Against All Enemies

For the past few years and all over Texas, a series of training seminars led by the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) has been quietly radicalizing law enforcement agents. As NBC 5/KXAS-TV Dallas-Fort Worth’s series Against All Enemies lays out, they’ve been doing so by advocating one key tenet: sheriffs, owing their direct allegiance to the constitution, have a power that supersedes that of federal agencies. Local sheriffs, per CSPOA, have the power to block the FBI and even the president of the United States. More crucially, they are also able to personally decide whether and which laws are constitutional. As this months-long reporting makes clear, these fringe ideas had infiltrated Texas’ official state training sessions, a terrifying finding given CSPOA’s ties to the far-right extremist group the Oath Keepers. The docuseries, in turn, prompted tangible results: Following an internal investigation into CSPOA trainings, the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement (TCOLE) determined that material taught therein qualified as “political discourse” and was thus not legitimate. For shining a light on an insidious attack on democratic ideals and exemplifying the ways dogged journalism can counter coordinated claims of disinformation, Against All Enemies wins a Peabody Award.