Johnson County sheriff supports extremists with documented ties to white supremacists

It is not just election interference that is at stake in Johnson County. It is the morality of every Johnson County resident — indeed, of every Kansan — that must be considered when they sit quietly as Sheriff Calvin Hayden stands in support of Richard Mack and his so-called Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. Mack must be eschewed by anyone who seeks elected office.

Mack has immersed himself in the bowels of the white supremacist movement. He was a featured speaker at a June 1995 “Bible camp” in Prescott, Arizona, run by the Sandpoint, Idaho, Christian Identity group America’s Promise Ministries. Christian Identity theology holds that the white people of Northern Europe are the Lost Tribes of Israel, and God’s chosen people. It believes that Jews are Satanic and Black people are pre-Adamic — that is, not fully human.

At the time of the camp, it was the dominant theology of white supremacists. Mack read to the crowd from his book, From “From My Cold Dead Fingers: Why America Needs Guns”: “The Rev. Jesse Jackson types and the NAACP have done more to enslave Afro-Americans than all the southern plantation owners put together.” The crowed of bigots apparently loved this racist lie, but we all must say it has no place in our public life.

He also told the crowd of racists and antisemites that “if (God) asks us to defend freedom and the Bible with our lives and if he asks us to take the sword, then we must. We have no choice.” So much for Mack’s vaunted nonviolence.

Mack has also contended multiple times that county sheriffs are the supreme law of the land. He inherited this lie from an organization known as the Posse Comitatus. And the website of his Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association sports the banner headline: “Yes! You can join the posse!”

The people in this region know something about the Posse Comitatus. We remember the patently racist and antisemitic broadcasts its members made in 1983 from KTTL, a radio station in Dodge City, Kansas. Two federal marshals were murdered by Posse leader Gordon Kahl in North Dakota that year. And in 1985, a Posse encampment outside Rulo, Nebraska, was broken up and its leader eventually convicted of two murders. No one — not Mack nor anybody else — can borrow that name and its ideas without consequences.

Finally, we come to the question of Richard Mack and Oath Keepers. He once served on the board of Oath Keepers, but is no longer in that position. At an Oath Keepers conference on Oct. 12, 2019, Mack introduced the leader of the group from the podium: “My dear friend. … We have stood shoulder to shoulder in this battle for freedom. And so, Stewart Rhodes, founder of Oath Keepers, will be the next speaker.”

Now, Stewart Rhodes and other Oath Keeper members have been indicted for seditious conspiracy in relation to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. I guess Mack no longer consider Rhodes fit for friendship.

Mack has tried to have it both ways since he came to prominence. He sits and talks with Christian Identity zealots, but is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, like many others in the Kansas City area. He claims he is not a white supremacist. But talks like a hardcore racist. He served two terms as the sheriff of Graham County, Arizona, until 1996, but then was voted out by a public that had enough of his antics. He says he supports the militia movement and the Posse Comitatus — but exactly where does that support end when lives are taken?

There are enough Richard Macks in this world. We certainly do not need one more as sheriff, anywhere.

Leonard Zeskind is author of “Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream.” He is vice president of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights in Kansas City.