“Some of my favorite people are women.”
Richard Mack and his magical mystery tour are coming to take you away.
This week, a group of journalists from the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting dropped a series of investigative stories about the “constitutional sheriff” movement, with a focus on the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) founder Richard Mack.
The story details how Mack and the CSPOA have taken their medicine show on the road over the past few years as a way to recruit law enforcement officers, people who wish they were law enforcement officers, and various groupies to his way of thinking.
From the story:
The sheriffs group has spread its ideology to at least 30 states, becoming more mainstream in part by securing state approval for taxpayer-funded law enforcement training. It has held formal trainings on its “constitutional” curriculum for law enforcement officers in at least 13 states over the past five years. In six states, the training was approved for law enforcement officers’ continuing education credits. The group also has supporters who sit on three state boards in charge of law enforcement training standards.
Having attended a few of these trainings myself, I can attest that they are generally low-budget and poorly run. They have a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants quality that might be amusing to some people. Occasionally, a non-sheriff politician of questionable moral character might appear like disgraced Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is facing impeachment. But, overall, they lack the kind of splashy music and special effects that, say, a Trump rally brings to the table.
The model of a traveling roadshow to convert people to a specific way of thinking was also fundamental to the method of W. Cleon Skousen, who was an anti-communist crusader, FBI agent, police chief of Salt Lake City, and friend of revered Latter-Day Saint President Ezra Taft Benson. After speaking at various anti-communist rallies, including a 1961 event at the Hollywood Bowl in front of a 25,000-person crowd with far-right luminaries, including Fred Schwartz (founder of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade), Ronald Reagan, and John Wayne, Skousen started the Freeman Institute, which catered to a mostly Mormon audience and encouraged them to fight like hell against the scourge of communism.
For Skousen, as for Mack and most of the GOP at this point, the stakes were high. In 1961, Skousen warned of a coming woke apocalypse:
Either the people would humble themselves and say to God, our heavenly Father, give us strength to endure. We will obey your commandments. We will be morally clean, we will worship you, we will be honest and we will fight for truth and righteousness. Or it says, we will abhor God and we will turn away from Him and we will become a degenerate people and if that happens, we will be wiped as clean of the land.
In 1984, the Freeman Institute became the National Center for Constitutional Studies (NCCS), which produces those “pocket Constitutions” that have George Washington on the front (even though Washington did not write the U.S. Constitution). The little pamphlet has reached the top of “Amazon best-sellers” and was carried by Cliven Bundy.
To Skousen, communism was everything wrong with America, and “communists” encompassed a wide swath of people, including feminists, Jews, and civil rights protestors. Skousen also wrote and published (through his own publishing imprint) dozens of books. One of them, 1985’s “The Making of America” was recently recommended by Moms 4 Liberty and Richard Mack himself. “The Making of America” is a ponderous tome that purports to tell the story of the U.S.A.’s founding through the tales of individual white men with a John-Bircher twist. (Both Skousen and Benson played footsie with Birchers and plainly agreed with them; their offspring became members and leaders.)
Many of Skousen’s beliefs came from mainstream Mormonism, particularly the notion that the U.S. Constitution was holy and America was a chosen land. The constitution, Skousen wrote, is “the world’s greatest political success formula,” which makes his book also sound like a multi-level marketing scheme. (Both the Freeman Institution and Mack’s CSPOA have MLM-style qualities.) Skousen’s dislike of Black communities is apparent in his work, not the least because he says that slavery was “good.”
By the end of his life, Skousen seemed more like a troll than a prophet, a wizened and cranky man who popped up when something weird was going on. At his death, some Bingham Young University professors – where Skousen was a professor of history and religion – disavowed Skousen’s teachings. (The Mormon church, as far as I can tell, has not disavowed Skousen but has, in recent decades, tried to distance itself from Skousen’s overt “slavery-was-good” racism.)
These ideas remain, however perplexingly, extremely popular. You find them in the rhetoric of extremists like Stuart Rhodes, who founded the Oath Keepers, and Glenn Beck, as well as even among Mormon politicians who disavow extremism like Mitt Romney.
My point here is to say that while mainstream politicians – including sheriffs – take great pains to disavow overt anti-federal and anti-Black sentiment, I have not seen any real effort to address the historical roots that explain why these theories remain so popular. One of Mack’s key claims is that the U.S. Constitution – the original text plus the first ten amendments only – is divinely inspired and, as a result, should govern law enforcement over and above “rules” or “codes.” I submit that this idea is not terribly controversial. Now there’s a huge caveat – Mack specifically means that the U.S. Constitution is about white, male power.
But also, isn’t that also kind of true? One Texas sheriff got salty with me when I asked about his involvement in the CSPOA and said, defensively, “People should be grateful that there are law enforcement officers who want to take the time to learn their constitutional rights and protect them from violations of their constitutional rights.” The subtext was clear to me: You, little lady, should be grateful I care about your constitutional rights or else.
I am assuming that the Sheriff is less concerned with his department's inevitable violations of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth amendments.
It seems to be a common event with law enforcement breaking the commandment of Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. When they are according to them the supreme power, AKA The Boss of the people and innocent peoples lives are ruined in the process. Also how could any human being think or say that slavery was good.