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They don't. LEOs will routinely conduct searches without any warrant or probable cause and if they find anything and the defense tries to have it thrown out, the LEO will say the search was "voluntary". Similarly, they will say people were "voluntarily detained" if they don;t know to ask "am I free to go?"

Calling yourself a sovereign citizen will get you nowhere. Saying "I don't consent to this search" will not prevent a search. But it will allow you to get anything found suppressed, unless a judge decides there was probably cause or the body cam happens to fail and so there is no record of your refusal.

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I see that I was unclear - I did not mean "the law goes along with this, and I don't know why?" I meant "I do not understand why Sov. Cit. would believe that the law would agree to these ideas".
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> why would law enforcement and courts go along with it?

They don't want to deal with it. If someone has one of those SovCit license plates, you know pulling them over is guaranteed to result in frustrating verbal sparring match, which may result in the cop giving up (which is then shared as evidence for the SovCit movement's effectiveness!), or may escalate to a physical altercation.

Whether or not the SovCit practitioners understand that's what's happening is anyone's guess.

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> Whether or not the SovCit practitioners understand that's what's happening is anyone's guess.

Probably more of them don't understand. I am very unfortunate to have one in my extended family, and they have fully lost their grip on reality and basic cause-and-effect. They skate by most of the time, which reinforces their beliefs, and then once the pile gets large enough, the whole thing collapses on them, and then cycle starts over.

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> Like, why would this be true

Steel-manning the sovereign citizens movement (which I don't believe in): they believe authority comes from the consent of the populace, which is a true statement and in many countries founding documents, they mistakenly think that means the law doesn't apply to them when they as an individual do not consent.

They basically don't get that democracy is the tyranny of the many.

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Social contract philosophy has always seemed oversimplified to me. Are people in China or Iran consenting? "I consent, so I won't be killed" seems more like coercion.
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What is tolerated is consented to in a sense. The alternative is rejection of the contract terms but you have to be willing to bet your life on it.
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I don't see how that could be called consent. No one would say someone consented to sex, for example, because they weren't willing to die by refusing.
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