In response to the assassination of three Baton Rouge police officers, Donald Trump tweeted out "we demand law and order” and later even suggested that president Barack Obama had a sinister, if vague, link to the slayings.
But Trump has more than once associated himself with leaders and groups whose anti-government ideas are clearly linked to terrorism, both domestic and also international — and one member of such a group spoke Monday night at the Republican National Convention.
In a widely noted July 18, 2016 op-ed at Vox.com, academics Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann argue that “The Republicans waged a 3-decade war on government. They got Trump.” Underlying that “3-decade war” has been a spreading anti-government ideology that centers around the concept of “nullification”.
The idea that citizens can selectively nullify federal and state laws with which they disagree has become widely popular on the far right and appears to have helped motivate Eugene Gavin Long, the assassin of the three slain Baton Rouge cops.
“Nullification” ideas also underlay the occupation, by armed militants, of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in early 2016.
Historically, the concept of nullification helped motivate tax evasion schemes and sporadic anti-police and anti-government violence by the virulently racist, white supremacist Posse Comitatus movement and the more recent Sovereign Citizens Movement
Now, an African-American county sheriff belonging to a national group that promotes nullification has addressed the Republican National Convention.
Few of the media outlets covering Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke’s fiery Monday night speech at the 2016 RNC in Cleveland have noticed Clarke’s participation in the anti-government group known as CSPOA — the County Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. Clarke was nominated as the 2013 CSPOA sheriff of the year.
On March 1, 2013, Donald Trump, Jr. appeared for an interview on the nationally syndicated radio show of one of CSPOA's leaders, Sam Bushman. Joining Bushman and Trump, Jr. for the interview was Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC) board member James Edwards, who has repeatedly spoken at CofCC meetings and is listed on the group’s most recently available 990 IRS tax form as a CofCC director.
Website material promoted by the crudely white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens has been widely credited with having inspired Dylan Roof, accused of having assassinated, in the summer of 2015, nine members of a Charleston, SC church prayer group.
For its part, the County Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) promotes nullification and has billed itself as “The army to set our nation free”. In April 2016, a Center For Public Integrity report shone a harsh spotlight on the group’s ties to anti-government extremism, including ideas that align with the radical anti-government Sovereign Citizens Movement :
“What’s unique about his group is not that it opposes gun controls but that its ambition is to encourage law enforcement officers to defy laws they decide themselves are illegal. On occasion, some of his group’s sheriffs have found themselves in curious agreement with members of the sovereign citizens’ movement, which was also founded on claimed rights of legal defiance and is said by the FBI to pose one of the most serious domestic terrorism threats.”
In effect, CSPOA is a vector through which ideas on nullification are spreading among public officials.
Another such vector is the national group Oath Keepers ; CSPOA founder and head former county sheriff Richard Mack serves on the Oath Keepers board of directors. Like CSPOA, Oath Keepers has been involved in armed disputes over federally-owned lands.
(Oath Keepers head Stewart Rhodes originally intended to bring armed members of his group to the 2016 Republican National Convention, to provide “security” but was dissuaded by CSPOA head Mack.)
CSPOA sheriffs have a track record of support for far-right anti-government militancy. Although CSPOA head Richard Mack disagreed with the January 2016 armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by anti-government militants and militia members, Mack nonetheless offered rhetorical support.
Another CSPOA member went further - Grant County Sheriff Glenn Palmer twice met with leaders of the occupation, and one of the leaders told press that Palmer agreed with the militants’ views.
One year before CSPOA nominated sheriff Richard Clarke as the 2013 CSPOA sheriff of the year, the 2012 CSPOA national convention featured a startling array of anti-government leaders and ideologues.
At the 2012 CSPOA event, sheriff Glenn Parker was nominated as CSPOA’s 2012 sheriff of the year. Sheriff Palmer has come under scrutiny for building a personal army of “deputies”, and he is not the only CSPOA sheriff to do so.
In 2012, an investigation by a local CBS affiliate TV station revealed that some of thousands of deputies in Maricopa County, AZ sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “posse” — deputies who wear uniforms, have badges, and carry guns — had criminal pasts which, according to the investigation, included,
“arrests for assault, drug possession, domestic violence, sex crimes against children, disorderly conduct, impersonating an officer - and the list goes on.”
Another CSPOA sheriff is Hannaford County, TX sheriff Pamela Elliott, who according to one media report “is accused of intimidating Democrats and Latinos in her Texas county — which has been thrown into political turmoil since her 2012 election.”
Part of Mack’s book glorifies the 2014 standoff between federal agents and armed militants supporting rancher Cliven Bundy, accused of illegally grazing his cattle on federal lands. Bundy’s son Ammon Bundy would go on to lead the 2016 occupation of the Malheur wildlife refuge.
During the 2014 standoff, Elliott — whose picture is on the cover of CSPOA head Richard Mack’s 2014 book “Are You A David?” that promotes Mack’s anti-government ideology — put out a “standby order for volunteers” to back Cliven Bundy.
According to sociologist and researcher on the origins of the Tea Party Dr. James Scaminaci, the idea of county sheriffs whose authority supersedes federal authority conforms with a long-term plan, devised in the 1980s by theocratic Christian Reconstructionist thinkers, by which Christian militias could oppose federal power and eventually “reconstruct” the nation along “biblical” lines. As Scaminaci describes, those theocratic strategists,
“openly suggested that they had to create a strategy of resistance to federal tyranny; they further argued that while defensive violence was biblically and constitutionally justified, in the interim, they should retreat and not openly challenge the federal government; they argued that Jesus was the first militiaman; they argued that lesser magistrates, that could include governors, mayors and local sheriffs, were responsible for interposing themselves between federal tyranny and the individual local citizenry; and, they called for the development of a militia based on the models of ancient Israel and the American Revolutionary War.”
One of the architects of that master strategy has been Gun Owners of America (GOA) founder and head Larry Pratt, who contributed a chapter to the 1983 book Tactics of Christian Resistance that was edited by Christian Reconstructionist theorist Gary North.
North has advocated public community stoning to implement the death penalty for a range of infractions of biblical law including blasphemy, heresy, adultery, homosexuality, witchcraft, female un-chastity (sex before marriage), and “incorrigible” teenage rebelliousness.
Why carry out the executions with rocks ? Argued North, “the implements of execution are available to everyone at virtually no cost." Moreover, the "executions are community projects--not with spectators who watch a professional executioner do `his' duty, but rather with actual participants."
Gun Owners of America founder and head Larry Pratt works closely with CSPOA head Richard Mack, (a former publicist for Pratt's GOA) and the two have appeared together on the InfoWars conspiracy theory Internet talk show.
Pratt has spoken at several CSPOA national conventions including in 2012 and in 2014, when Pratt celebrated the 2014 Bundy ranch standoff as a illustration of a “magnificent” display of resistance by armed citizens to federal tyranny.
Pratt was described in a 2014 Rolling Stone feature story, by journalist Alexander Zaitchik, as “the Gun Lobby's Secret Weapon”.
That Rolling Stone story detailed Pratt’s past admiration for civil defense patrol in Guatemala, during the 1980s, that are now widely regarded by human rights groups as having functioned as death squads.
Pratt was also present at a 1992 Colorado meeting of far-right, virulently racist, anti-government white supremacist leaders that helped shape the rising militia movement. As James Scaminaci describes in one of his academic monographs,
‘In 1991-1992, two leading “traveling evangelicals” for the Christian Reconstructionist movement, David Barton and Larry Pratt, made contacts with the Christian Identity movement. By late 1992, three known representatives of the Christian Right, including Larry Pratt, had met with 150-160 white supremacists to agree to participate in building a nationwide militia.’
The welter of anti-government ideas that saturated the rising militia movement helped inspire the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which up to that point was the worst act of domestic terrorism in American history.
Another CSPOA convention speaker has been lawyer Thomas E. Woods, who at the 2012 CSPOA convention in Arizona expounded on his legal theory of nullification. Woods is a cofounder of the racist, neo-Confederate League of the South.
In a 2016 speech to League of the South members, President Michael Hill declared,
“There is no use organizing the South in search of a moderate way and half measures. The neo-Bolsheviks intend to continue their campaign of Cultural Marxist genocide against the South and only a radical and uncompromising organization will be able to stem that tide and reverse it….
...it is time for the traditional South to unite and fight back before it is too late to effectively do so. The time for hand-wringing over political correctness is over...
So I am asking all proud Southerners of our kith and kin, blood and soil nation to become Southern nationalists and join with us today. Come prepared to do battle for your survival. Together we will be strong enough to throw our enemies into the sea and banish them forever from our sacred Motherland. Hail Dixie! Hail Victory!”
The underlying strategic vision that unites white supremacists such as Hill, anti-government militias, and anti-government groups such as CSPOA and the Oath Keepers, argues Dr. James Scaminaci, is a concept known as Fourth Generation Warfare.
In early 2016, Donald Trump personally met, and accepted a book co-authored by, the originator of the Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) theory: William S. Lind, who for several decades worked closely with master architect of the religious right Paul Weyrich.
Lind first advanced his 4GW theory in a key 1989 article published in the US Marines Corps Gazette. Argues Scaminaci,
“While Lind’s 1989 article in the USMC is widely known, linked to, and cited in military strategic circles, it is also a blueprint for the development of the Patriot militia that is completely unknown to longtime observers of the Patriot militia movement.”
Lind’s 1989 article was not merely a template for the American militias — copies of Lind’s 1989 article were found, according to Lind, in the Tora Bora cave hideouts of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. In effect, Lind has more than once suggested, 4GW theory provided the strategic vision behind al-Qaeda’s spectacular 2001 terrorist attacks on America.
In a subsequent 1994 Marine Corps Gazette article William S. Lind laid out an additional set of ideas which gave strategic direction to 4GW as carried out by American anti-government groups, by outlining the now increasingly popular and widespread conspiracy theory referred to as “cultural Marxism”. Describes Scaminaci, Lind’s 1994 article,
‘directly stated that the liberal Democratic establishment under the rubric of promoting “cultural Marxism” or “political correctness” or “multi-culturalism” was the enemy of America’s traditional Judeo-Christian culture that was not only being abandoned, but being purposefully and actively destroyed, while “cultural Marxists” overlooked the internal threat posed by Islam. Lind closed that article with the prophetic, “The next real war we fight is likely to be on American soil.” ‘
William Lind has been the most ardent and effective promoter of the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory — which posits that in the 1920s and 1930s a small band of Jewish Marxist intellectuals launched a vast, amorphous plot that threatens to destroy not only America, but Christianity and Western Civilization.
In 2002, Lind told attendees at a Holocaust denial conference that the originators of the “cultural Marxism” plot “were all Jewish”.
The 2009 book Lind gave to Donald Trump at their early 2016 meeting, The Next Conservatism, contains discussion of both Fourth Generation Warfare and also “cultural Marxism”.
Lind’s version of the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory provided direct inspiration to convicted neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, whose 2011 Norway terrorist attacks killed 77 and wounded an estimated 319.
Among his many books, William S. Lind is author of the 2014 novel Victoria : A Novel of Fourth Generation War.
In his novel, Lind describes how white Christian militia insurgents fighting “political correctness” use 4GW tactics to overthrow the federal government, carry out ethnic cleansing — including forcing back families with children into compulsory sharecropping on white lands in the countryside, thwart an attempted black nationalist uprising by vaporizing the center of Atlanta with a tactical nuclear weapon, and launch a 10th crusade against Islam.
Lind’s novel closely resembles the “Turner Diaries”, by white supremacist leader William Pierce, that was found in the possession of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, in 1994 following the bombing of the Murrah P. Federal Building, when McVeigh was apprehended by police.
In chapter 17 of his ongoing work on the 4GW networks and plans of the American Christian right, James Scaminaci argues,
“Turning to targeting strategy of what a state of Fourth Generation Warfare may resemble, this chapter has demonstrated that the dominant ideological narratives of the Christian Right and Patriot Movement—Culture War and New World Order—are strongly correlated with terrorist plots.”