The Far-Right Movement That’s Above the Law

In May of 2021, I attended a rally in Battle Mountain, Nevada, to celebrate the fact that Lander County had become the first “constitutional county,” cementing the county’s lifetime relationship with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. There, I began to understand the “constitutional sheriff” movement that would threaten democracy, even as we move quickly toward the 2024 presidential election. (This trip was also the first where I saw “Trump 2024” signs, which were more fateful than I had imagined.)

The “constitutional sheriff” movement descends from other far-right movements of the past few decades, but, around 2011, ex-sheriff Richard Mack decided to turn the sheriff into the key figure, the law enforcement officer who would prevent complete Armageddon even in the face of a corrupt government. Mack’s CSPOA is the largest  organization for constitutional sheriffs and has recruited hundreds of sheriffs through trainings and rallies like the one I attended, which included several Nevada sheriffs.

The Battle Mountain rally also included groups of die-hard Trump voters, the same ones who form his populist base today. The constitutional sheriff movement pulled from many of the same strains that MAGA does — rural resentment, distaste for “woke” cultural issues, attachment to guns, and a sense that Trump has been chosen to overhaul (or overthrow) the government in a way that more closely matches Mack’s vision than that of traditional Republicans. The speakers and attendees presented many of the core ideas that are now part of Trump’s campaign — parental rights and worries about public schools, distrust in federal authorities, concerns that the election had been “rigged,” the Q-anon conspiracy, and, of course, militias and guns.

Much of this populist movement also contained an embedded threat to democracy as we know it — one sponsor handed out hats that said #UNRIG, after all. The idea was less to reform the system than to overturn it completely. As Mack would say, the sheriffs would “keep the peace” even when the people wanted violent rebellion. What I saw in 2021, much of which I found fantastical (like Trump 2024), has become pervasive and is the subject of my book The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy. To understand the true threat to democracy this November, we all need to understand the constitutional sheriff movement — which has the express goal of remaking how we understand law enforcement and government — and the movement’s insight into communities all around the country that seem poised to rebel.

On May 15, 2021, a crowd gathered in a small park behind the only high school in Battle Mountain, Nevada, for a “Patriotic Social Gathering.” 

The town’s name is misleading, because Battle Mountain is not a mountain but rather a valley nestled among three mountain ranges at the juncture of two rivers where the Union Pacific Railroad still stops to pick up loads of gold and copper. Its most famous event is a yearly World Human Powered Speed Challenge, in which people race small pods on the “straightest, smoothest and most ideal road surfaces in the world.” 

Lander County, which contains the city of four thousand, had recently decided to become a “constitutional county.” The county board of commissioners, which governs the region, agreed to pay $2,500 for this dubious designation in order to, as one commissioner put it, “do something about the restrictions on freedoms,” referring to state COVID health regulations that for the past year had limited the size of church services, closed many businesses, and required schoolchildren to wear face masks. 

The board of commissioners thought that the people of Lander County needed an opportunity to gather and express their united opposition to the federal and state government, particularly in the wake of the recent inauguration of President Joe Biden and the swirling conspiracy theories seeded by the far right, which included rumors about rampant pedophiles, election machines changing votes, and the Great Replacement theory. It was both a protest against the state of the nation and a way to lift the spirits of residents, who, according to their leaders, were fighting a war, if not physically, then spiritually. 

“It’s about protecting our freedom, our liberty, our lives,” one commissioner summarized. 

That spring morning, I watched vendors set up for the event. Beribboned booths advertised RE/MAX Realtors and the West Coast Patriots, a subdivision of the Three Percent (III%), a militia movement linked to January 6, whose name represents the apocryphal “3 percent” of Americans who fought the British in 1776. The day was spitting rain. The cars in the parking lot — which quickly filled to overtake muddy patches of field — were mostly pickup trucks proudly displaying Gadsden and pro-Trump flags alongside various hand-painted anti-Biden signs: “Joe Biden is NOT my president.” “America was RAPED. 11-3-20.” 

Security came in the form of a militia whose members wore military-style fatigues in shades of Desert Storm and tactical vests decorated with the Punisher logo — a skull with dripping fangs representing justice outside the law — and Thin Blue Line patches, a pro-law enforcement symbol adopted as a direct response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Most carried a sidearm and a long gun. They patrolled the picnic tables, the porta-potties, the food booths. Unlike other attendees, some wore balaclavas to cover their faces and shield their identities. When it rained, they huddled underneath canopies. Children ran up to examine their weapons and received friendly fist bumps. 

A woman with a blond blowout designed to withstand the rain handed me a brown baseball cap with “#UNRIG” on the front, which was part of the tour’s provocation: that the 2020 presidential election had been somehow subverted, despite what every judge agreed was an utter lack of evidence. When a speaker yelled, mid-monologue, “We’ve been fucked!” everyone applauded and cheered. 

What made this rally interesting to me were the uniformed sheriffs not just protecting the public but also making a political statement. There were six currently serving Nevada sheriffs there, about one-third of the sheriffs in the state, men elected to enforce all federal, state, and local laws, even though at this moment they were endorsing the breaking of those laws. They were, in other words, perfectly fine with moving what appeared at first glance to be a culture war between red and blue America into political revolution. 

Sheriffs are elected in every state except Alaska, Connecticut, Hawaii, and Rhode Island. Over three thousand of them must campaign for office every four years, in most cases. This means that sheriffs, unlike police chiefs, are in many ways equal to other elected local officials, with the power to set departmental policies, hire and fire staff based on political support (or lack thereof), and express controversial opinions to curry political favor. To a sheriff, city police are mere “code enforcers,” and many sheriffs believe they outrank police chiefs and other appointed officials, who don’t have to make their case to the public at large. 

They are also the whitest, most masculine, and longest-tenured. As of 2020, only 4 percent of sheriffs were Black, and less than 2 percent were women. In 2020, one Texas county elected its first Black sheriff since Reconstruction. Even though sheriffs must run for office, they often win reelection over and over. Tenures of forty or fifty years are not uncommon. Over half of all sheriff elections are not contested, and 90 percent of the time the in­cumbent wins reelection. As a result, sheriffs are the least diverse of any democratically elected officials. 

Many sheriffs believe they directly represent the people, their constituents, or at least the ones who can vote. Despite or because of this, sheriffs see themselves as the highest law in the land, independent and operating on equal footing with other important officials like the county supervisors, the governors, even the Supreme Court of the United States. 

A sheriff in Louisiana who held office for nearly three decades put it this way in an interview with NPR: “The sheriff … is the closest thing there is to being a king in the U.S. I have no unions, I don’t have civil service, I hire and fire at will. I don’t have to go to council and propose a budget. I approve the budget. I’m the head of the law-enforcement district, and the law-enforcement district only has one vote, which is me.”

THE HEADLINE SPEAKER of the Patriotic Social Gathering was “Sheriff” Richard Mack, who has spent the past three decades organizing sheriffs to be key interpreters of the U.S. Constitution, able to use their king-like powers to advocate for far-right causes, including the centering of Christianity in public institutions, a loosening of firearms regulations, and a reduced role for federal law enforcement agencies. In 2011, three years after the election of the first Black president of the United States, Mack founded a group called the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), the largest organization in the so-called constitutional sheriff movement, which is a political, cultural, and religious movement that claims sheriffs have expansive, unique, and often superstitious powers. Since 2020, the constitutional sheriff movement has gained mainstream popularity in response to COVID and the 2020 racial justice uprisings, largely through the efforts of Mack and events like the one in Battle Mountain. 

As befitting his role as the godfather of the far-right sheriff movement, Mack was the center of attention, posing with attendees for photographs and beaming with pride. Mack, now in his late sixties, wears professorial eye­glasses and his unnaturally dark hair slicked back with what is rumored to be black shoe polish and a healthy dose of Aqua Net. He sported a black polo shirt tucked into jeans with a leather belt slung below his belly along with cowboy boots and an affable smile. Incredibly tan, he reminded me of a pro­fessional golf player. 

“I used to have a term for his type,” someone who knew Mack told me, “and I just call them tucked-in. The shirt’s tucked in. They don’t gain too much weight. They pay their bills on time.” 

Mack loves being a sheriff, even though he hasn’t been one since 1996. The CSPOA, which at one point filed for nonprofit status but was dissolved in 2021 by the State of Arizona for failure to file annual reports, is his life. His Dodge Charger has a “CSPOA” vanity license plate. A decal of the CSPOA logo — which includes a bald eagle and a sheriff’s star — covers the entirety of the car’s hood. Despite not being tax-exempt, the group solicits “donations” and, as of 2022, has an advisory board, but it’s clear that the group is driven by Richard Mack. 

According to Mack and the CSPOA, sheriffs are not just law enforcement; they are special stewards of the U.S. Constitution — which is not just a regular legal document but a religious text to be interpreted literally — and can refuse to enforce federal, state, or local laws that they believe violate particular tenets of the “original Constitution,” which includes the Bill of Rights (amendments one through ten). Per the CSPOA’s website: “The law enforce­ment powers held by the sheriff supersede those of any agent, officer, elected official or employee from any level of government.” 

While the ideas behind the CSPOA have recently come to the forefront of politics, the constitutional sheriff movement has deep roots in American history. The ideology echoes the same themes that sheriffs of both political parties use to resist reform and preserve their political power: the carefully built myth that sheriffs are uniquely accountable to voters and, as a result, do not require additional oversight. The constitutional sheriff movement has also benefited from the problematic rightward lurch of all members of law enforcement, who are leaping to anti-progressivism and, in many cases, far-right extremism as a way to resist community demands to reform, defund, and reduce the role of police and jails in America. 

CSPOA membership and the influences of its ideas have spread widely since 2020, although the numbers are hard to quantify. In 2022, Political Research Associates, a nonprofit that tracks extremist groups, estimated the number of CSPOA-aligned sheriffs to be around 400. Mack told me that he thought it was now closer to 800, which seems like a gross overestima­tion to me. Two political scientists surveyed 500 sheriffs and found that around a quarter of them expressed positive attitudes about the CSPOA. And it’s certain that around 50 sheriffs out of 254 in Texas attended CSPOA training sessions, which in the Lone Star State once counted as continuing education. 

These numbers are difficult to verify, and many sheriffs who express the same views as the CSPOA will say (falsely or not) that they have never heard of the organization. Many others have told me that just because they are members does not mean that they agree with everything the CSPOA claims to represent. Mack himself has emphasized repeatedly in his public statements — and to me personally — that he does not care about membership in the CSPOA, and there is no list, leaked or otherwise. “Pls understand,” he wrote to me, “our goal is not memberships, it is the restoration of Liberty.” 

WHEN THE NEVADA SHERIFFS took the stage, Mack spoke first. He had nodded along enthusiastically with all of the prior speakers like a genteel patriarch, stooping gently to listen when fans came to chat him up. Now the center of attention, Mack allowed his gaze to wander softly, almost in wonder, as if he beheld a miracle. 

“Wow,” Mack began, looking upon the crowd in genuine awe, his eyes wide, his face pleased like a child. “What a beautiful day!” He has done variations of this speech hundreds of times for over a decade. Perhaps his background as a youth in musical theater gave him this ability of projecting both expertise and wonder. 

He first mentioned an NBC reporter who was planning a “hit piece” — all press is good press — and said he wanted to be clear on the purpose of the CSPOA. “The CSPOA,” he said, “is about one thing. The notion that all men and women are created equal.” Everyone cheered. “And that all of us answer equally to the law.” 

“Freedom and liberty are for all God’s children, and I’ve been saying that for four decades,” he said, chopping his arm in the air. The woman in front of me had on a red hat that said “Trumpism.” Another attendee, male, wore a baseball hat with a bald eagle and an American flag. 

Mack also has his own imaginary history, one in which sheriffs in the American South were not there to profit from convict leasing and sheriffs in the West were not responsible for the jailing, forced labor, and genocide of Native people. In his mind, sheriffs are the noble embodiment of a chivalrous code. To emphasize this, Mack recites a made-up tale about Rosa Parks, who, in his imagined version, would have been helped by a sheriff who refused to arrest her when she did not move to the back of the bus. The story both insulates him from charges of racism and allows the audience to imagine their outrage over COVID vaccines and gun control as part of the heroic history of the civil rights movement. 

“In December of 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for not giving her seat to a white man. Would you have arrested her, Officer? Sheriff?” he said, addressing the audience. “No, our job would have been to protect her from the government that was doing evil.” The sheriff, Mack implied, was on the side of Rosa Parks, whose enemy was the government, not racist white people. 

At some gatherings, Mack even casts himself as the valiant sheriff and Parks as a woman in need of rescue, a courtly romance of sorts. “She [Rosa Parks] looked up at me with her beautiful eyes and kind of a scared look and said, ‘Why can’t we just be left alone?’” he has elaborated, providing a bowdlerized version of the story that presents Parks as a victim of government overreach. In 2009, he said, “What does the constitutional officer do today? He protects Rosa Parks the gun owner. He protects Rosa Parks the victim of the IRS. He protects Rosa Parks the tax protester. He protects and defends Rosa Parks the medical marijuana person. And he protects people who simply want to be left alone.” The story often brings Mack to the verge of tears.

JUST AS HE CREATES a fantastical and ever-shifting version of Rosa Parks’s story, Richard Mack is always crafting and polishing his own origin story. Mack’s father was an FBI agent, and Mack, who was both athlete of the year and drama student of the year at Safford High School in 1971, originally planned to follow in his footsteps. However, he failed the entrance exam, so he joined the Provo Police Department in Utah instead, which set him on his path. 

In his books, Mack describes himself as a beat cop in Provo and a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While working undercover busting “druggies” — he grew his hair long and his beard bushy — Mack became disillusioned with what he saw as a focus on “numbers” in policing. He held particular ire for the “war on drugs,” writing once: 

Why did so many people have to go to jail because of marijuana, especially when it was less harmful than alcohol? Is law enforcement really about public service or public harassment? … After years of research, I am now totally convinced that the “Drug War” is a farce. It provides no benefit to the public and actually makes the drug problem worse. 

In the early 1980s, Mack went to a two-day seminar held by onetime Brigham Young University professor and far-right conspiracy theorist Willard Cleon Skousen where, Mack says, he was transformed. At the 2022 FreedomFest — a multiday libertarian conference in Las Vegas that features far-right luminaries and financial advisers who tout the gold standard — Mack walked onstage to the soundtrack of “Return of the Mack” and ex­plained how Skousen “changed [his] life back in 1983, when, as a rookie cop, I attended one of his seminars called Constitutional Studies for Peace Officers.” He added that Skousen “converted [him] to the U.S. Constitution.” 

According to Mack, 240 people attended that seminar. 

“I don’t know what happened to the other 239 of them, but this one was converted,” Mack told a Tucson newspaper reporter. 

Skousen was an FBI agent, police chief, and anti-communist with connections to the John Birch Society and high-profile members in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His ideas deeply influenced Mack as well as other far-right and anti-government leaders. Mack’s constitutional sheriff movement hinges on a belief that the entire country faces an existential threat, generally framed as coming from communists, socialists, liberals, the media, and, he told me as I wrote this book, me. Because the stakes — the future of the country — are so high, recruiting sheriffs to become constitutional sheriffs is tantamount to fighting the eternal war between good and evil. 

To understand the influence of Skousen, you first have to understand the “White Horse Prophecy,” a series of disputed teachings by LDS founder Joseph Smith and leader Brigham Young. The prophecy predicts that the “nation will be on the verge of crumbling to pieces and tumbling to the ground.” It goes on: “You will see the Constitution of the United States almost destroyed; it will hang like a thread,” an oft-repeated portion reads. When this happens, “this people will be the Staff up[on] which the Nation shall lean and they shall bear the Constitution away from the [very] verge of destruction.” 

Skousen, whom conservative writer David Frum once called one of the “legendary cranks of the conservative world,” relied on this prophecy in his work, which reiterates the need for followers to be vigilant about dangers from the left. While Skousen’s name may not resonate with a lot of people, his ideas have been influential on the right, even to this day. He wrote over twenty books, which he self-published and distributed widely among LDS leadership. 

One of his most popular books, The Making of America, was recommended by the far-right group Moms for Liberty as recently as 2023 as well as by Mack, who described it as “the longest book I’ve read, except for the Bible.” Prominent GOP politicians, including Utah senator Mitt Romney and for­mer Texas governor Rick Perry, both presidential candidates, have recommended Skousen’s books and discussed his work with familiarity. As part of the Tea Party movement, Glenn Beck revived Skousen’s oeuvre, launching them into the Amazon top ten list for 2009. 

After his death in 2006, Skousen’s family took over his organization, now called the National Center for Constitutional Studies. The NCCS sells a variety of videos based on Skousen’s The Making of America, as well as “pocket Constitutions,” which periodically top the Amazon bestsellers list. They are notable because they have a portrait of George Washington on the front, holding a quill (although Washington did not write the Constitution), and are, according to the website, “proofed word for word against the originals housed in the Archives in Washington, D.C. They are identical in spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.” Mack often carries a copy, as do many other far-right organizers. 

In 1988, Mack finally won “the best job in the world,” sheriff of Graham County, Arizona, and he was reelected in 1992 as a conservative Democrat, which is when his interest turned to far-right politics. During his second term, Mack became one of a handful of sheriffs recruited by the National Rifle Association (NRA) to challenge the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, a 1993 bill signed by then president Bill Clinton that instituted mandatory waiting pe­riods and background checks for handgun purchases. The cases made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court as Printz v. United States, and the court ruled 5-4 in favor of the main plaintiff, a Montana sheriff named Jay Printz. The majority opinion was written by Justice Antonin Scalia. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurrence in which he set forth the template that would become modern Second Amendment jurisprudence, which provides for an individual right to own firearms. This case made Mack a far-right hero; in 1994, he was the NRA’s officer of the year. 

From the mid-1990s on, Mack made multiple runs at public office, running in the GOP primary for Utah County sheriff in 1998, during which he argued that incarcerated people were being “coddled” and promising to feed them “cold bologna sandwiches and cereal.” His opponent defeated him handily. (Mack argued he lost because of a federal raid that he said was retaliation for his lawsuit. The raid was related to a securities fraud investiga­tion against other individuals; Mack was not charged.) Then Mack tried for Provo city councilor in 1999 (lost) and governor of Utah in 2003 (ran as a Libertarian on a platform opposing water fluoridation). After dropping his gubernatorial campaign, he ran a pretend campaign as part of a short-lived 2004 Showtime reality show called American Candidate, in which contestants competed to become “president.” Mack was the fourth one to leave the show. 

During his fake campaign he vowed to abolish taxes, legalize marijuana, and legalize polygamy. A reporter from the Deseret News visited his home office in Provo and described it as “decorated with a large sword, a bald eagle statue that glows when plugged in, and a photo of Mack standing in a barn with a group of men dressed like cowboys and holding rifles.” Not accepting defeat, in 2006 Mack campaigned as a Libertarian to be one of Arizona’s senators. His platform included abolishing the IRS and income taxes. “I am running to restore personal liberty before it is too late,” his website read. 

In between these failed attempts, he went on a speaking circuit, talking to far-right groups, gun enthusiasts, and anyone protesting government reg­ulation. His talks focused on the need to resist the feds, especially when it came to guns. Mack told reporters he was being followed by the FBI, probably a fiction to amplify his profile. As a devout LDS man steeped in anti­communist and conspiratorial rhetoric, Mack captured an apocalyptic worldview combined with religious fervor and devotion. He began to appear at Tea Party events. In need of money to support himself, he sold cars and tried to recruit more people to his movement. 

In 2009, Mack met Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia group, and published his foundational text, The County Sheriff: America’s Last Hope, which was endorsed by Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. Mack became a board member of the Oath Keepers, which, like the constitutional sheriff movement, centers fidelity to a particular interpretation of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, reminiscent of an imagined history of the American founding. “The Oath Keepers and I were a marriage that was made in heaven,” he said at the time. 

The thing you have to understand about Richard Mack is that he sees “the sheriff” and his life’s work as a divine and necessary part of a coming apocalypse in America. His vision can feel welcome in the far-right politics of violence. 

“The sheriffs will be the peaceful solution,” Mack said, arguing that when the chips are down and militias reach for their guns, the sheriffs will mediate and prevent widespread civil war. Mack’s call to sheriffs is one of peace but also assumes violence: “There is still hope to keep this revolution a peaceful one. There is a man who can stop the abuse, end the tyranny, and restore the Constitution, once again, as the supreme law of the land. Yes, it is you, SHERIFF! You can do it. You have the power, the authority, and the responsibility. You are the supreme keeper of the peace, you are the people’s protector, you are the last line in the sand.” 

At the time I went to Battle Mountain, January 6 had come and gone. I had naively thought that “Stop the Steal” had ended. Mobs streamed into the Capitol building, sure, but the firmament of democracy held steadfast. 

What I saw in Battle Mountain, however, were the people who had not forgotten. Their war was not over.

Are Mack and the constitutional sheriffs simply reflecting the truth about violence, power, and race in America? What if they are just a symptom of the sheriff persisting as an institution? 
For the people at Battle Mountain, county commissioners were more powerful than the United States Congress or the state legislature. And above everyone else was the county sheriff, something like a cross between a knight and a king. According to Mack’s 2009 book, The County Sheriff, “The federal government, the White House, or Congress do not hire us, they cannot fire us, and they cannot tell us what to do.”

Reprinted from The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy, by Jessica Pishko, to be published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Jessica Pishko.