07.26.13
A letter to Schuylkill County
Police Chief Mark Kessler, now briefly Pennsyltucky’s most famous citizen, has the attention of all the medium-sized newspapers in the region. And the Southern Poverty Law Center which noticed his attempts to take a militia-style group nationwide earlier this summer.
From the Morning Call:
Gilberton police chief Kessler told NBC News on Wednesday that he expects to lose his job, but believes his speech is protected under the First Amendment.
From the Harrisburg Patriot-News, an editorial:
Kessler, 41, bald, outspoken and as hard as the coal that’s scraped from the ground in the massive fields on the east edge of town, is literally a force of one. He also serves on a local school board.
He’s also active in gun-rights circles. He appears on a radio show on the conspiracy-minded website “Infowars??? [run by crazy Alex Jones.] And he hosts his own website where he’s organizing a militia-style group called The Constitutional Security Force.
He also pushed a resolution through the Gilberton borough council authorizing him to take any measures needed to prevent the “unconstitutional enforcement??? of changes to federal gun laws.
Let’s be clear, there’s something seriously disturbing about the idea of a gun-toting, F-Bomb spewing, conspiracy-theorist, police chief/school board member who may or may not have anger management issues being anywhere near a position of power.
But there’s also something weirdly Pennsylvanian about the rhetoric that sprays from Kessler’s mouth as fast as the rounds he fires from the borough-owned weapons in his videos.
Let’s dispense with hard coal romanticism bit. I grew up there and hard men mining hard coal were pretty much all gone by the time I was in my early teens.
The rest is fine, though, and reading it I thought of responding to it from the perspective of having been there and now being here.
What is to be said to my old tribe back in Schuylkill County?
Well, I had some points to make:
Dear Schuylkill County:
I’m writing to you from today from the sunny streets of Pasadena in southern California. But I grew up in Pine Grove and spent almost half my life in Schuylkill Country. I’ve been gone now for over two decades.
However, I can’t imagine any police chief in a small town in the area in the early-70’s, when I was a teen, being anything like Mark Kessler. I didn’t know anyone, in a place where plenty of people had guns, who had a couple assault rifles firing full auto. Didn’t know anyone with even a remote chance of going nationwide with profanity as a brand, a stars-and-bars patch on his shirt and the assertion that “libtards”, uh, take it … well, watch the videos.
The place was strongly Republican and Gus Yatron was the representative in our nation’s capital for a really long time. He was an uncontroversial man, quiet, not known for much of anything. He would have been appalled at someone like Mark Kessler. I suspect everyone who ran things in the small town of Pine Grove, only twice and some as large as Gilberton, would have been horrified. Sure, there were raging jerks but they were kept out of any positions of power or authority.
If you could place Mark Kessler’s videos in a time machine and send them back to Gilberton forty years ago I bet you the people would watch and be convinced the country had collapsed and been overtaken by complete violence and anarchy.
Police Chief Mark is a symbol of national progress, I suppose, and not of any good kind. You can respect the freedom of speech and still believe a person like him needs to be ejected from any position of government-mandated responsibility at once. You can’t excuse away a personal website that just looks like a recruiting advertisement for a militia, one that declares the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms unconstitutional. How does that work with local law enforcement, anyway, since the ATF is a specific enforcement agency of federal law? What happens when, theoretically, the ATF comes to Gilberton?
I can tell you that in southern California, Mark Kessler would have been history as a policeman or sheriff, probably less than a day after his videos went viral. Then maybe he could have a career in private security.
Yes, Schuylkill County and Los Angeles County might as well be as far apart and different as Earth is from Jupiter. But I think we can probably agree that a warm heart is of much greater value than curses, the middle finger and a demonstration spray of hot lead meant to intimidate.
I feel sorry for the people in Gilberton. Perhaps they did not know Chief Mark Kessler like this. But now that they do they should realize, too, that government and its ability to authorize someone to have an assault rifle that’s used to get in the face of others is not good government. Law enforcement that uses its position to try and recruit a militia is not, by any definition, good law enforcement.
Doesn’t matter how small and close-knit your town is, it’s just bad and you’re the worse for it.
On Police Chief Mark Kessler’s website he calls the Southern Poverty Law Center an “anti-American group.”
If you know what the SPLC and what it does, track the violent right, you have an inkling as to why.
Earlier this summer Kessler and his Constitutional Security Force became an object of interest:
In preparation for that feared day when the federal government comes for citizens’ guns — a fear that animates much of the antigovernment “Patriot??? movement — a police chief in Pennsylvania has formed a militia-like group to stand against federal authorities he believes are intent on destroying the Constitution. The group, the Constitutional Protection Force (CPF), has already grown to 38 chapters in 38 states, with each dedicated to “meeting any attempts by the federal government to forcibly disarm the public,??? one website claims.
Behind the effort is Mark Kessler, police chief in the tiny borough of Gilberton, Pa …
Of course, it remains to be seen just what will become of Kessler’s militia — if it will grow or dissolve amid the ever-tendentious fight to pass gun control legislation. But in the meantime, the CPF has attracted widespread attention, and support, from a growing faction on the radical right.