On July 23 John Furlong appeared before the Palm Coast City Council. He identified himself as the “director of Flagler County for CSPOA, which is the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association.” He told the council that “we’re working in Flagler County, in all 67 counties in the state of Florida, to make every county in the state of Florida a constitutional county.”
He did not say how Flagler County was not a constitutional county, or how its government organisms like the City Council could legally function if they were not constitutional. He did not say who that “we” are. His association has no state registration, so you can’t check. The chamber was empty, so Furlong did not seem to be representing anyone local, at least not anyone who’d be bothered to show up. These “we” of dubious organizations tend to be more of an “I” pretending behind plural pronouns and social media masks to be, like gangs, more phalanx than clique.
There is a national organization. Several investigations of the group give us an idea of its origin and purpose. It is not the sort of organization the Palm Coast City Council or any local government–or anyone, really–should be associated with, at least not if local governments don’t want to be associated with extremists, bigots, and vigilantes who see federal authority in particular and government in general as the enemy.
The Anti-Defamation League reports: “The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) is a large anti-government extremist group whose primary purpose it is to spread anti-government propaganda to, and recruit from, law enforcement personnel, especially county sheriffs and sheriff’s deputies.”
The association believes, illegally, that a sheriff’s powers preempt federal and state laws and local ordinances, and that the sheriff has the authority not to enforce any law the sheriff, and the sheriff alone, considers unconstitutional. In other words, Sheriff Staly would outrank the FBI, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and all state and federal courts. We’ve heard this before: it’s sovereign citizen extremism behind a police shield. It’s what perverted the states’ rights movement during Jim Crow, when the likes of George Wallace and Theodore Bilbo and Ross Barnett liked to claim that federal law had no authority in their state.
Last year, after a Texas Tribune investigation reported that “Some 50 Texas sheriffs and numerous elected officials have attended trainings on the unsupported notion that sheriffs can single-handedly overrule state and federal law,” the state’s law enforcement commission investigated, then prohibited granting state education credits to those attending. When even Texas takes a stand against constitutional
wackos, it’s time to stop being solicitous or pretend to merely be lending an ear and to take a similar stand.
The record of the organization’s leadership is more sinister than its theoretical crack-smoking. The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association’s founder is Richard Mack, a former sheriff in Arizona, a former Oath Keeper–another anti-government extremist organization that recruits from police and military ranks–and a gun-supremacist. After his sheriff days he adopted militia tactics. He was willing to use women and children as human shields against federal agents during the Bundy Ranch standoff in Nevada 10 years ago. In 2009 he took part in a Second Amendment march synchronized to the anniversary of Tim McVeigh’s terrorist bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, the bombing that murdered 168 people, 19 of them children.
Mack then founded the CSPOA posse scelestus to oppose gun legislation. He expanded the mission to constitutional vigilantism by glomming onto Covid’s masking and vaccine hysterics before taking to the John Birch lecture circuit to spread the gospel of McVeigh, Alex Jones–owner of the disinformation site Infowars–and supremely white conspiracies.
The organization’s current leader, Sam Bushman, owns an online radio station called Liberty News Radio. Top story as I write this: “BOYCOTT THE SATANIC ANTI-GOD OLYMPICS.” It features James Edwards’s “Political Cesspool” radio show, whose mission statement “is pro-White.” The Cesspool has “featured a wide roster of white supremacists, anti-Semites and other extremists, such as the longtime Klan leader David Duke and Holocaust denier Willis Carto,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The CSPOA national conference Bushman organized in Las Vegas last April “drew a parade of felons, disgraced politicians, election deniers, conspiracy theorists and, in the end, a few sheriffs,” according to NBC.
This is the organization whose local ordinance John Furlong on July 23 told the Palm Coast City Council it should adopt. This is the organization whose creed Furlong espoused to claim that “we need the constitution to be the steadfast of our nation, of every citizen of every group.” He urged the council to enact an ordinance “to give more teeth to help the sheriff and his deputies and his CER team, which is community emergency response teams, to enact if anything they need help to keep peace and order in the county.”
Not for nothing, but emergency management is Jonathan Lord’s domain, not the sheriff’s, and it’s a safe bet to say that neither Lord nor the sheriff have had trouble keeping “peace and order,” or would want to be part of an ordinance that would violate at least half the original articles of the Bill of Rights. Did I mention that what John Furlong is proposing, even in the hands of our esteemed sheriff, is illegal? Sheriffs “have no authority, not under their state constitutions or implementing statutes to decide what’s constitutional and what’s not constitutional. That’s what courts have the authority to do, not sheriffs,” says Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor and executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University.
Furlong is urging the County Commission to pass the same ordinance and claiming, correctly, that one Florida county passed something like it last year. Collier County calls itself, with a straight face one must assume, a “sanctuary county for the Bill of Rights” (sic). So have a few other counties around the country.
From Pandoras about Agenda 21 to fluoride alarmists to anti-vaxxers to birthers and white replacement theorists, it’s not unusual for the well of local governments to ooze kooks and crackpots at public comment time. That’s what public comment time is for. It’s a good pressure valve, and it can be a gauge of society’s more typhoidal tendencies.
John Furlong’s Wilford Brimley demeanor makes him look every bit the nice guy, like everyone’s favorite uncle, as involved as the next guy in what he must think, probably with little research, is a terrific idea, though he’s not alien to credibility gaps. Last August he was among a few fevered voices trying to bully the council into conducting a forensic audit of all city accounts, claiming, without evidence of course, that he hears “too much going on” that’s “concerning.”
So why make an issue of John Furlong’s proposal to the council? Because of the shocking response he got from Mayor David Alfin, a man who lost a son in the line of duty, a federal agent killed with his partner with the same murderous disregard for law enforcement that CSPOA’s history is soaked in.
This is what Alfin told Furlong: “Your initiative is very near and dear to my heart, my family’s heart as well. So I would ask if you would reach out to me so that we can have a one on one conversation so that I can understand it better and more thoroughly. And obviously I would ask that you might contact each city council member individually so that they can better understand some of the details underlying what you’re trying to do. And if you have the time, I’m sure that we would be able to find time to do that.”
Alfin never says as much to most residents who bring serious, legitimate everyday concerns to the council. I’m sure we can all agree that, say, Royal Palms Parkway’s third-world memory lanes or a decent vacation-rental ordinance or this year’s debate on whether to plunder the city’s treasury with another harebrained rollback are more important issues by astronomical units of magnitude than entertaining anti-government propaganda.
Yet to this representative of an organization hardly distinguishable from a hate group, Alfin–one of whose opponents again in this year’s mayoral election is the former sovereign citizen Alan Lowe–is willing to extend the red carpet and start turning council and administration upside down to help with the “details” of what Furlong is trying to do.
It is inexplicable. Alfin is not an uninformed man. He is absolutely not uninformed about the history of domestic defiance and terrorism against federal authority, though he appears to be uninformed about enablers like CSPOA. I’m going to choose to think that Alfin, whose heart can sometimes trick him into forbearance for all the wrong reasons, committed a well-intentioned but catastrophic misjudgment, as often happens when the fetish for law enforcement is brandished in front of candidates running for their lives. Otherwise, his response would be unforgivable.
We–by which I mean we, 70,062 Palm Coast voters–should hope Alfin and the council did have some meetings to better understand where this poisoned proposal is coming from, but not with John Furlong. They could start with their attorney. They could start with five seconds on Google. They could start with their common sense and, failing that, their conscience. Palm Coast and Flagler County governments have better things to do than give aid and succor to hate and dog whistles hiding behind the Constitution.
