became fascinated with Dulce Base, a purported hidden military base inside a mesa in northeastern New Mexico. UFO researchers believe it has subterranean levels occupied by workaday aliens running their own sort of parallel military bureaucracy. Morton says he led a research expedition to Dulce, where an “ultrasound of the mesa” proved that the lower layers are really there. (Morton felt sorry for me when I told him that even though I’m from New Mexico, the subterranean alien base somehow escaped me. “Talk to the Jicarilla Apaches,” he said. “They talk about fighting the ant people.”)
For a time, the UFO world contented Morton. He led reporters from the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register on wild UFO-hunting expeditions. One OC Register story from May 1993 captures him driving very fast toward Area 51 while explaining that the aliens there were from the planet Krondac. “They’re actually bluish-gray and a little bigger than most people think. They’re 3 to 4 feet tall.” During that era, Morton was a regular guest on the beloved UFO-oriented radio program Coast to Coast AM, back when it was hosted by founder Art Bell. (His relationship soured with the current host, George Noory, and he eventually stopped appearing.)
It was then that he met Melissa Thomson, who was originally from Utah. According to Colleen, Melissa (who tends to avoid giving interviews) came from a large and tight-knit Mormon family that disapproved of Sean and their relationship. (In one email Colleen received from Melissa’s brother, he described Sean as “a mental midget” and expressed a desire to kick his ass.)
At their trial, Morton said that the two met in 1998 at a New Age conference in Las Vegas. “Melissa had heard me on the radio and came to the conference for us to meet,” Morton told the jury, smiling. “It was love at first sight.” She moved to Hermosa Beach in California in the summer of 1999 and the couple has been together ever since.
Everything seemed to be rosy in the Mortons’ world for about a decade, until Sean decided to turn his psychic abilities into a profit center. He had started a mailer a few years earlier, in 1993, called Delphi Associates Newsletter, where he offered financial and political predictions and began referring to himself, ambitiously, as “America’s Prophet.” But now he made the leap from an observer of the stock market to a player, founding the Delphi Associates Investment Group, run out of the couple’s home. Delphi claimed a special advantage: Morton’s psychic abilities, which guided him to make smart and profitable investments. He marketed himself to the New Age community as one of their own, someone they could trust. In a long-winded letter to investors in 2010, Morton said he’d seen too many scams and Ponzi schemes targeting his fellow spiritual seekers.
“I am putting my faith, energy, spirit and reputation on the line to do the very best that I can for all of you,” he wrote. “I am not willing to risk my immortal soul or spiritual path by ripping anyone off. I am a public figure. I speak regularly at expos and conventions. I am not hard to find, not hard to contact, have lived in the same house for 23 years, driven the same CAR since 1983, and published my Delphi Associates Newsletter for the last 14 years. I’m not going anywhere.”
The Securities and Exchange Commission had other ideas. That same year, the SEC sued Morton for fraud, claiming he’d bilked investors out of $6 million and disputing the legality of selling one’s psychic abilities as an advantage. The SEC also maintained that not all of the money he’d collected from investors had even made it into the stock market; instead the Mortons had dumped it into various shell corporations, including the nonprofit Prophecy Research Institute, a religious entity.
Morton argued two things: the SEC charges were bunk, initiated by a disgruntled investor; and they were part of a broader pattern of government harassment, spurred by the fact that he knew too much. “Because I’m on the cutting edge, I’m obviously hated by some force in the government,” he said in an interview. “When I started messing around with Area 51, I was told, ‘They are going to come after you.’ I had a five-star general say, ‘You’re too funny to kill.’ Some agent told me that the fact that I’m psychic makes me easy to discredit by the media and ‘that’s why they’re not putting a bullet in your head.’”