In May of this year, however, he received a telephone call from an SPLC “reporter.” Sheriff Richard Mack says he was amazed and told the reporter: “This is really funny. You guys have been lying about me for 15 years and this is the first time you’ve bothered to call me.”
At a speech in Sacramento, California, on December 10, Richard Mack, former sheriff of Graham County, Arizona, and founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), announced that within a matter of days he will be filing a lawsuit in federal court against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for slander, libel and defamation.
Sheriff Mack, who successfully challenged the 1993 federal Brady handgun control act in a landmark case that went all the way through the United States Supreme Court, has been an outspoken champion of constitutionally limited government and a critic of federal usurpation and abuse of police powers. The forty-year-old Southern Poverty Law Center is notorious for lionizing left-wing extremists (such as unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers) and equally notorious for smearing innocent individuals and organizations with the “racist,” “extremist,” “anti-semitic,” “anti-government,” and “hate group” labels. It is not surprising then that it has targeted Richard Mack for vicious treatment in a number of its publications and web sites over the years. But even more troubling than what it has published about him, says Sheriff Mack, are the lies that it has spread to law enforcement agencies about him in the seminars and training programs the SPLC conducts for federal, state, and local agencies.
Sheriff Mack, who was a speaker, along with this writer at the 53rd Anniversary Banquet of The John Birch Society in Sacramento, also announced to the assembled guests that he would also soon be filing papers to run in the Republican primary for the 21st Congressional District of Texas against incumbent Rep. Lamar Smith, whom Mack describes a “RINO” (Republican In Name Only). The 21st District includes much of San Antonio and Austin, as well as Fredericksburg, where Mack now resides.
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