Look at these colonizers.ProfX wrote: ↑Sun Aug 07, 2022 1:33 pm When Sheriffs Won't Enforce The Law
https://www.npr.org/2019/02/21/69640073 ... ce-the-law
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Songer is one of about a dozen sheriffs, mostly in rural parts of the state, who have come out against the law. Some say they will apply certain measures — for instance, the background checks — but will ignore others. One sheriff said he is not going to arrest a 20-year-old farmer who happens to have a semi-automatic rifle with him on his tractor.
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"Sheriffs standing for freedom have the responsibility to interpose — it's the 'doctrine of interposition' — whenever anybody is trying to diminish or violate the individual rights of our counties," Mack says.
Mack runs an organization called the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which has offered courses in this line of thinking to law enforcement officers. Mack won't disclose the names of sheriffs who have joined the association, so it's hard to gauge his influence.
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Ideologies aside, elected sheriffs have extraordinary freedom to pick and choose which laws to enforce.
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Here’s the Secret “Sheriff Fellowship” Curriculum From the Country’s Most Prominent MAGA Think Tank - Slate
More in link.While the Claremont Institute hosts a variety of other fellowships, the Sheriffs Fellowship is the first program to focus on elected officials who are currently serving. For that reason, information about the fellowship and the program is important for voters who live in counties where these sheriffs run jails, serve warrants, detain individuals at traffic stops, and help federal officials enforce immigration laws. Sheriffs also have a great deal of discretion in important contested legal areas like the enforcement of gun laws, where they are often in charge of issuing permits and confiscating weapons under red flag laws, and in how to handle health orders, including enforcement of anti-COVID-19 measures like mask mandates, business closures, and vaccination policies. At least some of the Claremont sheriffs were recruited because of their resistance to COVID orders from state and federal governments. Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County, California, was specifically praised by the institute for “the courageous stand taken over the past year,” clearly a reference to Bianco having allied himself early in the pandemic with anti-vaxxers and with right-wing anti-abortion advocates in Southern California. Most recently, Bianco accused a Latina Riverside city councilmember, Clarissa Cervantes, of defacing the county courthouse because of her presence at in a pro-choice protest, spurring calls for his resignation. “You are lucky we couldn’t arrest you!” he threatened Cervantes through social media.
Sheriff Kim Cole of Mason County, Michigan, was recruited through Hillsdale College, whose chairman, Pat Sajak, took controversial positions against stay-at-home orders early in the pandemic and was recently photographed with anti-vaxxer Marjorie Taylor Greene. A Claremont program director explained the reason for the invitation in an email to Cole: “In our research on who to extend invitations to we took recommendations from friend [sic] of the institute and organizations but one thing that I know stood out to us about your leadership in these times has been how you courageously stood up to unconstitutional covid mandates.” During the peak of COVID deaths, Cole appeared regularly on Fox News to critique Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home orders and signed a letter promising not to enforce COVID protections that said, in part, “We believe that we are the last line of defense in protecting your civil liberties.”
Some of the sheriffs brought their wives along; they also were awarded a $1,500 honorarium. (According to emails from his office, Bianco turned down the honorarium.) Upon accepting program invitations, sheriffs received a box of books as well as a nearly 300-page packet of readings, largely by Claremont scholars. “Do not be alarmed by the amount of reading,” an email from the organizer warned.
The first day was focused on policing and heavily featured the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald, a lawyer who has written dozens of articles arguing that law enforcement in America does not have an implicit or explicit racism problem. The supplemental readings for this section included articles and books by Mac Donald with titles like War on Cops, The Diversity Delusion, “The Myth of Systemic Police Racism,” and “Black Lies Matter.” One assigned reading included Mac Donald’s argument that Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd may not have been “a product of racial animus at all,” but rather was possibly due to “poor training and an unfit temperament.”
In a different article on Chauvin’s murder conviction—one that didn’t make it into the Claremont materials—Mac Donald argued that Chauvin may have been railroaded, and that his conviction meant that “it is an open question whether any police officer can receive a trial free from mob pressure, should he be prosecuted for use of lethal force.” This is the type of learning the sheriffs would have been likely to experience on Day One, and likely fits with many of their preexisting views. Attendee Sheriff Mike Lewis of Wicomico County, Maryland, has been a longtime outspoken critic of the Black Lives Matter movement and his biography is titled Sheriff Mike Lewis: Constitutional. Uncanceled. (“Sheriff Lewis is at the forefront of important initiatives protecting conservatism and the American way of life against defund the police, identity politics, and cancel culture,” reads the book description.)
Sheriff Brian Hieatt of Tazewell County, Virginia, later echoed Mac Donald when he wrote in a reflection on his time with Claremont scholars, “We are facing movements across our Nation to take away punishments and any disciplinary actions from people committing crimes.” (Hieatt’s department has imprinted the words “In God We Trust” on its official vehicles—Christian natural law, which dismantles the line between church and state, is a big part of both the “constitutional sheriff” movement and Claremont.)
