Freemen Institute Founder Blasts Freemen Author Says Radical ‘Outlaws’ Have Destroyed The Good Name
W. Cleon Skousen, conservative author and lecturer who helped found the original Freemen Institute, says the term has become distorted and destroyed by outlaws.
“As a 16-year veteran of the FBI, it’s abhorrent to me that these people in Montana call themselves freemen,” says Skousen, a former Salt Lake City police chief and Brigham Young University educator.
The 82-year-old author of more than 30 books on Mormon religion, American history and the U.S. Constitution helped organize the Freemen Institute in 1972 as a place to study the U.S. Constitution.
“They grabbed onto a name they didn’t understand and said, ‘We Freemen can do anything, we’re free from the law,’ ” he told The Salt Lake Tribune. “They’ve destroyed the name.”
Skousen said he also is dismayed to see the label “constitutionalist” evolve from a term to describe a respected constitutional scholar to a reference to tax dodgers.
Popularized by Skousen in the 1970s, the term “freemen” was taken from the Magna Carta, an agreement guaranteeing citizens certain liberties. It was signed on June 15, 1215, by King John of England.
“It was when the English were trying to reassert themselves against the Normans and said they were freemen,” said Skousen. “We were the first to apply it, but it was not long afterward that some of these fanatical radicals started distorting the use of the word.”
In the early 1980s, Skousen became alarmed as the term “freemen” was used by separatists to set up scattered “sovereign” townships. The board of directors of the nonprofit Freemen Institute voted to change the organization’s name to the National Center for Constitutional Studies.
Much of the research and literature published by Skousen’s original Freemen Institute has been recirculated and reinterpreted by the current movement that Skousen opposes.
“These people have gotten this strange idea in their minds they only answer to themselves,” he said. “They have not done their homework and they’re irrational.”
Still, Skousen hopes that the mistakes the federal agents made in Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, won’t be repeated with the freemen standoff in Montana.
“They’re a bunch of outlaws, but under no circumstances should the FBI get in a shootout with them,” said Skousen, whose law enforcement career began as an FBI messenger.
“It’s a Catch-22 for the FBI, and somebody needs to do something. But there’s no basis for shooting people. I shudder every time I think of what happened to the Weaver family” at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.