Sheriff Claremont Fellow

5 25

MERRI OK

see proto posse commitatus gale

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RWW

CA Gubernatorial Candidate Chad Bianco Claims 'Our Government Was Formed Only For A Christian Nation'

01/14/2026

Chad Bianco, who currently serves as sheriff of Riverside County, California, is among the leading Republican candidates running for governor. Bianco is also a Christian nationalist, which was on full display during a recent appearance he made on the His Glory TV network.

"It's been beat into us that there has to be a separation of church and state," Bianco said. "There is, but it's backwards: The government cannot be involved in your church. The government can't tell you you can't go to church. They can't tell you you can't pray. They can't tell you what church you have to go to. That was the founding of our country. The founding of our country was them coming here with Protestant Christian values that formed our country so they could practice freely their religion."

"[That] how they developed the Constitution," he continued. "In all their founding paperwork, it said the government shall stay out of religion. It also said that our government was formed only for a Christian nation. Without Christian values, our form of government will not work. That means that our Christian values absolutely must be in our government."

"Tyrannical government cannot oppress the churches, but our values are supposed to be in our government," Bianco asserted. "You should be electing people that have your values. Not your political party; it's your values. Vote on your values and this country would be basically how it was 200 years ago, 250 years ago now this year. We can turn this around easily if we would all just get out and vote."

Video URL

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Bianco's assertion that "all the founding paperwork" declared that "our government was formed only for a Christian nation" is patently false, which is quite obvious given that the Constitution itself explicitly declared that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."

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5 25 ggg

Sheriffs Fellowship

The Claremont Institute

https://www.claremont.org › Fellowships

claremont sheriff's fellowship from www.claremont.org

All incoming Sheriffs Fellows will be awarded: a $1,500 honorarium, up to $700 in travel costs, and lodging for the duration of the fellowship. Most meals will ...

2024 Claremont Sheriff Fellows - by Jessica Pishko

Substack · Posse Comitatus

10+ likes · 7 months ago

claremont sheriff's fellowship from sheriffs.substack.com

A list of the 2024 Claremont Sheriff Fellows. I will write more about each sheriff later, but do want people to know if your sheriff is on the list.

Fellowships

substack Jessica Pishko

The Highest Law in the Land

How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy

By Jessica Pishko

Category: Politics

wayburn richard mack spkr

please forgive my failure to post for the past few weeks. You can read here why I’ve had trouble accessing the basics of water, power, and internet. We are doing much better, however, and thank you to everyone who sent me notes.

On October 30, the Claremont Institute is presenting its “sheriff award” to Sheriff Bill Waybourn of Tarrant County. You know, the one who let a baby die in his jail. I wanted to also give my readers a list of the 2024 Claremont Sheriff Fellows. I will write more about each sheriff later, but do want people to know if your sheriff is on the list. (Since I started writing about the Claremont Sheriff Fellowship, Claremont has refused to make the names public.)

They are:

Al Auxier, Kendall County, Texas

Marquis Cantu, Llano County, Texas

Thaddeus Cleveland, Terrell County, Texas

Mark Crider, Walla Walla County, Washington

Damon Devereaux, Logan County, Oklahoma

Max Dorsey, Chester County, South Carolina

Jeff Gahler, Harford County, Maryland

Richard Hickox, Churchill County, Nevada

Gordon Smith, Bradford County, Florida

Bob Songer, Klickitat County, Washington

Rick Staly, Flager County, Florida

Clinton CJ Walters, Bradford County, Pennsylvania

Chris West, Canadian County, Oklahoma

I’ll point to a few trends. First of all, Ryan Williams’s fever dream of the West is plainly alive, given the number from Texas, Oklahoma, and Washington. Second, there are at least a handful of CSPOA members or affiliates on this list as well as one sheriff who was present on January 6, plus multiple sheriffs credibly accused or misconduct. As I’ve written before, however, these all appear to be requirements to be a Claremont Sheriff Fellow, not a barrier.

There is a chapter in my book* all about the Claremont Sheriff Fellows, which I consider at this point the greatest threat to not just democracy but the safety of communities.

Let me know in the comments if you have information on these sheriffs. I’ll write more about each one as well as the specifics of the fellowship this week.

*I am still donating to Mutual Aid in Asheville if you send me proof of purchase of the book, any version.

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ref slate

claremont-institute-secret-sheriff-fellowship-curriculum-revealed

last November, the Claremont Institute hosted its inaugural class of “Sheriff Fellows.” Over the course of a week, eight sheriffs—all white men—chosen from the more than 3,000 in the country stayed at the Waterfront Beach Resort in Huntington Beach, California, attending a series of discussions, lectures, and fireside chats steeped in the far-right-wing think tank’s heady intellectualism and radical ideology. While the Claremont Institute restricted public access to the fellowship, a review of the fellowship’s previously unreported curriculum reveals a program that presented for the sheriffs two sets of people in America: those communities sheriffs should police as freely and brutally as they see fit, and those “real” Americans who should be considered virtually above the law.

:{:{Public information requests and other reporting have provided insight into the stated and unstated reasons behind the Claremont Institute’s recruitment of county sheriffs, and revealed the curriculum of the fellowship. (You can read the full curriculum at the bottom of this article.) What emerges in reviewing this information is a portrait of the far right’s deep investment in sheriffs.}:

They seem to be a key target of the movement because the office is already vulnerable to extremism and because sheriffs can enable other extremist actors like vigilantes and militias to wreak havoc on society. Claremont provides a historical and intellectual cover for selected sheriffs to continue a march into white Christian nationalism; for Claremont, the sheriffs are elected influencers who can push their message into the mainstream, far from the coterie of intellectual elites. They also have the authority to use violence under the color of law to enforce these principles in their communities.}:

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Claremont is currently recruiting a second class, with a plan to announce the lucky few this fall. The five-decade-old Southern California institution announced in an email sent during the fall of 2021 that the goal of the fellowship was to connect with sheriffs as “uncorrupted law enforcement officials … not beholden to bureaucratic masters,” whose “jurisdictional latitude … places them on the front lines of the defense of civilization.”

:{:{While the Claremont Institute hosts a variety of other fellowships, the Sheriffs Fellowship is the first program to focus on elected officials who are currently serving. For that reason, information about the fellowship and the program is important for voters who live in counties where these sheriffs run jails, serve warrants, detain individuals at traffic stops, and help federal officials enforce immigration laws. Sheriffs also have a great deal of discretion in important contested legal areas like the enforcement of gun laws, where they are often in charge of issuing permits and confiscating weapons under red flag laws, and in how to handle health orders, including enforcement of anti-COVID-19 measures like mask mandates, business closures, and vaccination policies.}:

At least some of the Claremont sheriffs were recruited because of their resistance to COVID orders from state and federal governments. Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County, California, was specifically praised by the institute for “the courageous stand taken over the past year,” clearly a reference to Bianco having allied himself early in the pandemic with anti-vaxxers and with right-wing anti-abortion advocates in Southern California. Most recently, Bianco accused a Latina Riverside city councilmember, Clarissa Cervantes, of defacing the county courthouse because of her presence at in a pro-choice protest, spurring calls for his resignation. “You are lucky we couldn’t arrest you!” he threatened Cervantes through social media.}:

Sheriff Kim Cole of Mason County, Michigan, was recruited through Hillsdale College, whose chairman, Pat Sajak, took controversial positions against stay-at-home orders early in the pandemic and was recently photographed with anti-vaxxer Marjorie Taylor Greene. A Claremont program director explained the reason for the invitation in an email to Cole: “In our research on who to extend invitations to we took recommendations from friend [sic] of the institute and organizations but one thing that I know stood out to us about your leadership in these times has been how you courageously stood up to unconstitutional covid mandates.” During the peak of COVID deaths, Cole appeared regularly on Fox News to critique Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home orders and signed a letter promising not to enforce COVID protections that said, in part, “We believe that we are the last line of defense in protecting your civil liberties.”

Some of the sheriffs brought their wives along; they also were awarded a $1,500 honorarium. (According to emails from his office, Bianco turned down the honorarium.) Upon accepting program invitations, sheriffs received a box of books as well as a nearly 300-page packet of readings, largely by Claremont scholars. “Do not be alarmed by the amount of reading,” an email from the organizer warned.

:{:{The first day was focused on policing and heavily featured the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald, a lawyer who has written dozens of articles arguing that law enforcement in America does not have an implicit or explicit racism problem. The supplemental readings for this section included articles and books by Mac Donald with titles like War on Cops, The Diversity Delusion, “The Myth of Systemic Police Racism,” and “Black Lies Matter.” One assigned reading included Mac Donald’s argument that Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd may not have been “a product of racial animus at all,” but rather was possibly due to “poor training and an unfit temperament.”}:

In a different article on Chauvin’s murder conviction—one that didn’t make it into the Claremont materials—Mac Donald argued that Chauvin may have been railroaded, and that his conviction meant that “it is an open question whether any police officer can receive a trial free from mob pressure, should he be prosecuted for use of lethal force.” }:

This is the type of learning the sheriffs would have been likely to experience on Day One, and likely fits with many of their preexisting views. Attendee Sheriff Mike Lewis of Wicomico County, Maryland, has been a longtime outspoken critic of the Black Lives Matter movement and his biography is titled Sheriff Mike Lewis: Constitutional. Uncanceled. (“Sheriff Lewis is at the forefront of important initiatives protecting conservatism and the American way of life against defund the police, identity politics, and cancel culture,” reads the book description.)

Sheriff Brian Hieatt of Tazewell County, Virginia, later echoed Mac Donald when he wrote in a reflection on his time with Claremont scholars, “We are facing movements across our Nation to take away punishments and any disciplinary actions from people committing crimes.” (Hieatt’s department has imprinted the words “In God We Trust” on its official vehicles—Christian natural law, which dismantles the line between church and state, is a big part of both the “constitutional sheriff” movement and Claremont.)

Day Two involved a series of history lessons, including New York Times Magazine’s editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein’s essay about the 1619 Project, of which Claremont Institute scholars have been deeply critical. (Nikole Hannah-Jones’ essay “America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One” was assigned as a supplemental reading.)

The day ended with a fireside chat with Kyle Shideler, a Claremont analyst who has focused his work on “terrorist groups.” It’s worth considering Shideler’s views on what does—and what does not—constitute a terrorist threat to understand what this lecture might have entailed. For years, Shideler has written that antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters are direct threats to the nation. By contrast, Shideler has written extensively and ferociously against laws to combat domestic terrorism. He has complained of the “FBI and Justice Department’s overzealous behavior in regards to January 6” prosecutions, calling the rioters and insurrectionists that day “trespassers,” and accused the DOJ of “persecuting J6 participants.”

He’s called the Jan. 6 committee the “Russian Collusion Hoax 2.0,” criticized the “fanatics at DOJ prosecuting non-violent J6 protestors,” and claimed it was a “lie” to say Capitol police officers lost their lives as a result of the Jan. 6 attack. These are claims that were echoed by Sheriff Mark Lamb of Pinal County, Arizona, another attendee of the fellowship program, after Jan. 6, when he called the rioters “very loving, Christian people,” and demurred after being asked about the law enforcement officers killed and injured that day.

Recently, Shideler seemed to make an odd pivot to siding with the “defund the police” crowd he had spent years criticizing, calling for the FBI to be “abolished” and saying that “To save the rule of law, the bureau must be destroyed.” The reason for this call for radical abolition? The enforcement of a court-authorized search warrant at Mar-a-Lago over allegedly stolen classified documents, or as Shideler described it, a raid “over some boxes that another part of the government shipped to [former President Donald Trump].” (Opposition to the FBI is a core tenet of the constitutional sheriff movement, whose adherents believe that ultimate authority rests with the sheriffs, not federal law enforcement agencies.) The subject of Shideler’s chat to the fellows last year was “Antifa’s Threat to the Constitution.”

Day Three was focused on heady philosophical pursuits, while Day Four broadened the discussion to include various progressive movements and projects, largely, it seems, from the angle of learning about one’s enemy—or “countering the perversion of the justice system by which the revolutionary Left seeks to advance its totalitarian agenda,” in Claremont-speak. This included sessions called “The Federalist vs. The Progressives” (Parts I and II), “Black Power & Identity Politics,” and “The Sexual Revolution & Feminism.” The last two sessions are notable in what they do include—strangely chopped-up readings from Stokely Carmichael on Black Power and Ibram X. Kendi on the idea of an anti-racist amendment—as well as what they do not: any feminist writers other than Betty Friedan.

The only reading about LGBTQ issues was a 1971 manifesto from the Trans Liberation Newsletter, which raises the question of why sheriffs need some special knowledge of “transgender liberation” in order to do their police work in a way that treats everyone similarly. (Research has shown that trans people who interact with the police are much more likely to encounter violence than cisgender people, but it seems doubtful that this information was on the syllabus.) The day ended with a classic John Wayne Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Ultimately, the Claremont Sheriffs Fellowship is, at first blush, an unlikely union of the intellectual right and the populist right. But Claremont and its affiliates have long looked to figures like Barry Goldwater and Donald Trump to unite right-wing populism with their somewhat obsessive desire to defeat the perceived harms of liberals. Considering Claremont’s embrace of Trump and the Big Lie, the union feels like the appropriate sign of the times.

:{:{The intellectual far right also clearly sees the utility of an army of sheriffs who are able to put these ideals into practice. Prior to the last presidential election, the Claremont Institute’s 79 Days Report outlined how Donald Trump could take over the federal government by force, specifically naming county sheriffs as important to recruiting militia members and civilian posses to prevent “hostile crowds of outsiders” from protesting a MAGA takeover. Sheriffs appear willing to accept this mantle.}:

In a reflection on the fellowship, Sheriff Cole wrote: “I never saw this day coming to America. A time when Sheriffs are placed in a position to stand in the gap between citizens’ rights and a government that seems to reach further and further over that line. Sheriffs must have a knowledge of where that line is and how to address the overreach with confidence.” He then credited Claremont with giving him the “Constitutional based knowledge” he needed to make these decisions.}:

This leads to another important point: Sheriffs are the perfect messenger for Claremont. They have a great deal of authority thanks to the overfunding of police in this country. They can use tanks, helicopters, SWAT teams, battering rams, surveillance technology, and, of course, guns to subdue and terrify community members. Because they are elected, they are in a better position to defy state and federal authorities, who have little oversight and cannot remove a sheriff from office even if they are a member of a militia group like the Oath Keepers. Perhaps most insidiously of all, because the left has paid so little attention to sheriffs and the largely rural areas where they have the most power, sheriffs have been allowed to spread their extremist beliefs with the imprimatur of gun and badge.

In the wake of Trump’s election lies, sheriffs are demanding more leeway to surveil ballot boxes and have encouraged vote vigilantes to snitch on their neighbors regarding alleged-but-never-proven “voter fraud.” Unlike the brains behind Claremont, sheriffs who are currently serving can act independently from other elected officials to fight this nonexistent fraud with the force of an army and relative impunity. Now, thanks to the Claremont Institute, they can justify such violent and anti-democratic schemes with the patina of intellectual firepower.

doc agenda]

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MAGA Claremont Institute Honors Sheriffs Who Defy Laws They Don’t Like

NO LNX

Trumpland

MAGA Institute Honors Sheriffs Who Defy Laws They Don’t Like

LAW AND ORDER OPTIONAL

The Claremont Institute’s new “sheriffs fellows” have vowed not to enforce pandemic restrictions, vaccine mandates, gun laws—and basically any other laws they disagree with.

Adam Rawnsley

Former Senior Researcher

Published Nov. 22 2021

The MAGA think tank at the vanguard of pro-Trump public intellectuals is recruiting sheriffs with ties to the far right and a dubious devotion to the “rule of law” to be academic “fellows” as part of a new program launched by the conservative institute this week.

The Claremont Institute, a far-right research group that’s home to a number of former Trump administration officials, announced a new crop of eight “sheriffs fellows” selected from across the country on the basis of their “character, aptitude, accomplishments, zeal, and community reputation” to visit Claremont’s California campus and study a syllabus of standard conservative political catechism.

The coursework, Claremont says, is fairly anodyne—lectures on Locke, the Federalist Papers, and English legal history—but the Institute’s choice of students is far more radical. Of the eight fellows announced this week, six have some affiliation with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), an organization labeled as an anti-government extremist group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center for its endorsement of the idea that sheriffs can pick and choose which laws to enforce based on their own personal beliefs about what the Constitution allows.

In that spirit, members of Claremont’s first crop of sheriff fellows have vowed not to enforce pandemic restrictions, vaccine mandates, gun laws, and basically any laws they disagree with. For far-right groups like the Claremont Institute, those efforts to sidestep the rule of law and the will of democratically elected governments are a feature, not a bug.

“There are a growing number of groups who are clinging to the idea of the constitutional sheriff as the way to undermine everything from school board elections to attempts to curtail the pandemic restrictions to Biden administration regulations,” says Devin Burghart, executive director of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights in Washington state. “Claremont is just the most recent example of many of these organizations that are pushing the constitutional sheriff idea as a way to gain power at the local level.”

In response to questions from The Daily Beast, a Claremont spokesperson said the institute did not consider affiliation with the CPSOA or the constitutional sheriffs movement in selecting applicants. “We rarely take institutional positions, and don’t do so here, but Sheriffs who revere the Constitution are a good thing,” the spokesperson wrote.

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The constitutional sheriffs movement arose in the 1970s and ’80s in the wake of the farm crisis, when plunging land and agricultural commodity prices forced parts of rural America into poverty and swelled the ranks of extremist vigilante movements, says Burghart. In the years since, the idea of a “constitutional sheriff” who could nullify federal laws and create “posses” of like-minded civilians to stiffen that resistance has grown in times of anti-government sentiment, including the militia movement of the 1990s and the Tea Party of the 2010s.

While the constitutional sheriffs movement drew its strength from the backlash to gun-control measures in the 1990s, the current incarnation of the movement is focused on undermining COVID-19 public health restrictions—an issue Claremont’s chosen fellows seized on.

Sheriff Mark Lamb, for example, is a newly minted sheriff fellow from Arizona’s Pinal County and a favorite of both Fox News bookers and former President Trump himself. Lamb, an avowed constitutional sheriff, became a right-wing celebrity when he publicly vowed not to enforce Republican Gov. Doug Ducey’s stay at home order in early 2020. Lamb subsequently tested positive for COVID-19 after he was invited to the Trump White House for a press event with law enforcement but the infection hasn’t changed his attitude. He’s since taken to Fox News to state that he will refuse to enforce any state or federal vaccine mandate.

As then-President Trump pressured Democratic governors to open their states, many of Lamb’s colleagues in Claremont’s freshman class of sheriff fellows followed suit with acts of public defiance. When Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued a stay-at-home order in April 2020, she earned then-President Trump’s wrath and a tweet demanding that residents “Liberate Michigan.”

Neither Lamb nor any of the sheriffs fellows responded to requests for comment from The Daily Beast.

Kim Cole, a Claremont fellow and sheriff from Mason County, Michigan, who had previously signed a CSPOA letter vowing not to enforce any Obama administration gun control measures, answered the call. He joined with a handful of Michigan sheriffs to vow that they would not enforce the measure.

Culpeper County, Virginia Sheriff and Claremont fellow Scott Jenkins announced a similar response following Trump’s call to “liberate” Virginia under then Gov. Ralph Northam. Jenkins, a speaker at CSPOA’s 2020 conference, said in a Facebook post that he would “not trample the constitutional freedoms of our citizens to enforce an edict” of Northam’s executive order to close some businesses.

In the case of Riverside’s Sheriff and Claremont fellow Chad Bianco, that casual attitude towards the risks associated with COVID-19 has had dangerous consequences. Like a number of his colleagues, Bianco made a name for himself through Fox News appearances and membership not just in the CSPOA, but in the far-right Oath Keepers militia. In Bianco’s case, his public refusal to enforce COVID-19 precautions has spilled over into Riverside’s jails, which have experienced “one of the largest outbreaks of COVID-19 of jails,” according to the ACLU.

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Will Sommer, Martha Mercer

While the constitutional sheriffs movement may seem like a handy cudgel against the growth of vaccine and quarantine rules, its most troubling appeal to the MAGA right may lie in an imagined ability to nullify not just laws, but elections.

In the weeks before the 2020 election, a Claremont working group sketched out a scenario in a report, “79 Days to Inauguration,” that reads like a mixture of conservative war game and fan fiction. The report, first reported by The Bulwark, posits a contested presidential election that sparks a violent insurrection in which sheriffs promise to “deputize regular citizens into posses”—augmented with volunteers from the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys—and band together to restore order and suppress “lawlessness.”

Adam Rawnsley

Former Senior Researcher

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Return of the Sheriff

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https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/militias-with-badges

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yes, it could get worse.}:

The Claremont Institute — the home of John Eastman, author of the blueprint for overthrowing the presidential election — has a new initiative for undermining the rule of law.

And if you are not alarmed, you ought to be.

The Trumpian institute is launching a programto weaponize "patriotic law enforcement officers" to counter "the perversion of the justice system by which the revolutionary left seeks to advance its totalitarian agenda."

In announcing its new "Sheriff’s Fellowship" the institute tied together last year’s urban disorders, Covid-19 lockdowns, and “the electoral disaster of 2020,” and declared that “our nation's conservative movement needs a countervailing network of uncorrupted law enforcement officials.”

Specifically, Claremont envisions a cadre of sheriffs “not beholden to bureaucratic masters, and whose geographic boundaries, jurisdictional latitude, and - most important - direct connection and responsibility to citizens, places them on the frontlines of the defense of civilization.”

Think of it as militias with badges, guns, and formal law enforcement powers. Or, if you like, secession-by-sheriff.

Indeed, Claremont is late to the game. The so-called Constitutional Sheriffs have been a thing for quite a while now.

“Although the Oath Keepers, another anti-government extremist group that recruits from law enforcement, have garnered more media attention in recent years,” the Anti-Defamation League said in their report, the Constitutional Sheriff movement “has arguably had more success infiltrating law enforcement, including at the executive level.”

The central tenet of [the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association], borrowed from the anti-government extremist sovereign citizen movement, is that the county sheriff is the ultimate authority in the county, able to halt enforcement of any federal or state law or measure they deem unconstitutional.

This is no longer simply a fringe movement confined to a few rural counties.

Trump and members of his administration cultivated and encouraged the sheriffs’ movement, and openly embraced leading figures like Arizona’s Joe Arpaio. Former Attorney General Sessions famously praised what he called “the Anglo-Saxon heritage” of the office.

“Since our founding, the independently elected sheriff has been the people’s protector, who keeps law enforcement close to and accountable to people through the elected process,” Sessions said. “The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement. We must never erode this historic office.”

Milwaukee’s Sheriff David Clarke — who was named Constitutional Sheriff of the year in 2013 — became a prominent Trump surrogate and was, reportedly in line for a position in Trump’s Department of Homeland security.

More recently, Clarke urged January 6 participants to refuseto cooperate with law enforcement authorities.

"ALERT!!!," Clarke wrote. "If you attended the Trump rally in Washington DC last Wednesday and are contacted by the FBI or they come to your home, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO TALK TO THEM. DON'T LET THEM IN YOUR HOME EITHER. POLITELY TELL THEM TO LEAVE AND CLOSE THE DOOR."

"If you did not go into the US Capital (sic) you do not have to explain why you exercised your Constitutional right to assemble," Clarke wrote. "TRUST NO GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL right now." [twt pix]

clarke has since fallen into well-deserved obscurity, but the hot new face of the movement is Mark Lamb, the sheriff of Pinal County, Arizona.

In a new Politico profile, Lamb calls himself ‘America’s Sheriff,’ who “fashions himself as more of a vigilante resister, with a heavy dose of anti-government, sometimes militant rhetoric.”

Sheriff Lamb is the very model of the modern Trumpian law enforcement official. Politico reports:

Lamb supported the “stop the steal” campaign in Arizona and has expressed sympathy for the Jan. 6 rioters. He has called vaccine mandates “garbage” and spoke at a recent anti-vaccine rally in Phoenix, where he told supporters, “We’re going to find out what kind of patriots you are. We’re going to find out who is willing to die for freedom.” He also makes direct appeals to citizens, an effort that looks more dangerous after former President Donald Trump riled up supporters on Jan. 6. For example, Lamb, an ardent defender of the Second Amendment, has spoken in support of the formation of private militias — “well within the Constitution,” he told a group of supporters in March — and emphasized the power of sheriffs in Arizona, an open-carry state, to call local civilians into service to “suppress all affrays, insurrections and riots that comes to the attention of the sheriff.” Last year, as Black Lives Matter protests swept across the country, he formed a **local civilian “posse” to assist his office with law enforcement, even though there were no such protests in Pinal County.

Now, fresh off its role in trying to overthrow the 2020 election, Claremont wants a piece of that action. Here is how a recent fund-raising letter for Claremont described the Trumpian think tank’s new program:

• The current revolution against the American regime, involving as it does both crime and political malfeasance, requires a coordinated response from patriotic law enforcement officers. Those whose "chain of dependency" is directly to the people of their region - officers not beholden to the centralized ( and often corrupt) bureaucracies of federal or state governments, nor the vicissitudes of easily pressured city officials.

• Sheriffs are appropriate for this response. Since their beginnings as "shire-reeves" ("county watchmen") centuries ago in England, sheriffs have been intimately connected with, and answerable to, the people of their "shires" and therefore the first layer of protection, and last line of defense, for the people's rights.

• Our project will equip sheriffs with strategic knowledge and end their isolation. Their efforts will be supported, enhanced, and multiplied through a reliable like-minded network of fellow sheriffs and others with complementary areas of expertise and potency.

(Here is a screen shot of the letter.)

:{:{}:

If Claremont gets its way, there will be sheriffs like Joe Arpaio, David Clarke, and Mark Lamb all across the country.

You are not worried nearly enough about what that might mean.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/michigan-sheriff-implies-that-extremists-arrested-in-plot-to-kidnap-gretchen-whitmer-were-merely-trying-to-arrest-her/

vid

On Thursday, the FBI announced that six men were facing federal charges in connection with an alleged plot to kidnap and possibly kill Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced that seven of their allies were facing weapons charges at the state level.

And in a new local sheriff who had appeared at a rally with some of the suspects made an awkward effort to defend them, implying that perhaps they were merely trying to "arrest" Whitmer rather than kidnap her.

According to the FBI, far-right extremists (including members of the Wolverine Watchmen, a militia group) planned to kidnap Whitmer and take her to Wisconsin, where they would conduct a "trial" for treason. The militia members were furious with Whitmer for the social distancing restrictions that she ordered in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. And if they found Whitmer guilty of treason, the FBI said, she would be executed.

But when Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf was interviewed by Fox 17 (a Fox affiliate in Grand Rapids, Michigan), he implied that what the extremists had in mind was not a terrorist plot, but merely a citizens' arrest.

Two of the men facing charges are brothers Michael and William Null, who have been accused of providing support for terrorist acts. Fox 17 aired video that showed Leaf standing alongside William Null at a demonstration in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where both of them protested against Whitmer's stay-at-home order. Leaf was a guest speaker at that event.

Leaf, discussing the Null brothers, told Fox 17, "We can't convict them in the news media here. They do have a right to a fair trial."

Leaf was asked if he had any "regrets" about standing alongside a man who is "now being charged in a plot to kidnap the governor."

He responded, "Well, it's just a charge. And they say a plot to kidnap, and you gotta remember: are they trying to kidnap — because a lot of people are angry with the governor, and they want her arrested. So, are they trying to arrest, or was it a kidnapping attempt? Because in Michigan, if it's a felony, you can make a felony arrest."

Leaf added, "It doesn't say, if you're elected to office, that you're exempt from that arrest. I have to look at it from that angle, and I'm hoping that's more what it is. In fact, these guys are innocent until proven guilty. So, I'm not even sure if they had any part in it."

Leaf's comments are drawing a lot of responses on social media. Twitter user George Schwab, @CpkGeo, posted, "That sheriff needs to go NOW!," and another Twitter user, Eric Brown, @EricBrown1911, wrote, "Words cannot describe the lengths at which people go through to justify ignorance and stupidity."

Detroit-based attorney William Maze, @TheDUILawyer, tweeted, "Insane. But Sheriff Dar Leaf is a member of the far right Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) and has links on his page to 'Posse,' which can only refer to theright wing hate group Posse Comitatus."

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