Fighting the System : Rights: Self-proclaimed ‘state citizens’ say the law allows them to renounce control by the federal government.

Jared Held, a Studio City sound engineer, gave up his Social Security number and bank accounts and refuses to use ZIP codes. Alan Bird, a marketing analyst from Moorpark, openly tools around without a driver’s license or license plates.

Steve Jones, an African American actor from Los Angeles, is renouncing his right to vote, and says his distrust of government has grown so deep that he compares modern American citizenship to enslavement.

“Being a U.S. citizen,” said Jones, “is roughly analogous to being a nigger if you’re black--as much a subject as I would’ve been had I been a slave on a plantation.”

It’s an extreme analogy. But it represents the intense feelings of self-proclaimed “state citizens” who view themselves not as citizens of the United States, but as citizens of the Republic of California. That identity, they insist, gives them more freedom than the remaining federal citizens who they say live under an abusive government.

In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, much attention has been focused on the anti-government “patriot movement,” whose numbers purportedly include the suspects in the attack.

But authorities say not all of its adherents promote violence or retreat to far-removed compounds. Stuck someplace in the right-wing nether world between Libertarians and Idaho survivalists, there are people who lead seemingly ordinary suburban lives but are quietly severing their ties to the government--refusing to pay taxes, returning their driver’s licenses, even declining to use conventional mailing addresses.

Their weapon, they say, is the law. Held says he’s installed a $90,000 law library in his townhouse. Bird, who prevailed when accused of driving without a license, helps others research the law. Such local “citizens” spend much of their time poring over antique law books at the rustic, Box Canyon home of their leader, a pear-shaped, 66-year-old former security guard named Richard J. McDonald.

“We don’t believe in guns,” McDonald said. “We believe in doing it through political means, through the ballot box.”

“If we did know anybody that had motivations like that, we’d be the first to turn them in,” Bird, a former Mormon missionary with a boyish face and piercing blue eyes, said of the bombing. “There is no justification for what they did.”

State citizens do not appear to be arming themselves or others, according to local law enforcement authorities and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, which has been following their meetings. Local officials for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms said they had never heard of McDonald or his followers.

A little-known network of individualists with no formal name, state citizens subscribe to McDonald’s hardly original belief that local rights supersede federal control and that smaller government is better. Political scientists say they are among a slew of right-leaning groups cropping up around the nation that reflect growing disenchantment with government, as well as a deeply rooted American distrust of authority.

McDonald’s broad philosophy appeals to a wide array of people with different backgrounds; he claims about 5,000 followers nationwide whom he reaches through computer, fax, radio and a cable-TV show called “LA Lawman.” Held, Bird and Jones, for example, all are articulate, college-educated and successful in their fields.

Monthly gatherings at the Beverly Garland Holiday Inn in Studio City draw as many as 300 people. Each Sunday at noon, a much smaller group of prospective citizens meets at McDonald’s book-lined house to watch videotapes and listen to his ideas. He also sells $795 self-help kits, which explain how to renounce federal citizenship and defend oneself in court if arrested.

One recent introductory gathering at his home between Chatsworth and Simi Valley drew a Los Angeles Unified School District teacher, a blazer-clad contracts administrator for a major film studio and an evangelical Christian couple interested in home schooling who had driven down from Washington state with their seven children.

“Don’t believe what I say,” McDonald told a rapt audience, some of whom were taking notes or videotaping the proceeding. “I’m the biggest liar God ever created. Believe what the law books say.”

The eighth-grade dropout insists that his only goal is to educate the public about the existence of two classes of citizenship in this country. The inferior, federal kind is used as an excuse to deny all sorts of rights. Lesser known, he says, is state citizenship, which dates back to an era when the states were recognized as sovereign republics and is more closely aligned with the Founding Fathers’ intent.

In one of the videos McDonald shows recruits--titled “Big Park”--singing police tie up a family and haul it from its home to make way for a federal park. The gleeful officials then move out all the family’s furniture, and turn the home into a ranger station.

But state citizens can protect their property rights, among others, if they only study the law, McDonald says.

As a result of their legal immersion, citizens use all sorts of technical terms and make dozens of arcane distinctions between common language and what they believe was the Founding Fathers’ plan. For example, they prefer to say they “travel” rather than drive and use “conveyances” rather than cars or trucks.

As Held tells it, paid, professional drivers may be taxed. But ordinary people, traveling in their personal conveyances, were never meant to be taxed because they have an inherent right to travel.

Citizens often proclaim themselves “sovereign citizens” because the Founding Fathers intended for no one to be subject to a king. Their mistrust of lawyers also finds a linguistic root in Colonial times.

“You know where the meaning of the word ‘attorney’ comes from, don’t you?” asked Held. “To turn the words in the king’s favor.”

Their legal gymnastics often tire authorities. “They tend to be great time wasters,” said Jerry Franklin, a deputy district attorney in Santa Barbara who has handled a number of citizens-generated traffic cases and views them as largely harmless, if misguided.

Nonetheless, a spokeswoman for the ADL said state citizens bear monitoring because some of their anti-government views overlap those of citizen militias, which espouse violent resistance to government. Some state citizens also have been known to distribute racist or anti-Semitic literature, she said.

“I don’t believe they are fronts for militias,” said Tzivia Schwartz, Western states counsel for the ADL. “But we do believe they are fully supportive of the militia movement, as evidenced by the speakers they invite to their meetings.”

Franklin, meanwhile, knows the citizens best for their legal maneuvering. Whenever their familiar legal briefs land on his desk--claiming residency in a fictitious “2nd Judicial District”--Franklin tries to make contact and dissuade them “from the nonsense that’s sure to follow.”

“The only thing ‘sovereign’ about them,” said Franklin, “is that they screw up royally.”

In late November, a Sylmar man named David J. Sanders was sentenced to six months in jail after he told a Municipal Court judge in San Fernando that he was a “sovereign white male” under the California Republic’s Constitution and thus was exempt from the motor vehicle code.

Sanders, who was convicted of driving without a license, could not be reached. But his wife, Heather, said later she personally appealed to the judge and her husband’s employer in an effort to release him and make sure he still had his job and health insurance.

Heather Sanders also blamed McDonald and his citizens kits, which persuaded her husband to represent himself in court.

With a toddler at home and twins on the way, she said she sympathized with the beliefs of her husband, a 38-year-old purchasing agent, but feared the consequences.

“It was very stressful for me,” she said. “I assumed he’d only get a fine--it was his first offense. But of course the judge threw the book at him.”

Finally released on bail pending an appeal, Sanders could have been placed on probation if only he had agreed to comply with its terms and get a driver’s license. But Sanders’ defiance left Judge L. Jeffrey Wiatt with little choice but to impose the maximum sentence, Wiatt said.

“I can’t inquire as to their beliefs . . . I just deal with the case in front of me,” Wiatt said. “It’s kind of hard for me to understand what their legal theories are, other than absolute nonsense.”

Although experts tend to agree with that assessment, they also note that anti-tax, anti-government movements are quintessentially American.

“There’s a long tradition in America of withdrawing from the corruption of the culture,” said Robin Einhorn, an American history professor at UC Berkeley.

“Thoreau’s Walden Pond would be one example. In the early 19th Century, there was a whole slew of these which had very complicated ideologies worked out to justify why they were doing it.”

Like Thoreau, who went to jail in protest of a tax to finance the Mexican War, Bird was also prepared to defend his beliefs behind bars.

Still, the 37-year-old father of three admits he was nervous before his appearance in Ventura Municipal Court last Dec. 5. Word of Sanders’ sentence the week before had spread quickly along the citizens’ grapevine.

“I was scared spitless ‘cause that guy had just gone to jail the Friday before,” said Bird, who faced five counts. But he said he had the law on his side and was well prepared.

“I sat down and read every motor vehicle law from 1905 forward. And I saw what the Legislature did and what was its intent.”

He argued that the state Department of Motor Vehicles only issues driver’s licenses and vehicle registrations to people with Social Security numbers--but the Social Security system is voluntary.

So if someone declines to obtain a Social Security number because of political or religious beliefs, Bird argued, how can he be penalized for not carrying a driver’s license?

“It’s a legal impossibility,” said Bird. He also entered into evidence a long affidavit explaining why he has returned his license and plates to the DMV.

After a half-day trial, Judge Thomas Hutchins found Bird not guilty of driving without a license, driving without registration and having no registration in his possession.

A fourth charge of failing to appear, the apparent result of a court computer glitch, was dismissed. Bird was convicted of a fifth count--failing to display front and rear license plates--but planned to appeal.

The official explanation for Bird’s victory is that an inexperienced prosecutor, faced with his first citizen, made a technical error. But the case is being touted by other citizens as a victory.

McDonald says he doesn’t plan to stop in traffic court but hopes to place citizens-sponsored initiatives aimed at restoring local rights on ballots in several Western states. (Oddly enough, many state citizens have renounced their rights to vote.) His obscure group’s newfound celebrity might help as McDonald was tied up with one interview after another when, in the wake of the Oklahoma bombing, reporters came calling to determine whether the man who had renounced government was a commando or the guy next door.

“I’ll be on the TV on 4, 5 and 6 tonight,” he told one caller. “Yup, and there’s someone here now, too.”

Times staff writers Sara Catania and Kenneth R. Weiss contributed to this story.