constitutional sheriffs rW

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11 24 THIS WILL BE GENERIC FOR RTWING SHERIFFS

PRIMARY ON MASS DEPORT

SEE PJT 2025 FELLOWSHIP VOUGHT PARDON

see richard mack COWS

SEE SHErIFF CLAREMONT FELLOWS; WAR GAMES 79 DAYS

see fox

trifecta

nsa generic

collecting from various nodes

1021 this is becoming generic node for RW cops

cliven bundy?

see c word as god term

bak 11 22

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~ stay at home? yup mich

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SUBSTACK

cart

The Highest Law in the Land

How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy

By Jessica Pishko

BOOK

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AN 10 26

A private investigator hired by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office to handle sensitive internal investigations had previously worked for an organization designated as an anti-Muslim hate group and participated in the controversial Cyber Ninjas review of Arizona’s 2020 election, according to a newly unsealed report.

Phoenix New Times reported that the court-appointed monitor's 226-page report on the sheriff's office looked at the way AZ Truthfinder, a company founded by former Gilbert police officer Stephanie Ameiss, obtained a county contract worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It was discovered that the résumé Ameiss had submitted as part of the bidding process omitted important aspects of her background, such as her six years of experience as lead investigator for Understanding the Threat, an organization founded by the former FBI agent John Guandolo.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled Understanding the Threat as a hate group, stating that it was an organization that promoted anti-Muslim conspiracy theories and offered training programs to law enforcement agencies. The group ceased operations in 2023.

The report from the monitor stated that Understanding the Threat had published material that attacked Muslims, Black Lives Matter activists, Democrats and others.

The report states that Ameiss did not include her participation in the Cyber Ninjas-led investigation into Maricopa County's 2020 election results on her resume. After Donald Trump had lost in the state, the Republican-controlled Arizona Senate engaged Cyber Ninjas to carry out the highly criticized review.

AZ Truthfinder was one of the three companies bidding for the contract to carry out investigations in the situation where conflicts had prevented the sheriff's Professional Standards Bureau from dealing with the cases itself, and the leadership of the sheriff's office had chosen the company less than 24 hours after having looked at the bids.

Axios states that the company has obtained approximately $270,000 from Maricopa County since June 2025. The monitor doubted if the sheriff's office had carried out a meaningful background check before giving the contract.

The report stated that either the 'vetting process' was a sham or the vetting that had in fact been carried out had shown some of the same material that we had uncovered, but they had chosen to ignore it.

The results occur while Sheriff Jerry Sheridan and Maricopa County have been attempting to put an end to the years of federal court supervision which followed a racial-profiling lawsuit brought against the sheriff's office.

Chris Hegstrom, a spokesperson for the Sheriff's department, said to Axios that the agency was going over the report and was still committed to "full and effective compliance" with the court's orders.

The monitor suggested that the circumstances relating to the contract should be referred to a possible misconduct investigation.

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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.

Boebert’s Ex-Manager Targeted in FBI Raid on Election Clerk

Q COUNTRY

Kelly Weill, Will Sommer, Katie Baker

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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‘TERRIFIED’

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

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here.

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msn no lnx

President Donald Trump has pardoned a sheriff from Virginia — who happens to be a stalwart MAGA supporter — after his conviction of accepting more than $75,000 in bribes.

Trump announced the pardon in a Truth Social post on Monday.

He declared that former Culpeper County Sheriff Scott Jenkins would receive a "full and unconditional" pardon in the Memorial Day social media missive.

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Jenkins was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison after he was convicted of conspiracy, honest services fraud, and bribery last December, according to the Daily Beast.

The president used some familiar terminology to describe Jenkins' experience with the U.S. justice system. Trump claimed the bribed sheriff had been "dragged through HELL by a Corrupt and Weaponized Biden” Department of Justice.

“This Sheriff is a victim of an overzealous Biden Department of Justice, and doesn’t deserve to spend a single day in jail,” Trump wrote. “He is a wonderful person, who was persecuted by the Radical Left ‘monsters,’ and left for dead.”

The president said instead of sitting in a cell, Jenkins will instead have a "wonderful and productive life."

Prior to losing an election in 2023 for the sheriff’s job, Jenkins had been Culpeper County's top law enforcement officer for more than a decade.

That long career fell apart after the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Virginia brought allegations against Jenkins accusing him of taking tens of thousands of dollars worth of bribes in exchange for appointing businessmen from Northern Virginia as auxiliary sheriffs. The businessmen reportedly weren't interested in enforcing the law, but rather skirting traffic tickets and carrying concealed guns without the need for a permit, according to prosecutors.

Officials said that none of the men who paid for the positions were trained for the roles, or vetted, and none ever rendered any kind of law enforcement service to the sheriff's department.

“We hold our elected law enforcement officials to a higher standard of conduct, and this case proves that when those officials use their authority for unjust personal enrichment, the Department of Justice will hold them accountable,” Acting U.S. Attorney Zachary Lee said in March after Jenkins' conviction.

Jenkins has connections to the MAGA world through the Claremont Institute, a far-right think tank where he was one of eight sheriffs selected as fellows. The institute's membership includes a number of former Trump officials.

In April, Jenkins insisted if he could talk to someone in the Trump administration, he could get help in his case.

"I truly believe if I could get an hour of time with someone in the administration, and lay out some facts with my attorney” it could spare him prison, Jenkins said during a webinar hosted by the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. "I believe wholeheartedly in the president. I believe if he heard the information, I know he would help if he knew my story."

It appears he was right.

The Independent stands for many things, often uniquely so. It stands independent of political party allegiance, and makes its own mind up on the issues of the day. The Independent has always been committed to challenge and debate. It launched in 1986 to create a new voice and in that time has run campaigns for issues ranging from the legalisation of marijuana to the Final Say Brexit petition.

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claremont

[### Trump pardons MAGA sheriff who took more than ...

The Independent

https://www.the-independent.com › ... › US politics](https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-pardons-maga-sheriff-bribes-b2758198.html)

2 days ago — Jenkins has connections to the MAGA world through the Claremont Institute, a far-right think tank where he was one of eight sheriffs selected as ...

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RWW

04/28/2025

by

Peter Montgomery

Richard Mack, a former Arizona county sheriff and founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, is making the rounds of right-wing podcasts demanding that President Donald Trump pardon a sheriff who was convicted in December on federal charges of conspiracy, fraud, and bribery.

Mack recently appeared on the show hosted by intensely antisemitic far-right conspiracy theorist Stew Peters as part of his campaign to win a pardon for Scott Jenkins, the former sheriff of Culpeper County, Virginia, who was convicted by a jury and sentenced last month to 10 years in prison. Peters introduced Mack as “a longtime friend of the Stew Peters show.”

Mack portrays Jenkins as the victim of political persecution. Here’s how the Justice Department described the evidence against Jenkins:

According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Jenkins accepted cash bribes and bribes in the form of campaign contributions…

In return for the bribes, Jenkins appointed each of the bribe payors as auxiliary deputy sheriffs, a sworn law-enforcement position, and issued them official Culpeper County Sheriff’s Office badges and credentials. The bribe payors were not trained or vetted and did not render any legitimate services to the Sheriff’s Office or the citizens of Culpeper County.

Some of the money Jenkins received was reportedly in the form of $15,000 cash in a bag. More details from NBC channel 4 in Washington, D.C.:

Each of the bribe payors was sworn in as an auxiliary deputy and given a badge allowing them enhanced gun rights and, as some testified, the hope they could get out of speeding tickets. Others used the badges in attempts to get a COVID test, drive in highway emergency lanes or get around a TSA line.

Jenkins’ lawyer suggested that the scheme was a “creative” effort by the sheriff to get around Virginia legal limits on gun ownership. Mack, who made a name for himself as a plaintiff in a successful challenge to part of the Clinton-era Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, praised Jenkins’ oppositionto gun regulation:

…this guy, this Sheriff Jenkins, was the first sheriff in the country to respond to Joe Biden and say, there will be no gun confiscation, not on AR-15s or AK-47s—nothing. Nothing will be confiscated in my county by your federal government. Don't allow them to come in here. If they do start to come in here, I will deputize every single person in my county, and they will be required to keep their guns and be armed with high-powered rifles. Don't try it.

On Peters’ show and a recent appearance on Michael Jaco’s podcast, Mack complained that he, former Trump aide Michael Flynn, and MAGA rocker Ted Nugent had all tried to get Trump’s attention to promote a pardon for Jenkins, but that they had run into “blockers” in the White House. Flynn has also raised money for Jenkins' defense. On Jaco's show, Mack compared Jenkins’ badge-selling to the badges Mack offers in return for membership in CSPOA’s posse for a $760 fee. Mack and Jaco also commiserated about federal judges who have ruled against Trump actions and about what Mack called “some real evil RINO Republicans” in Congress.

Before introducing Mack, Peters delivered a rant denouncing immigrants as “parasitic criminals” and “savages.” He slammed the Trump administration for not delivering sufficiently on its promise of mass deportations. “Sheriffs have the power to enforce federal immigration laws in their jurisdiction,” Peters said, “and they also have the power to arrest treasonous government officials who allow this country to be invaded.”

Mack didn’t disagree with anything Peters said, though Mack said he was “really thrilled” that Trump was elected, and that the president has made a “good start” in securing the border in his first 90 days. He said there's "no way" that mass deportation will be successful without sheriffs' participation.

Mack and the CSPOA train law enforcement officers in Mack’s views about the Constitution and his belief that sheriffs are the “only legitimate law enforcement officers in this country,” as he told Peters. Mack partners with far-right figures like neo-Confederate Michael Peroutka and participated in the ReAwaken America tour, which brought together conspiracy theorists, MAGA insiders, and far-right activists. The often-unaccountable power of local sheriffs and the impact of Mack’s “constitutional sheriff” movement are exploredin a recent book, “The Highest Law in the Land: How The Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy,” by journalist Jessica Pishko.

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rumor chic on inaug, quashed?

an 1 25

Trump repeatedly promised mass deportations during his 2024 campaign, even vowing to end birthright citizenship despite the fact that it is in the U.S. Consitution's 14th Amendment. And on Monday night, January 20 — after returning to the White House — President Trump issued an executive order against birthright citizenship, underscoring his deportations promise.

Many legal experts, however, are saying that carrying out the amount of mass deportations Trump has promised is much easier said than done.

CalMatters conducted a comprehensive survey of sheriffs in California, asking all 58 sheriffs in the state about immigration enforcement under Trump's second presidency.

READ MORE: Trump Inauguration dubbed 'a coronation of our country's descent into oligarchy'

According to reporters Tomas Apodaca and Nigel Duara, Trump's promises "could put California's 58 elected sheriffs in the hot seat because of their responsibility to manage local jails."

Sheriffs in Los Angeles, Napa, Orange, Madera, San Bernadino and Mendocino Counties told CalMatters they will "comply with state law," while Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco said he will "cooperate with ICE." And the sheriffs of Kern and Butte Counties responded, "Unclear."

"CalMatters reached out to the sheriffs by e-mail and website contact forms," Apodaca and Nigel Duara explain. "When those weren't available, we called the contact number on their website. Two county sheriffs' offices — Monterey and San Mateo — did not return calls seeking comment."

The CalMatters reporters add, "For months, Trump allies have signaled that they'd focus initial immigration enforcement on undocumented people who have committed crimes. This month, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would empower immigration agencies to deport people arrested on suspicion of burglary, theft and shoplifting. The bill is expected to pass the Senate."

READ MORE:**'Operation Aurora': Denver suburb on edge as Trump takes office**

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an 12 24

Trump's advisors have been hoping county sheriffs in border states will assist with the incoming administration's mass deportation campaign. But several sheriffs are already publicly promising to not lift a finger.

According to a Tuesday report in WIRED magazine, Trump's top Trump immigration advisors like Tom Homan and Stephen Miller have been having conversations with several far-right sheriffs who have expressed an interest in helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) remove immigrants from the United States. But that effort is unlikely to pick up traction, both for legal reasons and because other sheriffs have said they already have their hands full and don't want to take on more work.

Currently, ICE's 287(g) program allows for state and local law enforcement to collaborate with ICE in its efforts "to protect the homeland through the arrest and removal of noncitizens." However, this does not include sheriffs themselves rounding up and detaining undocumented immigrants. Additionally, no federal funding has been appropriated to any sheriffs' offices that help ICE, meaning just 125 out of 3,081 sheriff's offices in the U.S. have signed up. And Yuma County, Arizona Sheriff Leon Wilmot told WIRED that the Supreme Court has already established that enforcing immigration law is outside the jurisdiction of local police departments and sheriffs' offices.

READ MORE:**'Quickly get into problems': These 3 obstacles could slow down Trump's mass deportations**

"[T]hat's not our realm of responsibility," Wilmot said. "If we wanted to do immigration law, we would go work for Border Patrol."

The push for sheriffs to assist the incoming administration has been led by retired sheriff Tom Mack, who is the head of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA). Mack told WIRED he's been exchanging voice and text messages with Homan about getting more sheriffs involved with deportations. Homan has previously promised to build "the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen." But Wilmot said "no one listens to" Mack, that he "hasn't been a sheriff in a long time" and that he "pushes his own agenda."

Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway, who is a Democrat, told WIRED that he wasn't invited to an event Homan hosted in his state last month, even though Hathaway's jurisdiction includes some of the nation's biggest ports of entry. He added that he would refuse any calls to help the Trump administration deport immigrants, as it would hurt his standing in his county.

"I'm not going to cooperate, because 95 percent of the residents of the town where I live, where my county is, are Hispanic,” Hathaway said. “I'm not going to go checking the documents of practically every single person in my county to determine their immigration status, because that would create distrust between law enforcement and all the people in my community."

READ MORE: 'Wait until 2025': Trump's former ICE chief makes chilling promise at far-right conference

The sheriffs bucking calls to assist with mass deportations even include some of Trump's biggest supporters in the law enforcement community. Livingston County, Michigan Sheriff Mike Murphy — who hosted a pro-Trump rally in a building owned by the sheriff's office — told the outlet that he isn't interested in using county resources to help with federal immigration law enforcement.

"I still have a county to do police work in,” Murphy said. “Just because the president says, 'Hey, go out and round them up,' that is not all of a sudden gonna move to the top of my priority list. If somebody's house is getting broken into, that's my priority. If somebody's involved in an injury crash and they're laying on the side of the road, that's my priority. I've got cases that are open.”

Other border state sheriffs who have come out against calls to help the Trump administration round up migrants include Val Verde County, Texas Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez and Brewster County, Texas Sheriff Ronny Dodson. According to Dodson, the incoming Trump administration giving sheriffs the authority to jail migrants could "break" county law enforcement.

"I’m not gonna let the government tell me what to do in my job," Dodson said.

READ MORE: 'Wait until 2025': Trump's former ICE chief makes chilling promise at far-right conference

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MMA

Bounties, self-deportation, and extremist sheriffs: How Project 2025 partners are planning for Trump’s mass deportations

Written by John Knefel

Published 11/21/24

Organizations on the advisory board of Project 2025, a sprawling plan to provide the incoming Republican presidential administration with policy and staffing recommendations, have responded to President-elect Donald Trump’s victory by promoting extreme approaches to carrying out his promise to deport upward of 10 million undocumented immigrants.

Right-wing think tanks the Center for Immigration Studies, The Claremont Institute, and the Center for Renewing America have all advanced anti-immigrant policies since Trump’s win. Some of their proposals include offering bounties for information on suspected undocumented people, conscripting far-right so-called “constitutional sheriffs” to serve as immigration enforcers, and attempting to make life so miserable for out-of-status immigrants that they flee the country — referred to euphemistically as “self-deportation.”

Trump has already named the two top officials who will be tasked with carrying out his mass deportation plan, and they both have direct connections to Project 2025. Tom Homan, Trump’s pick for “border czar,” is a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025’s lead organizer. He is also credited as a contributor in Project 2025’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership, which proposes drastic cuts to legal immigration in addition to harsh crackdowns on undocumented people. Homan has promised to “to run the biggest deportation operation this country has ever seen.”

Alongside Homan will be Stephen Miller — a top architect of Trump’s Muslim ban and family separation policies — who will serve as deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser in the new Trump administration. Miller and his conservative advocacy organization, America First Legal, attempted to distance themselves from Project 2025 amid growing backlash to the effort, but their fingerprints are all over it. Miller appeared in a Project 2025 promotional video, a top AFL executive authored a chapter in Mandate, and AFL was on the advisory board until it removed itself following public outcry.

But the likely influence that Project 2025 partners will have on Trump’s looming immigration policy extends far beyond Homan and Miller. Below are some of the coalition’s more extreme proposals.

Center for Immigration Studies pushes bounties, self-deportation

The Center for Immigration Studies is one of the three main branches of the Tanton network, named after John Tanton, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement.” The SPLC has designated CIS as an anti-immigrant hate group.

On November 13, CIS published a blog under the headline “The Trump Deportation Plan: Easier Done than Said.” The article argues for a stricter version of E-Verify — which uses Social Security data to determine employment eligibility — called G-Verify, which would require employers to electronically submit the eligibility form to the Department of Homeland Security.

The blog acknowledges that these programs “would not capture unauthorized migrants who work ‘off the books’” — a common critique of E-Verify, which critics argue actually pushes immigrant workers into unregulated markets.

That’s where the bounties come in. CIS continues, “However, lawful employees, business competitors, customers, or even family members who are aware of this unlawful practice might be willing to report the employer’s criminal practice to DHS in return for a small (say $2,000) reward and a promise of confidentiality.”

In another blog — this time for the National Review — CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian revived the idea of “self-deportation,” which is to say coercing undocumented people into leaving the country by making life miserable for them.

“Persuading illegal aliens to go home on their own saves the government time and money,” Krikorian wrote.

“And it’s also preferable for the illegal aliens themselves, allowing them to return on their own terms,” he continued, “They can settle their affairs, pack up their belongings, and go home for Christmas — and not come back.” After arguing that immigrants leave the country all the time, he suggested that one reason might be that “little Mario came home one day from P.S. 666 insisting on being called Maria.”

Krikorian has been joined in resurrecting this once-radical proposition by Heritage Foundation President — and Project 2025 evangelist — Kevin Roberts, who recently pushed it on The Vince Coglianese Show. While praising his colleague Tom Homan as a fantastic hire, Roberts argued that “such a big part of this is trying to inspire self-deportation.”

As a sign of how far contemporary politics have shifted toward the nativist right, it’s worth remembering that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) was roundly excoriated for proposing “self-deportation” as a central plank of his immigration plan during the 2012 presidential race. He was denounced at the time by liberal magazines, mainstream outlets like the Washington Post editorial board, and conservatives including former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and a little magazine called the National Review.

In another blog published following Trump’s win, CIS argued that “the time may have come for President Biden or President-elect Trump to deploy the [Alien Enemies Act] against Iranian nationals residing in the U.S.” Per the author’s own description, invoking the act would allow “the president to summarily detain and remove nationals of enemy nations” — i.e., Iran. As the Brennan Center for Justice notes, the Alien Enemies Act “is best known for its role in Japanese internment, a shameful part of U.S. history for which Congress, presidents, and the courts have apologized.”

• ### The Claremont Institute: Conscript right-wing sheriffs for deportations

The Claremont Institute is a MAGA-aligned think tank that publishes the right-wing blog The American Mind. While the conservative authors featured on The American Mind may not necessarily speak for the institution, they offer a clear window into the Trump movement.

On November 8, The American Mind posted a blog headlined “Mr. President, Deputize Your Local Sheriffs.” The piece was written by Kyle Shideler of the Center for Security Policy, an SPLC-designated hate group.

“President Trump should look to sheriffs to fill U.S. Marshal roles,” Shideler argued, for the purpose of facilitating “the cross-deputization of local sheriffs’ deputies and police officers along the Southern border, which is needed to address prohibitions against state and local officials enforcing federal immigration law.”

“That manpower will be required if Trump is to meet his campaign promise of securing the border and expelling millions of illegal aliens,” he continued.

Shideler further suggested that “conservative organizations” could “identify local law enforcement leaders who support the Trump agenda” — adding that “those who have participated in the Claremont Institute’s Sheriffs Fellowship would be an excellent place to start.”

Jessica Pishko — author of a recent book about sheriffs and right-wing movements — reported on Claremont’s inaugural sheriff fellows program in 2022. She revealed that it “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.”

As Pishko and others have noted, many of Claremont’s honorees adhere to the far-right ideology of the constitutional sheriffs movement, which holds that sheriffs “should be the ultimate law enforcement authority in the U.S.”

• ### Center for Renewing America defends “Operation Wetback”

The Center for Renewing America is a MAGA-aligned think tank founded by Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist and top architect of Project 2025.

On November 8, CRA published a white paper titled “Primer: U.S. Deportations — A Longstanding & Normal Process” which attempts to normalize and sanitize an earlier mass deportation undertaking officially known as “Operation Wetback” (though CRA’s authors don’t use that racist slur).

The authors argue that “mass deportations are a normal part of the president’s toolbox.”

“For example, in 1954, the U.S. government conducted a campaign that resulted in the mass deportation of Mexican nationals—1,100,000 persons,” they continue.

Left unmentioned is the humanitarian catastrophe unleashed by the mass deportations. As Dara Lind wrote for Vox when Trump praised the Eisenhower-era mass deportations in 2015, immigrants were “deported en masse: by train, by truck, by plane, and by cargo ship.” She adds that a “congressional investigation described conditions on one cargo ship as a ‘penal hell ship’ and compared it to a slave ship on the Middle Passage.”

In one mass raid, 88 people died of “sun stroke as a result of a round-up that had taken place in 112-degree heat,” according to a definitive account by Mae Ngai.

And as Professors Louis Hyman and Natasha Iskander argue, Operation Wetback was largely a propaganda campaign that “enforced the idea that American citizens are white.”

Nevertheless, the 1954 operation has become a touchstone for the Trumpist right. As but one example, Stephen Miller recently cited the “Eisenhower model” as justification for the potential deployment of the U.S. military “​​in a large-scale deportation operation.” CRA’s anodyne description of the 1950s deportations shows how embedded this history has become in the MAGA movement.

• ### Project 2025 embeds itself in Trump 2.0

Trump’s new administration and its partners in the conservative policy ecosystem are laying the groundwork for the most nativist, xenophobic government in decades. From Homan and Miller to the think tanks providing them scaffolding, every sign suggests that the Trump administration will terrorize, surveil, and deport immigrants and their communities in record numbers. And Project 2025 and its partners will almost certainly continue to provide a roadmap for the draconian crackdown.

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not const? an 11 24

An Ohio sheriff's office official has reportedly told Democrats that he would not respond to their emergency calls because of their party affiliation.

In the days leading up to the November presidential election, Clark County's Lieutenant John Rodgers said he would use voter registration records to determine which calls he responded to.

According to WHIO, Rodgers' posts had been shared over 250,000 times on social media as of Friday.

The station reviewed social media posts with the threats from Rodgers.

"I am sorry. If you support the Democrat Party I will not help you" and "The problem is that I know which of you supports the Democratic Party and I will not help you survive the end of days," he reportedly wrote.

ALSO READ:Dems freaking out over ‘grossly incompetent’ Harris operation in Pennsylvania

One post demanded "proof of who you voted for" from residents seeking help.

The Clark County Sheriff's Office told WHIO that an investigation had been launched into the social media posts.

"It is understood that while these comments are highly inappropriate, they in no means reflect the Clark County Sheriff's Office delivery of service to ALL our community and does not reflect the mission and values of the Sheriff's Office. The community has a right to be upset over the actions of Lt. Rodgers and he, as well as the Sheriff's Office in general, will have to work even harder to replenish the trust of members of our community," a statement from the department said.

ALSO READ:Dems freaking out over ‘grossly incompetent’ Harris operation in Pennsylvania

Rodgers suggested that he was under the influence of sleep aids when he wrote the posts.

"It does cause some of my communication to be 'out of character' which is a documented side effect," Rodgers explained in one post.

The Clark County Sheriff's Office said Rodgers had received a written reprimand for violating the department's social media policy.

===

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Election denial groups and right-wing media figures are talking about their election interference plans as voting begins

Election denial groups have publicly talked about their plans to challenge voter rolls, monitor ballot drop boxes, and recruit and train poll workers to be a “spy in the camp” on Election Day

Written by Payton Armstrong

Research contributions from Media Matters Staff

Published 10/31/24

Election denial groups and some right-wing media figures have been discussing their plans to interfere in the 2024 voting process, building on previous efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and interfere with the 2022 midterm election.

Leading up to the 2024 presidential election, election denial groups and right-wing media figures have discussed their plans to challenge citizens’ right to vote, vowed to monitor drop boxes, claimed to be recruiting and training poll workers, launched apps to track supposed fraud on Election Day, and encouraged activists to monitor for noncitizen voting.

In the 2022 midterm elections, right-wing media supported election denial groups recruiting poll workers and poll watchers and asking for volunteers to monitor ballot drop boxes. These efforts had seemingly grown out of conspiracy theories from former President Donald Trump and right-wing media that the 2020 election was rife with voter fraud and had been stolen, culminating in a violent attempt to overturn the election by storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

As voting begins for the 2024 election, “election officials across the country are ramping up their security measures at polling places,” as reported by NBC News, including “beefing up law enforcement presence to donning bulletproof vests to deploying drones for surveillance amid an increasingly hostile environment.”

Right-wing groups and media figures are encouraging challenges to voter rolls, including asking supporters to flag “suspicious voter[s]” with “Hispanic-sounding last names”

• • Election denial group True the Vote has urged followers to submit voter-eligibility complaints by using an app, resulting in thousands of challenges to voter registrations.True the Vote is run by Catherine Engelbrecht and Greg Phillips, who regularly promote the group’s activities in right-wing media. CNN reported: “One of the main drivers of the fruitless challenges is a conservative Texas-based nonprofit group called True the Vote, an election-monitoring organization that has long peddled debunked voter-fraud theories. The group’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, has called on followers to help clean voter rolls by using an app called IV3 that enables users to research voter data and submit voter-eligibility challenges to local election offices.” CNN, [7/29/24; Media Matters, 1/26/23]

• • Cleta Mitchell — who leads the Election Integrity Network and has appeared frequently in right-wing media to promote the group and its activities, and fearmonger about noncitizen voting — was reportedly involved in helping the development of EagleAI for mass voter challenges in various states.As reported by Documented, “Eagle AI draws from public data sources like voter files and newspaper obituaries to build a dashboard for activists to conduct their own ‘list maintenance’ and generate potentially thousands of challenges to voter eligibility with a few clicks.” Documented, [8/17/23; Media Matters, 6/14/24, 10/2/24]

• • Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, a coalition of election-denying activists, has reportedly been recruiting people at the state level to “target the registrations of potentially left-leaning voters.”The New Republic reported that the coalition “recruits activists at the state level and trains them to target the registrations of potentially left-leaning voters in an effort to tilt the balance of the electorate toward conservative-leaning voters.” The New Republic, [10/16/24]

• • In the last several months, the Ohio chapter of Election Integrity Network has reportedly “mounted a statewide effort to kick thousands of registered voters off the rolls in the runup to the 2024 election.”According to local reporting, at least 13 counties “have received thousands of voter registration challenges, the vast majority of which have been rejected” and that “most of those challenges, the officials say, come from locals identifying themselves as members of the Election Integrity Network.” Cleveland.com, [9/25/24]

• • On CBS News, the head of the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network encouraged people to flag “Hispanic-sounding last names” for potential voter roll challenges. In an interview with the network, James Womack, head of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, discussed creating a “list of suspicious voters” who may be on the voter rolls in North Carolina. CBS also aired a clip of a video in which Womack also said, “If you’ve got folks that you, that were registered and they’re missing information … and they were registered in the last 90 days before the election, and they've got Hispanic-sounding last names, that probably is, is a suspicious voter.” Media Matters, [10/22/24; CBS News, 10/21/24]

• • On Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, the founder of Fight Voter Fraud, Linda Szynkowicz, offered the MAGA audience voter data for mass eligibility challenges in Georgia. “Go to our website, download the request data so you can have a list of people in your county that we believe should not be voting in your county, and you can actually hang on to those,” she said, adding, “Do your due diligence. We’ll even teach you how to do it.” Media Matters, [10/7/24]

• ## Right-wing groups and media figures have been recruiting and training poll workers and observers

• • Election Integrity Network claims to have recruited tens of thousands of “election integrity patriots” and holds regular online coordinating calls. The Guardian, [10/21/24]

• • Right-wing group Judicial Watch announced that “as part of its ongoing election integrity efforts, its trained observers will monitor polling sites in Wisconsin on November 5.”Judicial Watch President and podcast host Tom Fitton was quoted in the press release saying, “Judicial Watch’s teams will monitor the election in Wisconsin to expose and deter any fraud.” Per Democracy Docket, Judicial Watch is “a right-wing legal group that’s constantly filing all manner of litigation against the government — Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, challenges to immigration policy, attempts to thwart environmental actions and any other issue that riles up Republicans. ‘Judicial Watch’s strategy is simple: Carpet-bomb the federal courts with Freedom of Information Act lawsuits,’ the New York Times wrote of the organization in a 2016 profile.” Judicial Watch, [10/22/24; Democracy Docket, 6/11/24]

* Tea Party Patriots, which sponsored Trump’s January 6 rally, is apparently doing “poll watcher trainings specifically in Georgia” in collaboration with Election Integrity Network.On War Room, election denial figure and Tea Party Patriots founder Jenny Beth Martin claimed her group is also partnering with Turning Point Action and America First Works on door knocking efforts. Martin also described the groups’ efforts in Georgia in a separate interview, saying they are “making sure that poll watchers are recruited and trained.” Media Matters, [9/9/24, 1/30/24]

• • Right-wing group VoterGA — co-founded by Garland Favorito, who has fundraised for his election denial organization during appearances on a far-right show — collaborated with the Election Integrity Network on poll-watcher training.CNN reported that “VoterGA, a nonprofit led by a computer consultant-turned-activist named Garland Favorito who has a long history of promoting debunked conspiracy theories, has made inroads with some election officials.” In a phone interview with CNN, “Favorito argued that he and his group are fighting for election integrity and that some state and local officials have sought to cover-up elections malfeasance in Georgia. As an example, he cited his inability to review ballots from the 2020 election,” ignoring that state law requires for the ballots to be sealed after the elections. CNN, [10/9/24; Media Matters, 6/14/23]

• • On the Christian nationalist program FlashPoint, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump recruited poll watchers and promoted the RNC’s new “election integrity division” to “ensure that there is no funny business” in the election.During the appearance, Trump said that the RNC is working to stop “3:00 a.m. dumps” and “ballots in suitcases that miraculously appear places,” and she called on the audience to “volunteer to be part of our team, ballot harvest with us where it's legal, you know, be a poll watcher, be a poll worker.” Media Matters, [5/30/24]

• • Christian nationalist “prophet” and podcast host Lance Wallnau has been traveling the country on his “Courage Tour” recruiting conservative Christians as poll workers to be a “spy in the camp” on Election Day.During Wallnau’s tour — which recently got a boost from Trump’s running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) — attendees were directed to a group called Lion of Judah, which ProPublica reported “offers a free course titled ‘Fight the Fraud,’ with modules detailing poll workers’ basic duties and helping people find their local elections offices so they can apply as well as email templates to streamline the process.” Notably, Wallnau has already declared that “there will be cheating” in the 2024 election. ProPublica, [10/16/24; Media Matters, 9/27/24]

• • A Turning Point Action member used QAnon supporter Melody Jennings’ podcast to recruit poll workers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.The member, Brett Galaszewski, urged Jennings’ audience to become poll workers and get involved with the Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, Republican Party’s “Election Integrity Committee.” Jennings is an election denier who participated in election denial efforts during the 2022 elections by coordinating attempts to intimidate voters at ballot drop boxes. Jennings even took credit for armed men who staked out drop boxes in Arizona. Media Matters, [11/15/23; The New York Times, 11/1/22]

• • Right-wing “Stop the Steal” activist Scott Presler, who has previously pushed the QAnon conspiracy theory, called on Donald Trump Jr.'s Rumble podcast audience to become poll workers and to investigate county voter rolls in Pennsylvania.Media Matters, [9/5/24, 1/30/23]

• ## True the Vote is planning to monitor ballot drop boxes for supposed fraud, including partnering with Steven Crowder and “working with sheriffs”

• • True the Vote claims to be planning to monitor ballot drop boxes in Michigan and Wisconsin with “24/7 streaming video” that will be “available for anyone.” On War Room, founder Catherine Engelbrecht declared, “This cycle, we do intend to have eyes on those drop boxes with surveillance footage.” Media Matters, [9/5/24]

• • True the Vote also claims it “is reaching out to sheriffs across the country” to monitor ballot drop boxes.In different media interviews, Engelbrecht claimed to be working with “three very influential sheriffs” in Wisconsin and said the organization is offering local sheriffs “camera equipment” to monitor drop boxes and, in exchange, the public can livestream the footage to “see for themselves what’s happening.” Media Matters, [8/6/24]

• • YouTuber Steven Crowder is apparently “partnering” with True the Vote for “the scoop” from the group’s drop box monitoring.True the Vote claims it has been “setting up teams and schedules for drop boxes” to monitor “with a little handheld camera” in multiple states and says Crowder is “opening up” the organization’s efforts “to a whole new crowd.” Media Matters, [10/19/24]

• ## Right-wing groups have launched apps, hotlines, and websites for people to report supposed voter fraud and issues at the polls on Election Day

• • True the Vote launched a new app for users “to quickly report problems at the polls” and “document and report instances of suspected election fraud” to funnel to local law enforcement.True the Vote claims to be “working with sheriffs” in Wisconsin and plans to funnel reports of supposed “problems at the polls” from users of its new app. Media Matters, [9/12/24, 9/20/24, 8/6/24]

• • Election denial group The America Project launched an app “for people to hop on and report different things that they see that they know are illegal,” as described by the group’s Director of Rights & Freedoms, Amanda Freytes.The America Project was founded by former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who following the 2020 election, became one of the country’s biggest election denial funders. Twitter/X, [10/5/24; Media Matters, 1/26/23]

• • Right-wing group United Sovereign Americans launched a new “election complaint” webpage, where people can submit supposed voter fraud to authorities.Founder Marly Hornik has promoted the webpage on War Room. CNN, [10/23/24; Democracy Docket, 5/29/24]

• • Judicial Watch announced it “will run an Internet hotline for voters in all states to report suspicions of election and voter fraud.”The hotline’s poster asks people to send Judicial Watch a detailed email “if you witness any suspicious activity at your polling place, have issues with your voting machine, or witness voter fraud or intimidation.” Judicial Watch, accessed [10/23/24, 10/23/24]

* YouTuber Steven Crowder touted a plan to have “boots on the ground” on Election Day because “this already is election theft,” saying there will be a “live electoral integrity map” where his audience can “see any shenanigans going on” in real time.Crowder claimed there will be “investigative journalism units and team leaders, managers in every major swing city.” Crowder also said that he would be “partnering” with True the Vote for “Election Night,” and claimed that they “will have tens of thousands of volunteers” combined “watching hundreds of key polling locations and ballot drop boxes around the country.” Media Matters, [9/23/24; Truth Social, 10/28/24]

• ## Right-wing figures are also encouraging people to monitor for noncitizens voting, or registering to vote

• • During a so-called election integrity call, election denier Cleta Mitchell called on MAGA activists to watch their local Department of Motor Vehicles for noncitizen voter registration and distribute her group’s materials on the ground.Mitchell said: “There are things you can do in your local communities. Watching at your DMVs, watching - going to your election board, asking your local election officials what are you doing to ensure that noncitizen are not getting registered to vote and getting — we've got sample resolutions. We've got signs, you can download and leaflets you could hand out.” Media Matters, [10/8/24]

• • On a Rumble live stream, Election Integrity Network leader Kerry Toloczko said that “we don't want noncitizen voting,” and she offered materials for right-wing activists who are planning to monitor for noncitizen voting at the local level.Toloczko, who has also appeared on Newsmax to push baseless claims of noncitizen voting, said that their activists are “everywhere” trying to “suppress the people who are trying to vote unlawfully,” asserting, “We have activists, grassroots activists, so we're handing these [signs] out in churches, in parking lots, in voting centers.” Media Matters, [10/17/24, 10/18/24]

• • Wisconsin-based talk radio host Vicki McKenna urged her listeners to go to polling locations and “stand with very large signs that say in Spanish, ‘Noncitizens are not permitted to vote in the state of Wisconsin.’” McKenna warned of noncitizens voting and complained that “they don’t want you in the field. They don’t want you participating. They don’t want you observing elections.” 1310 WIBA,*The Vicki McKenna Show*, [10/18/24]

rww 9 24

• Paul Rosenberg @ Salon: Who created the “constitutional sheriff” myth? Hint: It’s not in the Constitution

Author Jessica Pishko on how two Arizona sheriffs created an entire mythology — and a dangerous movement.

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omfg

an 7 24

Retribution is at the center of Donald Trump’s third presidential election campaign.

“I am your warrior,” Trump proclaimed earlier this year. “I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

Trump’s loyal surrogates have duly embraced the project — perhaps no one more zealously than Ivan Raiklin, a retired Army Reserve lieutenant colonel and former U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency employee, who bills himself as the former and would-be president’s “future secretary of retribution.”

Raiklin is seeking to enlist so-called “constitutional” sheriffs in rural, conservative counties across the country to detain Trump’s political enemies. Or, as he says, carry out “live-streamed swatting raids” against individuals on his “Deep State target list.”

“This is a deadly serious report,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told Raw Story. “A retired U.S. military officer has drawn up a ‘Deep State target list’ of public officials he considers traitors, along with our family members and staff. His hit list is a vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans and a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom."

READ:Trump's far-right army is threatening bloodshed — believe them

Raskin called on House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to “denounce this dangerous plot and to repudiate threats of, and planning for, political violence from any quarter. Bipartisan opposition to vigilante violence and assassination plots is essential for American government to continue.”

The list Raiklin has been circulating since January is extensive.

It includes numerous Democratic and Republican elected officials; FBI and intelligence officials; members of the House Select January 6 Committee; U.S. Capitol Police officers and civilian employees; witnesses in Trump’s two impeachment trials and the Jan. 6 committee hearings; and journalists from publications ranging from CNN and the Washington Post to Reuters and Raw Story — all considered political enemies of Trump.

Julie Farnam, a former U.S. Capitol Police employee named on the list who as assistant director of intelligence and interagency coordination warned about the potential for violence in advance of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, said she would not be intimidated by the list.

“Any hit list is designed to impart the silence and fear of those named on it,” Farnam told Raw Story. “But silence is victory for those who write such lists. Conversely, speaking the truth without fear will always be the undoing of those who seek to intimidate and spread hate in our world. I can never be silenced.”

In addition to Farnam, the list includes nine current or former U.S. Capitol Police employees. The agency declined to comment for this story.

Raw Story is not publishing the full list given the potential risk posed to people unaware that they’re on it.

One individual named on the list who spoke on condition of anonymity noted that Raiklin is associated with retired Lt. General Michael Flynn.

“And Trump himself has repeated on dozens of occasions calls for revenge, retribution and retaliation,” the person told Raw Story. “This is another example of that broader phenomenon of revenge against political enemies that animates the former president and his entire movement, and for that reason should concern us all.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to emails requesting comment for this story.

‘Attack on our democracy’

The accusations of “treason” and other imagined offenses leveled by Raiklin against these individuals are typically based on fanciful legal theories and outlandish factual claims, if anything at all.

For example: Raiklin, in a podcast, suggested without evidence that the unidentified person responsible for setting pipe bombs outside the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee on Jan. 6, 2021, was “a subordinate-surrogate of the Capitol Police Board,” which oversees the Capitol Police.

But Raiklin is nothing if not self-assured that the “evidence” he’s gathering on anti-Trump “deep state” plotters is real. So real, it seems, that Raiklin claims the material — fully revealed — would establish probable cause for county sheriffs across the nation to issue arrest warrants for various high-ranking officials who have, in one way or another, run afoul of Trump.

Under Raiklin’s objectively bizarre plan, the sympathetic sheriffs would deputize some 75,000 military veterans — veterans he claims have been pushed out of service because they refused to comply with COVID-19 vaccine mandates — to carry out the arrests.

Raiklin has gone so far as to pitch his plan to a group of far-right sheriffs who met in Las Vegas in April.

Public records requests filed by Raw Story with dozens of county sheriff offices reveal that word of Raiklin’s efforts has reached the email inboxes of sheriffs from Wisconsin to Oklahoma.

But Raiklin’s effort to enlist these sheriffs appears to be foundering: Not one has openly signed on, and even some who are sympathetic to his cause publicly warn that his plan violates due process.

Undaunted, Raiklin has attempted to build relationships with conservative members of Congress, and aides to two Republican lawmakers who chair influential House committees confirmed to Raw Story that they are familiar with him.

An overriding reason for why Raiklin hasn’t been entirely marginalized or relegated by fellow conservatives to the realm of kooks and gadflies?

Raiklin uses the kind of hyperbolic language that Trump himself uses — and that Trump’s base eats up.

He gives federal agencies and media outlets Trump-like nicknames such as “FB-Lie,” “Faux-litico” and “National Poison Radio.”

“My nickname is the Deep State marauder, aka the mauler,” Raiklin told a group of election deniers in New Jersey earlier this year. “And I like using ice picks instead of poking the bear.”

In a video posted in May to X, which now accrued more than 10 million views, Raiklin said, “Expect to see live-streamed swatting raids of every single individual on that Deep State target list, because the precedence has already been set.”

Notwithstanding Raiklin’s claim that his plan would be “legal, moral and ethical,” swatting — the false reporting of an emergency to garner a response from law enforcement for the purpose of harassing a target — is illegal.

Raiklin has nevertheless promoted the idea in podcast interviews, multiple posts on X, a press conference and conversations with prominent far-right extremists.

In recent days, Raiklin’s rhetoric has escalated beyond setting out future hypothetical scenarios for retribution.

He mocked one former federal employee blocking him on X while suggesting that the targeted individual “wants me to speak to him in person” and asking him for his “preferred punishment for committing treason.”

And during a podcast, he claimed to be surveilling a U.S. Capitol Police employee, whom he mentioned by name, “both physically and digitally.”

Experts worry that provocative rhetoric from figures such as Raiklin could impose a climate of fear on civil servants simply trying to do their jobs. Even worse, Raiklin’s rhetoric could inspire violence against them.

“The idea that you would target anyone that was there on the basis of allegiance to the rule of law and the Constitution is really scary,” Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, told Raw Story.

Stier’s organization promotes professional, merit-based civil service as a pillar of good governance — a notion that he said is being increasingly challenged.

“This represents, in my view, an attack on our democracy,” Stier said. “We have a rule of law. If any civil servants are violating the law, there are mechanisms in place to hold them accountable. Vigilantism is not the way to have a society function.”

Raiklin responded to a phone call requesting comment by posting a recording of the voicemail on his X account on Tuesday, while commenting: “Looks like Elements of the Deep State Target List have asked @jordangreennc of Raw Sewage to try to find out more about my list….”

Later, he acknowledged a set of written questions submitted by Raw Story but didn't answer them, while accusing Raw Story and "domestic terrorist leftists" of hounding him.

"Look at my entire Deep State target list," Raiklin said. "That is the beginning. This is the scratching of the surface of who is going to be criminalized for their treason, okay?"

One prominent media organization named on Raiklin’s “target” list expressed concern for its journalists, five of whom also appear on the list by name.

“The conspiracy theories underpinning this list are baseless, and the calls for targeted harassment are dangerous,” Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesperson for the New York Times, told Raw Story. “The Times reporters on the list are simply professional journalists doing their jobs. Swatting is a criminal offense, and in the event of any instances directed at our employees, the Times will work with law enforcement to prosecute those responsible.”

Said Raw Story Publisher Roxanne Cooper: “Purposefully threatening and endangering the safety of working journalists is both reprehensible and illegal, and the American public should reject and denounce anyone who engages in such behavior.”

CNN, Reuters, the Atlantic and American Oversight declined to comment on Raiklin. Emails to the Washington Post, Politico, ABC News, NBC News and MSNBC, whose journalists are also named on the list, went unreturned.

Who is Ivan Raiklin?

As the 2020 election approached, conspiracy minded Trump supporters with active Twitter accounts were in abundance. Most never broke through the incessant MAGA noise, or merely added another note to its election denialism dissonance.

Raiklin was different.

He was a seasoned veteran with a background in military intelligence who wound up playing a small but significant role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election in Trump’s name.

Following a distinguished career in the U.S. Armed Forces in which he served as a military attaché to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and foreign affairs specialist assigned to the Ukraine Crisis Team, Raiklin left the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2017 to run for U.S. Senate in Virginia, according to the Washington Post.

At the time, Raiklin’s candidacy in 2018 provided little indication of the MAGA loyalist relishing the destruction of Trump’s enemies that he would become.

If anything, Raiklin fashioned himself as a force of apolitical positivity.

“The reason I’m running is that we’ve had such a negative political atmosphere the past couple years,” Raiklin told theCourierin Iowa. “I want to inject a ‘positive disruption’ in the political conversation. Being a veteran of 20 years, I’m pretty much a political agnostic.”

But Raiklin didn’t get far: He failed to garner a sufficient number of signatures to make it onto the Republican primary ballot. And when he sued the Virginia GOP and the state Department of Elections, claiming that he was unfairly excluded, a federal judge tossed out the suit.

Following his disappointing foray into electoral politics, Raiklin began his turn toward Trump’s MAGA movement.

In 2019, he appeared at a QAnon-themed fundraiser for retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, whom Raiklin met in 2010. (Flynn and Raiklin have become close in recent years, with Raiklin urging Trump to select Flynn as his vice presidential running mate and Flynn featuring Raiklin in his current speaking tour.)

Roughly a week after the 2020 election, when major media outlets had called the election for Democratic candidate Joe Biden, Raiklin went on Alex Jones’ conspiracy theory show InfoWars and confidently predicted that Trump would ultimately obtain the necessary number of electoral votes to secure reelection.

“I absolutely guarantee it,” he said. “One hundred percent. Unequivocally. Full stop. There is no possibility that he does not reach 270.”

It's a classic example of how Trump’s followers often act on Trump’s wishes or anticipate his desires without receiving specific directives.

For months, Trump had been saying that the only way he’d lose the election is if Democrats stole it through fraud. Now, Trump had lost, and Raiklin was arguing that Trump was winning, against all evidence.

Raiklin, in essence, operates as an agent of Trumpism independent of Trump.

And as the 2024 election nears, the same dynamic is apparent: Trump articulates the broad themes, and his supporters scramble to put them into practice.

“Stand back and stand by” set the stage for the Jan. 6 insurrection in 2021, and now, “I am your retribution” serves as a solicitation to supporters such as Raiklin to put together specific plans for retribution against Trump’s political enemies.

‘Operation Pence Card’

Raiklin’s primary contribution to the effort to overturn the 2020 election is a memo he drafted for the benefit of Trump’s presidential campaign.

Entitled “Operation Pence Card,” it proffered a novel legal argument that Vice President Mike Pence held the authority to set aside electoral votes from states narrowly carried by Biden.

The plan is widely associated with attorney John Eastman, who now faces charges of racketeering and conspiracy in Georgia, and with conspiracy, fraud and forgery in Arizona.

But Raiklin actually tweeted out his plan one day before Eastman drafted his now-infamous stop-the-steal memo. And Raiklin wielded enough influence that Trump himself, on Dec. 23, 2020, retweeted Raiklin’s “Operation Pence Card” tweet to his tens of millions of followers.

Around the same time, Raiklin dined with then-Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who attended a meeting at the White House along with other House Republicans to discuss plans to object on Jan. 6 to the congressional certification of the presidential election — the final, generally ceremonial step before a presidential inauguration.

On Jan. 4, 2021, Raiklin had told Jerome Corsi, a longtime conspiracy theorist, that with regard to Trump supporters descending on Washington, D.C. en masse: “I am not calling for any violence, but at the same time, I can’t stop people from committing it.”

Raiklin was present at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 when a pro-Trump mob breached Congress’ defenses and temporarily stopped lawmakers’ electoral vote certification. Raiklin has not been charged with any crime related to the attack.

Following the Jan. 6 attack, the Army Reserve opened an investigation into whether Raiklin violated its rules against partisan political activity, but by early 2022, the service had cleared him of wrongdoing.

Raiklin has said the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Homeland Security have also investigated him, but those investigations likewise concluded without formal accusations of wrongdoing against Raiklin.

“So what does that trigger me to do?” Raiklin said during a presentation to a group of election deniers in New Jersey in February. “It weaponizes me against them. And so, since they haven’t found anything, and you’re investigating me, sir, I have the capability and capacity to start digging into you, your family, your friends, your associates — every single thing that you do in your life.”

Whitewashing the crimes of violent J6 rioters

While avoiding prosecution himself, Raiklin has eagerly taken up the cause of defendants who claim they were wrongfully prosecuted for their role in the Jan. 6 attack.

In June, Raiklin held a press conference in Detroit to promote his “live-streamed swatting raids” scheme. He did so alongside Treniss Jewell Evans III, who served a 20-day prison sentence for illegally entering the Capitol. Also speaking at the press conference: Sarah McAbee, the wife of a former sheriff’s deputy who is currently serving a 70-month sentence for assaulting a Washington, D.C., metropolitan police officer.

Ronald Colton McAbee, Sarah McAbee’s husband, wore patches with the word “SHERIFF” and the emblem of the anti-government Three Percenter movement on his clothing while taking part in an hours-long battle at the mouth of the Lower West Terrace Tunnel on Jan. 6.

A GiveSendGo campaign to support his wife applauds McAbee for answering “the call to stand up for our nation,” but following his conviction the Department of Justice described him as witnessing rioters knock an officer defending the U.S. Capitol to the ground. McAbee’s response was the opposite of rendering aid, according to the government.

After the officer was kicked and stripped of his baton by rioters, the government contends that “McAbee stepped into the archway, grabbed the officer’s leg, and pulled him further toward the crowd. When a second MPD officer stepped off the police line to assist the downed officer, McAbee stood up, yelled at the officer who had stepped out to assist, and then swung his arms and hands towards the officer’s head and torso. McAbee made contact with the officer and was wearing the reinforced gloves at the time of the assault.”

In the run-up to Jan. 6, Raiklin had baselessly ascribed the legitimate election of Joe Biden to “domestic fraud” committed by people “potentially under foreign actors’ payroll.” Now, at the press conference in Detroit in June 2024, Raiklin was inverting the violent crimes committed by Trump supporters to portray them, not the officers defending the Capitol, as the victims.

“You need to know who is coming after us,” Raiklin said, naming two people who are part of the U.S. Capitol security apparatus. Without presenting any evidence, Raiklin accused one of the men of “weaponizing and working with the DOJ… to criminalize against Sarah’s husband.”

Cultivating relationships with House Republicans

All the while, Raiklin is forging ties with Republican lawmakers who are sympathetic to the Jan. 6 rioters.

While leveling outlandish charges of criminal misconduct at federal civil servants, Raiklin has become a familiar presence at congressional committee hearings controlled by Republican lawmakers eager to downplay the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, or, alternately, shift blame to Democrats for the violence.

Raiklin has sat in the gallery behind the witnesses in at least five House committee hearings over the past year.

Among them: the House Administration Oversight Subcommittee chaired by Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), the House Oversight and Accountability Committee chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-KY) and the House Judiciary Committee chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH).

“I don’t just sit back behind the witnesses when I’m in the House,” Raiklin said on a podcast in May. “For 15 months, I’ve been grinding day in and day out talking to dozens of members of Congress giving ideas on what needs to be done.”

On another podcast, Raiklin said: “The only person that understands this is a guy by the name of Barry Loudermilk…. Why? Well, because he’s doing the right thing. And I get an opportunity to explain this to him and his staff regularly.”

Nick Petromelis, an aide to Loudermilk, told Raw Story he, Petromelis, is “familiar” with Raiklin.

Loudermilk ignored a request from the now-defunct House Select January 6 Committee to explain a tour he gave to constituents on the eve of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. His committee deposed Farnam, the former U.S. Capitol Police intelligence leader who is on Raiklin’s target list, last month.

Austin Hacker, an aide to Comer, likewise said he, Hacker, was aware that Raiklin had attended House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearings.

Despite promising in late May that he would find out whether Comer had personally spoken to Raiklin, Hacker stopped responding to follow-up messages from Raw Story.

Raiklin said on a podcast in May that he has sent his “Deep State target list” to Comer, Jordan and the Administration Oversight Subcommittee chaired by Loudermilk.

Hacker told Raw Story that Comer, his boss, does not have the “target list” document. Aides to Jordan and the House Administration Oversight Committee did not respond to emails from Raw Story seeking confirmation that they received copies of the list.

None of the three House members responded to requests for comment about whether they support Raiklin’s antics.

Raiklin has singled out other members of Congress for praise. Of Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), who filed legislation to hold U.S. Attorney Merrick Garland in “inherent contempt,” Raiklin said she “has exhibited the maximum courage that her position allows.”

Luna’s legislation would hold the attorney general in “inherent contempt” for refusing demands to turn over audio of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s interview with Biden, related to Biden’s retention of classified documents in the garage of his Delaware home. “Inherent contempt” is a tool that would allow the House sergeant-at-arms to take Garland into custody and compel him to sit for a congressional proceeding. Raiklin told one podcaster that he “saw” Luna at a congressional hearing in May.

Luna’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

‘Go to the maximum level’

While cultivating ties with members of Congress, Raiklin has been lobbying sheriffs — with mixed results — to join his effort.

To reach potentially sympathetic sheriffs, Raiklin has focused on an organization called the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association.

Under the leadership of Richard Mack, a former sheriff from Arizona, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association has promoted the controversial view that county sheriffs are the highest law in the land and are within their rights to ignore any federal and state laws that they deem to be unconstitutional.

But Mack told Raw Story he has severed ties with Raiklin since talking with him in early June, and that he disapproves of Raiklin’s rhetoric.

During the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association’s annual convention during April in Las Vegas, Raiklin asked a panel of sheriffs if they would “be willing to go to the maximum level to create consequences for these federal actors” whom he claimed had committed “seditious conspiracy.”

The response was less than promising.

Still, the potential for violence should not be discounted, according to Devin Burghart, executive director of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights and someone who has been monitoring the far right for more than three decades.

“It is certainly not out of the realm of possibility to see them using the office of the sheriff and posses they wish to create to start rounding up political opponents,” Burgart told Raw Story. “Right now, in the far right, the promotion of post-election violence and bloody political retribution has become disturbingly commonplace. In that context, the results of the election are almost an afterthought — only important in determining whether their murderous rage will have state sanction.”

While the far-right’s willingness to escalate may increase as the election approaches, at the time of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association convention in April, the two elected sheriffs on the panel were taking a cautious approach.

Sheriff Bob Songer from Klickitat County in Washington state told Raiklin that much as he might want to help, he doubted many prosecutors would be willing to press charges.

Sheriff Dar Leaf from Barry County in Michigan, put it more forcefully.

“We’re not going to be able to just go out and arrest,” he said. “We’ve got to do a grand jury indictment, just like the Constitution says.”

Leaf’s far-right credentials would seem to make him a prime candidate for Raiklin’s project. He gained national notoriety in 2020 when he suggested that members of an anti-government militia accused of attempting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer might have been trying to carry out a citizen’s arrest.

Leaf has falsely claimed that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election, and a lawyer representing Leaf reportedly sought evidence from an ad hoc group organized by lawyer Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn in December 2020 that could be used to justify “issuing probable cause warrants to sequester Dominion voting machines.”

But if Raiklin and his allies were discouraged by Leaf’s response at the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association convention, they haven’t given any indication of it.

During a podcast appearance with Mark Finchem, a former Arizona state representative who took part in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, Raiklin said he was certain that the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association could help “identify which county sheriffs would be clamoring, clamoringto prosecute these scum.”

“I know one,” Finchem replied. “Dar Leaf in Barry County, Michigan.”

Reached by Raw Story earlier this month, Leaf said that despite fielding a question from him at the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association convention, he doesn’t know who Raiklin is.

Leaf reiterated his rejection of Raiklin’s plan by expressing an aversion to politically motivated prosecutions.

Furthermore, Leaf warned that if indictments were obtained through grand juries “stacked” with Trump supporters, any criminal activity uncovered through depositions would be thrown out “because we started out breaking the law.”

Among dozens of other sheriff’s offices across the country contacted for this story, two in Wisconsin — Burnett County and Polk County — confirmed receiving an email with the subject heading: “Ivan Raiklin Requests Deputization of 80K Veterans” that linked to Raiklin’s video and encouraged them to get in contact.

“Please Watch this viral video that has garnered 9.8M views in 5 days,” it reads. “Important you understand. Remember your Oath.”

Raiklin’s name landed in one other sheriff’s inbox through a subscription to the “General Flynn Newsletter,” which is promoting the documentary about the former national security adviser.

The email, received by Tulsa County Sheriff Vic Regalado in Oklahoma, describes Raiklin as a member of a team “hand-selected” by Flynn to provide event attendees “with an informative and unforgettable experience.”

The email describes the “General Flynn was Framed Evidence Wall,” a visual prop that Raiklin uses prior to each film screening that presents “an exhaustive timeline and link analysis of all the major political and government officials at the most senior levels that weaponized against General Flynn to prevent him from exposing their corruption.”

During his months-long campaign, Raiklin has continuously referenced Mack and the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association in an effort to build credibility for his plan.

During his press conference with Treniss Evans in Detroit, Raiklin mentioned that the previous evening he’d “had a very long conversation with a guy by the name of Sheriff Mack” on the topic of “vetting and communicating with sheriffs.”

On a livestream of the press conference, Raiklin displayed a photo of the two men huddling over a laptop, suggesting a collaborative effort.

In a recent interview, Mack told Raw Story at the time that he had been “getting all sorts of calls” about Raiklin.

But since that meeting, Mack said he has soured on Raiklin’s plan.

“I’m afraid I don’t approve of some of his language, the hyperbole, the rhetoric,” Mack said.

For the same reason, Mack said, he resigned from the Oath Keepers. Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right group that recruited from the ranks of retired law enforcement and military veterans, is currently serving an 18-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy at a federal prison in Cumberland, Md.

“It’s not where CSPOA can go,” Mack said, adding that he and Raiklin “are not working together at all.”

Since early June, Mack said that the two men have not spoken or exchanged any emails.

“Quite frankly, he talks about that list of 350 people — I’m sure they can afford lawyers,” Mack said. “It reeks of lawsuits, and it doesn’t follow due process.”

During his press conference with Evans, Raiklin said the two men are planning to attend the Sheriffs Association of Texas’ annual conference in Fort Worth, Texas, this month and pitch their plan.

“I would say that my inbox has been interesting lately with the amount of sheriffs that have an interest in seeing Texas uphold the United States Constitution, and preserve the way of life that we’ve come to expect as constitutionally guaranteed,” Evans said during the press conference.

But Mack said Raiklin’s score is currently 0.

“I know a lot of sheriffs, especially in Texas,” Mack told Raw Story. “I do not believe he has a single sheriff aligned with him. He’s never been able to give me a name.”

‘It’s so easy to learn where they live’

While cultivating relationships with members of Congress, lobbying sheriffs and recruiting volunteers to join posses tasked with detaining political enemies, Raiklin has also forged relationships with other extremists, seeming to cast about for a legal rationale in support of his scheme.

Over the past six months, Raiklin has appeared on at least three podcasts with Dr. Pete Chambers, who helped organize a “Take Our Border Back” convoy earlier this year to support Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s defiance of the federal government.

Like Raiklin, Chambers is a retired lieutenant colonel who formerly served in the Army Special Forces. Following his retirement from the military and later, in 2022, from the National Guard, Chambers joined the “sovereign citizen” group, whose members shot a man and took him hostage in 1997.

Chambers said when he watched Raiklin’s viral video outlining his plan to carry out “live-streamed swatting raids” against his “Deep State target list,” he recalled that he said to himself: “Ivan, you’ve just kicked open the door, and we’re going to have to back your play. And we can. And we’ve got the receipts to do it.”

During the conversation between the two men, Chambers referenced something called “the doctrine of lesser magistrates.” Although the term is rooted in the 16th century Protestant Reformation in Europe, it was more recently popularized by Matthew Trewhella, a Wisconsin pastor who has advocated killing abortion doctors.

Michael Flynn has recommended Trewhella’s 2013 book, The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates: A Proper Resistance to Tyranny and a Repudiation of Unlimited Obedience to Civil Government,as “a masterful blueprint showing Americans how to successfully resist tyranny.”

Trewhella’s book also received a plug at the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association convention where Raiklin attempted to sell the sheriffs on his “live-streamed swatting raids” plan.

Chambers seemed to acknowledge the improvisational nature of applying a 16th century religious doctrine to an ideological battle with Trump’s political adversaries in the United States of America in 2024.

“We’re building a plane and flying it here, I would say,” he said. “However, it is legal, moral and ethical…. If we can get together and develop the alliances of these sheriffs, then we decrease the space that these people can then maneuver.”

‘Gonna face those guns’

Next week, barring something cataclysmic, Trump will officially become the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nominee.

Trump will become the nominee despite being convicted of 34 felonies in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case in Manhattan, and he still faces dozens of additional federal and state charges despite a recent Supreme Court ruling that granted Trump — and any future president — immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts” they took as president.

Trump is as defiant as ever.

“I did nothing wrong. We’d have a system that was rigged and disgusting. I did nothing wrong,” Trump said June 27 in his debate against Biden.

On a parallel track, Raiklin’s embrace of lawlessness appears to be growing stronger.

In June, Raiklin published a 76-minute video of himself speaking with Cliven Bundy, a 78-year-old Nevada rancher who is perhaps the ultimate icon of the far-right anti-government movement. In 2014, Bundy’s refusal to pay grazing fees to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management led to an armed standoff between the FBI and militia members, along with other supporters, including Richard Mack from the CSPOA.

Raiklin flattered Bundy during the exchange as “quite the legend,” while describing the federal government as “the most corrupt institution on the planet.” The two men agreed that “the militia” — a term used to describe armed citizens — “puts a check on the federal government.”

The rhetoric used by the two men became increasingly confrontational, with Bundy accusing the federal government of plotting to kill Americans. Cliven Bundy noted that his son, Ryan Bundy, was wounded, and a friend, LaVoy Finicum, was killed during a traffic stop during the Malheur National Forest occupation in Oregon in 2016.

“They don’t have those bullets to fight our enemy across the border,” Bundy charged. “They’ve got those bullets to kill us in America.”

Raiklin then quoted the Bible to suggest the proper response was “an eye for an eye.”

Bundy lamented that sheriffs across the country did not heed his call in 2014 for them to disarm federal agents in their jurisdictions.

“I said, ‘If you don’t disarm them, one of these days you’re going to face those guns,’” Bundy recounted.

“Now, we’re getting closer,” he quickly added. “Gonna face those guns.”

Raiklin, in response, appeared to advocate for doxing federal agents.

“Oh yeah, we’re not only going to do that,” he said. “Again, they’re going to experience the most peaceful, legal and moral, ethical and patriotic endeavor they’ve ever experienced in their life. Every one of them. Because we have tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people that will facilitate them experiencing that.

“Because it’s so easy to learn where they live,” Raiklin continued. “Each one. Where their homes are. Who they’re related to. Where they frequent. What kinds of vehicles they own. What kinds of devices they own and that they emit GPS geo-tracking data. Which social media apps they use. We monitor all their communications.”

===

no lnx many pix

Inside the bizarre Las Vegas conference where Trump-loving sheriffs, felons and conspiracy theorists vowed to form militias to patrol polling places and seize voting machines to stop Biden

A recent CSPOA conference in Las Vegas drew attention for its controversial mix of attendees, including felons, disgraced politicians and sheriffs

The event aimed to address extremism allegations within the group and outline plans for upcoming elections, such as investigating alleged voter fraud

Critics raised concerns about potential election interference and misinformation

By JAMES GORDON FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED:, 21 April 2024

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A right-wing sheriffs' group that challenges federal law held a bizarre rally in Las Vegas last week featuring felons and conspiracy theorists as the country's presidential election is just months away.

The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, founded in 2011 by former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack, held its annual conference in Las Vegas last week at the Ahern Luxury Boutique Hotel conference center.

The group, known as CSPOA, teaches that elected sheriffs must 'protect their citizens from the overreach of an out-of-control federal government' by refusing to enforce any law they deem unconstitutional or 'unjust.'

The right-wing 'constitutional sheriffs,' claim legal power in their jurisdictions that exceeds U.S. federal government and state authorities.

In particular, this time around, the organization is urging its members to seize voting machines while investigating claims of 'rampant voter fraud' that during the 2020 election proved to be baseless.

Last week's Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association conference in Las Vegas drew attention for its controversial mix of attendees, including felons, disgraced politicians and sheriffs. It's founder Richard Mack is seen speaking on the stand

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Last week's Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association conference in Las Vegas drew attention for its controversial mix of attendees, including felons, disgraced politicians and sheriffs. It's founder Richard Mack is seen speaking on the stand

Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser and retired three-star general who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI but was pardoned by then-President Donald Trump, was a speaker at the conference

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Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser and retired three-star general who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI but was pardoned by then-President Donald Trump, was a speaker at the conference

Trump's friend and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell also spoke as he pushed his election denial theories

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Trump's friend and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell also spoke as he pushed his election denial theories

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This time around, the group want to form a group that will patrol polling places and have the power to seize voting machines while investigating Democrats and other countries that are sending immigrants to the the U.S. in order to vote illegally, they claim and reported by NBC News.

In 2022, the group continued to promote baseless conspiracy theories that the last presidential election was stolen from Trump are have recently been pushing a dubious theory that county sheriffs can access voting machines and intervene in how elections are run - and also have virtually unchecked power in their counties.

Voting-rights advocates and election experts said any attempts by law enforcement to interfere in elections would be alarming and an extension of the threat posed by the continued circulation of Trump's claims about the 2020 election.

'The safest way to actually achieve that is to have local law enforcement understand that they have no obligation to enforce such laws,' Mack said during a recent interview. 'They're not laws at all anyway. If they're unjust laws, they are laws of tyranny.'

Mike Gannuscio (left) is running to be a sheriff in Mohave County, Nevada

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Mike Gannuscio (left) is running to be a sheriff in Mohave County, Nevada

In 2022, the group continued to promote baseless conspiracy theories that the last presidential election was stolen from Trump are have recently been pushing a dubious theory that county sheriffs can access voting machines and intervene in how elections are run. Zapata County, Texas, Sheriff Raymundo Del Bosque holds his hat over his heart during the national anthem

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In 2022, the group continued to promote baseless conspiracy theories that the last presidential election was stolen from Trump are have recently been pushing a dubious theory that county sheriffs can access voting machines and intervene in how elections are run. Zapata County, Texas, Sheriff Raymundo Del Bosque holds his hat over his heart during the national anthem

'The sheriff is supposed to be protecting the public from evil,' Dar Leaf, the chief law enforcement officer for Barry County, Michigan, said during last year's conference. 'When your government is evil or out of line, that's what the sheriff is there for, protecting them from that.'

The sheriffs' group has railed against gun control laws, COVID-19 mask mandates and public health restrictions, as well as the alleged election fraud.

It has also quietly spread its ideology across the country, seeking to become more mainstream in part by securing state approval for taxpayer-funded law enforcement training.

The public-facing image of the sheriffs group, prominently features the American flag and the experiences of black civil rights icons who pushed back against unjust laws.

But details of its operations are closely held, and its finances are shielded from public scrutiny.

It was briefly registered as a nonprofit in Arizona, but internal records indicate it is now a private company.

The group does not release its list of dues-paying members, nor does it publicize information about where or how it conducts trainings.

The sympathies of the group's leaders for right-wing, white-nationalist extremist causes, however, are well documented.

The CSPOA is also unequivocal about gun rights and supports the right of criminals and the mentally ill to carry firearms, opposing gun registration or background checks.

About 100 people attended the day-long conference in Las Vegas last Wednesday

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About 100 people attended the day-long conference in Las Vegas last Wednesday

Attendees of the conference milled around and mingled with one another in the lobby

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Attendees of the conference milled around and mingled with one another in the lobby

Various speakers from the 'law enforcement' community were on the stand and able to speak

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Various speakers from the 'law enforcement' community were on the stand and able to speak

Mack was an early board member of the Oath Keepers, the group involved in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Although he said he split with the group several years ago when it became a militia, Mack still speaks at Oath Keeper-affiliated rallies.

Leaf was investigated, but not charged, in connection with the Michigan attorney general's investigation into the alleged illegal seizure and breach of vote-counting machines in 2020.

He also appeared at an election-denier rally with two men later charged in the conspiracy to kidnap Michigan's Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

Over the last six years, the group has hosted trainings, rallies, speeches and meetings in at least 30 states for law enforcement officers, political figures, private organizations and members of the public.

The group has held formal trainings on its 'constitutional' curriculum for law enforcement officers in at least 13 of those states. In six states, the training was approved for officers´ continuing education credits.

The group also has supporters who sit on three state boards in charge of law enforcement training standards.

Legal experts warn that such training - especially when it's approved for state credit - can undermine the democratic processes enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and is part of what Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor and executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University, called a 'broader insurrectionist ideology' that has gripped the nation since the 2020 presidential election.

'They have no authority, not under their state constitutions or implementing statutes to decide what's constitutional and what's not constitutional. That's what courts have the authority to do, not sheriffs,' McCord said.

'There's another sort of evil lurking there,' McCord added, 'because CSPOA is now essentially part of a broader movement in the United States to think it's OK to use political violence if we disagree with some sort of government policy.'

Mach, who founded was an early board member of the Oath Keepers, the group involved in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, pictured above

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Mach, who founded was an early board member of the Oath Keepers, the group involved in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, pictured above

Mack, seen here, said he split with the Oath Keepers group several years ago when it became a militia, although he still speaks at Oath Keeper-affiliated rallies

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Mack, seen here, said he split with the Oath Keepers group several years ago when it became a militia, although he still speaks at Oath Keeper-affiliated rallies

At least one state, Texas, canceled credit for the sheriffs´ training after determining the course content - which it said included a reference to 'this is a war' - was more political than educational. But other states, such as Tennessee, have approved the training, in part because it was hosted by a local law enforcement agency.

Unlike other law enforcement continuing education, such as firearms training, the sheriffs' curriculum is largely focused on the alleged constitutional underpinnings of sheriffs' absolute authority to both interpret and refuse to enforce certain laws.

One brochure advertising the group's seminars states: 'The County Sheriff is the one who can say to the feds, `Beyond these bounds you shall not pass.´'

Nationwide, there are some 3,000 sheriffs, whose salaries are funded by taxpayers. Mack has claimed about 10 per cent of those are members of CSPOA together with a further 10,000 regular citizens. About 100 people attended the Vegas conference.

They sheriffs serve as the chief law enforcement officers in their counties and are the only elected peace officers in the country.

They appoint deputy sheriffs and jailers and service the courts in their jurisdictions.

Especially in rural areas, sheriffs hold immense sway over what happens in their county.

Amy Cooter, research director at the Middlebury Institute Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism, said many sheriffs join the group from 'a misinformed but well-meaning perspective.' But, she added, it also allows some sheriffs to 'potentially engage in extremism by not enforcing legal, lawful, legitimate orders.'

Some states have pushed back against the group's training efforts, and not all sheriffs subscribe to the group´s ideology.

Many at the National Sheriffs' Association conference distanced themselves from the constitutional sheriffs or claimed not to know what they were about.

'When I took an oath 17 years ago as sheriff, I took the oath to uphold the Constitution, not overstep it,' said Troy Wellman, sheriff of Moody County, South Dakota, and a vice president of the National Sheriffs' Association.

And there has been public pushback in some counties led by 'constitutional sheriffs.' In Klickitat County, Washington, residents alleged Sheriff Bob Songer, a board member of the sheriffs group, engaged in fearmongering and intimidation.

He was the target of a formal complaint in 2022 that the state's law enforcement standards agency ultimately dismissed for lack of jurisdiction.

Michael Peroutka, another sheriffs group board member and former candidate for Maryland's attorney general, was once affiliated with the League of the South, which supports 'a free and independent Southern republic.'

At a 2019 sheriffs´ training event, he said, 'There is a creator God. Our rights come from him. The purpose of civil government is to secure and defend God-given rights.'

Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University's Program on Extremism, described the sheriffs group as 'insidious' and said it had become 'mainstream standard-bearers for entrance into more violent forms of extremism.'

'Just because it's not as overt in their subversion of the democratic system, just because it's quieter about how it does it and what it's calling for, doesn't make the ideas any less dangerous,' said Lewis.

===

June 20, 2023 

• Frederick Clarkson @ Salon: “Unfriending” America: The Christian right is coming for the enemies of God — like you and me.
• Adam Gabbat @ The Guardian: Well-funded Christian group behind US effort to roll back LGBTQ+ rights.
• John E. Finn @ Talking Points Memo: Conservatives Are Now Trying To Create ‘Constitutional Counties,’ Which Happen To Be Unconstitutional.
• Beth Reinhard and Josh Dawsey @ The Washington Post: Gov. Ron DeSantis used secretive panel to flip state Supreme Court.
• Stephanie McCrummen @:(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}::{The Atlantic: The Woman Who Bought A Mountain For God.
• Justin Baragona @ The Daily Beast: MAGA Melts Down Over Hunter’s Plea Deal: We’re ‘Controlled by COMMUNISTS!’
• David Gilbert @ Vice News: Inside Moms for Liberty’s Close Relationship With the Proud Boys.

Tags: Leonard Leo Ron DeSantis Round-Up Seven Mountains Alliance Defending Freedom Moms for Liberty Proud Boys

===

year in hate

https://www.splcenter.org/year-hate-extremism-2022/trends-and-threats#sheriffs

the no lnx nice grsf

Sheriffs Working to Subvert Democracy

By Rachel Goldwasser

A smattering of county sheriffs across the U.S. tested the limits of democracy in 2022, with an assist from extremist law enforcement groups.

These constitutional sheriffs are devoted members of an antigovernment extremist movement that believes sheriffs are the highest authority in the country, above even the president. They usurp the duties of the Supreme Court by personally deciding which U.S. laws are legitimate and whether to enforce them.

These sheriffs are actively damaging the nation’s rule of law and attempting to shape the U.S. into a country where fringe law enforcement officers determine what human, civil and property rights they will enforce.

In the U.S., where the justice system already perpetuates great inequities that disproportionately effect people of color, these members of law enforcement further undermine equal justice under the law.

In 2022, constitutional sheriffs’ ideology intruded into another facet of democracy: elections. Members melded their extremist positions with their law enforcement authority to investigate rogue, conspiratorial allegations of fraud in the 2020 presidential election and brought doubt into the legitimacy of the 2022 midterm elections.

Two extremist law enforcement groups, Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) and Protect America Now (PAN), led these efforts.

CSPOA radicalizes sheriffs and the public through law enforcement training, presentations to lawmakers and civilians, online media and books written by the group’s founder Richard Mack. The organization is linked to extremists, including Oath Keepers, sovereign citizens, neo-confederates and white nationalists.

PAN was founded by political operatives and is less outspoken about their constitutional sheriff beliefs, but most of their advisory board and members are constitutional sheriffs whose ideology has shaped the organization at large. PAN has focused its attention on immigration issues, supporting the anti-immigrant hate group Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR) in its efforts to demonize migrants and lobby for policies that reflect this.

Beginning in the summer of 2022, both organizations worked with election conspiracy group True the Vote, whose founders participated in the film 2000 Mules, which promotes the “Big Lie,” the conspiracy theory parroted by former President Trump that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.

The Sheriffs Alliance Interfering with U.S. Elections

Graphic connecting individuals and groups with efforts to interfere in U.S. elections

Photos credits: Donald Trump: James Devaney/GC Images; Michael Flynn: Chris Kleponis/AFP via Getty Images; Sidney Powell: Drew Angerer/Getty Images; Catherine Engelbrecht: Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images; Lin Wood, Mark Lamb, Richard Mack: Gage Skidmore; Gregg Phillips: CNN Screen Shot via Texas Tribune

CSPOA posted a press release to its website on May 24, 2022, calling on local law enforcement agencies to investigate the 2020 election. The organization’s leaders and member sheriffs repeated the claim on July 12 at a CSPOA press conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Sheriffs that were investigating and those considering it spoke publicly about their efforts and repeated themselves a day later at the Libertarian Freedom Fest in Las Vegas.

True the Vote announced its partnership with PAN on June 22, calling it ProtectAmerica.Vote. The group advertised that the effort was intended to teach sheriffs about their state election laws and provide them with grants to investigate alleged voting violations. The partnership included a plan to build a “National Election Integrity Voter Hotline” that would be linked to sheriffs’ offices and promote their cause in an informational campaign starting Aug. 1.

Multiple sheriffs affiliated with CSPOA and PAN spent the year attempting to investigate the 2020 election or interfering in the 2022 midterm elections. A group of devout constitutional sheriffs from Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin were the most egregious.

ARIZONA’S CONSTITUTIONAL SHERIFF PROBLEM

Mark Lamb, sheriff of Pinal County, Arizona, and PAN leader acted as the face of the PAN True the Vote partnership. In an interview published in the right-wing media source American Greatness on July 20, Lamb claimed that he was “disturbed” by talk of a law enforcement focus on domestic violence threats, that the feds had no jurisdiction over his county and that if they tried to push what he called unconstitutional mandates, “We would stop them,” Lamb said.

David Rhodes, Sheriff of Yavapai County, Arizona, has been linked to CSPOA and the Oath Keepers, and most recently an Oath Keepers offshoot organization, the Yavapai County Preparedness Team (YCPT). YCPT and the group Lions of Liberty formulated a plan to stake out and film Arizona ballot drop boxes for cases of fraud. At a July 23 YCPT meeting, group leader Jim Arroyo told members, “We have already coordinated with Sheriff Rhodes, and he told us if we see somebody stuffing a ballot box, and we get a license plate, they will make an arrest, and there will be a prosecution. Bottom line.” YCPT and Lions of Liberty eventually halted monitoring after a lawsuit was filed against them by Protect Democracy on behalf of the League of Women Voters asserting the group was engaging in voter intimidation.

MILITIAS, ELECTIONS AND PLOTS IN MIDWEST

Dar Leaf,Sheriff of Barry County, Michigan, is a lifetime member of CSPOA. He received the group’s Sheriff of the Year award in 2017. On May 18, 2020, Leaf appeared at a protest alongside members of the Michigan Liberty Militia (MLM), whose members were found guilty in 2022 of a 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Leaf was asked if he regretted having shared a stage with MLM members, and he replied, “It’s just a charge, and they say a ‘plot to kidnap,’ and you got to remember that. 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 kidnap attempt? Because you can still in Michigan if it is a felony, make a felony arrest.”

In December 2020, Leaf began his investigation into the presidential election. Leaf’s attorney Carson Tucker reached out to Trump allies, including conspiracy theorist and former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn, attorney Sidney Powell and Lin Wood’s Fight Back Foundation asking for information regarding "counties that have been potentially compromised.” Leaf tried to seize the voting machines from those counties to run his own investigation. In 2021 Leaf also worked with a private investigator who partnered with a sheriff’s deputy to question county clerks in six Michigan townships. After learning that the state was investigating his own investigation, on June 3, 2022, Leaf sued the Michigan attorney general, secretary of state and members of the state troopers for illegal interference. His claims in his lawsuit were dismissed by a Michigan judge on Aug. 29, 2022.

Leaf’s extremist election denial continued through 2022 as he made claims of voter fraud at the July CSPOA True the Vote press conference, FreedomFest in Las Vegas and to CSPOA members after the midterms. Leaf has gone so far as to call for sheriffs to host common law grand juries on the 2018 “stolen election” conspiracy. This type of grand jury is promoted by the National Liberty Alliance, a sovereign citizen group Leaf has worked with.

Christopher Schmaling, Sheriff of Racine County, Wisconsin, has also closely affiliated with CSPOA. He has appeared on Sheriff Mack’s online show and presented with CSPOA at 2022 FreedomFest. Schmaling, who was once the keynote speaker at a Trump rally, launched his own investigation into alleged 2020 voter fraud.

In 2021, Sheriff Schmaling tried to have nursing home staff and the majority of the Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) arrested. He claimed they committed voter fraud after the WEC changed a policy during the pandemic that allowed nursing home staff to assist residents with their ballots in 2020. The Racine County District Attorney’s office declined to prosecute.

Ironically, in 2022, Schmaling refused to charge Harry Wait, leader of the group H.O.T. Government, who requested multiple absentee ballots using false information. When asked about it, Wait said, “Basically, I committed a crime when I ordered them. I emailed Sheriff Schmaling, asked if he was going to arrest me, and he said, ‘hell no.’ ” The Wisconsin attorney general’s office began an investigation July 29, 2022.

Schmaling also presented at 2022 FreedomFest, alongside other election denying sheriffs.

Unfortunately, these men have made a significant impact, using their power as law enforcement officials to make and investigate spurious allegations and gotten their ideas in front of a wide audience. Fortunately, these men represent a fringe movement, one many law enforcement officers still refuse to participate in.

While multiple Arizona sheriffs including Sheriffs Lamb and Rhodes joined the constitutional sheriff’s movement and meddled in U.S. elections, making the process more fraught for voters, another Arizona sheriff, Paul Penzone of Maricopa County, Arizona, exemplified the legitimate role of sheriffs: He chose to denounce the same extremist ideology and support democracy rather than participate in actions or groups working to damage it.

In in the run-up to the 2020 election, Penzone said in a press release, “With the same conviction we display when taking the oath of office, we must commit to practice impartial and nonpolitical actions during the course of our duties.” He continued, “Denying, ignoring or refusing to recognize and apply the laws as they are written is not within the authority of law enforcement professionals. Terms such as ‘Sanctuary’ county become an excuse to circumvent the law and defy due process and democracy.”

Then again on Nov 12, 2022, when speaking to the groups and politicians targeting elections and voting facilities, Penzone told the press he would not stand for any threat to voting, voting facilities or election workers.

“We are seeing a radical movement, including some local law enforcement, of people who are committed to destroying trust in our system for their own selfish gain,” Penzone told the press in August as the 2022 midterm elections heated up. “We must fight against it, or our nation will no longer be the democratic standard.”

REJECTING CONSTITUTIONAL SHERIFFS IN POLICY

All law enforcement can play a role in minimizing the harm from the constitutional sheriff movement. They can resist disinformation and conspiracy theories. They can resist recruitment into extremist groups like CSPOA, PAN and the Oath Keepers that actively prey on them. County sheriffs and police chiefs can push back on the notion that their function is to interpret the law rather than enforce it. The National Sheriffs Association can finally decide that there is no place for extremism among their ranks and refuse membership to sheriffs who actively promote antigovernment ideologies, including constitutional sheriffs.

State leaders can ensure that board members of their state police officer trainings and certification programs (POST) are not constitutional sheriffs or affiliated with extremists. These same boards can also create rules that prevent extremists from conducting official law enforcement training in their state.

States should limit the role of sheriffs’ posse members or deputized private citizens to core law enforcement functions – not election administration. And federal and state authorities should ensure that constitutional sheriffs do not engage in voter intimidation or intervene or interfere in election administration in any way.

Congress can ensure no federal funds are used for training that promotes CSPOA propaganda. Congress should investigate all law enforcement departments’ links to extremism. Law enforcement officials who self-identify as constitutional sheriffs, engage in election interference or otherwise violate the Department of Justice’s new Title VI protocols prohibiting discriminatory conduct, should be ineligible to receive federal funds.

Every level of government from national, state, and local law enforcement organizations should publicly reject the views and practices of constitutional sheriffs – and should not permit these individuals to serve in leadership positions.

===

rww 5 23 -->

https://religionnews.com/2023/05/24/fighting-what-it-views-tyranny-**michigan-board-declares-itself-constitutional-county/**

...>The resolution, which is largely symbolic, is influenced by the writings of a Wisconsin pastor who promotes the idea of resistance to civil authority. The commissioners who voted for the resolution,all Christian, are committed to the idea that God has blessed America.

We wish to highlight freedoms and constitutional rights which have been violated over the past few years as well as those currently at risk due to societal and political pressures,” said Ottawa County vice chair Sylvia Rhodea in a prepared statement prior to the vote Wednesday (May 24).

Among those violations she mentioned was a “requiredaffirmation of a Marxist DEI value systemfor some county positions,” which she said conflicts with her religious beliefs. (DEI is an acronym for “diversity, equity and inclusion,” an organizational framework that promotes full participation of people or groups that have historically been underrepresented.) She also noted individual freedoms that were “repeatedly violated” during the coronavirus pandemic.

The 9-1 vote, with the lone Democrat on the Board of Commissioners opposing the measure, came after midnight, following six hours of public comment. It was the latest foray for the newly elected board, which swept into office in January on a platform of restoring the county’s Judeo-Christian heritage and thwartingtyranny, government overreach and injustice.</p>

Hundreds of residents of Ottawa County crammed into the commissioners’ meeting room and an overflow room on Tuesday. By a 3-2 ratio, they begged the commissioners not to adopt the resolution.

;If every local governmental unit saw its role as interpreting and following the Constitution as they see fit, our democracy would collapse and our country would fall into chaos,” said Milton Nieuwsma of Holland, Michigan, who spoke up at the meeting.

The>resolution adopted ;not to authorize or appropriate funds, resources, employees, agencies, contractors, buildings, or offices for the purpose of enforcing any statute, law, rule, order or regulation that restricts the rights of any law-abiding citizen affirmed by the United States Constitution.”

It was not clear if the county intended, for example, to resist a red flag law that aims to keep firearms away from those at risk of harming themselves or others. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed the red flag law on Monday

.

Ottawa County, which voted for Donald Trump by **>nearly 60%** in 2020, is a deeply red county in a blue state that went for President Joe Biden.

Last year, a newly formed organization called **Ottawa Impact** unseated eight incumbent Republican county commissioners to win a controlling majority of the 11-member board. (Two of those commissioners have since publicly distanced themselves from the group but nonetheless voted to approve the “constitutional county” resolution.)

"Vice-Chairperson Sylvia Rhodea, second from right, speaks during an Ottawa County Board of Commissioners meeting, Tuesday, May 23, 2023, in Grand Haven, Michigan. Vice Chairperson Sylvia Rhodea, second from right, speaks during an Ottawa County Board of Commissioners meeting, May 23, 2023, in Grand Haven, Michigan.

The new commissioners became politically active after the county and state health departments shut down a Hudsonville Christian school for not complying with a 2020 coronavirus mask mandate that resulted in an outbreak.

While Ottawa County has long been the province of Dutch settlers with a distinct Calvinist brand of Christianity, it has recently been consumed by a more muscular form of evangelical Christianity common in other parts of the country. That Christianity, sometimes calledChristian nationalism, maintains that preserving a Christian America may require overturning laws.

RELATEhttps://religionnews.com/2023/05/17/what-is-christian-nationalism-anyway/">What is Christian nationalism, anyway?

In their first meeting on Jan. 3, the new commissioners fired the county administrator and legal counsel, closed the county’s office for diversity, equity and inclusion and attempted to demote the health officer. They also changed the county motto from “Ottawa County: Where You Belong” to “Ottawa County: Where Freedom Rings.”

“They are about this far-right agenda of ‘We’re going to do things their way,’ and by the way, ‘we’re going to use Scripture to get there,’” said Roger Bergman, the sole incumbent Republican commissioner who was not defeated in 2020. He was not present at Tuesday’s meeting.

In drafting the resolution to become a “constitutional county,” the commissioners were relying on the writings of Matt Trewhella, a Brookfield, Wisconsin, pastor who in the 1990s created an anti-abortion militia and more recently has been active in promoting the idea of resistance to civil authorities based on the ideas of John Calvin and the Magdeburg Confession of 1550, which called on Protestant pastors to resist political tyranny.<

Pastor Matthew Trewhella gives an online sermon in an Oct. 2022 video>Pastor Matt Trewhella gives an online sermon in an October 2022 video. Video screen grab

Trewhella gave a talk at an Ottawa County GOP fundraiser on May 10, where his self-published 2013 book, “The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates,” was available. His newest venture is a website called County Before Country: Expanding God’s Kingdom through Christian Localism.

Both Joe Moss, the new chairman of the county commission, as well as Rhodea, his vice chair, endorsed Trewhella’s book and made a YouTube to promote his ideas.

“Understand, the wicked tyrants always count on the blithe compliance of the lesser authorities in order to get their evil down in the fabric of society,” Trewhella said at the May 10 GOP fundraiser, according to an audio recording of his talk. “The interposition of the lesser authorities is massively important to stop evil in a nation.”

County commissioners are generally tasked with overseeing the health and safety of residents. They supervise those who plow the roads, maintain the parks and issue licenses and certificates.

Resolutions like this, say law experts, have no teeth.<;re assertions of ideological spleen,” said Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan. “It’s a way for the counties to signal that they are unhappy with the direction the state is going. But legally the declarations are meaningless.”

Still, many residents expressed shock and dismay at their county commissioners’ actions Tuesday. They included a Michigan State University student who was barricaded in a gym on campus during the Feb. 13 mass shooting that resulted in the deaths of three students. She  begged commissioners not to disregard new gun safety laws.

David Barnosky, a retired pipeline surveyor who began a Facebook group called Ottawa Objects, said the new commissioners have abrogated power that is not theirs.

“They think they know everything,” said Barnosky. “They’re not even close.”

RELATED: https://religionnews.com/2023/01/06/a-christian-nationalist-taxonomy/">Who are the Christian nationalists? A taxonomy for the post-Jan. 6 world

This story was reported with support from the Stiefel Freethought Foundation

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// deep state? const sheriff

mma 4 23

mARK LEVIN (GUEST): And let me tell you something. Never before in American history has a president been indicted by a DA or an attorney general. It's never been tested. The truth is that you can't really indict a sitting president at the federal level. It's never been imagined at the state and local level, so why am I imagining it? Thanks to Alvin Bragg, he showed us how to do it against the next president, the leading Republican candidate for president.

By God, it's time for Republicans to fight back, to run on the edge of the Constitution, to see what they can do because we're going to lose the country otherwise. This corrupt president and his family are taking us under. This corrupt attorney general and this whole damn federal Department of Justice and FBI, they're out of control. We need local and state law enforcement to step up.

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mark Lamb, the sheriff of Arizona’s Pinal County and a right-wing activist, has officially launched his campaign for U.S. Senate.

Right Wing Watch reported in February that Lamb told activists at a pro-gun rally that he was seriously considering a run for the Arizona Senate seat that will be on the ballot in 2024. He filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission Monday, the Washington Post reported. Among Lamb’s potential Republican primary opponents for the seat now held by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema are last year’s failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and failed Senate candidate Blake Masters.

“We need leaders in this country that aren’t too politically correct to protect us,” Lamb says in a campaign video released Tuesday in which he vows to “stand up to the woke left.” The video focuses on border security, with Lamb saying, “It’s time to declare the drug cartels terrorist organizations and use military force to wipe them out just like we did to ISIS.”

Lamb built a fan base as a reality TV personality and has taken hard-right positions on immigration, COVID-19 vaccines, and public health measures, while promoting bogus stolen election claims and QAnon conspiracy theories. At a 2021 anti-vaccine rally, 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.”

Lamb has also trafficked in far-right smears against drag performers, saying on a far-right streaming show in January that drag shows are “designed to break the moral compass that exists in each and every one of us” to make it easier “for them to really push that evil and corrupt agenda.” Media Matters noted this week that Lamb appeared on the viciously antisemitic TruNews network in 2021.

A month after supporters of former President Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Lamb started a “law and order” group called Protect America Now, whose website claims, “We support Sheriffs and law enforcement members that believe in God, Family and Freedom.” The group asks for a monthly donation of $17.76 to “help us win this battle for the soul of America.”

That figure, of course, is not random. The date of the American colonists’ Declaration of Independence became a chant and veiled threat of “revolution” used by so-called “Stop the Steal” activists trying to keep Trump in power after his defeat. Lamb had kind words for the angry Trump supporters who descended on Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021. “I don’t know how loud we have to get before they have to listen to us and know we will no longer tolerate them stripping our freedoms away,” Lamb said, calling the insurrectionists “very loving, Christian people” who “just happen to support President Trump a lot.”

In 2022, Lamb and his group entered into a partnership with True the Vote, a so-called “election integrity” group that promotes false claims about election fraud and whose bogus claims provided the fuel for propagandist Dinesh D’Souza’s widely debunked “2000 Mules” film. “We’re gonna make sure that we have election integrity this year,” Lamb said at a Trump rally last July, “We will not let happen what happened in 2020.” Lamb has apparently toned down his stolen election rhetoric this year, telling a local Fox affiliate last month, “I’ve never been provided any evidence of significant material fraud.”

Lamb is also an admirer of so-called “constitutional sheriff” Richard Mack and his Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which teaches sheriffs and other local law enforcement officials a far-right interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

Last year, Lamb appeared in a TV ad for Arizona Senate candidate Jim Lamon in which Lamon was portrayed as a lawman in an “old West”-style shootout with Sen. Mark Kelly, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and President Joe Biden. Lamon was defeated in the Republican primary.

Lamb and his sheriff department were highlighted in a 2021 American Civil Liberties Union report, which called on the U.S. Justice Department to end its 287(g) agreements with a number of sheriff departments, including Pinal County. These agreements allow the departments like Lamb’s to jail noncitizens with pending criminal charges and to serve and execute warrants on noncitizens held in jail. The report cited a history of racial profiling and other civil rights violationsat the department, including some during Lamb’s tenure.

Tags: Mark Lamb Election 2022 Election 2024 Immigration Protect America Now True the Vote

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i'm guesing but precedent?

an me 1 23

A small faction of sheriffs in the state of Illinois is pushing back against the state's ban on assault rifles, an initiative being enforced by Illinois Gov. Jay Pritzker's (D) office.

According to NBC Chicago, a legal battle is brewing in the state as some believe the newly passed piece of legislation —House-Bill 5471, also referred to as the Protect Illinois Communities Act— violates Second Amendment rights.

Per the news outlet, a number of law enforcement officials in the state have weighed in with their assessments of the bill offering relatively critical opinions of it.

READ MORE: 'The heck with that': Dick Durbin says Saudi Arabia 'should be out of business' over oil production cuts

McHenry County, Ill. Sheriff Robb Tadelman took to social media with his concerns following the passing of the bill. “Neither myself nor my office will be checking to ensure that lawful gun owners register their weapons with the state, nor will we be arresting or housing law-abiding individuals that have been charged solely with non-compliance with this act,” he said.

Other Illinois law enforcement officials in various counties also weighed in with similar concerns, namely Kankakee County Sheriff Mike Downey, Sheriff Jack Harlan in Boone County, and Winnebago County Sheriff Gary Caruana, according to NBC Chicago.

In fact, Downey released a statement on the sheriff department's Facebook page addressing the new bill. Some Republican lawmakers have also echoed law enforcement officials' concerns.

“We will not comply with this legislation because we don’t have to,” said former Illinois State Rep and Republican gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey “Our Constitution protects us. The sponsors of this bill may have won a temporary victory today, but they will lose because they cannot get around the rights we have guaranteed in our Constitution.”

READ MORE: Why the power grid is an 'attractive target' for domestic terrorists and white supremacists: report

Despite the critical takes on the new law, Pritzker and his office are standing firm in support of it.

“Anybody who doesn’t comply, there are consequences for that,” Pritzker said. “You don’t get to choose which laws you comply with in the state of Illinois. The State Police is responsible for enforcement, as are all law enforcement all across this state. They will, in fact, do their job or they won’t be in their job.”

Per the news outlet, the governor's office also described the pushback as "'political grandstanding at its worst,' and said that sheriffs and departments that refuse to enforce the ban are 'in violation of their oath of office.'"

“The assault weapons ban is the law of Illinois. The General Assembly passed the bill and the governor signed it into law to protect children in schools, worshippers at church and families at parades from the fear of sudden mass murder,” a spokesperson said. “Sheriffs have a constitutional duty to uphold the laws of the state, not pick and choose which laws they support and when.”

Pritzker’s spokesperson also said, “We’re confident that this law will hold up to any future legal challenges."

READ MORE: Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse's Mom receives standing ovation at GOP event in Wisconsin

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badish code

https://newrepublic.com/article/168567/constitutional-sheriffs-midterms-arizona

the “Constitutional Sheriffs” Movement Is Planning to Disrupt Election Day

:{:{A group of law enforcement officers who think their authority supersedes the federal government’s are running for elections across the country—and monitoring voters at the polls Given the numerous election deniers running right now—for the U.S. House and Senate, for governor and for secretary of state—the 2022 midterm elections’ consequences for the state of democracy are hard to overstate. But beyond the likes of Kari Lake or Doug Mastriano, who are garnering loads of national attention, there are hundreds of local officials whose races will shape the fate of future elections: county sheriffs. Just as a smaller-scale series of local acts of intimidation and violence led us to the violent attempt to overthrow the election on January 6, 2021, there’s a growing nationwide movement of self-proclaimed “constitutional sheriffs” who are preparing for their own slow-motion insurrection.}:

Adherents believe that county sheriffs are empowered to enforce the law in accordance with their personal interpretation of the Constitution, that their law enforcement authority supersedes that of states and the federal government. There is “no valid basis in the text or history of the U.S. Constitution” for this, as Georgetown University Law Center and the States United Democracy Center have outlined in depth. However, fueled by this political ideology, one rooted in white supremacism, these “constitutional sheriffs” and their supporters in far-right and paramilitary groups are gearing up for the first national election after the insurrection. https://revealnews.org/article/big-lie-sheriffs-target-us-elections

investigation by Jessica Pishko, published at Reveal, exposes the alliances and ties between far-right groups such as the Oath Keepers and a national network of sheriffs who have embraced election denial and have “appointed themselves election police.” Election deniers have also encouraged constitutional sheriffs to run in 2022. You can hear constitutional sheriff rhetoric in a number of incumbent candidates in states such as Washington, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts. Though constitutional sheriffs’ groups had been on the wane in recent years, Pishko reports, the pandemic and the “Stop the Steal” movement has given them new life, infusing them with new members and granting them a bigger platform with anti-vaxxers and election deniers.

more than half of Arizona’s current sheriffs, according to the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, “are at least partially aligned” with the constitutional sheriff movement. Some have also joined the election denial effort, such as Yavapai County Sheriff David Rhodes, who spoke to the Yavapai County Preparedness Team in Arizona, an organization that has some association with the Oath Keepers, as it was planning surveillance of ballot drop boxes in Arizona—“Operation Drop Box.” As the head of the Preparedness Team said at its meeting ahead of the midterms, “Everybody is worried about civil war.” Richard Mack, a former board member of the Oath Keepers and founder of the influential Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, has also visited Arizona to speak to the group. Democrats are “getting away with murder,” he told a gathering of the Preparedness Team, and “all we are asking for is that every county sheriff look at what happened in his county and make sure that we don’t fall prey.”

}:

Elsewhere in Arizona, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb is working with True the Vote, who were behind the debunked election-denying 2000 Mules film and who have collaborated with QAnon influencers. Lamb is “promising to act as a liaison between them and law enforcement,” as Media Matters reported. In addition to supporting “Stop the Steal” and blaming the January 6 insurrection on Hillary Clinton, among others, Lamb led a “posse” in response to Black Lives Matter protests, recruiting civilians, though his county saw no protests.

the campaign Lamb has joined, called Protect America Now, encourages sheriffs to “be ready to enforce the law and protect our constituents from any form of illegal activity,” according to documents Pishko obtained. It also offers the sheriffs “much needed grant resources to help you secure the voting procedures in your county with equipment, personnel, and increased citizen communication.” Among its recommendations are increased “patrol” at ballot drop boxes and reporting any suspicious activity to a national hotline run by True the Vote. “When other areas of government breakdown,” their letter to sheriffs says, “our local Sheriffs step in to make sure the law is enforced.”

Through such outreach, invoking election “security,” other sheriffs have enlisted in their efforts, pledging to carry out “investigations” into alleged election fraud across the United States. In Johnson County, Kansas, Sheriff Calvin Hayden failed to identify any election fraud. His investigation, The Kansas City Star reported, “hasn’t led to any charges or arrests but has helped build his profile among election deniers.” As he told supporters at an August meeting, “We’ve got to find somebody” who can say definitively that fraud is happening. At the same meeting, Hayden also told supporters, “I’m so sick and tired of hearing, ‘You’re hurting our democracy. You’re hurting our democracy.’ We don’t have a democracy. It’s a constitutional republic,” a far-right trope.

Those behind “Operation Drop Box,” the ballot box surveillance effort, stood down after they faced legal action for their desire to monitor voting locations while carrying guns. But that was just one part of the larger effort pushed by True the Vote and others, who have been coordinating to monitor ballot boxes on a much larger scale, as Pishko uncovered. As of October 27, Jen Fifield at Votebeat reported, more than 4,500 people signed up with True the Vote to monitor ballot boxes nationwide. “Their list of volunteers is growing by dozens a day,” Fifield noted, “especially since the news of voter intimidation at the sites began to spread.” That is, as the media has tracked these groups, as voters have lodged complaints, their numbers are growing.

Melissa Gira Grant@melissagira

Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at The New Republic and the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work.

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no lnx many

Angry Right-Wing Moms Are Trying to Have Librarians Arrested by “Constitutional Sheriffs”

BY JESSICA PISHKO

NOV 04, 2022

Pippin wearing a "Moms for Liberty" shirt and placing her hands over stacks of books.

Jennifer Pippin, president of the Indian River County chapter of Moms for Liberty, helped launch a criminal investigation of her local school library, seeking to criminalize Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, among other books. Giorgio Viera/Getty Images

In March, special counsel to the sheriff of Hamilton County, Tennessee, Coty Wamp, was campaigning for district attorney when she met with a group of parents calling themselves Moms for Liberty. Wamp said afterwards that she had facilitated a meeting between the “parents’ rights” group and the sheriff’s office because she thought law enforcement could help the group in its goal of banning books. “I think that there’s going to come a time with some of these books where it crosses a criminal line,” Wamp said. “It’s called contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” Wamp won that promotion to district attorney and was one of the earliest law enforcement figures to begin to establish a frightening new alliance between far-right sheriff’s offices and the radical right-wing parent’s group seeking to upend America’s educational system.

After Wamp’s meeting, she did not shy away from the possibility of filing charges for “criminal” books, although she later told Jezebel that she did not intend to suggest she was going to go about arresting librarians. Whatever her actual intentions, the alliance Wamp sought to foster is a dangerous one and one that is spreading.

Across the country, members of Mothers for Liberty, a far-right group focused on banning library books and whitewashing school curricula, have appealed to sheriffs as allies in these goals. Much like the partnerships between sheriffs and militia members, or sheriffs and election deniers, this alliance is another example of how sheriffs have become the arm of the law willing to enforce the radical agenda of the far-right. It also shows how determined groups like M4L are to be seen as having legal legitimacy—and how willing sheriffs are to provide it.

I have spent the past few years reporting on far-right sheriffs and their allies and confidants. One notable change since 2020 has been the increasing number of women who identify with the politics of far-right groups like the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. While most people associate groups like CSPOA with hyper-masculine-fueled violence, women are often key facilitators between these groups and voters.

Much of this alliance emerged during the pandemic, when far-right parent groups opposed masking in schools. On forums like Facebook, these parents, mostly mothers, passed around information about the so-called constitutional sheriff movement, citing its members as potential allies. This blossomed into an anti-public-school movement focused on altering classroom curricula to eliminate material about racism, sex, or LGBTQ people; policing classrooms and libraries; eliminating requirements for all forms of vaccines as well as masking for COVID; and pushing parents to embrace home-schooling as an ideal way to escape federal and state government indoctrination.

While many anti-mask and election conspiracy rallies were filled with men clad in military-style apparel and carrying long guns, women presented a softer side and turned out in equal—if not stronger—numbers, in my observation. During the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association’s “Arise USA Resurrection Tour” last year, the two women founders of Freedom Angels appeared onstage to talk not just about resisting mask and vaccine orders but also about establishing entire communities free from government regulation, like food co-ops and alternative home-schooling. Large public events sponsored by CSPOA drew crowds approaching gender parity.

Moms 4 Liberty—their slogan is “Parents’ Rights”—is just one of these influential women-led groups. It was formed in Florida by Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice after both lost their reelection campaigns for their respective local school boards. Their latest conference theme was “Joyful Warriors,” another example of how far-right women mitigate the toxic masculinity associated with groups like the Oath Keepers, border militias, and the Proud Boys. According to recent reporting by Mother Jones, the group now claims 100,000 members across 38 states.

While M4L has been accused of various direct actions like harassing local school board officials with emails, calls, and threats, it has lately begun to approach county sheriffs as a way to legitimize its grievances and gain actual traction in criminal courts. Granted, it hasn’t been too successful yet. But these alliances suggest that should it not achieve its goals via democratic means, M4L is perfectly willing to find its own firepower.

One strategy has been to bring criminal complaints to sympathetic sheriffs, which become “sex crime” investigations, further spreading the QAnon-influenced anxieties that children are being recruited or brainwashed by sex predators presenting as progressives. In the spring, Jennifer Pippin, who is an M4L chapter chair, filed a criminal complaint against a school library in Indian River County, Florida, for failing to remove dozens of books flagged by the members as inappropriate. The original list of books for examination included more than 150 titles, and while some were removed, not all of them were. In an email, Pippin told a member of the school board that she was focused on “ALL of the books currently in the libraries that have sex, rape, drugs etc etc in them that need to be removed immediately so they don’t get into the hands of anymore students in our district.” She threatened, “I’m holding all of you accountable.”

Indian River County Sheriff Eric Flowers—who last year was aSheriff Fellow at the far-right think tank Claremont Institute—assigned a sergeant to investigate the issue, reviewing emails between an M4L representative and various local officials. There were even annotated pages of the books in question, including sections of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a 2005 novel by Jonathan Safran Foer about a 9-year-old boy whose father is killed in the 9/11 attacks. (The book has been the subject of previous attacks by some parents since it was published.) The pages are annotated with handwritten notes like “sexual encounter” and “masterbation.”

The six-week investigation resulted in a 74-page report, which concluded that “no crime occurred.” Whether patently unconstitutional charges are ultimately filed in cases like these, though, is not the issue. The chilling effect of the threat is.

That threat is real. In a letter to the school superintendent, Flowers wrote that “the totality of the circumstances do not allow us to make an arrest in this case,” but added, “We do not feel that this content is appropriate for young children even though it does not rise to the level of a crime.” Flowers then recommended “stricter oversight” for children’s books.

Other sheriffs—especially those in Florida, where M4L began and has garnered support from Gov. Ron DeSantis—have conducted similar investigations into so-called dirty books, and while no criminal charges have resulted thus far, they indicate that going to the sheriff is an accepted strategy. In Flagler County, Florida, another M4L member filed an almost identical complaint to Pippin’s. And in Polk County, Florida, a dark money group called County Citizens Defending Freedom funded a series of complaints about books (under the guise of citizen complaints) to Sheriff Grady Judd, who deemed the material “vile and nasty and inappropriate” but not pornographic. Judd added that the matter was “under review to determine if there will be a criminal investigation” based on additional complaints, which all appear to have stemmed from the same dark money group that produced the initial complaints.

Sheriff candidates in many counties are also courting M4L members as political allies, appearing alongside them at events, providing legal legitimacy to their fears, and contributing to the spread of misinformation. Sheriff Wayne Ivey of Brevard County, who was recently exposed for potentially trying to bribe political candidates he did not like to exit races and endorse his preferred candidates, has embraced M4L-allied members for school board.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Sheriff Vic Regalado did an April speaking event with an M4L county chair in which he supplied background on “applicable laws,” explaining that many criminal laws do not apply to book banning, even things that would “make a normal person puke.” He noted, however, regarding a book of poetry, “If an individual on the streets of Tulsa, Oklahoma, were showing this to a child, they would be in cuffs like that”—snapping his fingers—“and they would be prosecuted, but I don’t know that they would be convicted in today’s world.”

“This is now accepted,” he continued, waving a page around, arguing that a jury would be unlikely to convict because “a lot of parents are apathetic,” and blaming in particular single mothers. He ended by promising to consult with the district attorney about “how we can insert law enforcement into this thing.”

It might seem unusual to have elected law enforcement—especially in a time of much-hyped fears of violent crime and alleged understaffing—insert themselves into whether a book should be in a school library. Sheriffs, as politicians, need not justify the use of their resources, though, whether they are used to solve murders, investigate non-existent election fraud, or thoroughly report out whether Jonathan Safran Foer’s book about 9/11 is too sexy for the youths.

The alliance between sheriffs and M4L makes further levels of political sense as well. Local police chiefs are unlikely to be allies, as their budgets are scrutinized by city leadership and they tend to be in larger cities. Sheriffs serve longer terms than police chiefs and are politicians at heart, having the ability to deploy time and personnel however they see fit, with little if any oversight. And even if there were oversight, in most states where M4L is active, it has the support of state actors and other powerful politicians. Investigating a school book is both safe, easy, and popular in these jurisdictions, especially compared with solving actual crime.

===

===

ADL mack:

Mack reached out to sheriffs via mailers and surveys, as well as individually.  When Mack held a speaking event, he invited nearby sheriffs to attend.  Mack was also vocal in praising sheriffs who took actions he approved of, calling them “constitutional sheriffs.”  Soon, CSPOA began handing out the “Constitutional Sheriff of the Year” award; winners have included controversial Wisconsin sheriff David Clarke, Jr., who described Black Lives Matter as a hate group and claimed they would join with the terrorist group ISIS to destroy American society, as well as Nick Finch, a Florida sheriff who unlawfully released a man arrested for a firearms felony and was suspended by the governor.  A Washington state sheriff, Bob Songer, received the award for refusing to enforce a state gun control initiative.

===

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_Sheriffs_and_Peace_Officers_Association

8 22

Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) is a political organization of local police officials in the United States who contend that federal and state government authorities are subordinate to the local authority of county sheriffs. Self-described constitutional sheriffs assert that they are the supreme legal authority with the power and duty to defy or disregard laws they regard as unconstitutional.^[2][3] The movement is related to previous nullification and interposition notions,^[1] and promotes such efforts.^[4] It has been described as far-right by the Southern Poverty Law Center.^[5] The CSPOA has claimed a membership of 400.^[3]^

• :{1:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{History}:
• :{2:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Ideology}:
• :{3:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{References}:
• :{4:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{External links}:

History[

The association was founded in 2011 by former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack who was a board member of the Oath Keepers at the time.^[6] In 2017, the association said it had 4,500 dues-paying members, with more than 200 sheriffs among them.^[1] In 2021, Mack said that 300 of the 3,000 sheriffs in the U.S. were members of the association.^[6]^

Ideology[

The movement has some ideological similarities with the self-styled patriot movement and sovereign citizen movement, and some members of those movements also espouse "constitutional sheriff" ideology.^[7][1] The "constitutional sheriff" or "county supremacy" movement itself arose from the far-right Posse Comitatus, a racist and anti-Semitic group of the 1970s and 1980s that also defined the county sheriff as the highest "legitimate" authority in the country,^[1][8] and was characterized by paramilitary figures and the promotion of conspiracy theories.^[1] Sheriffs are not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.^[9] The ideological basis of the sheriffs' movement is instead based on various incorrect historical and legal claims, relying on a pretense that the historic powers of the high sheriff of an English shire apply in the USA regardless of subsequent legal developments.^[1]^

A number of county sheriffs in the United States have expressed sympathy with the movement's goals and have publicly vowed not to enforce laws they deem unconstitutional.^[2] Law professor Robert L. Tsai writes that, "in practice constitutional sheriffs and their followers tend to occupy the edges of anti-government conservatism, organizing themselves to promote gun rights and property rights, to resist tax laws, national healthcare, gay marriage."^[1]^

Members of the movement have vowed not to enforce gun laws,^[10] public health measures adopted to combat the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic,^[2][3][11] and federal land use regulations.^[3] Sheriffs who refuse to enforce land-use laws facilitate the illegal use of public land (for example, for livestock grazing or all-terrain vehicles use) and in some cases have threatened Bureau of Land Management (BLM) employees.^[3] A research study of reports from 1995 to 2015 found that counties with sheriffs who are members of the movement "have higher rates of violence against BLM employees than other Western counties."^[3]^

The movement has attracted support from some landowners, county commissioners, law enforcement figures (in particular Richard Mack and Joe Arpaio), and some politicians who have played on "fears of federal officials intruding on property rights and gun rights."^[1]^

Reference

===

rww 12 21

constitutional Sheriff’ Richard Mack Endorses Mark Finchem, Oath Keeper, QAnon Promoter, and Stop the Steal Activist, for Arizona Secretary of State

arizona secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem announced last week that he has been endorsed by ‘Constitutional sheriff’ Richard Mack. Finchem is a state representative, promoter of QAnon and stolen election conspiracy theories, and a member of the Oath Keepers militia group who was present at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. He was previously endorsed by former President Donald Trump.

Mack, a former Oath Keepers board member and a supporter of the Bundy family’s armed standoff with federal officials, founded the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which teaches law enforcement officials that “the power of the sheriff even supersedes the powers of the president.” He urges county sheriffs to resist “tyranny” from state and federal governments; during the COVID-19 pandemic, he has told sheriffs to refuse to enforce state public health measures like mask requirements. A recent report by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism warned that CSPOA’s trainings spread anti-government extremism among law enforcement officers.

Right Wing Watch reported this year that Mack is expanding the CSPOA by having county governments as well as individual law enforcement officers join the organization.

Finchem’s website includes a link to a recent appearance on the far-right One America News network in which he talked about the bogus “audit” of Maricopa County votes and claimed, “When we keep digging, we keep uncovering things that are these anomalies which—they turn into evidence, which become proof, which we refer to the attorney general’s office.”

In January, Finchem described the violence at the Capitol as “What happens when the People feel they have been ignored, and Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud.” A week after the Capitol insurrection, Finchem claimed that social media deplatforming is “something very similar” to what German Nazis, Pol Pot, and Mao did, warning, “When you silence speech, and you silence thought, the next step is eliminating people.”

Shortly before this year’s elections in Virginia, Finchem spoke ata campaign rally for Virginia Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin.

In 2019, the Phoenix New Times described Finchem as a “fringe lawmaker” who described the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville as “a PSYOP to impugn those of us who stand for the rule of law and civil rights.” During the Obama administration, Finchem claimed that the president was “taking every opportunity to install his ideological, totalitarian dictatorship.”

Arizona’s current secretary of state, Democrat Katie Hobbs, has received death threats and harassment from Trump supporters. She and other election officials targeted by Trump and his allies have told CNN they live in fear of retaliation for not backing Trump’s stolen-election claims. Hobbs is running for governor.

The Associated Press has reported that two other Arizona state legislators running to be the GOP nominee for secretary of state have proposed new restrictions on voting and a bill allowing state legislators to disregard voters and choose their own Electoral College electors.

Some right-wing donors aligned with Trump are focusing on electing Trump allies to oversee future elections. Trump has also endorsed secretary of state candidates in Michigan and Georgia and a proponent of debunked stolen election claims for Michigan attorney general.

Tags: Donald Trump Mark Finchem Richard Mack Arizona audit Election 2020 Election 2022 Election 2024 Misinformation Stop the Steal Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association CSPOA Republican Party

==

==

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/sheriff-s-fellowship/

no lnx

One far-right, Trump-inspired think tank is adding more fuel to the extremism fire.

According to The Bulwark,The Claremont Institute is at the center of a new initiative called the "Sheriff's Fellowship." The disturbing new movement is described as an incentive to "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 short, these types of sheriff groups classify more as "militias with badges, guns, and formal law enforcement powers. Or, if you like, secession-by-sheriff."

While the Sheriff's Fellowship is a new initiative for Claremont, the publication notes that other similar organizations like the Constitutional Sheriffs have existed for quite some time.

"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 thecounty sheriff is the ultimate authority in the county, able to halt enforcement of any federal or state law or measure they deem unconstitutional.

Trump, members of his administration, and well-known law enforcement officials have echoed the values and beliefs highlighted by the Claremont Institute. In fact, during a previous interview, Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions (R) lauded the practices of "Anglo-American" law enforcement.

"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," said Sessions. "The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement. We must never erode this historic office."

Sheriff Mark Lamb, the sheriff of Pinal County, Ariz., is also seen as an upcoming member of the Republican Party. The law enforcement officer, who describes himself as "America's Sheriff," who "fashions himself as more of a vigilante resister, with a heavy dose of anti-government, sometimes militant rhetoric."

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.

Milwaukee's Sheriff David Clarke, a known vocal supporter of Trump, has also expressed extremist views. In the days leading up to the January 6 insurrection, Clarke even urged Capitol rioters not to comply with law enforcement.

"ALERT!!!," Clarke wrote on Facebook at the time. "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."

===

ref

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

chls sykes

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.

===

ref 2

https://www.adl.org/resources/reports/the-constitutional-sheriffs-and-peace-officers-association-cspoa-and-richard-mack

no lnx

report

Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) and Richard Mack: How Extremists Are Successfully Infiltrating Law Enforcement

Constitutional Sheriffs

Sections

Key PointsIntroductionThe Emergence of Richard MackMack’s Public Speaking Crusade - Including White Supremacist VenuesRichard Mack and Indoctrinating Law EnforcementMack and CSPOACounty Membership'Training' Law EnforcementPolicy Recommendations

FULL REPORT

KEY POINTS

The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) is an anti-government extremist group whose primary purpose is to recruit sheriffs into the anti-government “patriot” movement.

CSPOA is led by Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff who gained celebrity on the right in the 1990s after suing to overturn a prominent gun control measure, the Brady Law, especially after the Supreme Court ruled largely in his favor.

The central tenet of CSPOA, 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.

Mack primarily marketed this (false) claim as a way to oppose gun control measures, but in 2020-21, he has also used it to exploit anger and frustration over federal and state measures to combat Covid-19.

Mack crisscrosses the country for speaking engagements where he promotes himself, CSPOA and his county sheriff thesis.

Increasingly, he seeks out law enforcement audiences, billing his extremist events as “trainings.”

In a disturbing development, in 2021, Mack was able to win official state approval for his “trainings” in Montana and Texas, which allows attendees to receive continuing education credit for attending Mack’s events.

===

NY sgt union racists FBI rAID 10/21

===

1021 an

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/supreme-court-2655250387/

Yesterday, I described a situation in which local boards of education are being squeezed between two separate but related forces. On the one hand are shadowy nonprofit organizations funded by the very obscenely rich that are staging "protests" against masks, vaccines, the teaching of anti-racism and other things they don't. I call them the death-threat squads. They harass, intimidate and threaten board members in such numbers as totrigger waves of resignations. Their goal isn't changing minds. It's silencing enemies. The tactic works.

But it only works due to the help of a tandem force in question. On the other hand are local law enforcement officers, even whole police and sheriffs' departments, who do not or will not enforce the law in order prevent such crimes from being committed. Why? Because they are sympathetic to the interests of those who are committing the crimes. For this reason, a national school board group called on the president to help. The US attorney general is now taking steps to investigate.

I'm summarizing yesterday's column, because I want to stress this pattern — the squeeze play — that's between active agents of the very obscenely rich and passive agents of the state. I want you to be aware of how these lawless forces work in tandem, though not necessarily in explicit coordination, to shape not only our views of politics but our understanding of freedom, too. I want you to see more fully that what they are doing now is how they want America to be, a nation in which the in-group can harass, intimidate and threaten the out-group, and the out-group is legally and constitutionally bound to put up with it.

Consider an upcoming case to be heard before the United States Supreme Court. It's the biggest case on Second Amendment rights since Heller in 2008. Heller established the right to self-defense. The state is forbidden to outlaw guns for personal use and safety. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, plaintiffs hope to take Heller a step further to establish the right to conceal one's weapon.

It's important to understand the context of Bruen. Heller was decided before America elected its first Black president. After the election, the"gun-rights" movementsprang into action. I said this yesterday, but didn't say why. It's because democracy "unexpectedly" empowered non-white people. For many white people, empowered non-white people, especially Black people, means disempowered white people.

Something had to be done. Since American democracy could no longer be trusted, they turned to their guns. They turned to tactics to fight the feeling of being "enslaved." Thanks to Heller, they could legally carry their guns in public, in places where they'd never need a gun, like the library. They said they were exercising their rights. They were lying. They were doing exactly what the school board death-threat squads are doing now. (Local law enforcement officers said then as now that nothing can be done.) They were harassing, intimidating and threatening people they don't like. They were doing that because harassing, intimidating and threatening people makes them feel free.

The need among some white people to feel "free" in the face of a treacherous democracy that empowered non-white people — thus robbing white people of their freedoms — was so fierce that a day that might otherwise have triggered a national reckoning on gun violence was barely noticed. While most Americans saw the slaughter of 20 innocents at Sandy Hook as an overwhelming reason to increase gun regulation, the "gun-rights" movement was focused on something else: the 2012 reelection of Black president and chief avatar of tyranny.

I used to say the Republican reaction to the Sandy Hook massacre was the rapid expansion of laws deregulating access to firearms and their use. I was wrong. Those laws, including concealed carry laws, were a reaction to Barack Obama's reelection. They were a reaction to American democracy betraying white people for a second time. (The good guy with a gun is not just a good guy who shoots back. He's a white guy who's "free" to shoot whomever he pleases. That's what makes him good.) It is the expansion of these laws, and all they symbolize, that's set to be heard by the Supreme Court. I don't have reason to doubt this court will establish a concealed carry right. Once that happens, the right to military weapons might not be far behind.

Thus the high court will do its part in squeezing freedom out of Americans. On the one hand, the in-group gets to harass, intimidate and threaten the out-group with guns, concealed and/or open. One the other, local law enforcement gets to shrug, pointing helplessly to the Supreme Court and its interpretation of the Constitution. The out-group does indeed have the right to equal protection. What we're seeing, in stages, is a slow-motion conspiracy to pretend otherwise.

Which is the point. Freedom for the out-group is equal to tyranny for the in-group. More accurately, freedom for the in-group is dependent on the out-group living in fear of the in-group. Without that fear, the in-group just doesn't feel free enough. That's why freedom isn't and can't only be doing whatever you want. Freedom must mean harassing, intimidating and threatening the out-group while enacting laws and interpreting the Constitution so the out-group can't fight back.

===

===

omg

The 2021 Sheriffs Fellowship: Saturday, November 13th - Friday, November 19th.

We're pleased to announce that the 2021 Sheriffs Fellowship will take place over a week (November 13-19, 2021) in Orange County, CA. 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 also be provided.

About The Fellowship

Founded in 2021, the Claremont Institute Sheriffs Fellowship offers training of unparalleled depth and excellence in American political thought and institutions, from the country’s top constitutional experts and political theorists. Fourteen sheriff applicants will be selected for their character, aptitude, accomplishments, zeal, and community reputation to gather for five days to study and discuss the political-philosophical, institutional, and historical arc leading from the American Founding to today’s militant progressivism and multiculturalism, with particular emphasis on the role of law enforcement in maintaining liberty. Discussions will be based on readings from primary sources including John Locke, the Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, key court decisions, and the writings and speeches of great statesmen.

The Curriculum

Upon acceptance into the program, fellows will receive a reading packet with designated primary texts and assignments, when applicable, for each course. This year’s curriculum will pay special attention to the dominant political themes animating the American political debate today in our education, media, and national political rhetoric. Fellows will engage in a theoretical and practical study of these themes under the direction of Claremont scholars and summer faculty. In over twenty intensive daily seminars and relaxed evening symposia, Sheriffs Fellows discuss political philosophy and American government with Claremont’s distinguished scholars and senior fellows.

Topics include:

• The Declaration of Independence & the Constitution
• The Statesmanship of George Washington
• The Political Science of The Federalist Papers
• The Abolition of Slavery and Equal Rights Under the Constitution
• The Statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln
• Natural Rights & Natural Law
• Progressivism, the New Deal, and the Great Society
• Conservatism & Modern Liberalism
• The Living Constitution
• The New Left & the Roots of Radical Leftist Ideology

Who Should Apply?

Sheriffs currently serving to protect the United States of America.

Required Information:

• Personal Information
• Resume
• Personal Statement
• Short Answer Questionnaire
• 1 Essay Question
• 4-5 Recommendations (may be mailed separately)

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/la-county-sheriff/

not enforce mask

me

Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva is refusing to enforce a mask mandate because he claims it is "not backed by science." On Friday, July 16, Villanueva released a statement pushing back against the proposed mandate as he offered specifics about why he opposes masks for certain people, according to Axios.

"Forcing the vaccinated and those who already contracted COVID-19 to wear masks indoors is not backed by science and contradicts the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines," Villanueva**said in the stateme**nt.

While he did admit that the L.A. County Public Health Department does have the authority to enforce the measure, he made it clear his "underfunded/defunded" law enforcement agency will not be following suit.

"The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health (DPH) has authority to enforce the order, but the underfunded/defunded Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department will not expend our limited resourcesand instead ask for voluntary compliance,"the statement continued. "We encourage the DPH to work collaboratively with the Board of Supervisors and law enforcement to establish mandates that are both achievable and supported by science."

The county mask mandate comes as COVID-19 cases continue to rise in the area. As of Thursday, July 15, the county's seven-day COVID case average jumped to 1,077. The New York Times also reported that "between Dec. 7 and June 7, the unvaccinated accounted for 99.6% of the county's coronavirus cases, 98.7% of COVID-19 hospitalizations and 99.8% of deaths."

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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 the right wing hate groupPosse Comitatus."

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so which side do const sheriff and anti-gubmint soverignty wacko militia types break?  in disputed election? boogaloo?

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177013

Trump’s Claim He’ll Send Sheriffs to Polling Places is Revealing in a Lot of Unintended Ways

Breaking News

tags: Republican Party, voting rights, Donald Trump, Vote Suppression, voter intimidation

“Are you going to have poll watchers?” Hannity asked his friend during an interview clearly aimed at pulling viewers away from simultaneous coverage of the Democratic convention. “Are you going to have an ability to monitor, to avoid fraud and cross check whether or not these are registered voters? Whether or not there’s been identification to know that it’s a real vote from a real American?”

“We’re going to have everything,” Trump replied. “We’re going to have sheriffs,and we’re going to have law enforcement, and we’re going to have hopefully, U.S. attorneys, and we’re going to have everybody, and attorney generals. But it’s very hard.”

This, understandably, raised eyebrows. The president would send law enforcement to police polling stations? It’s a scenario that seems analogous to elections conducted by Eastern European strongmen, not by an elected official in the United States.

There are a few things to keep in mind about this claim, though.

The first is that, like so many of Trump’s wild assertions, he has made it before. In August 2016, he gave a speech in Altoona, Pa., in which he pledged to combat what he presented as endemic fraud in the state.

“We have to call up law enforcement. And we have to have the sheriffs and the police chiefs and everybody watching,” he said then, later adding another familiar refrain, that “the only way they can beat [me] in my opinion — and I mean this 100 percent — is if in certain sections of the state they cheat, okay?”

When he made the claim at the time, though, there was a significant roadblock to the plan. The Republican Party had been restricted from dispatching poll watchers to precincts for more than 30 years, the result of a lawsuit filed by the Democrats in 1981. Why? Because the Republican National Committee was using “poll watchers” in an effort to intimidate non-White voters....

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https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/sheriffs-salon-owners-and-fox-news-desperate-attempt-turn-pandemic-latest

Right-wing media personalities have long struggled to find a conservative hero in their culture war, someone to serve as an ideological martyr for their cause -- and they’ve made some pretty ridiculous attempts to force it along the way.

Gun owners? Rosa Parks. A police officer who arrested a Black man for breaking into his own home? Rosa Parks with a badge. Rogue rancher Cliven Bundy? Rosa Parks on the open range. If only conservative media were more interested in Rosa Parks herself, maybe they’d understand why those comparisons are ludicrous. But that hasn’t stopped conservative media figures from continuing to draw parallels between civil rights activism and a new front in the right-wing culture war: opposition to stay-at-home orders during the coronavirus pandemic.

Weeks after the network began hyping protests against the coronavirus safety measures, Fox News has found a folk hero in Texas salon owner Shelley Luther, who defied the state’s stay-at-home order to reopen her salon and refused to comply in a court appearance. The network — unlike conservative commentator and former Rep. Allen West — hasn’t made explicit comparisons between Luther and Parks just yet. But Fox has used its platform to promote local sheriffs and business owners who are defying lockdown orders. And it's made Luther into the de facto face of the anti-lockdown movement against big, overreaching government, utilizing an old playbook to turn a public health emergency into a battle in the culture war.

Fox News worked to portray Luther as a martyr to stay-at-home orders.

Luther reopened her salon on April 24 in defiance of the state’s stay-at-home order. On April 28, District Judge Eric Moyé issued a temporary restraining order against Luther. On May 5, after she refused to follow that order, Moyé found Luther in contempt of court and sentenced her to seven days in jail, though she would be released less than 48 hours later.

The order Luther violated was issued by Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and came with a maximum penalty of $1,000 in fines and 180 days in jail. Moyé offered Luther the opportunity to avoid jail time if she would acknowledge that she had broken the order and agree to shut down her salon until the stay-at-home order was lifted, but she refused. Luther claimed that she needed to keep her salon open to feed her kids, even though she had applied for and received $18,000 in financial aid through the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program. And given that a GoFundMe page had been set up for her a day before she first reopened, it’s hard to see this as anything other than a public relations stunt; thanks to Fox News, it would be a very successful one.

Abbott, along with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, criticized the judge for enforcing Abbott’s own executive order. Fox News quickly hosted Patrick multiple times on the network, where he advocated for Luther and accused Moyé of making “a giant overreach.” (Luther, for her part, has advocated for who is up for reelection this year.)

On May 6, Fox prime-time host Sean Hannity interviewed Luther’s boyfriend, Tim Georgeff, and compared Luther’s punishment to the Mel Gibson character's execution for treason in the movie Braveheart. Prime-time host Tucker Carlson invited Luther’s attorney Warren Norred to appear on Tucker Carlson Tonight the same day and said that he hopes Luther’s story “awakens people.” In the interview, Norred criticized “tiny tyrants” in government and complained that the judge treated Luther as a “heretic” and demanded that she “bend the knee.” Luther herself appeared on the May 8 edition of Hannity after she was released, and Hannity again compared her ordeal to that of William Wallace in Braveheart.

Fox News devoted 2 hours and 48 minutes of coverage to Luther’s story between May 5 and 2 p.m. EDT May 8. To put this in context, Fox News covered the high-profile killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man shot in Georgia while out for a jog, for only 47 minutes between May 3 and 2 p.m. EDT May 8.

Fox News is using an old playbook to turn a public health emergency into a battle in the culture war.

For years, Fox News has propped up conservative figures as heroes in a war against big government. In 2014, Fox went all-in on Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his protests that led to an armed standoff with the federal government. Fox did the same in 2014 as it worked to portray Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson as a martyr when A&E temporarily put the show on hiatus after he made anti-LGBTQ comments. Similarly, in 2015, Fox News and other right-wing media outlets rallied around Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage certificates for same-sex couples.

The strategy of portraying conservatives as the victims of liberal policies -- even when, as was the case for Luther, the policy being violated was implemented by a Republican -- makes sense as part of Fox’s political messaging, as it furthers a narrative of conservative oppression.

In addition to Luther, Fox has recently taken to elevating other anti-lockdown activists. An Arizona sheriffnamed appeared onTucker Carlson Tonight to discuss his decision not to enforce the state’s stay-at-home order. Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County, California, appeared on Fox & Friends. Three other sheriffs who’ve made recent Fox News appearances to decry stay-at-home orders have ties to the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, an extremist group. Business owners Eliot Rabin, Juan Desmarais, and Rick Savage have all appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss their decisions to defy stay-at-home orders by keeping their businesses open.

In April, Fox News helped uplift the anti-lockdown protests with an overwhelming amount of coverage. In just over one week, Fox News ran 91 segments about those protests, amounting to roughly six hours of programming. As the pandemic stretched into May, Fox began attempting to shift focus away from the mounting death toll and the president’s lagging approval ratings on his handling of the disaster, limiting what pandemic-related stories it aired to pieces about conservatives who were supposedly harmed by stay-at-home orders. The raging pandemic is starting to become an afterthought on the network, and Fox is moving on to topics like the Department of Justice’s decision to drop charges against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and the phony “Obamagate” scandal. With its coverage of Luther’s case, Fox has found a way to portray conservatives as the real victims in this public health crisis.

Conservatives keep fighting their culture war amid a deadly pandemic.

While a certain intellectual gladiator of the right may claim that “facts don’t care about your feelings,” Fox News knows this isn’t quite right. The network needs to downplay the pandemic to protect President Donald Trump. But you can't convince an audience that a deadly pandemic is just an acceptable fact of life with #facts and #logic; you need to sell them on it by playing to their emotions, giving them a hero to cheer for and a villain to rage against.

Taking Luther’s story as an example, a rational analysis of what happened would show her as a person who didn’t think the law the rest of us are expected to follow should apply to her, who was given an opportunity to avoid jail after violating the law and refused, who applied for and received government assistance, and who raised nearly $500,000 from a GoFundMe page started before reopening the business. To convince an audience that the victim in this situation is the salon owner -- especially an audience that likes to think of itself as supporting “law and order” -- you have to appeal to their emotions to override the massive amounts of cognitive dissonance involved.

A pandemic is no time for culture war gamesmanship, but as Fox News’ latest cavalcade of conservative martyrs shows, it’s the only game the network knows how to play.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-cheering-rogue-sheriffs-connected-extremist-group

faux  News is cheering on rogue sheriffs who refuse to enforce shelter-in-place or social distancing orders that they claim are unconstitutional. Three of these sheriffs who have appeared on the network also have ties to the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, an extremist, pro-militia group.

While protests to the stay-at-home orders cropped up across the country, sheriffs in several states have insisted that enforcing the orders would violate people’s constitutional rights. According to the Miami Herald, Sheriff J.D. Raymond in Washington state said he will not enforce any guidelines that he believes “infringe on your constitutional rights.” Four sheriffs in Michigan issued a statement that sympathized with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s desire to protect the public, but concluded her orders are “overstepping her executive authority” and said they therefore will not enforce them.

Fox News has interviewed several sheriffs who refuse to enforce these measures, asking if the orders have gone “too far” and if people are just “standing up” for their rights. (Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade agreed that Michigan’s orders are “unreasonable,” and Fox prime-time host Sean Hannity went as far as to call the orders “draconian” and praised the places that are starting to ease restrictions.)

Three of the sheriffs Fox spoke to -- Mark Lamb of Pinal County, Arizona; Dar Leaf of Barry County, Michigan; and Ted Schendel of Benzie County, Michigan -- have ties to the extremist groupConstitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA).

CSPOA was founded by Richard Mack, a former rural Arizona sheriff and one of Southern Poverty Law Center’s top radical, anti-government leaders. According to SPLC, Mack’s website warns that “the greatest threat we face today is not terrorists; it is our federal government” and calls the IRS “Gestapo.” His group ascribes to a theory that county sheriffs are the “highest legitimate law enforcement” in the United States, as SPLC put it, and that they should not enforce laws that they deem to violate people’s constitutional rights.

Mack made headlines in 2014 when he told Fox News there was a plan to put women on the frontlines in a Nevada standoff between rancher Cliven Bundy and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. While he admitted his plan “sounds horrible,” he insisted it was the only way to show how ruthless federal agents are. He was also one of the most ardent supporters during the 41-day standoff at an Oregon wildlife refuge led by Bundy's son in 2016 and openly admitted he hoped his support would boost the visibility of CSPOA.

Now Fox is interviewing these CSPOA-associated sheriffs about their opposition to the stay-at-home orders.

• Mark Lamb: Lamb is a member of the CSPOA’s “Freedom Coalition,” which demands an independent investigation into “all arrests and incarcerations from the IRS, BLM, FDA, BATF, EPA, USFS, and all other bureaucracies” in order to free any victims whose only crime “has been to offend federal bureaucrats” and are now in prison because of “out-of-control” federal regulations.
• Dar Leaf: In 2016, Leaf was named CSPOA’s “Sheriff of the Year,” and in 2019, he spoke at the organization’s annual conference, where he allegedly called progressives “people who can’t spell communism.”
• Ted Schendel: According to Michigan’s Northern Express, Schendel refers to himself as a “constitutional sheriff” and in 2013 won the CSPOA’s “Grand Defender of the Constitution” award forvowing not to enforce an assault weapons ban if it was passed.

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‘constitutionalist’ Oregon sheriff rules his rural county like a personal fiefdom

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ew 120

The letter writers also raised concerns about Pendley's actions and opinions in and out of office.

1. In November, he publicly expressed support for the views of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), an extremist public lands organization affiliated with armed militants Ammon and Cliven Bundy.
2. He has variousconflicts of interests. He represented three Utah counties in their attempt to shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments and still receives payments from former-employer the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which is still suing the BLM.
3. He is overseeing a controversial move of the BLM headquarters from Washington, DC to Colorado that has not been approved by Congress.
4. He holds controversial views. In addition to arguing in support of selling off public lands, he also thinks that wild horses are the biggest issue facing Western public lands, ignoring issues like fossil fuel extraction and the climate crisis, the fate of the endangered greater sage-grouse and Gunnison sage-grouse and overgrazing by livestock.

"Putting someone like William Perry Pendley in charge of what happens on these public lands is likely to just accelerate climate disruption," Shelley Silbert, letter signatory and executive director of conservation group Great Old Broads for Wilderness, told InsideClimate News.

The Interior Department dismissed the concerns of the letter writers.

"For this group of environmental extremists to call themselves sportsman and conservationists is as laughable as this letter. Mr. Pendley brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the Department and is committed to carrying out the Administration's priorities for the betterment of the American people," an Interior spokesperson told The Hill Monday.

But environmental groups argue that Pendley's positions are the extreme ones.

"William Perry Pendley is an ideological zealot with values that are deeply out of touch with the mainstream," Wilderness Society conservation director Phil Hanceford

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/republicans-fantasy-constitution-trumps-attack-on-the-constitution-is-nothing-new-for-the-right-which-has-long-tried-to-write-its-own-version/

no lnx

Republicans’ fantasy Constitution: Trump’s attack on the Constitution is nothing new for the right — which has long tried to write its own version

Written by Paul Rosenberg / Salon October 28, 2019

Donald Trump’s recent criticism of the “phony emoluments clause,” used in defense of his since-abandoned G7 scam, was striking for its bluntness. But it’s part of a long history of conservatives flagrantly ignoring the actual Constitution and substituting an imaginary version in its place. At Vox, Ian Millhiser thoroughly debunked the notion that Trump wasn’t violating the Constitution by seeking to hold a summit meeting at his own hotel, including reference to work by Georgetown’s John Mikhail, whose examination of 40 different dictionaries made mincemeat of any “public meaning” argument to try to defend Trump.

Of course Trump doesn’t care about such arguments, and doesn’t rely on typical conservative legal arguments either. But he does rely on the underlying conservative impulse and assumption that the Constitution means whatever he wants it to mean, and that anyone who disagrees with him is subversive.

This view can be found in the so-called “constitutional sheriff’s” movement, which believes that county sheriffs get to pick and chose which laws to enforce and can keep federal law enforcement agents out of their counties. Tellingly, the word “sheriff” — like the word “God” — doesn’t even appear in the Constitution. Trump’s favorite convict sheriff, Joe Arpaio of Arizona, is a member of this movement. The far-right “Oathkeepers” movement has a similar fantasy-based view of the special constitutional status of anyone who’s sworn an oath to serve the government — and who then decides they’ve got a secret identity as a Supreme Court justice.

But don’t be fooled into thinking this is just a fringe conservative view. Dangerous and troubling as these views and that organization may be, it’s the conservative constitutional fantasies from the actual Supreme Court that have done far more damage to our democracy. Take, for example, the Dred Scott decision of 1857, written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, which held that black people had no constitutional rights because when it was adopted, they were regarded as “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” What’s more, Taney claimed, “This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race.”

That was a lie, as I explained here, based on a fantasy past. In the real past, slavery was abolished in the Vermont Republic in 1777, well before the Constitution was drafted, and Quock Walker sued for and won his freedom under the Massachusetts Constitution in 1781 — again, before the Constitution was drafted.

Walker’s case deserves closer inspection to show specifically how wrong Taney was. Walker had been promised his freedom, but his master died before the promised date, and his widow married a man who not only refused to free Walker, but beat him as well. Walker won not one, but two civil jury trials, both of which affirmed his freedom and awarded monetary damages, after which the man who had abused him was convicted in criminal trial.

In his charge to the jury, Chief Justice William Cushing stated that, “slavery is … as effectively abolished as it can be by the granting of rights and privileges wholly incompatible and repugnant to its existence.” That unambiguous recognition of “the granting of rights and privileges” directly contradict Taney’s false premise in Dred Scott. The “fixed and universal” opinion he wrote about was a racist fantasy.

There was also a future fantasy involved in the Dred Scott decision — the fantasy that the decision would put an end to abolitionism,, and secure the institution of slavery once and for all. Instead, it only fueled the dynamic which eventually brought the Civil War, which was initiated by the South, based on yet another fantasy — the one about absolute states’ rights (except, of course, when it came to forcing Northern states to return escaped slaves.)

The fantasy of corporate personhood

After that terrible struggle, we passed the Civil War amendments to firmly establish the full citizenship rights of black Americans, which in turn would become the subject of multiple conservative fantasies, primarily involving the 14th Amendment. First was the fantasy — still haunting us today — that the 14th Amendment established “corporate personhood” and was actually intended to protect corporations as much as freed slaves and their descendants. This fantasy, too, came to us from the Supreme Court, though in a remarkably muddled way, asUCLA law professor Adam Winkler describes here.

In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the court reporter (a former railroad president) inserted a headnote saying that justices agreed that corporations were people under the meaning of the 14th Amendment, even though the decision itself said nothing at all on the subject. To this day, that case is mistakenly cited as precedent establishing corporate personhood, despite its silence. One of the justices hearing the case, Stephen J. Field, got the ball rolling, as Winkler explains:

A few years later, in an opinion in an unrelated case, Field wrote that “corporations are persons within the meaning” of the Fourteenth Amendment. “It was so held in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad,” explained Field, who knew very well that the Court had done no such thing.

That’s only one facet of how muddled the story is, as Winkler explains. The idea was first advanced in 1882 by Roscoe Conkling, a lawyer for Southern Pacific who was the last living member of the drafting committee responsible for writing the 14th Amendment. Conkling told the Court that the drafters had altered the wording, replacing “citizens” with “persons” specifically to cover corporations as well. There’s no other evidence supporting this claim, and substantial reason to doubt it. An unpublished journal of the committee’s deliberations that Conklin offered in support was later found to completely contradict his claim: The language had never been changed. “So far as anyone can tell, the rights of corporations were not raised in the public debates over the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment or in any of the states’ ratifying conventions,” Winkler notes, nor had anyone else on the committee ever made such a claim.

Even at the time, Conkling’s account was suspect, according to Winkler. He made the argument in a case that languished for three years before Southern Pacific suddenly settled it, after which the railroad brought a nearly identical case to the Supreme Court, with the same legal team — except for Conklin. “Tellingly, Southern Pacific’s lawyers omitted any mention of Conkling’s drafting history or his journal,” Winkler notes. “Had those lawyers believed Conkling, it would have been malpractice to leave out his story.”

So everything else was premised on Conklin’s lie, which even his own colleagues didn’t believe. But there were so many other bad actors involved, it was like a Trump Cabinet meeting. In fact, Field sounded just like one of them, as Winkler describes:

Taxing the property of railroads differently, he said, was like allowing deductions for property “owned by white men or by old men, and not deducted if owned by black men or young men.”

In short, this was a collective fraud perpetrated by a whole collective of scoundrels, creating a fantasy version of the 14th Amendment that’s become deeply and profoundly embedded in American law. It was famously used, Winkler notes, to strike down numerous economic regulations, including federal child labor laws, zoning laws, and wage-and-hour laws,” at the same time that Plessy v. Ferguson (the next case on our list) refused to apply the 14th Amendment to protect the rights of African Americans:

Between 1868, when the amendment was ratified, and 1912, the Supreme Court would rule on 28 cases involving the rights of African Americans and an astonishing 312 cases on the rights of corporations.

More white supremacist fantasies

As we’ll see below, another strange wrinkle emerged in the modern era: for the Supreme Court’s hardcore conservatives, the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection clause exists almost solely to strike down affirmative action. But first, we need to turn to Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the Court ruled that segregated facilities (supposedly “separate but equal”) did not deprive blacks of equal protection under law. It’s a much more ornate and convoluted lie than the one in Dred Scott, as I explained here, but to boil things down into basic fantasies, we need consider only three. First was the fantasy that the problem was all in black people’s heads:

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

Second came the exact opposite fantasy, that black inferiority was an immutable fact that human laws could do nothing to alter:

Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation.

Third was the fantasy that either nothing needed to be done, or that nothing could be done:

If the civil and political rights of both races be equal, one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.

Of course, this last was pure sophistry. The civil and political rights were obviously not equal, which was why the case had been brought in the first place. And that inequality perpetuated social inequality — specifically via segregation — as indeed was the whole point. It took decades of racist terror to get to the point where such an absurd concoction of fantasies could be propounded with such seriousness. The court pretended that black civil and political rights would still be protected, even after three decades of white racist violence proved otherwise, and that they could be neatly severed from “social rights” such as riding in an integrated railroad car — that being the issue at hand in Plessy.

The fantastical nature of the Plessy decision is thrown into sharp contrast by the bracing realism of John Marshall Harlan’s dissent. “The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race while they are on a public highway is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution,” Harlan wrote. “It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds.” The phrase “badge of servitude” comes directly from the 13th Amendment, underscoring the broader context that gave meaning to the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

Next, fast forward a century to Bush v. Gore, the case that settled the 2000 presidential election. In that instance, conservative justices who had never applied the Equal Protection Clause to defend black voting rights suddenly discovered its overwhelming importance in protecting the rights of ballots to be counted equally — by paradoxically ensuring that no ballots were counted at all! There was never any thought of who the voters casting the ballots might be, much less whether they could possibly constitute a class, as Equal Protection jurisdiction normally requires. It was not just a fantasy, but a farce.

Rather than dig into the details of the case, I’ll merely draw on a big-picture observation made by Geoffrey R. Stone, an editor of the Supreme Court Review, whom I quoted from here in July. Stone noted that the three hardcore conservatives on the court at that time — William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas—had cast 65 votes in non-unanimous decisions interpreting the Equal Protection Clause in the previous decade, 19 of which involved affirmative action. Collectively, they’d cast exactly two votes finding Equal Protection Clause violations in those cases — one less vote in an entire decade than they cast in the Bush v. Gore decision.  Summing up, Stone wrote:

What does this tell us? It tells us that Justices Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas have a rather distinctive view of the United States Constitution. Apparently, the Equal Protection Clause, which was enacted after the Civil War primarily to protect the rights of newly freed slaves, is to be used for two and only two purposes — to invalidate affirmative action and to invalidate the recount process in the 2000 presidential election.

Put simply, the Equal Protection Clause those justices recognized does not exist. It was a bad-faith fantasy of their own invention.

Fantasies of guns and God

Race is clearly a major driver of conservative constitutional fantasies. But it’s not the only one, as shown by the Court’s Heller decision, the first ever recognize an individual right to gun ownership in the Second Amendment — a position that former Chief Justice Warren Burger (a Republican appointee) once called “a fraud on the American public.” The decision by Antonin Scalia was so roundly criticized that Scalia co-authored a book in its defense, “Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts,” which was ripped to shreds by then-appeals court judge Richard Posner, in a devastating review titled “The Incoherence of Antonin Scalia.” To be clear, both Burger and Posner were highly respected conservative jurists. But they were not fantasists when it came to the Second Amendment.

Posner has a great deal to say about Scalia more generally, but my point is simple: Scalia claimed to be a textualist, but he completely ignored the following italicized text of the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

That text clearly articulates a collective need, thereby justifying a collective right. This is how the Second Amendment had always been understood, until, as Michael Waldman explained, the National Rifle Association embarked on a multi-decade propaganda campaign to brainwash the American public. Brainwashing can effectively spread a fantasy. But it is powerless to transform it into truth.

Just as the NRA waged a decades-long propaganda war to push their constitutional fantasy through the Supreme Court, many on the religious right are organizing to do the same with the First Amendment now. They’d like to use their fantasy version of “religious freedom” as a license to discriminate, and ultimately create a two-tiered society, just like the one enshrined long ago by Plessy. They’ve at least gotten their foot in the door with decisions like Hobby Lobby and Masterpiece Cakeshop.

Progressive activists, both secular and religious, have been fighting back in recent years, particularly focused on reclaiming the true meaning of Religious Freedom Day, as I’ve written about here in 2016, 2017,  2018 and 2019. I’ve also written repeatedly about Project Blitz (here, here, here and here), a state-level campaign employing this “religious freedom” fantasy to advance a three-stage, state-level theocratic agenda, first uncovered by researcher Frederick Clarkson last year. All this is embodied in a more sweeping fantasy of America as a Christian nation, a fantasy thoroughly debunked by Andrew Seidel in “The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American” (Salon interview here), and challenged on the ground by a new initiative, Christians Against Christian Nationalism (Salon story here). Directly confronting the constitutional fantasy aspect, the third part of Seidel’s book is entitled “The Ten Commandments versus the Constitution,” and it shows how each has elements opposed to principles of the Constitution. The Supreme Court has yet to write this fantasy into law, but shown by the examples above, it would hardly be out of character for them to do so.

Beyond the examples cited — and others like them — there’s another way in which conservative constitutional fantasies lead us astray, not at the level of individual decisions, but at the level of judicial philosophy. I already mentioned Posner’s refutation of Scalia’s version of textual originalism, but that’s only one version of the broader originalist approach, which Georgia State law professor Eric Segall dismantled in his 2018 book “Originalism as Faith,” which I wrote about here. In Segall’s view, originalism meets a lot of psychological needs, not just for judges, but for the broader public as well:

When the justices connect us to our past by supporting their decisions with persuasive evidence of prior agreements, they cultivate and maintain a distinctively American approach to hard public policy questions.

In addition, judicial appeals to original meaning might suggest that the justices are following the decisions of the founders, not imposing their own personal values. The justices want the American people to have faith that their decisions are grounded in prior law, not personal predilection, and references to originalist sources make that goal easier.

It’s a soothing “just-so story,” in other words. But it utterly fails in practice, as Segall told me in our interview:

Virtually every constitutional law case [decided by the Supreme Court] involves text that is imprecise, unclear, vague — equal protection, due process, establishment, unreasonable search and seizure, whatever. And as applied to the facts of any modern case, the history behind that is going to be extremely contested, even if we assume its relevance, which I don’t necessarily assume.

Thus, originalism is worthless at best. At worst, it’s a smokescreen for bad decisions:

The main argument in my book is that originalism doesn’t do anything. It’s never done anything. Forget about it. We should stop pretending text, history and precedent dictate Supreme Court decisions, and we should make [the justices] explain exactly why they’re doing what they’re doing — for transparency purposes.

But transparency is the last thing that the conservative peddlers of constitutional fantasies want. They didn’t want it in Dred Scott, nor in Plessy, Santa Clara, Heller or Bush v. Gore. At bottom, President Trump’s “phony emoluments clause” was nothing new for conservatives. In fact, it was part of a very long tradition. You might even say it was evidence that he’s a true conservative after all!

Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English. Follow him on Twitter at @PaulHRosenberg.

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https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/03/washington-constitutional-sheriffs-gun-ban-kkk.html

jared g

In recent months, a group of self-proclaimed “constitutional sheriffs” in Washington state has announced that they will not enforce the state’s new gun law, which tightens background checks and bans people under 21 years old from buying semi-automatic weapons. Asserting that the Second Amendment prohibits laws involving “registration of personal firearms under any circumstances,” members of the constitutional sheriffs movement declare that they have the right, even the duty, to refuse to enforce gun laws. Their refusal raises a thorny question: Should government officials ever refuse to enforce laws they personally believe are invalid?

The constitutional sheriffs movement likes to portray itself as a new incarnation of the civil rights movement, which follows Martin Luther King’s belief in “a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” But, as I have argued, the movement owes more to the Ku Klux Klan than to King’s philosophy of civil disobedience.

Richard Mack, founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association and leading spokesman for the constitutional sheriffs movement, has frequently claimed that if sheriffs in the South had recognized their authority to disregard unconstitutional laws, they would not have arrested Rosa Parks when she refused to move to the back of the bus. In contrast with Mack’s fantasies, the reality of police abuses during the Jim Crow era reveals the dangers that arise when law enforcement officials disregard laws they believe are unconstitutional. Throughout the civil rights era, government officials across the South didassert authority not to follow unconstitutional laws. But the laws they considered invalid were not the state laws imposing segregation but instead were the federal laws and court orders that required states to dismantle segregation. In 1956, nearly every Southern member of Congress signed the Southern Manifesto, which described Brown v. Boardas a “clear abuse of judicial power” and called on state governments to resist desegregation “by any lawful means.” In what has become known as “massive resistance,” state and local officials enthusiastically heeded that call. Eight states adopted interposition resolutions that proclaimed federal desegregation orders unconstitutional. Declaring, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever,” Alabama Gov. George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama to personally block the enforcement of desegregation orders that he believed violated the rights of whites to choose segregation. In the face of Southern defiance, Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy ordered federal troops to enforce desegregation orders and allow black students to attend previously all-white schools.

The constitutional sheriffs movement is, in fact, a direct descendent of the Ku Klux Klan.In the 1960s, the Klan criticized Southern police for not protecting the white population from what the Klan considered unconstitutional civil rights laws and federal court orders. In the following decade, Klan members formed the Posse Comitatus movement, which transformed this idea into national action. The Posse movement argued that not only were federal civil rights laws unconstitutional, but so were federal tax laws, environmental laws, and gun laws, to name a few. It proclaimed that the county sheriff is the only legitimate law enforcement agent and declared that the sheriff has a duty to prevent federal agents from enforcing oppressive laws. If sheriffs refused to do their duty, the group declared, the people should create citizen posses, or militias, to resist federal tyranny by force. The Posse movement’s founder stated, “The law is that your citizens—a posse—will hang an official who violated the law and the Constitution.” A wave of anti-government violence followed.

The constitutional sheriffs movement is, in fact, a direct descendent of the Ku Klux Klan.

Although the Posse Comitatus movement faded in the 1980s after several leaders were killed in police shootouts and others were imprisoned, the Posse philosophy has now been resurrected in the constitutional sheriffs movement. Mack himself has long espoused views literally straight out of the Posse handbook. In a 2009, Mack said, “I pray for the day that a sheriff in this country will arrest an IRS agent.” He also has continued to the crypto–anti-Semitism favored by the Posse. “There is one person who I believe can stop this New World Order. His name is your county sheriff,” Mack told Alex Jones in 2009. “There is no question your sheriff has the responsibility to protect you from tyranny and international bankers.”

The chaos and violence threatened by the constitutional sheriffs movement, meanwhile, was on full display in the 2014 confrontation between the federal Bureau of Land Management and rancher Cliven Bundy. Bundy called for armed resistance to support his refusal to pay more than $1 million in overdue grazing fees, and Mack and several other constitutional sheriffs joined the mob of roughly 1,000 armed protesters. Expressing his idiosyncratic understanding of the civil rights movement, Mack called Bundy a new Rosa Parks. ...As this history reveals, time and again the principle that law enforcement officers should refuse to enforce laws they consider unconstitutional has been advanced by those on the wrong side of constitutional history. That principle has frequently been advanced to support extremist constitutional views far outside the mainstream, such as the Posse’s view that federal agents have no authority to enforce tax laws, or Cliven Bundy’s view that the federal government lacks authority to own and maintain public lands.

But even if the idea weren’t being pushed by extremists, it would still be deeply troubling because ordinary political disagreements can easily be expressed as disagreements over the Constitution. Empowering sheriffs to refuse to enforce laws they deem unconstitutional gives them authority to disregard laws simply because they disagree with them.

Mack likes to say that the outcome of the Nuremberg tribunals justifies sheriffs’ refusal to enforce gun laws.

“The officers at Nuremberg said the same thing, ‘We were just following orders.’ Well the court determined that following orders when you’re committing a crime, or genocide, doesn’t cut it,” Mack told the Washington Post in 2016. “We say the same thing. Do not say, ‘I’m just following orders.’ Do what’s right.”

In reality, the Nuremberg tribunals established a much more limited principle than the proposition that government agents should disregard laws they don’t like and just “do what’s right.”

Indeed, under U.S. military law, which incorporates the Nuremberg principle, soldiers may only refuse orders that are clearly invalid: In the words of Army regulations, the duty applies only when “a person of ordinary sense and understanding would have known the orders to be unlawful.” Pursuant to that standard, soldiers can be prosecuted when they refuse to follow orders based on their own beliefs about what orders are invalid, as military courts ruled in court-martial proceedings. The United States Department of Justice in 1994 adopted a similar position on its authority to refuse to enforce or defend unconstitutional laws: It would exercise that authority only when a law’s unconstitutionality was clearly established. (Occasionally, the government has appeared to depart from that policy. Last year, for instance, the DOJ declined to defend in court key portions of the Affordable Care Act in a move the New York Times described as “highly unusual.”)

Stripped of its constitutional and patriotic rhetoric, the constitutional sheriffs movement should be seen for what it is: an extremist movement comprised of sheriffs willing to abuse their power as law enforcement agents to thwart even modest gun laws. Far from following the Constitution, the movement expresses contempt for the American constitutional system, which has long established a system of checks and balances that gives the people power through their elected officials to enact the laws they want, subject to review by courts that can determine whether laws comply with the Constitution. In this system, we can expect criminals to defy the laws, but we should all be concerned when the lawman goes rogue.

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https://www.politicalresearch.org/2019/04/29/new-mexicos-constitutional-sheriffs-pave-the-way-for-militias-patrolling-the-border/

no lnx pix

NEW MEXICO’S CONSTITUTIONAL SHERIFFS PAVE THE WAY FOR MILITIAS PATROLLING THE BORDER

By Cloee Cooper, on April 29, 2019

The U.S.-Mexico border between Columbus, N.M. and El Paso, TX. Photo:

Hadley Paul Garland/Flickr.

On April 20, the FBI arrested Larry Hopkins, the leader of a New Mexico-based militia group, on charges of being a felon in possession of firearms and ammunition. His group, the United Constitutional Patriots, drew international attention for illegally detaining hundreds of asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border in Sunland Park, New Mexico on April 16. The hundreds of parents and children seeking asylum were held at gunpoint by militia members until Border Patrol arrived.

Upholding long-standing tensions between federal and state law enforcement and militia organizations, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) condemned the United Constitutional Patriots for taking matters into their own hands. Similarly, the New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas said, “the rule of law should be in the hands of trained law enforcement, not armed vigilantes.”

Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) is a network of local law enforcement founded in 2011 by former Arizona Sheriff Richard Mack.

Although these state and federal officials tried to distance themselves from militia organizing, New Mexico’s constitutional sheriffs cumulatively have taken actions that signal that militias are welcome in the state. In fact, the majority of New Mexico’s local law enforcement over the last decade have closely affiliated with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), a network of local law enforcement founded in 2011 by former Arizona Sheriff Richard Mack. CSPOA is just one formulation of today’s Patriot movement, which is fueled by an interpretation of the U.S. Constitution that effectively “prohibits almost the entire structure of the current U.S. federal government.”

CSPOA views the local sheriff as the ultimate defense against a tyrannical government, furthers an alliance between local law enforcement and militia, and encourages all sheriffs to protect their interpretation of the Second Amendment. With roots in the Posse Comitatus, an organization founded in 1971 on the west coast as a vehicle for White supremacism and antisemitism, Mack’s CSPOA repackaged this ideology into more palatable terms for the 21st century. When he founded the CSPOA, he was also on the board of the leading militia organization, Oath Keepers. He fundamentally opposes immigration, defends unrestricted gun rights, and supports creating strong local law enforcement that can challenge the federal government, when he disagrees with their agenda.

Under the Obama administration, the CSPOA claimed involvement by more than 500 of the 3081 sheriffs nationwide. The states with the most widespread involvement are in the pacific northwest and southwest, with significant participation by sheriffs in various southern states.

Records indicate that 29 of New Mexico’s 33 sheriffs departments participated in CSPOA activities over the last 6 years. From signing a CSPOA resolution vowing not to enforce gun control laws under the Obama administration, to filling out an assessment of how “constitutional” they are,to attending meetings with right-wing antisemitic groups like the John Birch Society and the Oath Keepers on how to prepare against the New World Order, many of New Mexico’s sheriffs departments have closely affiliated with CSPOA and/or served as a conduit for their ideology. By doing so, they are signaling to militia groups like United Constitutional Patriots that they are welcome in New Mexico.

The majority of New Mexico’s county sheriffs and the New Mexico Sheriffs Association signed onto a CSPOA letter in 2013-2014, pledging to say “No” to Obama Gun Control laws. Among the signers was then-sheriff of Doña Ana, the county where the United Constitutional Patriots took action last week. The letter, which was signed by hundreds of local law enforcement and state sheriffs associations across the country reads:

in keeping with the Oath we each swore to protect and defend the United States Constitution and the Constitution of our State, and to do our duty to preserve the rights of the people we work for, we, the Sheriffs of America, do hereby declare and make it known, that we will oppose and disallow, any and all attempts to further erode the rights of the citizens of our counties and parishes. Accordingly, we oppose the current gun control scheme being proposed and any attempt to register gun owners or their firearms. In fine, the rights of the people to keep and bear arms Shall Not Be Infringed.

This map depicts in orange the 29 of New Mexico's 33 sheriffs departments that participated in the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) between 2013-2014.

This map depicts in orange the 29 (of 33) sheriffs departments in New Mexico that participated in Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) activities between 2013-2014. Map credit: Olivia Lawrence-Weilmann/Political Research Associates. Lena Gluck, Erin Gifford, and Jess Conger-Henry contributed data collection for this map.

Although the majority of New Mexico’s sheriffs that signed on to the 2013-2014 letter are no longer in office, Lincoln County Sheriff, Robert Sheppard, is and currently serves as the treasurer to New Mexico Sheriffs’ Association.

In line with CSPOA’s political position, Sheppard and at least 24 other New Mexico sheriffs recently spearheaded a statewide campaign to declare their counties “Second Amendment sanctuaries,” co-opting the immigration sanctuary model. Organized in response to Senate Bill 8, which will take effect in July 2019 and make it a misdemeanor to sell a firearm to anyone without a background check, sheriffs passed so-called “Second Amendment sanctuary” ordinances, vowing not to enforce Senate Bill 8. Sheriffs in Washington, Colorado, Oregon, and Illinois have joined New Mexico in vowing not to enforce statewide gun restriction laws.

Not enforcing the law would make it even easier for vigilantes with felony records, like United Constitutional Patriots leader, Larry Hopkins, to purchase guns and patrol the U.S. border.

As the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol and the New Mexico Attorney General denounce armed militia taking laws into their own hands, we must identify other government officials who are complicit in the proliferation of militias patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border. New Mexico’s constitutional sheriffs have acted as a conduit between sheriffs departments and militia, signaling to the militia organizations that they are welcome in the state. Moreover, with the majority of New Mexico’s sheriffs currently declaring their counties as “Second Amendment sanctuaries,” they open the door to armed militia groups terrorizing immigrants and asylum-seekers.

Cloee Cooper (PRA Research Analyst) holds a master’s degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism, specializing in social justice and investigative reporting. Cloee tracked, monitored and organized against anti-immigrant organizations with ties to white nationalism with the Center for New Community from 2009-2012. Her work can be seen at Chicago’s local PBS affiliate – WTTW, Alternet, Social Justice News Nexus, Imagine2050, Hard Crackers and in a Chicago Tribune investigation. She currently serves on the Editorial Board of Hard Crackers, a journal documenting the everyday life of those striving to overturn the mess we are in.

Read more by Cloee Cooper ?

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ref

greg champagne

...This "northern" camp was erected just days before and the occupants had been warned repeatedly for several days that their presence there was unlawful and that eviction was imminent. These warnings went unheeded.  Despite the statements coming from the media and protesters that they were completely peaceful and prayerful, it has been a fact that more militant protestors (terrorists) have destroyed property and physically beaten employees of the company in recent weeks. I personally witnessed and photographed what I estimate to be at least a half-million dollars in damage to bulldozers and excavators.  I further learned that many protestors other than Native American groups have descended upon the area such as anarchists and eco-terrorists who are hell bent on committing violence and damage.  The police presence in the area to protect farmers, ranchers and other private property interests has been costing the state of North Dakota millions of dollars.

The Sheriffs of several states have contributed manpower over the last several weeks to help preserve order and protect property

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https://www.alternet.org/drugs/bad-lawmen-devils-half-dozen-drug-corrupted-county-sheriffs

ast week, the good citizens of Mississippi's Tallahatchie County got a rude shock. The county's top lawman, Sheriff William Brewer, was at the courthouse, which was not unusual. This time, though, he was dressed not in his sheriff's uniform but in an orange prisoner jumpsuit to face federal criminal drug trafficking charges.

According to a federal indictment, over a period of 15 years, Sheriff Brewer had conspired with a local ne'er-do-well to have that person repeatedly rob drug dealers, give stolen cash to Brewer, sell the drugs, then give Brewer part of the proceeds. In return, that man got a free ride for his own methamphetamine trafficking activities. Well, until he started coming up with his own meth supply. When Brewer found out about that, he started demanding a $500 or $600 payment every week for the dealer to carry out his work unimpeded. The dealer eventually became an FBI informant and took his former partner down.

Brewer has now resigned as sheriff, and he has not yet been convicted of anything, but his arrest on drug and extortion charges is yet another disturbing example of the corrosive impact on law enforcement of enforcing drug prohibition.

County sheriffs are unique figures in the American law enforcement landscape. Unlike police chiefs or the heads of federal law enforcement agencies, they are typically elected, not appointed. They are subject to little effective oversight except from voters at the polling booth. They control policing not only of all county territory not handled by municipal police forces, but also the county jail and the policing of the courthouse. They control their own law enforcement fiefdoms.

And they sometimes turn to the dark side. For the past dozen years, the Drug War Chronicle has covered drug prohibition-related law enforcement misbehavior in a recurring feature, "This Week's Corrupt Cops Stories." During that period, hundreds of police officers, DEA agents, FBI agents, Customs and Border Patrol agents, jail and prison guards, and sheriff's deputies have gone down for one or more of the myriad forms of dirty drug policing.

Law enforcement misbehavior has run the gamut from planting drugs on innocent people to ripping off drug dealers and selling their stashes to sexual coercion to lying on search warrants to lying in court to pocketing cash from drug busts to embezzling asset forfeiture funds, and even stealing drugs from those drug drop-off boxes.

It's bad enough when the people charged with enforcing the law flout it, but it's arguably more disheartening and corrosive when the corrupt cops are the very people charged with heading law enforcement offices, such as county sheriffs. There are more than 3,000 of them, holding office in every state except Alaska (no county governments), Connecticut (replaced by State Marshals), and Hawaii (deputies serve in a division of the Department of Public Safety). The vast majority of them are honest law enforcement professionals.

But some are notoriously not. Each year, one or two or three county sheriffs find themselves on the wrong side of the law because of drugs, whether it's stealing them, selling them, or gobbling them down themselves. And sometimes, when they break bad, they do so in a spectacular fashion. Here are a half-dozen of the most outrageous from the past decade alone:

Oklahoma's Custer County Sheriff Mike Burgess. Burgess was hit in 2008 with a 35-count indictment charging him with coercing and bribing female inmates to participate in sex acts. He was hit with 14 counts of second-degree rape, seven counts of forcible oral sodomy, and five counts of bribery by a public official, among other charges. A federal lawsuit filed by 12 former inmates alleges that Burgess and his employees had them participate in wet T-shirt contests and gave cigarettes to inmates who would flash their breasts. Another prisoner alleged she was given trusty status after agreeing to perform a sex act on Burgess, but lost that status when she later refused. After a jury trial, now former Sheriff Burgess was convicted of 13 felonies, including five counts of second-degree rape and three counts of bribery by a public official. Testimony included that of several former female inmates who testified they feared they would be sent to prison if they did not provide sexual favors to the sheriff, as well as two female drug court participants. Burgess sexually assaulted one of them in his patrol car after arresting her for a drug court violation. In March 2009, he was sentenced to 79 years in prison.

Texas's Montague County Sheriff Bill Keating. Another badge-wearing pervert, Keating, 62, went down for a November 2008 drug raid at a home where the victim and her boyfriend lived. The boyfriend was arrested on outstanding warrants and removed by sheriff's deputies, who then searched the house and found meth paraphernalia. Sheriff Keating shooed the remaining deputy out of the bedroom, closed the door, and told the victim, "You are about to be my new best friend." He then threatened to arrest her on drug charges unless she "assisted" him by performing oral sex on him on multiple occasions and becoming a snitch for him.Keating pleaded guilty in that case in January 2009 but was then indicted along with nine jail guards—seven women and two men—for official oppression over allegationsthat the county jail was like Animal House. That indictment features multiple allegations of guards and inmates doing drugs and having sex with each other under Keatings' watch. Keating was looking at up to 10 years in prison on the original charge when he died of a heart attack in July 2009. The federal charges against him were subsequently dismissed.

Illinois's Gallatin County Sheriff Raymond Martin. Sheriff Martin found himself in hot water in 2009, when he was indicted on federal marijuana trafficking charges after being videotaped repeatedly providing pounds of marijuana to a local man, who would sell the weed and then give Martin the proceeds. That man became an informant for the DEA after Martin threatened him with death when he said he wanted out. It only got worse from there. While in jail awaiting trial, Martin, his wife, and their 20-year-old son were allarrested again, this time on solicitation of murder charges for plotting to knock off the guy who ratted them out. In September 2010, Martin was convicted of 15 counts in the drug trafficking and murder-for-hire scheme. He was sentenced to two life terms in federal prison in January 2011.

South Carolina's Florence County Sheriff E.J. Melvin.

The only black sheriff on this list, Melvin wasindicted on dozens of federal charges along with 11 others in 2011 for a massive and complex cocaine trafficking conspiracy. He was accused of dealing cocaine from his official vehicle, extorting money from drug dealers for protection or to get reduced charges. State police agents testified that they give Melvin a list of possible drug dealers, only to have him tip them off and arrange to get payments from them to keep the agents away. In addition to the massive cocaine conspiracy, involving multiple kilograms of the drug over a multi-year period, he was also accused of ripping off $5,000 in victim assistance funds for personal use. He ended up convicted on 37 of 43 counts and is now serving a 17-year federal prison sentence.

Kentucky's Whitley County Sheriff Lawrence Hodge. Hodge was indicted on both state and federal charges in 2011 for stealing around $350,000 over a seven-year period, including $100,000 he claimed was used in drug investigations. That wasn't all: Hodge was also charged with ripping off drug dealers and then funneling them to a local attorney. He would get a $50,000 kickback, the department would get a $50,000 "donation," and the dealers would get more lenient treatment. Oh, and he admitted to being strung out on pain pills. Hodge is now doing15 years of federal time and 17 years of state time, and when he gets out, he has to pay back some $335,000.

Oklahoma's Love County Sheriff Marion "Joe" Russell. Russell was arrested in 2016 on charges of corruption, neglect of duty, and housing a fugitive, but it gets hinkier than that. He was accused of turning a blind eye to meth dealing out of his own home by his adult son, covering up a missing person case where another family member is the main suspect. His son, Willie Russell, had already pleaded guilty to meth dealing. The fugitive, a young woman, was dating Willie and staying at the sheriff's house even though she had four arrest warrants outstanding. Russell would remind her that she was in a "safe haven," and when she left anyway, he arrested her and the man she moved in with—for harboring a fugitive. He was also accused of arresting drunken women in bikinis and taking them to his house instead of to jail. There, they were allegedly sexually assaulted and given meth. The missing persons case involves a young couple who were last seen in a car owned by Russell's nephew. That couple, Molly Miller and Colt Haynes, are still missing, but Russell is now in the clear, having copped a plea deal that resulted in one year of probation and $370 in court costs.

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dapl: pvt intel

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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/01/joe-arpaio-pardon-sheriffs-movement-215566

when ...Trump pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio, calling him a “patriot,” he didn’t just absolve him from the consequences of defying a federal judge. He didn’t merely excuse Arpaio’s racial profiling and illegal immigration sweeps. Trump’s pardon did do all of that. But it also did something more: It boosted a radical theory of law and American history that Arpaio supports, and which is gaining steam across the United States.

It’s called the “constitutional sheriff” movement, and as it grows, it’s increasing the risk of conflict between local law enforcement and federal authorities. Its animating idea is that a sheriff holds ultimate law-enforcement authority in his county—outranking even the federal government within its borders. Though the movement claims deep history in English law, its real roots lie in the more recent fringes of American right-wing thought. And its popularity helps explain why Arpaio’s defiance of federal law shouldn’t be seen as just one grandstanding sheriff crossing a line, but instead should be seen as part of a broader grassroots resistance to constitutional and cultural upheavals during the 20th century.

The strange idea that unites all members of this movement is that a sheriff is the highest law enforcement officer within a county’s borders—superior not only to local police, but also to officers and agents of the federal government. The actual influence of sheriff supremacy is hard to measure, but it has been growing in recent years, and today the official constitutional sheriffs’ association boasts 4,500 dues paying members and over 200 sheriffs. Its highest-profile members include Arpaio and David Clarke, who just resigned as sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, reportedly to help Trump in some capacity.

But those figures may underestimate how far its influence extends, and how fully it pervades certain regions of the country. In 2013, Arpaio joined nearly 500 other sheriffs who vowed not to obey any federal law that required them to confiscate guns from private citizens. In Utah, 28 of 30 sheriffs went even further, warning that “[n]o federal official will be permitted to descend upon our constituents and take from them what the Bill of Rights—in particular Amendment II—has given them.”

The constitutional sheriff movement arose from the ashes of the far-right, anti-semitic Posse Comitatus movement of the 1970s and 80s, led by William Potter Gale.The insignia favored by these Christian Patriots was a redesigned sheriff’s badge containing a noose, Bible and sword, to reflect their belief that sheriffs were responsible for the armed defense of citizens and higher law (a combination of their view of the Constitution and Christian Identity teachings). Before the movement collapsed with Gale’s death, its paramilitary figures developed an anti-tax, anti-government agenda that stoked conspiracy theories that Jews were responsible for oppressing farmers through crushing taxes and exorbitant loans. Its foot soldiers gained notoriety when they tried to stop foreclosures in the Midwest and engaged in shootouts with U.S. marshals.

The modern constitutional sheriff movement has revived the idea of sheriff supremacy envisioned by the Christian Patriots, tried to shed its anti-Semitic and racist origins, and now seeks to “take back America county by county, state by state.” Today, its ideology has gained traction with the militia movement, so-called sovereign citizens, separatists wary of centralized government—and increasingly, landowners, county commissioners, veterans and law enforcement figures. Cliven Bundy,who has clashed for years with the Bureau of Land Management, is an adherent of sheriff supremacy. In 2014, he demanded that the local sheriff step in and protect him from federal agents: “Sheriff, this is what We the People are asking this morning. Disarm the Park Service at …parks where the federal government claims they have jurisdiction.” One of his sons, Ryan Bundy, later said on TV, “The county sheriff is the only person that We the People have allowed to have policing power.”

As these unorthodox ideas have spread, politicians and lawmen have played boldly to anti-government sentiment, especially fears of federal officials intruding on property rights and gun rights. In 2014, Lora Hubbel, a candidate to become governor of South Dakota, told an audience: “The sheriff is the highest law officer in the county….Your county sheriff can tell the federal government ‘No, you can’t cross into my county.’ Your local sheriff is your best protection against the federal government.”

A number of candidates for sheriff or county commissioner around the country have campaigned explicitly on county-first theories of legal power. In New Hampshire, a businessman named Frank Szabo vowed to serve Hillsborough County as a constitutional sheriff who would defend citizens from “rogue federal and state agencies.” He even said he would be open to using deadly force to stop an abortion. And during the tense standoff in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge between Ammon Bundy’s armed men and federal agents, Glenn Palmer, a constitutional sheriff in Grant County, Oregon, praised the occupiers as “patriots.” Some, like Szabo and Hubbel, have lost elections when constituents recoil from the practical consequences of sheriff supremacy; others, like Arpaio, have been rewarded for their militancy.

Michael Barkun, an expert on political extremism, has termed this philosophy “radical localism,” because it valorizes and exploits subnational sources of power. In theory, that kind of localism could be a vehicle for many kinds of politics, but in practice constitutional sheriffs and their followers tend to occupy the edges of anti-government conservatism, organizing themselves to promote gun rights and property rights, to resist tax laws, national healthcare, gay marriage—and in Arpaio’s case, to implement a muscular view of border security. The enforcement policies of constitutional sheriffs aren’t neutral, but instead reflect a traditionalist and often apocalyptic worldview.

Do they have a point, at least in principle? The Constitutional Sheriffs claim to be supported by long tradition, but in fact sheriff supremacy is based on a faulty reading of history. Where states’ rights has some support in the text and history of the Constitution (notably in the 10th Amendment, but limited by the Reconstruction Amendments), the idea of sheriff supremacy does not: It has been made up by stitching together random references to sheriffs and militias in our political and legal texts. It relies on a highly selective reading of history, pretending that the high sheriff of the English shire was transplanted to colonial America, and then somehow emerged in the present day untouched by legal developments over the past 200 years.

In fact, in colonial America, most sheriffs were appointed by the Crown or landowners rather than elected by the people. The turn toward direct election of sheriffs came later, as part of the reforms of Jacksonian democracy. The militant orientation of the modern movement also comes from elevating the right to bear arms above all other rights, while treating the Second Amendment as if it codified the militia as a constitutional entity on par with Congress, the president, or the Supreme Court. It didn’t do that—not even close. And the sheriff supremacists never mention the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed equality and due process as part of the rights of national citizenship, and imposed new limits on states (and, by extension, local authorities).

Despite the “constitutional” label, sheriff supremacy makes mincemeat out of the framers’ constitutional design. The most basic principle of the original American Constitution is that of federal supremacy: When an irreconcilable conflict emerges between federal law and a subordinate source of law, federal law prevails. The office of sheriff itself is a creature of state constitutions and state law rather than some unchanging “common law” that supersedes federal law. Under long-standing constitutional principles, the federal government’s power to implement national policy reaches wherever is necessary to make that policy effective, as long as it doesn’t contravene a specific power that has been reserved for the states.

Nowhere did the framers explicitly authorize local government officials and lawmen to act as final authorities on the Constitution’s meaning. That would have run counter to every impulse they had in creating a stronger, more effective national government, and a coherent and consistent rule of law. The very thought of hundreds or thousands of armed individuals (there are over 3,000 sheriffs nationwide) each claiming the last word on the Constitution would have sent shudders through the men who met in Philadelphia.

The ideology of sheriff supremacy has attracted supporters largely by trading on popular suspicion of the federal government and disgust with land management policies. And, not surprisingly, the belief system has ended up encouraging clashes between sheriffs and the laws of their own state. In March 2013, Nick Finch, the sheriff of Liberty County, Florida, refused to enforce a state law that banned carrying a concealed weapon without a license. The sheriff’s reason for releasing the man from jail and allegedly altering the arrest records: “I know what law rules the day, and it’s the U.S. Constitution.” When word got out, Governor Rick Scott suspended Finch and the state charged him with official misconduct. Finch was eventually reinstated after a jury refused to convict. During trial, Finch’s lawyer had invited the jury to engage in nullification: “There ain’t many of y’all, but you have your own common code or beliefs ... It’s a way of life over here for people to own guns ... There’s a distinct possibility that, every now and then, one of y’all is going to make a mistake and he doesn’t want to create a convicted felon out of an incident that could be misunderstood.”

The costs of friction caused by sheriff supremacy can be high, and they always end up falling squarely on a sheriff’s constituents. Though a sheriff might sweep into office by promising to protect local taxpayers, overly aggressive tactics can backfire by leading to expensive lawsuits. One estimate put Maricopa County taxpayers on the hook for over $70 million dollars to defend Arpaio’s policies.

The face of the constitutional sheriff movement today is Richard Mack, who like Arpaio was once a sheriff in Arizona. Mack is the author of the pamphlet, Constitutional Sheriff: America’s Last Hope, which Arpaio has urged every citizen, police officer and sheriff to read (the entire back cover, in fact, is taken up with a plug by Arpaio.) In his pamphlet, Mack urges lawmen to save America from “a growing Marxist creed ... political whining for universal health care, gun control, forced equality through governmental redistribution of wealth, and the removal of religious beliefs and expressions from our public institutions.” The county sheriff, according to Mack, “is our nation’s last line of defense” against these changes. But “the greatest threat we face, as a nation,” he says, “is our own Federal Government.”

In 2011, Mack, with the help of Arpaio and others, founded the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. “We’re not mainstream,” Mack has confessed. CSPOA believes that “America needs to make a strong turn around to get back on the freedom track laid for us by our Founders” and that the county sheriff “is the last hope of making this happen.” The organization advocates “protection, service, and interposition” by sheriffs to protect citizen’s rights, and trains sheriffs and deputies how to engage in alternative tactics to resist the federal government.

If that word “interposition” sounds familiar, it’s because the concept was made famous in the 1950s when state officials tried to prevent racial integration by interposing themselves between white citizens and federal troops sent to enforce orders by federal judges. It’s also closely related to the older idea of nullifying laws believed to be unconstitutional—again, popularized by slave states such as South Carolina that opposed any regulation of that practice. Ironically, the militant abolitionist John Brown—hated during his day by law enforcement—was sometimes described by supporters as interposing himself and his men between the bodies of defenseless slaves and their owners, slave catchers, and the Slave Power that had corrupted the federal government.

For today’s constitutional sheriffs, interposition means demanding that federal agents obtain permission from a sheriff before conducting business in a county, and perhaps barring their way if consent is not given. It means stepping in between the government and county residents “to keep those at bay who would confiscate bank accounts, guns, land, property, and children.” It might also mean ignoring what “the County Attorney advises the sheriff to do” because they believe a sheriff “has no obligation to go along with those who subvert the Constitution.”

***

While in office, Arpaio behaved like what you would expect of someone who subscribed to sheriff supremacy. He consistently referred to himself as a “constitutional sheriff.” His office regularly issued news releases asking for more armed volunteers for his Maricopa County posse, which is understood to be a representation of the people and the measure of a sheriff’s potency to resist tyranny. The bigger a sheriff’s militia, the more faith residents have that external threats can be resisted. In fact, Arpaio bragged that his office operated 52 separate posse groups with nearly 400 armed volunteers. He used posses to patrol shopping malls and even called for armed citizens to “take action” against mass shooters and terrorists. In 2012, CSPOA gave Arpaio a lifetime achievement award.

Whenever Arpaio wanted to strike a defiant tone, as he did once federal judges and the Department of Justice had had enough, he always returned to the provocative idea of sheriff supremacy. After a federal judge ruled that Arpaio lacked authority under state law or federal law to detain undocumented migrants, he simply flouted judicial orders and ignored his attorney’s advice because he disagreed with the judge’s interpretation of the Constitution. “I will continue to enforce illegal immigration laws,” he brazenly announced. Arpaio declared that he would “never give in to control by the federal government” and would not “back down.” He even came up with a secret backup plan to turn over captured migrants to Border Patrol instead of ICE to evade a judge’s orders to cease and desist immigration enforcement.

Trump’s pardon of Arpaio didn’t just let the sheriff off the hook; it short-circuited the part of the American judicial process designed to hold government accountable, and resolve conflicts between levels of government. It began when a class-action lawsuit was filed in 2007 by individuals who claimed they had been racially profiled during Arpaio’s immigration raids and traffic stops. In 2012, the DOJ intervened in the case to vindicate federal interests in ending discriminatory policing, to stop Arpaio from retaliating against his critics in violation of the First Amendment, and to ensure that non-English detainees didn’t forfeit their rights without understanding them. Arpaio lost the first case and settled with DOJ, but was held in civil contempt of court for continuing to capture migrants without legal authority and for failing to turn over records of these encounters.

Acting on a referral from the federal judge overseeing the case, the DOJ eventually sought to hold Arpaio accountable for criminal contempt after Arpaio’s recalcitrance continued. A second judge tried the case and convicted Arpaio, finding that he had “willfully violated the [earlier] order by failing to do anything to ensure his subordinates' compliance and by directing them to continue to detain persons for whom no criminal charges could be filed.” Trump pardoned Arpaio just days before he was to be sentenced.

During the legal proceedings, Arpaio made the puzzling assertion that he had never violated his oath of office, despite having ignored direct orders from a federal judge. As far as he was concerned, the oath of office gave him the right, indeed even the responsibility, to ignore the federal court. He was merely doing the rightful job of a sheriff, enforcing the laws and Constitution as he saw them, unaccountable to anyone but himself. Now that Arpaio has been pardoned, his place in the pantheon of constitutional sheriffs is secure. And his view of American law and history—one shared by kindred spirits, and one that menaces not just federal law but the Constitution itself—just got a troubling endorsement from the president of the United States.

--

Robert L. Tsai is Professor of Law at American University and author of America’s Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community (Harvard 2014)--

==

==

rational wiki

Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA, for short) is a US Peace Officer group that believes that sheriffs are "the highest executive authority in a county and therefore constitutionally empowered to be able to keep federal agents out of the county".^[1] It promotes this viewpoint as a method of saving the country from tuh overbearin fedrul gubmint. It is unclear how they intend to spread their ideology to states such as Alaska or Connecticut, which lack any office of the sheriff. Their membership consists of a staggering fourteen sheriffs, one county commissioner, and one chief of police, drawn from thirteen states (mostly southern and western). The organization draws much of its philosophy from the similar sovereign citizen and Posse Comitatus movements.

• :{1:(style="text-align:left;display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Richard Mack and Oath Keepers}:
• :{2:(style="text-align:left;display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Legal counsel}:
• :{3:(style="text-align:left;display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{The Convention!}:
• :{4:(style="text-align:left;display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Ferguson, Missouri}:
• :{5:(style="text-align:left;display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{See also}:
• :{6:(style="text-align:left;display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{References}:

Richard Mack and Oath Keepers

Richard Mack, who along with Joe Arpaio founded the Constitutional Sheriffs Association, is one of the founders of the Oath Keepers, a group focusing on police and military personnel which, though it may occasionally reflect slivers of militia ideology, advocates that members lay down arms and nonviolently refuse to comply with orders they view as unconstitutional^[2][3]. It is Mack's view that "[t]he greatest threat we face today is not terrorists; it is our federal government… One of the best and easiest solutions is to depend on local officials, especially the sheriff, to stand against federal intervention and federal criminality."^[4]^

Legal counsel[edit]

They have as legal advisor one Judge Navin-Chandra Naidu, who has worked with many organizations from the Sultanate of Sulu to a Chinese county, and is a member of the American Federation of Television & Radio Artists. Sounds like an interesting guy. His website, "Ecclesiastical Court of Justice and Law Offices,"^[5], has the usual stuff about the country being essentially Christian in nature, and offers advice on how churches can avoid paying tax. In 2001, he was a wanted man, accused in Fiji of forging his law degree,^[6] and his dealings with the Pembina Nation in North Dakota have managed to irk the Anti-Defamation League.

The Convention]

In January of 2012, they invited all sheriffs and deputies in the U.S. to come to their conference in Las Vegas. Several hundred did show, including 8 from Colorado; to a man, they returned making heroic attempts to be respectful while not laughing their collective asses off.^[7] The general opinion of the "liberal"^[8] sheriff of Weld County was something along the lines of "We thought they had some interesting points, but overall we were unable to accept that this is the role of local law enforcement."^[9]^

There was speculation at the convention that this was designed to help support Arizona in the coming months, when the courts rule on the illegality of Arizona's anti-immigration policies.^[10]^

The 2013 convention is to be held at St. Charles, Missouri, May 31 - June 1. Among the speakers scheduled is birther Michael Zullo who will present a program on "Presidential document fraud." ^[11]^

Ferguson, Missouri[edit]

In August 2015, a few armed white men who self-identified as members of Oath Keepers showed up at the Ferguson, Missouri anniversary protests of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. Were they there to protest government overreach in killing unarmed civilians? No, they were there to "protect" someone who worked for Alex Jones' Infowars website.^[12][13]^

See also[edit]

• Joe Arpaio
• Militia movement
• Posse Comitatus
• Sovereign citizen

References[edit]

1. :{:{Jump up}:

↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20120120163425/http://www.cspoa.org/index.php

}:

2. :{:{Jump up}:

↑ Oath Keepers: Orders We Will Not Obey [1]

}:

3. :{:{Jump up}:

↑ "The entire point of Oath Keepers is to advocate nonviolence. We're telling police and soldiers that if they're asked to do something unconstitutional, or asked to violate the rights of Americans, that they should put down their guns. We just saw this with the Tunisian military, by the way, when it refused orders to fire on protesters." - Stewart Rhodes, co-founder, in April 2011 Interview with Reason [2]

}:

4. :{:{Jump up}:

↑ Keller, Larry (August 2009). "The Second Wave: Return of the Militias". A Special Report from the Southern Poverty Law Center

}:

5. :{:{Jump up}:

↑ Ecclesiastical Court of Justice and Law Offices

}:

6. :{:{Jump up}:

↑ http://tvnz.co.nz/content/43438/4042040/article.html

}:

7. :{:{Jump up}:

↑ Denver Post

}:

8. :{:{Jump up}:

↑ Hardly.

}:

9. :{:{Jump up}:

↑ "We have a large group of people in my county who agree with these principles," said Weld County Sheriff John Cook, explaining why he attended the conference. "I agree with a lot of it. But I don't advocate, obviously, violence against other law enforcement offices." [3]

}:

10. :{:{Jump up}:

↑ From a personal conversation between a RationalWiki editor and a Boulder County deputy sheriff about the convention.

}:

11. :{:{Jump up}:

↑ CSPOA web site [4]

}:

12. :{:{Jump up}:

↑ [Who are the Oath Keepers, and why has the armed group returned to Ferguson?] by Sarah Larimer and Abby Phillip (August 11 at 12:49 PM) The Washington Post.

}:

13. :{:{Jump up}:

↑ [In Ferguson, protesters challenge state of emergency] by Abby Phillip, Mark Berman and William Wan (August 11 at 12:53 PM) The Washington Post.

}:

Categories: 

• Pseudolaw
• Libertarian wingnuttery

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/the-renegade-sheriffs

on  a Friday afternoon in March, 2013, a sheriff’s sergeant named Jody Hoagland noticed a red Nissan pickup truck drifting off a road. Hoagland was two hours into his shift patrolling Liberty County, Florida, eight hundred square miles of the state’s Panhandle. He had just come from a small shed fire, and was driving through the Apalachicola National Forest, which carpets the southern half of the county in longleaf pines. Two-lane roads meander past grazing cows, Baptist churches (“Good News: Jesus Loves You”), Confederate flags, and roadside stands peddling stink bait. Signs of humankind vanish, save for the solitary roadside mailbox. You live here because you want to be left alone.

Hoagland signalled the truck to pull over. A scruffy bearded man was driving and a blond woman was in the passenger seat. A silver .357 revolver lay between them. Two Chihuahuas barked excitedly. Hoagland asked the man, whose name was Floyd Parrish, to get out of the truck, and noticed a bulge in his right jeans pocket—a Titan .25-calibre handgun, it turned out, with one round in the chamber and the safety off. Parrish didn’t have a permit to carry a concealed weapon. It was easy to get one—all you had to do was take a class and pay a fee. Hoagland arrested Parrish and drove him to the county jail. Not long afterward, the sheriff, Nick Finch, called.

Finch had been Liberty’s sheriff for less than three months. He first decided to run for the job during a garage sale, after a customer locked her keys in her car and Finch called the sheriff’s office for help. There was only one deputy on the road, he was told, and the deputy was tied up in a funeral procession. Finch, who was raised on a farm in Iowa, had spent close to two decades in the Army and in the Air Force Reserve, so he was fluent in the language of God and country. White-haired and blue-eyed, with a meaty build, he was appealing to voters, and was helped by the fact that his wife’s family had lived in the area for generations.

Liberty County, with eighty-seven hundred residents, is the state’s second least populous. It is whiter, poorer, and less well educated than Florida as a whole. Timber has long been the chief industry, though the federal government has slowed logging in recent decades to protect the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker. One local told me, “The saying goes, ‘In Liberty County, if you run out of toilet tissue try a woodpecker.’ ” A number of side roads bear the names of residents; when I visited recently, I drove down Jimmy Lee Drive and ran into the actual Jimmy Lee. The closest thing to a community history, “The Heritage of Liberty County, Florida,” has entries on the region’s tupelo honey; homecoming queens; and worm grunting, or coaxing worms out of the earth with a wooden stake and a metal strip. Several pages are devoted to a theory that the Apalachicola River’s east bank was the original Garden of Eden.

Liberty’s sheriff and his dozen or so deputies are the only law-enforcement agents in the county. As in much of rural America, the sheriff is far more than an administrator. He’s an aspirational figure and a moral touchstone. Eddie Joe White, the current sheriff, told me, “There’s no way to define the parameters of sheriff. From one day to the next, you’re a fireman, you’re a paramedic, you’re a grief counsellor. You can’t back away from any responsibility and say it’s not your job, because, as sheriff, you are responsible for everything as it deals with humanity.”

Finch won the election on his second try, in 2012, just after his fiftieth birthday. Before taking office, he went online to research his new position. Finch is conservative, and the sites he visited argued that the sheriff, in his county, is more powerful than the President. That argument was consistent with the beliefs of Finch’s law-enforcement hero, Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff who last year was convicted of defying a court order to stop the racial profiling of Latinos. “I like Joe, because Joe’s a lot like me,” Finch told me. “He doesn’t take shit from nobody. He knows what his role is, and come hell or high water, he was going to do what he thought was right.” On Facebook, Finch posted a Breitbart story, about a sheriff named Denny Peyman, headlined “Kentucky Sheriff to Obama: No Gun Control in My County.”

There are roughly three thousand sheriffs in America, in forty-seven states. Arpaio and Peyman are among the dozens aligned with the “constitutional sheriffs” movement. Another is David A. Clarke, Jr., the cowboy-hatted Wisconsin firebrand who considered joining the Department of Homeland Security. (He now works at America First Action, a pro-Trump political-action committee.) There are even more followers of constitutional policing across America among law enforcement’s rank and file. One group, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, or C.S.P.O.A., claims about five thousand members.

C.S.P.O.A. members believe that the sheriff has the final say on a law’s constitutionality in his county. Every law-enforcement officer has some leeway in choosing which laws to enforce, which is why it’s rare to get a ticket for jaywalking, for example. But, under this philosophy, the supremacy clause of the Constitution, which dictates that federal law takes precedence over state law, is irrelevant. So is the Supreme Court. “They get up every morning and put their clothes on the same way you and I do,” Finch told me. “Why do those nine people get to decide what the rest of the country’s going to be like?” To the most dogmatic, there’s only one way to interpret the country’s founding documents: pro-gun, anti-immigrant, anti-regulation, anti-Washington

Finch was on the way to Dirty Dick’s Crab House with his wife when he started getting calls about the arrest. (If you are a rural sheriff, everyone has your cell-phone number.) After speaking with Hoagland, he drove to the county jail, where Parrish, a former logger, told his version of the arrest. He and his partner, Sherry Chumney, lived in a wooden house on forty acres of land, a half mile down a dirt road, past a barricade of tangled brush and two “No Trespassing” signs. Parrish carried the .357 revolver in case he came across an unfriendly panther or bear. He carried his small gun because he had a chronic lung disease; if he felt woozy, he fired it, and Chumney rushed over with his inhaler. That afternoon, Parrish said, he had driven to his brother’s place and forgotten that the small gun was in his pocket.

Finch listened to the story, and then told him, “Fortunately for you, young man, I’m a believer in the Second Amendment.” He let Parrish go, a practice that people in Liberty call getting “unarrested.”

Since its inception, in ninth-century England—when the sheriff was called the shire reeve, or county guardian—the office has been a kind of one-man government. The first sheriffs were appointed by the king, and charged with collecting taxes, investigating deaths, and commanding the posse comitatus, a gang of locals dispatched to hunt fugitives. (In Latin, the term means “the force of the county.”) The British brought the idea with them to America, where the office took on the characteristics of its new home. In 1652, when Virginia’s royal governor told each county to choose a sheriff, Northampton County let its voters decide.

Nearly every American county still has an elected sheriff. Over time, cities established police forces, which diminished the office’s power in the densely populated Northeast. (In 2000, Connecticut eliminated the post entirely.) But in the South and in the West, where many counties are far larger than in Eastern states, the sheriff ties together isolated communities. He is Andy Taylor, from “The Andy Griffith Show,” and Little Bill Daggett, from “Unforgiven.” Southerners call him the “high sheriff.” Almost every American sheriff is a white man. He’s more likely to come from the place he serves than a police chief is, and his deputies are intimately involved in everyday life. Casey LaFrance, an associate professor at Western Illinois University who studies law enforcement, told me, “The sheriff’s the one that’s going to tell me I’m getting divorced if I don’t know it, or tell me I have eight days to leave my house.”

In most states, including Florida, the sheriff’s office is written into the state constitution. Once a sheriff is elected, he can usually be removed only by a governor or by the voters. His average tenure is twenty-four years. “Once you become the sheriff, you’re likely to remain the sheriff until you retire or die,” LaFrance said. This gives sheriffs wide latitude to shape how the law is enforced. According to research by the political scientists Mirya Holman and Emily Farris, sheriffs who believe myths about abused women—for instance, that they can easily leave their abusers—are less likely to demand the mandatory arrest of domestic-violence suspects. Similarly, sheriffs critical of immigrants are more likely to order deputies to check a driver’s immigration status during a routine traffic stop. Holman, an associate professor at Tulane University, said that many sheriffs believe, “I’m this independent man that has control over this, and no one can tell me what to do.”

In the formation of this Constitutional Republic, the county was—and remains the seat of power for the People. The county Sheriff is the only legal law enforcement officer in the united states of america! The Sheriff can mobilize all men between the ages of 18 and 45 who are in good health and not inthe Federal military service. Others can volunteer, women included. This body of citizens is the sheriff’s posse. All of them serve when called by the Sheriff. The title of this body is posse comitatus.The idea of a constitutional sheriff emerged in the nineteen-seventies, in California. It was first proposed by William Potter Gale, who had been an aide to General Douglas MacArthur. According to Daniel Levitas’s book, “The Terrorist Next Door,” Gale embraced a belief system called Christian Identity, and, as a self-styled minister, preached that the Constitution was a divinely inspired document intended to elevate whites above Jews and racial minorities. From his Ministry of Christ Church, outside Yosemite National Park, where he sermonized in front of a giant Confederate flag, Gale produced a newsletter, “identity,” its name reflecting his ideology and his fondness for unnecessary capitalization. In 1971, he mailed Vol. 6, No. 1, to his flock. Its featured story, written by Gale, appeared under the byline of Colonel Ben Cameron, a character in the film “The Birth of a Nation” who helps found the Ku Klux Klan. Gale railed against civil-rights laws, the income tax, the United Nations, and the showering of tax dollars on foreign allies. He believed that a conservative posse comitatus offered a solution:

Gale was writing not long after Bull Connor, the public-safety commissioner in Birmingham, Alabama, had turned dogs and fire hoses on nonviolent protesters. His innovation was to wrap his rants in constitutionalism and legalese, a tactic intended to make them sound legitimate. Michael Barkun, who has written extensively about the radical right, told me that Gale’s message was, “We know what the law really means. It’s all those lawyers who have erected a kind of apparatus of deception.”

By the early nineteen-eighties, Gale’s dogma, in the form of the Posse Comitatus movement, had taken hold in the Midwestern farm belt, which was reeling from a foreclosure crisis.A sympathizer who ran Cattle Country Broadcasting, in Dodge City, Kansas, played Gale’s screeds nightly. “The law is that your citizens—a posse—will hang an official who violated the law and the Constitution,” Gale said in the summer of 1982. “Take him to the most populated intersection of the township and at noon hang him by the neck.” Posses had formed in nearly half the country. Some convened their own “common law” grand juries and “indicted” officials for ostensibly failing to uphold their oaths of office. A few turned violent. Posse members assaulted an I.R.S. agent in Wisconsin, tried to “arrest” a cop in Idaho, and nearly provoked a shoot-out in a California tomato field.

The movement’s violent side was eventually its downfall. In 1983, authorities in North Dakota tried to arrest a Posse acolyte named Gordon Kahl, a mechanic who had violated probation in a tax-evasion case, and two U.S. marshals died in the ensuing standoff. Kahl went into hiding for four months, and then was killed in a second gun battle, in Arkansas, along with a local sheriff. Although some Posse members rebranded themselves Christian Patriots, it was too late. A few years later, Gale was convicted of mailing death threats to a judge and to I.R.S. agents. When he died, in 1988, the movement was fading from prominence. His vision of sheriff supremacy, however, persisted.

After Sheriff Finch released Floyd Parrish, Sergeant Hoagland couldn’t let the incident go. “The more I just sat there and stewed on it, steamed on it, it just ate away at me,” Hoagland told me. He had no problem with guns; he hunted gators, deer, turkeys, and squirrels. But he suspected that Finch was doing a political favor. Hoagland wasn’t the only deputy suspicious of Finch. The sheriff’s experience was mostly in the military and in state agencies, not in small-town policing. When I met Mark Mallory, a former lieutenant at the office, he handed me paperwork from four incidents that he believed Finch had mishandled. Other former deputies recalled a botched attempted arrest in which Finch told the man detained, “I’m fucking God in this county.” (Finch told me that he didn’t remember the incident, and added, “I’m a Christian, and I would never compare myself to God.”)

Hoagland started looking for another job, and two months after the Parrish incident a nearby fire department offered him full-time work. On his last day at the sheriff’s office, Hoagland called an inspector at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, a state agency that investigates misconduct by public officials. Three days later, he travelled to F.D.L.E. headquarters, in Tallahassee, for a taped interview. He told inspectors that he had kept a copy of the paperwork from Parrish’s arrest but that when Tim Partridge, another deputy, went to retrieve the jail copy it was missing. Partridge also checked the logbook for Parrish’s name, and found that someone had whited it out.

Eleven days later, a friend tipped Finch off that his arrest was imminent. Finch, who was at the sheriff’s office, went home and changed into a blue shirt and jeans so that reporters couldn’t take an arrest photo of him in uniform. When he got back to the office, F.D.L.E. officials were waiting for him. An inspector read him Executive Order 13-140, in which Rick Scott, the Republican governor, suspended him from office. “I thought, This is crazy. I haven’t done anything wrong,” Finch told me. The headline in the Calhoun-Liberty Journalread “Sheriff Arrested for Official Misconduct.” In the next issue, the paper listed him in the police blotter alongside men arrested on suspicion of domestic battery and armed robbery.

Shortly after the arrest, Finch got a phone call from Richard Mack, who had followed news of the arrest from his Arizona home. Mack said that he was the founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. In Finch, he saw a fellow-patriot, and he wanted to help.

One day last fall, Mack bounded to the front of a school lecture hall in suburban Phoenix. At sixty-four, he has dark hair and a grandfatherly charm. The night before, I’d met him at a mall where, for exercise, he likes to ascend the descending escalators. This morning, he was proselytizing to about three dozen people at his group’s Oath of Office Training, one of several workshops that it puts on across the country each year.

The workshop was held in a white room draped with six American flags and a canary-yellow Gadsden flag, reading “DON’T TREAD ON ME,” which was a mainstay of Trump and Tea Party rallies. “We have a moral responsibility to obey just laws, and we have a moral responsibility not to obey unjust laws,” Mack told the audience of mostly older white men, echoing Martin Luther King, Jr. “Who decides? The person who takes the oath decides.” There were murmurs of approval.

The crowd was a cross-section of today’s anti-government right: a retired male cop fed up with “Antifa nonsense,” a retired female cop concerned about “the jihadi threat,” an elderly couple afraid of “the conspiracy to put us into world governance.” Another man told me that the world is controlled by the Vatican, the District of Columbia, and the Queen of England, then handed me seven stapled pieces of paper and promised, “It’s gonna make your eyes fall out of your head.” It was an indictment issued by a common-law grand jury, one of William Potter Gale’s innovations.

In the eighties and nineties, Mack served two terms as the sheriff of Graham County, Arizona. One of his influences was the Salt Lake City police chief and author W. Cleon Skousen,who believed that the Founders were God’s disciples and the Constitution a Christian document. As a young officer, Mack had attended one of Skousen’s workshops. “That man spoke with the power of angels,” he told me.

...In 1994, Mack and a Montana sheriff named Jay Printz sued the federal government over a provision of the Brady Bill, a gun-control measure that would have temporarily required sheriffs to run background checks on gun buyers. As the case worked its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, Mack became a hero of the burgeoning militia movement, a collection of anti-government paramilitary groups that descended from Posse ideology. His status was bolstered after the Court ruled in the sheriffs’ favor, in Printz v. United States, in 1997. Each person at the Arizona workshop received a booklet dissecting the case, which, on the cover, had been renamed “Mack/Printz v. USA.”

As the decade wore on, the militia movement lost momentum, and Mack’s speaking gigs dried up. He worked as the public-relations director of Gun Owners of America, the N.R.A.’s more strident cousin. He also sold cars, ran for the U.S. Senate as a Libertarian, and was a contestant on the sole season of the Showtime reality series “American Candidate.” Disgruntlement with the Presidency of Barack Obama, and the dismal economy of the late aughts, helped revive anti-government fervor, and, along with it, Mack’s influence. In 2009, he self-published “The County Sheriff: America’s Last Hope,” a fifty-page manifesto with a sheriff’s star on the front and an endorsement from Arpaio on the back. “There is a man who can stop the abuse, end the tyranny, and restore the Constitution, once again, as the supreme law of the land,” he writes. “Yes, it is you sheriff!” Mack said that he sold a hundred thousand copies of the book.

By this time, sheriff supremacy had cross-pollinated with other kinds of right-wing thought,resulting, for example, in the county-supremacy movement, in which dozens of counties adopted ordinances claiming control over federal land. Each repackaging of the idea helped to slightly shift the broader public’s perception of what constitutes normal governance. This is how fringe ideas work. In a recent study published in the journal Political Behavior, participants were given a list of ways to address a divisive policy issue, such as immigration. Participants whose lists included either radically conservative positions (ban immigrants entirely) or radically liberal positions (accept all immigrants) were more likely to recalibrate their view of what the centrist stance was. Matthew N. Lyons, the author of the upcoming book “Insurgent Supremacists,” told me that this is how the extreme right wields power without holding office. “Their notion of political change is based on shifting the parameters of the political culture as a precondition for transforming institutions,” he said.

When Mack launched the C.S.P.O.A., around 2010, he described it as “the army to set our nation free.” He recruited supporters, in part, by playing to sheriffs’ Second Amendment ardor. (In Holman and Farris’s survey of sheriffs, ninety-five per cent said that defending gun rights was more important than restricting access to firearms.) After the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, and the subsequent push in Washington for gun control, Mack published a list that eventually included almost five hundred sheriffs who, in his words, “have vowed to uphold and defend the Constitution against Obama’s unconstitutional gun control measures.” (Several sheriffs later said that Mack had added them without their knowledge.) One Tennessee sheriff told the Southern Poverty Law Center, “If you come in here trying to take up the guns, it’s not going to be a nice day for somebody.”

Mack told me that he has spoken at more than a hundred and twenty-five rallies. Many supporters were also Skousenites, because the conservative commentator Glenn Beck routinely touted Skousen’s books. At C.S.P.O.A. workshops, everyone gets a Mad Libs-style workbook based on Skousen’s “The Making of America.” Speakers emphasize the Second Amendment, the Fourth (searches and seizures), and the Tenth (states’ rights). They portray officers as arbiters of morality and justice.

Mack personally disavows discrimination and infuses his lectures with the language of the civil-rights era. He likes to say, “We should have never heard of Rosa Parks,” explaining that a constitutional sheriff wouldn’t have arrested her. Yet, according to his ideology, a sheriff could, for example, reject the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship and rights to former slaves. (Mack described such a scenario as a “hypothetical,” and said, “I don’t do hypotheticals. I deal with what’s real.”) A speaker at one C.S.P.O.A. event I attended, an attorney, encouraged us to memorize the chorus of a song he’d written: No matter what they told you all

Courts and judges cannot make law

The case law method has a fatal flaw

Because courts cannot make law.

Mack brought Finch’s case to the attention of the conservative media. Within days of Finch’s arrest, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was floating the notion on his Web site, Infowars, that the case was an example of political persecution. An Infowars contributor said that Finch had won office as a nonpartisan candidate, “which to me is probably why you had a Republican governor sic his minions on this constitutional-following sheriff, because he owes his allegiance to no one.” Soon Mack called into the Infowars talk show and raised the possibility that Finch’s suspension was the result of an attempted coup. “That’s very common, to have enemies within,” he said.

Amid the flurry of coverage, a radio host named Burnie Thompson invited Finch on his afternoon show, on Talk Radio 101. Thompson prided himself on his independent thinking. “I’m not one of these—what do they call them?—whatever, these fringe groups,” Thompson told me. “I’m a pretty mainstream guy. I’m an Air Force captain. I got a master’s in journalism.” Still, he was impressed by Finch’s certainty that he’d done nothing wrong. After the interview, he read Mack’s book about constitutional sheriffs and became a convert. During the next few months, he interviewed Finch around a dozen times, helped him raise money for his defense, and asked a listener to record a song about the case to the tune of Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff,” replacing “shot” with “saved.”

Thompson told me that, in a bid to get Finch’s case thrown out, he had met with Governor Scott and his general counsel, Peter Antonacci. Thompson shared a theory with them, gleaned in part from Mack’s book, that a sheriff can do whatever he wants in his own jail. Antonacci repeatedly told him that there was no legal precedent for this theory. “I’m thinking, His chief counsel believes that?” Thompson said. “You know that feeling when you go, ‘Oh, my God, the world’s not what I thought it was’?” (Neither Antonacci nor Scott’s office responded to multiple requests for comment.)

In addition to official misconduct, a third-degree felony, Finch was charged with falsifying public records, a misdemeanor. Jack Campbell, the prosecutor in the case, told me, “To me, it was always a public-records case. If you want to stop enforcing a law, O.K., I guess you can. You can fire all your deputies and just sit over there in your office all day, if that’s what you want to do.” He continued, “But you’re the sheriff: you can’t hide and not tell people what you’re doing.”

Finch’s trial started just before Halloween. By then, his Facebook page had more likes than there are residents in Liberty County, and his defense fund had raised almost fifteen thousand dollars. “Somebody even sent me money from Australia,” Finch told me. There had been three rallies in three towns, the last in front of the Liberty County courthouse. More than a hundred people, some in American-flag shirts or scarves, strung up a Gadsden flag, set out lawn chairs and coolers, and waved signs: “When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty”; “Protect our Constitution”; “Nick Finch, the people’s sheriff.” One woman had strung a container of Bic Cover-it correction fluid around her neck, a nod to how Floyd Parrish’s name had vanished from the jail records.

On the day Finch testified, the mood in the Liberty courthouse was as electric as the opening night of a play. Mack had flown in from Arizona. Reporters came from Tallahassee. Finch wore a dark jacket, a blue dotted tie, and beige slacks. On his right lapel was a tiny American-flag pin. “Sheriff Finch,” Campbell said, “do you think you’re above the law? ...“No, sir.”

“Do you think your judgment trumps everybody else’s in the court system?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Do you believe that you had the authority as a constitutional sheriff to do away with this case, on your own authority?” Campbell asked.

“Absolutely,” Finch replied.

The case against Finch was mostly circumstantial. The jailer who’d been on duty that night testified that the sheriff walked out of the building with Parrish’s file. “Now, whether it’s under his bed at the house, or it’s out in the woods, or it’s in the shredder in a burn pit, it doesn’t make a hell of a difference. It’s not where it belongs,” Campbell told the jury. No one admitted to whiting out Parrish’s name in the jail records, though investigators had a lab analyze the splotches, which proved that someone had. “The fact is,” Campbell argued, “that the sheriff told this jury that he believes that his discretion allows him to decide which laws he’s going to follow and which laws he’s not. Ladies and gentlemen, if he’s going to break the law concerning carry-and-conceal firearms, how are we to believe that he won’t break the one for perjury in this trial?”

The jury deliberated for about an hour, and found Finch not guilty on both counts. Finch hugged everyone within reach, made a few remarks to the TV scrum outside the courthouse, and then called Alex Jones, who told his audience, “He needs to be the next governor—I’m telling you right now—of Florida. It’s these type of men that stand up for the Constitution that are going to save this country.”

Finch, reinstated, sued the county for attorneys’ fees and won about a hundred and sixty thousand dollars. The rest of his term was less triumphant. He fought with county commissioners over his budget. Three female employees sued him—two alleging gender discrimination in the department and one that he had sexually harassed her. Finch settled with all three. Trump’s emergence as a Presidential front-runner was a rare bright spot for Finch, who said he was among the first sheriffs in Florida to endorse him. Finch got to meet the future President at a rally in Tampa. “You know what?” he told me. “I look at Trump and I see myself. Because this guy is getting the shit beat out of him from Day One.”

Finch ran for reëlection in 2016. His chief opponent was Eddie Joe White, who was related to three previous Liberty County sheriffs, including one who was shot and killed in the line of duty in 1919. White chose a pointed campaign slogan: “It’s time we restore the trust.” Finch’s ads touted him as “Your Constitutional Sheriff,” but he and his wife, the Liberty County native, had divorced, and he knew this would count against him. Late one night about a month and a half before the election, Floyd Parrish and an acquaintance got into an argument. According to Parrish, the man, drunk and threatening, lunged at him, and he had no choice but to shoot. The man died. A deputy called Finch in the middle of the night to relay the news. Finch told me he thought, “Jesus. I’m done. There’s the election.” He lost the sheriff’s race, earning only six per cent of the vote.

For the constitutional-sheriffs movement, however, Finch’s defeat didn’t matter. The C.S.P.O.A. named him Sheriff of the Year in 2014, and Mack mentioned the trial in his book “Are You a David?” (The government is Goliath.) The movement’s ideas have now spread far beyond a few renegade sheriffs. In Nevada, for example, members of the Bundy family have emerged as leaders of a movement to wrest control of public lands from Washington. During an armed standoff on the ranch of the family patriarch, Cliven Bundy, which drew anti-government crowds from around the country, including several constitutional sheriffs, Bundy demanded that his local sheriff disarm federal authorities. The sheriff refused. Earlier this year, after charges against Bundy related to the standoff were dismissed, Bundy said to a TV reporter, “I think we’re going to protest the county sheriff: ‘Why didn’t you do your job?’ ”

In 2015, a Nevada lawmaker introduced a bill to give sheriffs veto power over some federal law-enforcement activities. Last year, in Washington, D.C., Jason Chaffetz, at that time a U.S. representative from Utah, introduced a bill that would, in practice, transfer law-enforcement responsibilities to sheriffs on certain public lands. Soon after Trump took office, he met with representatives of the National Sheriffs’ Association, including a sheriff from Pennsylvania who had served on C.S.P.O.A.’s advisory council, and one from North Carolina who had ties to the group. That summer, Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, who is now running for the U.S. Senate in Arizona. A few years back, when Mack visited D.C. to decry the Obama Administration’s immigration measures, only three lawmakers met with him. One was Jeff Sessions, now the Attorney General. Ryan Lenz, a senior investigative reporter at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me that “the migration of these ideas to the mainstream primed the election for Trump.” Trump’s election, in turn, “finalized the migration.”

I met Finch one night in December at a McDonald’s in Blountstown, Florida. We sat at a table near the window, the restaurant wreathed for the holiday. Finch was working as a long-haul trucker and had just finished a trip to South Carolina. He wore a Harley-Davidson T-shirt and a “Thin Blue Line” baseball cap; its insignia, an American flag with a single blue stripe, honors police. He recounted his time as sheriff, and when he got to the trial he stopped and shook his head. Occasionally, he strayed into national politics, asking, “How in the hell does Hillary Clinton get to lie, cheat, steal, and probably kill, and nobody cares?” As we talked, a former deputy stopped at our table and said, “What’s going on, Sheriff?” Finch responded with a pained smile.

Finch remains a powerful symbol for constitutional sheriffs. The day after Trump’s Inauguration, under a gray, drizzling sky, I drove to an Embassy Suites near the Baltimore airport for a C.S.P.O.A. training workshop. While I waited at a table in the lobby for my packet—and my black-and-gold lanyard that said I was part of the “posse”—a group of pink pussy-hatted women passed by, on their way to the Women’s March in Washington. In a conference room, the C.S.P.O.A. audience flipped through their “Making of America” booklets. Mack wasn’t there, but, via a video monitor, he introduced Finch as a sheriff whose “strong stand for freedom” had cost him his badge. Finch stood up, put his hand over his heart, and led the room in the Pledge of Allegiance. ♦

Reporting for this piece was supported by a grant from the Reporting Award at N.Y.U.’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

This article appears in the print edition of the April 30, 2018, issue, with the headline “Lone Stars.”

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stub

Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) is a political organization of local police officials in the United States who believe in an interpretation of the United States Constitution wherein federal and state government authorities are subordinate to local government authority. In this regard, the CSPOA is an outgrowth of the Patriot movement and has some ideological similarities with the Sovereign Citizen Movement, although they are by no means identical.^[1] An article by the Intelligence Report of the Southern Poverty Law Center states that "... the real root of the 'county supremacy' movement that has been explicitly embraced by the CSPOA is the Posse Comitatus, a racist and anti-Semitic group of the 1970s and 1980s that also defined the county sheriff as the highest 'legitimate' law enforcement authority in the country. . . ." and continues to identify several county sheriffs who are in sympathy with the stated goals of the CSPOA.^[2]^

References

1. ^ Rothschild, Mike - What this Sheriff said on Twitter is part of a dangerous trend, Attn.com (Oct. 15, 2016).
2. ^ Potok, Mark and Lenz, Ryan, Line in the Sand, Intelligence Report of the Southern Poverty Law Center (Jun. 13, 2016).

External links

• Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association
• "The Renegade Sheriffs

===

https://www.splcenter.org/news/2016/08/03/intelligence-report-constitutional-sheriffs-movement-spreads-promotes-defiance-federal-laws

august 03, 2016

A movement made up of sheriffs claiming to be the highest law enforcement authority in the country is growing nationwide as it exploits hot-button issues such as gun control to encourage sheriffs to defy federal laws they don’t like, according to the Summer 2016 issue of the SPLC’s Intelligence Report, released today.

The cover story, “Line in the Sand,” details the growth of this radical ideology since 2009. The movement, formed around an organization called the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), is a phenomenon rarely, if ever, seen in the United States – a concerted, long-term effort to recruit law enforcement officers into the antigovernment “Patriot” movement.

The Intelligence Report interviewed dozens of sheriffs who appeared on a list, compiled by the CSPOA, of almost 500 sheriffs who purportedly had “vowed to uphold and defend the Constitution against Obama’s unconstitutional gun measures.” Overall, it appears the movement is successfully exploiting concerns about gun, environmental and land-use regulations to bring law enforcement officers into the fold.“The phenomenon of the ‘constitutional sheriffs’ movement is deeply troubling and problematic,” said Mark Potok, senior fellow at the SPLC and editor of the Intelligence Report. “These men and women are being told by extremist leaders that they have the right to decide what laws they want to enforce and can keep federal law enforcement agents out of their counties. That is utterly untrue, the very opposite of constitutional, and it in fact encourages sheriffs and their deputies to defy the law of the land.”

The report notes that the organizing of these sheriffs is occurring against the backdrop of the larger militia movement and the occupation at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon early this year by antigovernment extremists.

The threat of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement is also examined in a training DVD included in the law enforcement edition of this issue of the Intelligence Report. The video, a short film designed to be shown at roll call, focuses on the rising threat of antigovernment extremists, especially in the wake of the occupation in Oregon and a related 2014 armed standoff with law enforcement officials in Nevada.

Also in this issue of the Intelligence Report:

• “White Lives Matter” is a look at a counter-movement to Black Lives Matter that has been built by radical-right activists. The project, which has become increasingly popular among neo-Nazis and other white supremacists, appears to be largely the work of a 40-year-old woman in Tennessee.
• “Hate in the Race” is a month-by-month examination of the political vitriol and extremism that has characterized the presidential race since last summer – a deluge of extremist rhetoric coming primarily from Donald Trump.
• “670 Days” reflects on the nearly two years between Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s first armed standoff with the federal government and his arrest in February – a period that saw the antigovernment movement grow by leaps and bounds, in part because of Bundy’s apparent imperviousness to arrest.

==

...Sex Offenders with Guns and Badges

There already exist, in America today, precedents for such a vision. One is inMaricopa County, Arizona, where County Sheriff Joe Arpaio commands a semi-private army of thousands of deputized volunteers that constitute his “posse”.

In 2012 a local CBS affiiate’s investigation showed that some of Arpaio’s deputees – who “wear uniforms, have badges, drive county vehicles” and even carry guns – also had criminal records that included,

“arrests for assault, drug possession, domestic violence, sex crimes against children, disorderly conduct, impersonating an officer – and the list goes on.”

Another example, from May 2016, is equally menacing. “Latinos and Democrats hide in safe houses as right-wing sheriff uses mob rule to take over Texas town“, read the title of one liberal media account of alleged political repression under the County Sheriff of Edwards County, Texas – a sheriff who belongs to the Christian right, anti-federal sheriffs group the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA).

One leader associated with CSPOA is Larry Pratt, founder and head of Gun Owners of America (GOA). Before founding CSPOA, former County Sheriff Richard Mack served as a lobbyist for Pratt’s organization.

Pratt was profiled in a July 14, 2014 story in Rolling Stone magazine, by journalist Alexander Zaitchik, that noted Pratt’s enthusiasm for the early 1980s efforts of Guatemala’s “Civil Defense Patrols”. Describes Zaitchik,

“It was during his involvement in Central American policy and supporting counterinsurgencies around the world that Pratt made multiple trips to Guatemala to observe rural “Civil Defense Patrols.” Contemporary human rights observers (and two subsequent Truth Commissions) consider them “death squads” for their role in killing and torturing civilians. But Pratt found much to admire. He combined observations from these visits with similarly impressed notes on the Civilian Home Defense Forces, vigilante patrols in Ferdinand Marcos’ Philippines, for a slim book published by the Gun Owners Foundation in 1990, Armed People Victorious. In it, he praises the leadership of Efrain Rios Montt, the country’s military leader during 1982 and 1983 who greatly expanded the civil defense patrols. Twenty years later, Guatemalan judges would find Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. One Amnesty International Report from Montt’s tenure detailed massacres in 60 Indian villages over a three-month period, leaving more than 2,500 dead. As late as 2001, Pratt was publically praising Montt as a “powerful Christian leader.”

In his final chapter of Armed People Victorious, Pratt enthused,

“The War on Drugs can be won the same way the guerilla insurgencies were pushed back in Guatemala and the Philippines… The history of the United States for years before and after the founding of the Republic was the history of an armed people with functioning militias involved in civil defense… While the United States has forgotten its successes in this area, other countries have rediscovered them. It is time that the United States return to reliance on an armed people. There is no acceptable alternative.”

Pratt’s vision is mirrored in William Lind’s 2014 novel Victoria, in which crime is vanquished when the triumphant white militia groups institute the summary execution of accused criminals. Lind specifically notes that those executed criminals are black.

In a series of columns he wrote in 2005 following a “symposium on modern war” William Lind attended during which participants sought to answer the question, “what might a state armed service designed for 4GW look like”, Lind expanded on the government-backed militia idea that he and Weyrich would later embed in The Next Conservatism:

The militias, perhaps under guidance of county sheriffs, would be government financed and report to national government at some level. Attendees considered Congress, rather than the chief executive, to be the best form of oversight – because an unscrupulous president might abuse such power. Explained Lind, in an August 24, 2005 column (one of 50 Lind columns in this PDF file),

“the militia we are talking about is a public, not a private militia. It is funded by government, and it reports to government (it is adcon to Congress and, unless mobilized, opcon to the county sheriff). Our working group thought it was important to keep the militia away from the federal executive branch as much as possible, because the executive branch will try either to destroy it or to turn it into a tool for Big Brother. But this militia is not just a bunch of guys running around in the woods. It is a state armed service, just like the four we now have — the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps and the Coast Guard.”

In March 2016, Donald Trump’s son Donald Trump, Jr. made direct contact with one of the leaders of CSPOA, a national organization of potentially renegade U.S. county sheriffs pledged to disregard and even oppose federal laws and authority they deem unconstitutional — which has ties both to militia groups across the nation, other far-right anti-federal national groups such as the Oath Keepers, racist political parties, Southern white nationalist groups, and radical gun owners groups.

Trump the 4GW Street Fighter

While Trump’s various positions track those in Lind’s book with considerable precision, his campaign tactics evoke William Lind’s 4GW, Fourth Generation warfare, tactics as well.

In 2015, Donald Trump entered the Republican primary race as an insurgent, with negligible support from the Republican Party. Elite pundits were nearly unanimous – Trump’s presidential bid was a national joke. One year later no one was laughing.

He gained extensive Internet exposure via big far right Internet venues such as the Drudge Report, and mainstream media dominance by ceaselessly attacking “political correctness” and violating established or unwritten norms of expected presidential behaviors. That, in turn served both to grow Trump’s populist support base and make him ubiquitous on the big TV networks in a way no other candidate was able to match.

And, he engaged in asymmetrical combat by going after his opponent’s weaknesses— and in a wholly unexpected manner that radically violated established Republican etiquette and convention.

The Next Conservatism takes it for granted that big money has almost irreparably corrupted both the Republican and Democratic political parties, and offers some solutions that would appeal widely across the political spectrum.

In a fashion that’s quite counterintuitive, Trump trounced his primary opponents, and gained Republican Party support, in part by attacking both as part of a political system corrupted by big money.

A key part of 4GW strategy involves the need to publicly delegitimize one’s opponents. During the first Republican primary debate, Trump launched a devastating attack on the legitimacy of his Republican opponents by pointing out that as a businessman he had long practiced giving money to politicians, both Democrats and Republicans – including many of Trump’s debate opponents – to buy access and favors.

In a prior interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump said, of such politicians, “When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.” Asked during the debate about the statement, Trump doubled down with,

“You’d better believe it. If I ask them, if I need them — you know, most of the people on this stage I’ve given to, just so you understand, a lot of money.”

Trump’s Republican primary opponents onstage, prominent current and former governors and sitting U.S. Senators did not dispute that this was how things worked, and did not deny that they were among the politicians whom people like Trump bought and sold. He reiterated the indictment with,

“I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them, and they are there for me.”

Trump concluded, “And that’s a broken system.” In one swift and decisive blow, he had reduced his Republican rivals to supplicants – spineless bought-and-paid for minions and courtiers of a corrupt status quo.

On page 29 of The Next Conservatism, Lind and Weyrich are scathing,

‘Truth be told, most Washington Republicans do not hold any core beliefs… Their only goals are to have a successful career as a professional politician and leave Washington rich. These courtiers’ attitude toward the “little people,” those who are not writing them $1,000 checks, is “I’m all right, Jack, I’ve got mine.” ‘

Economic Populism

..

===

===

Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association: Home

https://cspoa.org/

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Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_Sheriffs_and_Peace_Officers_Association

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Intelligence Report: 'Constitutional sheriffs' movement spreads ...

https://www.splcenter.org/.../intelligence-report-constitutional-sheriffs-movement-spre...

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Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association - Home ...

https://www.facebook.com › Pages › Other › Community

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The Renegade Sheriffs | The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/the-renegade-sheriffs

Apr 23, 2018 - Long tenures give sheriffs wide latitude to shape how the law is .... the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, or C.S.P.O.A., ...

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Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association - RationalWiki

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Constitutional_Sheriffs_and_Peace_Officers_Association

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The Troubling Sheriffs' Movement That Joe Arpaio Supports - Politico

https://www.politico.com/magazine/.../joe-arpaio-pardon-sheriffs-movement-215566

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Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association | The Marshall ...

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:{The best criminal justice reporting tagged with ":{Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:," curated by The Marshall Project.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Constitutional Sheriffs: The Cops Who Think the Government Is Our ...

https://www.nbcnews.com/.../constitutional-sheriffs-cops-who-think-government-our-...

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:{Apr 18, 2016 - Ex-Sheriff Richard Mack has a plan to roll back gun control, tax laws, and ... heads — the :{Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

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