UPDATE, July 6: The location of the Minnesota stop for the Arise USA Resurrection Tour has been shifted from Alexandria to Gilfillan Estate in rural Redwood County, best known as the site of Farmfest.
Screenshot:
The local talent hasn't been announced yet, but we'll keep an eye out.
Update: The "local" host for the event was Kimball area cattle man Don Schiefelbein, who was elected president-elect of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) in February 2021. More here. [end update]
The poster for the event:
[END UPDATE]
We've been noticing an uptick of posts about "Constitutional Sheriff" Richard Mack, and were thus curious about when his next visit to Minnesota might be.
It's not certain that Mack will be in Alexandria on Thursday, July 8, but Mack's group, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), is slated to be in Alexandria for the Arise USA Resurrection Tour.
Event venue and speakers To Be Announced, but we're hoping Minnesota's lawmakers and political candidates shy away from this one.
CSPOA's traveling companions, Arise USA, carry some disturbing baggage.
According to "Constitutional Sheriffs" group teams up with Antisemitic Conspiracist, Chuck Tanner and Devin Burger's article published on the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights' website:
On the Fourth of July, the “Arise USA” buses roll into Keystone, South Dakota, for the “Resurrection Tour.” The stop is the fortieth of the Arise USA: The Resurrection Tour’s scheduled 110-day, eighty-nine stop journey across the country.
At the Keystone stop, for $1000 per person, VIPs can visit Historic Deadwood, take group photos at Mount Rushmore and Custer State Park, mingle with Arise USA speakers at a cash bar, and get a ride to the big rally. Beyond the pomp and circumstance, the stop is also billed as “the beginning of the second American Revolution.”[1]
Behind the bunting and vinyl bus wraps, Arise USA is a fusion of two far-right strands: deeply antisemitic Qanon-style conspiracies combined with a return of the Posse Comitatus as the solution to the “Deep State.”
The tour is organized under the auspices of the Earth Intelligence Network, a non-profit run by former CIA employee turned antisemitic QAnon conspiracy monger, in partnership with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) of longtime militia figure Richard Mack
Lead tour organizer, Robert David Steele, is a prolific purveyor of antisemitism who spews conspiracy theories about “satanic Zionists” engaged in a global plot against white people; deems Jews “a secret society that believes itself to be exempt from all laws and customs of others;” promotes Holocaust denial; calls for jailing all Jews not sufficiently “loyal to the Republic;” and declares that we must “eradicate every Zionist who refuses to be loyal to their country of citizenship and the rule of law.”[2]
Former sheriff Richard Mack, a feature on the militia speaking circuits since the early 1990s, created the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association to woo law enforcement officials to side with the far-right and revive Posse Comitatus ideas.
Steele and Mack are now working side by side on this tour. In interviews, the two have talked of using the journey to build a movement together. . . .
Steele's antisemitism is documented in depth in the article; he spreads notions from the notorious The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as well as citing some of the most notorious Holocaust deniers. From Tanner and Burger's article:
. . .Arise USA promotions do not, however, point out Robert David Steele’s obsession with Jews. If the brief description in the introduction makes Steele sound Nazi-esque in his antisemitism, it is not an accident – a fact that becomes crystal clear in a cursory browse of his Public Intelligence Blog, subtitled “The truth at any cost lowers all other costs – curated by former U.S. spy Robert David Steele.”[10]
Before even reading an article on the site, the depth of Steele’s antisemitism becomes painfully evident in the fact that a search of “Protocols of Zion” on Steele’s website finds at least forty-two articles that cite this text to expound on the “Zionist conspiracy.”[11]
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is a 19th-century Czarist-backed fabrication that purported to document the existence of a global Jewish conspiracy for world domination. Antisemites have repeatedly used this document to incite bigotry and violence against Jews, including the German Nazis. The Protocols were also distributed by Christian Identity adherent and Posse Comitatus creator William Potter Gale.[12]. . .
. . . Another article on the Public Intelligence Blog promotes the idea of a Jewish conspiracy to “eradicate” white men by citing the views of British antisemite David Icke. Asking questions such as, “What are we to make of racially themed congressional caucuses, safe spaces, segregated dorms and theme houses, separate graduate ceremonies, and national lobbying groups such as the former National Council of La Raza (‘the Race’)?” the article answers,
“As David Icke so clearly illuminates, this is a Deep State & Zionist propaganda push seeking to incite a violent civil war that disarms and eradicates the white men specifically, and heterosexual men generally.”[36]
David Icke is well known for his bizarre conspiracy theory holding that “a reptilian race has controlled the planet for thousands of years and continues to do so today” and that reptilian “Jewish Rothschilds” lay behind Nazi atrocities against Jews.[37]
A search of Steele’s blog finds at least 105 articles referencing David Icke.[38] In a lauding review of Icke’s book Everything You Need To Know, But Have Never Been Told, Steele wrote,
“There are three kinds of holistic thinking: secular, ecological, and cosmic. With the exception of David Icke I know of no one, anywhere, who actually thinks holistically at all three levels (I fall short at the cosmic level).”[39]
In the review, Steele takes a detour to praise Holocaust denier, Ernst Zundel:
“I will mention here that I knew Ernst Zundel and his wife, both passed now, and found his victory over the Zionists in Canadian court cases compelling – Auschwitz, to take one example, for (sic) forced by facts to reduce from 6 million to 1.5 million the number of dead (still overstated, the Red Cross total is under 300,000), and it is now compelling known that a) most Jews (and Germans) died from starvation, typhus, and allied bombing and b) the Zionists refused to take the Jews offered an exit – all of them – for the bargain price of $3 million – the Zionist leaders WANTED hundreds of thousands of Jews to die so that they could CREATE the holocaust myth. It merits comment that the Zionist Wikipedia page on Ernst Zundel is full of lies and does not properly credit him with his extraordinary accomplishments at documenting the truth and demonstrating that the narrative about gas ovens is a total fabrication” [Italics added.[40]
Robert David Steele and Richard Mack’s Arise USA Tour has taken the far-right effort at law enforcement recruitment full circle – back to the vicious antisemitic roots of the original Posse Comitatus, albeit with a different vessel to express that antisemitism.
It is no longer possible for Richard Mack and the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association to lean on vague denials about the group’s ties to bigotry. Instead, the evidence of Richard Mack’s CSPOA partnership with antisemitism is wrapped around the outside of one of the Arise USA tour buses.
Let's hope Minnesotans--especially state lawmakers and political candidates--stay away from this event; in other states, linke-minded lawmakers have spoken at the local stops.
We'll update the post with the venue and speakers when this information becomes available.
Related post: Small town MN freedom fighting restaurateur's anti-vaxx pals make us pause about her savvy
Photo: "Richard Mack’s CSPOA partnership with antisemitism is wrapped around the outside of one of the Arise USA tour buses." Via "Constitutional Sheriffs" group teams up with Antisemitic Conspiracist.
If you appreciate Bluestem Prairie, you can mail contributions (payable to Sally Jo Sorensen, 600 Maple Street, Summit SD 57266) or use the paypal button in the upper right hand corner of this post. Those wishing to make a small ongoing monthly contribution should click on the paypal subscription button.
Or you can contribute via this link to paypal; use email [email protected] as recipient.
NEW: I'm now on Venmo for those who prefer to use this service: @Sally-Sorensen-6
Comments