This Mormon pseudo-historian is why the Oregon militants are so confused about the Constitution

Any time the Oregon militants record a video testimonial — and they do that a lot — they’re conspicuously displaying a pocket Constitution.

That’s inspired some obvious jokes about whether they should pull out those Constitutions out of their pockets once in awhile and read them — but that actually misses the point.

The militants do read those pocket Constitutions, but they’re also reading fraudulent interpretations scribbled in the margins, so to speak, by a communist-hating conspiracy theorist promoted by Glenn Beck, reported the Los Angeles Times.

Those annotations were written decades ago by W. Cleon Skousen, an ultra-conservative Mormon and former FBI agent who believed the Founding Fathers had established a Christian theocracy and never intended for the federal government to have any authority.

Constitutional scholars, however, generally hold Skousen’s theories in churlish regard.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning constitutional historian Jack Rakove, of Stanford University, said Skousen’s writings were “a joke that no self-respecting scholar would think is worth a warm pitcher of spit.” ...