How the [Un]Constitutional Sheriff Movement Threatens Democracy
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Brad is joined by first-time guest Jessica Pishko, author of the book 'The Highest Law in the Land.' The discussion centers around the constitutional sheriff movement, highlighting how sheriffs, despite being elected law enforcement officers, often act as unaccountable power brokers within the counties they serve. The conversation covers the sheriffs' role in both law enforcement and detention, their hard-to-remove positions, and the influence of far-right ideologies, particularly the constitutional sheriffs led by Richard Mack. This episode also touches upon the involvement of the Claremont Institute with sheriffs, propagandist roles, and the significant racial and political implications of their actions and ends with a call to reassess the necessity and role of county sheriffs in modern American governance.
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Joined today by a first-time guest and someone who I'm so happy to meet and whose book I'm so happy to have read, and that is Jessica Pischko.
So, Jessica, thank you for joining me.
I'm so glad to be here.
Thank you.
Written a great book on the constitutional sheriff movement and everything surrounding it, The Highest Law in the Land, a book about how unchecked power of sheriffs threatens our democracy.
And this book could not be more timely.
It touches on things ranging...
From immigration to militias to guns and everything I think that many of us are unfortunately having to confront on a daily basis now with the new administration.
And so I want to start by asking you about what a sheriff is and what a sheriff does because there may be folks listening thinking, well, what is a sheriff's movement or what do these sheriffs who think they're kings have to do with me?
Why is this something that has any kind of effect on American life in a time when every day there's a new crisis from the Trump administration and so on?
We're going to get there and it's going to click in about five minutes, I think, for everyone.
But we need to start with what is a sheriff and what do they do?
That's no problem.
So I think...
To put it into context, there are around 18,000 different law enforcement agencies in this country.
So it is not a surprise that I think for most people, you do not know all of the law enforcement agencies that are interacting in your community and other communities every day.
So just to bear in mind, there's a lot of agencies out there.
Now, sheriffs are the elected...
Law enforcement officer for a county.
So what's important about that is that while counties contain cities, right, so a county might contain a largest city or a very big city in the case of LA County, multiple cities, it also usually contains the suburbs and what we might call the surrounding exurban area or rural areas.
So just to keep in mind that the issue of voting with County elections is that you're getting usually disproportionately more suburban people voting than you might if you were doing, say, a citywide election.
So I think that for most folks, especially, again, most people live in cities.
That's just the truth.
So county elections are not always as discernible.
Sheriffs are elected about every four years in most places.
It's pretty normal.
They're not always elected at the same time as other officials, right?
So what tends to happen is their elections are off year, which again makes it more difficult for people to keep track of their local officials.
And I think the most important thing about sheriffs is that they do both policing.
So they do everything police do.
In most places, there are a handful of exceptions, but in most places they do patrol, they respond to calls for service, they do traffic stops, they investigate crimes, but they also run county jails.
So about 85% of sheriffs run Or 85% of county jails are run by sheriffs.
There are a few facilities that are city jails or not run by sheriffs, but the vast majority of them are.
And so what that means is that you have an elected law enforcement officer who really has kind of their fingers in like two pies, right?
There's one side that's the arrest side, and then you have another side, which is like the detention side.
And for just...
Also kind of remind most people that jails are where you go after you're arrested.
So it's a place mostly for people who haven't been convicted of crimes yet.
It's a vast majority of people in there.
And if people have been convicted of crimes, those are usually people who have been sentenced maybe a couple of months, anything less than a year, right?
That gets served perhaps in a county jail.
It's also a place where a lot of other kinds of detainees are held.
So that would include people being held for ICE or people being held for U.S. Marshals.
The main amount of jail that I think makes it important is that it's a temporary holding space for people who are on their way somewhere else most of the time.
I see you on social media fighting the good fight, making sure people know that there's a difference between jail and prison.
And I know you're teaching your children that and anyone else who will listen.
Sheriffs are hard to remove once they're in office.
So we have somebody who, as you say, Is involved in, like, enforcing law and then also, like, governing the sites of incarceration, which, you know, if you live in a big city, you may not think about very often.
If you live in a small county, a small town, it may be quite frightening to think somebody can not only arrest you for whatever they like in some cases, but also then be in charge of where you'll be jailed for any number of time.
Sheriffs are hard to remove, and that makes it even more scary.
Once they're in power, who does a sheriff answer to?
How can you check their power?
And is there any way to get rid of one if they're doing something that seems like it's not okay?
It's a place where there's a little bit of a difference between what sheriffs say and what the actual law is.
And then there are reasons why it could get confusing for people.
So, unlike a police chief, so police chiefs are answerable usually to a city council or a mayor.
If the police chief screws up, the city council or mayor can just fire him or her.
It's a very easy process.
I sometimes say it's like a CEO. You just fire the CEO if it's going badly, and then you hire a new person.
A search, there'll be a big search, you'll hire a new person.
Now, removing a sheriff is a bit different because sheriffs are...
Considered equal to all the other elected officials in a county, which means you have usually an elected prosecutor.
In most places, you have elected county commissioners.
You might have what they call in the South a county judge or like sort of a main county commissioner, county manager, something like that.
And so all these positions are considered equal, which means that none of the county officials can really fire the sheriff.
Different states have different laws on how to remove.
So in most places, there is a procedure for removing a sheriff that is the equivalent of a recall election.
That's the typical way.
And most recall elections fall in about two main categories.
So the first category is kind of more like a trial.
You have to bring evidence and say that the sheriff has violated some sort of oath of office or some sort of very specific.
Part of their job.
And then the second way is a recall.
This is the method in California.
It's a little more of an open recall.
If you get enough signatures, you could just have a recall election and then they let the chips fall where they may.
Now, what's interesting about sheriffs is there are so few recalls.
So what often happens is when people want to recall their sheriff, they look back, you know, at the cases and the news and they think, oh, we haven't recalled a sheriff in a hundred years.
And so when laws haven't been used in like a hundred years, people are, if they're confused, they're not sure.
Like, what do I do?
Do I remove this sheriff?
Do we wait?
And so this is where you get instances like a sheriff has committed a crime and the county commissioners are confused about the process for actually removing the sheriff from office.
Now, what usually happens in those instances is the sheriff resigns rather than going through a kind of formal removal procedure.
But it does present an occasional instance where, like I said, you have a sheriff who has like definitively committed a crime for which everyone kind of agrees they should leave office.
There's confusion about how to do it.
Now, there's other times when sheriffs may or may not have committed crimes that people, you know, may or may not think disqualifies them from office.
And this is where you get into more of a battle about the sheriff might refuse to resign.
You know, what kind of procedures could people use?
Plus, the other interesting thing about recalls is they can't usually just be for any old reason.
Like, let's say you're like, this sheriff is too racist, and we would like to recall him.
That's actually not a violation of the oath of office, oddly.
And so what often happens is the abuses of law enforcement that we would typically think of, maybe like poor training.
Racist stops, you know, discriminatory policing, those are actually not things that sheriffs can be removed for in many places.
So that, I think, is really where people get puzzled, because, as we'll talk about later, if you have sheriffs engaging in, let's say, political activity, it's not necessarily clear that that's something for which they can be removed from office.
I'm Andrew Seidel, a constitutional lawyer, activist, and author of The Founding Myth and American Crusade, books that explore the relationship of church and state and fight Christian nationalist disinformation.
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And your book really does make clear that not only are sheriffs removed, seldomly, and it just does not happen very often, but a lot of sheriffs are kind of folks who think of themselves as really answering to no one.
not answering to, as you say, a county commissioner, much less to even Any other law enforcement officer or agency, and really even the governor.
I mean, in some cases, you know, there are sheriffs in your book quoted saying that they're almost like a king because, you know, they only answer to the people.
And it's this really strange relationship where you're elected, and then once you're elected, you're kind of like, you know, the sole person in charge of this huge jurisdiction.
It's sort of a strange cutout in American electoral politics.
And that does lead us to the sheriffs who do see themselves as kind of an exception to our system.
And some of them see themselves as kings, as I've said, but it's solidified or congealed in the constitutional sheriff movement.
And at the center of that is a man named Richard Mack.
So some folks out there might have heard of constitutional sheriffs.
They might have been frightened.
They might have watched Fargo season four, as I did.
Tell us about that movement and why it is a threat to our demise.
The Fargo season four, not that inaccurate, so I have to say.
Except for maybe the hot tub part, which, like, I haven't seen the hot tub, so I'm not saying there's not one.
I haven't seen it.
I have seen it, and I mean, I don't know if there are sheriffs as good-looking as Jon Hamm out there, but, you know, that part...
No, I believe it.
So, here's the thing.
The constitutional sheriff movement, in a way, is interesting.
Well...
To first explain what it is.
So this is what they call themselves, to be clear.
They call themselves constitutional sheriffs.
I tend to use the word far-right sheriffs, and the reason being that the constitutional sheriff movement name is intentionally misleading because it makes it sound like sheriffs are in the Constitution, which they are not in the U.S. Constitution.
Now, what they mean when they say constitutional sheriff is they mean that the sheriff's primary job, and in fact, not just job, but sort of moral obligation, is to uphold the ideas in what they call the original Constitution, which is the first 10 amendments, to be clear.
So the Bill of Rights and what they consider sort of the original Constitution, which...
Hence, as it does in many far-right and patriot circles, it tends to also include, like, the Declaration of Independence.
This is something that I think the far-right is interested in kind of shifting, like, the Declaration of Independence into with the Constitution and sort of interpreting values and ideas in that way.
So to that extent, the constitutional sheriff movement is...
It's a values-based political movement.
And we know that because they have certain values that they uphold, right?
They, for example, are very strong supporters of Second Amendment rights.
So they're very strong supporters of gun rights.
They support more religion in government.
So that's their sort of First Amendment position.
They are certainly proponents of state rights and local rights.
It's a very strongly held belief for them.
And they have a certain amount of many libertarian sensibilities as well, although I think that that's changing.
Some of their libertarian sensibilities tend to be, you know, they value, for example, private property.
They don't like federal agencies like the IRS or the ATF. I guess they figure no one likes the IRS. They tend not to, you know, they don't really consider the rest of the constitutional amendments as part of...
What they think about.
So they're not, you know, for example, concerned with due process.
They're not concerned with like the 19th Amendment, like women voting.
It's a rather misogynistic movement.
They are firmly anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ rights, which not really in the first 10 amendments, but it's there anyway.
And they are also extremely xenophobic.
So they are very anti-immigrant.
Even though, as many people point out, immigration is a federal power, right?
It requires a federal government.
But for most constitutional sheriffs, the desire to police the borders of the United States kind of takes precedence out of their kind of anti-federal attitudes.
So I tend not to call it like an anti-government movement, again, because what they believe is just mostly, I would say...
Standard right-wing beliefs at this point, right?
These are pretty, I would say, standard beliefs that many, you know, currently in the federal government hold.
Now, their leader of the largest organization is called, well, the organization is called the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, so the CSPOA. It is run by a man named Richard Mack.
And Richard Mack, who is getting up in years, right?
He's sort of of, you know, of retirement age.
He's like, I think he's in his 70s at this point.
Richard Mack was a sheriff in Graham, Arizona, which is a very small place in Arizona.
He is a very interesting person, just in terms of how he got to where he is.
He is from a very devout Mormon family.
His story was that he wanted to join the FBI. But could not for various reasons.
He became a police officer.
I think he didn't pass the FBI test is why he didn't get into the FBI. But he became a police officer and said that he became very disillusioned with the idea of writing tickets.
He did not like writing speeding tickets.
And he sort of calls himself like a meter maid, you know, sort of.
Denigrating the idea of writing these speeding tickets, stopping people.
You didn't stop at the stop sign, etc., etc.
Around this time, we're now in the 50s.
In this post-war period, of course, there was a very strong anti-communist sentiment.
One of the ideas floating around was this idea that law enforcement could be tasked to root out communists.
Some folks had this idea, oh, we could root out communists using law enforcement.
This is a good idea.
If we train law enforcement to know who the communists are, we can teach them how to do it.
And so this began a concept of what is essentially like an ideological training for law enforcement.
And of course, you know, at the FBI, Herbert Hoover did somewhat of the same thing.
Wait, I said the name of the FBI director wrong.
Was I right?
The director of the FBI. Edgar Hoover.
Edgar Hoover.
My brain got a little, like, scrambled.
I think, sorry, I was scrambling, too.
I think Hoover was the president.
I was like, wait, that's the president.
Is that right?
Yeah.
So the head of the FBI at the time, Edgar J. Hoover, was also, he was, like, weaponizing the FBI to root out communists, right?
Like, he used the FBI as, like, an ideological tool to go after civil rights workers.
Anyone who was kind of anti-communist on the left.
So the idea was, can local law enforcement do this?
And Richard Mack was so sort of taken with the idea.
And after he became a sheriff, he thought this was such a great idea.
He thought, how can I get everyone to do it?
And the funny thing is, before he started the CSPOA, he did a number of things that just didn't work.
He, like, ran for multiple offices, didn't win.
So he ran for, like, Congress, didn't win.
He ran, he did it.
Reality TV show where he fake ran for president.
So he didn't win that.
Attempted to do a movement, his first sort of foray into something like constitutional sheriffs was something he called the county movement.
And the idea of this county movement would be, we had this idea that they would create like a safe haven county in rural Arizona, and all the libertarians would move there, and they would have basically like a libertarian utopia.
That didn't take off.
And the people who lived in that county...
We're like, what?
Why are you moving to our county and making it a libertarian utopia?
We object to this idea.
Finally, he came up with the constitutional sheriff movement, and this is around the time he met Stuart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers.
So now, you know, we've kind of flash forwarded into around, you know, 20, around 2010, 2011, 2012. This is, of course, the rise of the Tea Party.
So Barack Obama is elected president.
We have a sort of backlash among Republicans and people start getting elected as part of the Tea Party, right?
Which was intended to be a sort of hard right movement specifically opposed to like some of the ideas of Barack Obama and this idea that he was, you know, like super, this extreme liberal and we all needed to be like very worried.
And around the same time, the militia movement was also revived.
So Stuart Rhodes started to assemble the Oath Keepers.
Groups like the Three Percenters also started.
And what kind of happened is these guys, like Stuart Rhodes and Richard Mack and some other militia leaders, kind of started something like a road show.
They started going on the road, touring together.
They rode in a bus.
Together, from what I could tell.
Like, Stuart Rhodes' wife was frequently there.
She was, like, a frequent driver.
So they would kind of get in this van and, like, roll around, go to places, come out, have a kind of, like, revival, talk about the importance of, you know, the Constitution and the Second Amendment and militias.
And, you know, Richard Mack would kind of add this idea of the sheriff, right?
And so his...
Kind of takeaway was, well, if we want sort of peace and harmony in our communities, what we ought to do is get the sheriff involved because the sheriff is elected.
So he's a populist figure and he's the one that militias and other kind of far right groups will listen to.
So his thought was like to attach Stuart Rhodes Oathkeeper concept to like the sheriff who's the elected official.
One of the things that.
Comes through in the book is the idea that one way to get the militia to recognize the authority of the sheriff rather than other government officials, including other law enforcement officials.
I think January 6th is probably a pretty good example of times when and militia members are not necessarily going to recognize the authority of law enforcement.
Is the idea that the sheriff, his authority, almost always a him?
It goes back further than even the Constitution, that this is somehow like an ordained authority that goes back to God's natural law, to common English law, to something of time immemorial.
And so when you, a militia member, recognize the sheriff, you're recognizing the kind of right and good of eternal power and manhood rather than that meter-made policeman.
That Richard Mack makes fun of all the time or some bureaucrat nerd coming from an office.
Is that how you get the militias and the sheriffs to kind of coalesce in some way?
That's exactly right.
I mean, and this is like a lot of fantasy, right?
Like we're talking now about things that are not, that sheriffs have created about themselves.
But one of the things I try to do in the book is yoke this history of the sheriff.
To explain why the constitutional sheriff movement has so much tenacity.
Like, it's been kind of a sticky movement, so why do people buy this?
But yeah, so the concept is, you know, the sheriff is mentioned in the Magna Carta.
The sheriff is in, some say the sheriff is in the Bible, which my understanding is that is not the proper interpretation of the word that's used in the Bible.
But yeah, this idea, I think of like an Anglo-Saxon glorious culture, you know, it comes from Britain.
So it has this sort of...
I think medieval knightly feel, as you point out, very tied into ideas of gallant masculinity, duty and honor, respect for God and country, that is indeed very much differentiated from what you might call the feminized officer who writes reports.
There's a real disdain for writing reports.
Or the bureaucrat at the FBI who will scour information and create Compile, you know, resources, right?
There's this, like, disdain for that kind of work, and the idea that the sheriff is out there in the community, that they, you know, maybe not, maybe they wear a hat, maybe they don't, but they do kind of stand for, like, masculine virtue, and this, I think, idea of, like, a local figure that people, like, really respect in a sort of, but again, yes, and imbued with a lot of these thoughts of...
Again, kind of masculinity.
I don't know if people here are familiar with cowboy churches, but this is like something that a lot of sheriffs in Texas do.
So there are these sort of churches where it's not like inside, it's outside.
It's men, mostly men, and they sort of sit around and have, they seem to just have like barbecue and hang out.
Talk about manly virtue, and this is very much like the kind of Christianity that a lot of sheriffs are attracted to, right?
It is worth pointing out that both Stuart Rhodes and Richard Mack and quite a number of sheriffs in the West are Mormons.
Devout Mormonism is a religion that is tied to particularly constitutional sheriffs and the militia movement.
They share a lot of the same kind of Mormon ideas.
Again, this is, I think, because Mormonism is very much tied to the United States as like an institution, right?
The idea that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are something like religious documents to be revered.
And there's sort of a famous quote about the Constitution will hang by a thread.
And that's when you know, right, that the time has come, this sort of, like, this idea of, like, escalating towards the end times.
So, you know, that ideology certainly permeates a lot of what these sheriffs do.
Just want to stop and say, folks, if you're listening, catch my interview with Laron Martin, who wrote a great book about the FBI and Christian nationalism.
It goes all over the Edgar J. Hoover Christian nationalist sort of...
That we're talking about here.
And then check out an episode I did with Benjamin Park, a historian of the Latter-day Saints, about MAGA Mormonism, because it will also help illuminate some of the ideas that I think Jessica is referring to here as well.
Ice raids are starting all over the country.
There is fear.
There is a sense that churches and schools and hospitals are not off limits.
What role do sheriffs play?
in the process of detaining and deporting immigrants?
And how are we going to see them as a part of what Trump is trying to do with deportations across our country?
We divide this into kind of like basically three different buckets just to help.
Because one of the tactics of the Trump administration has been to smush things together and generate a lot of confusion, right?
So there's military at the border.
There's an invasion.
There's raids in Chicago and in school, right?
So there's so many different things going on that it can be hard to understand, like, what the roles of different agencies are.
So to first say, like, sheriffs are, of course, local law enforcement.
They are not federal law enforcement.
So there is, they cannot anywhere.
Enforce immigration law, which is to say they cannot pull people over or stop people that they believe might be immigrants, documented or not.
That is not allowed.
Now, I'm not saying things like that haven't happened or might not happen, but right now, to be clear, that is not allowed under any laws.
The first bucket of things that sheriffs do with respect to immigration is what I think is the most familiar, which is what they call interior enforcement.
And this is the idea that, you know, what ICE likes to do is they like to get people who are currently being held in jails.
So you look around the country, right?
You have, so there's over 3,000 counties.
Each county has a jail for the most part.
Happens is people are arrested.
They're put into jail.
They're kind of, they get their biometric markers read, right?
You get your fingerprint.
They look in the database.
Do you have other warrants?
And one of the other things they look to see is, are you wanted by ICE? So, yeah, the convenient thing for ICE is when people are arrested and in jail, ICE knows where they are.
And Tom Hillman actually just was on, I think, Dr. Phil's show talking about this, right?
Like, people are in a spot.
They're detained.
They can't go away.
And so it is easy, then, for ICE to go to that jail and pick the person up.
And that is primarily, like, the biggest function sheriff's play.
And that, to be clear, has been happening forever.
Like, definitely all throughout the Obama administration, all throughout the Biden administration, and now.
There's, like, a very consistent role sheriffs play.
And on occasion, sheriffs also rent their jails to ICE to house people.
There are also agreements called 287G agreements, which gives sheriffs a little more leeway to interrogate people in terms of their nationality and status.
In theory, if you're arrested, you don't have to tell what your nationality is.
You don't have to say, like, I'm a Mexican citizen.
Again, this is where a lot of racial profiling comes in, to be quite honest.
They just quite frankly, racially profile people based on like what language they speak or what their surname is.
And if you have a 287G agreement, the sheriff can basically do more questioning and figure out for themselves whether they think you might be deportable and then call ICE. I mean, this can range from some jails just give you a questionnaire, like, where are you a citizen of?
You know, are you a U.S. citizen?
Answer yes or no.
If you answer no, right, they just start investigating you to see if you're deportable.
Some places don't do that, but it could be anything.
And again, this is where sheriffs get to decide.
How are they going to do it?
The sheriff gets to decide, like, how do they want to handle this?
The second bucket is border enforcement.
Now, a lot of sheriffs, because they're county officials, they patrol a lot of rural areas.
And the Biden administration had given a lot of money to some of these sheriffs.
Sometimes they'll call them border sheriffs.
They're on the U.S.-Mexico border, generally.
They give them money to basically do patrol operations with Border Patrol.
And this usually involves, let's say, stopping suspicious vehicles, helping with...
Let's say there's a row or there's a group of migrants who are waiting to get picked up by Border Patrol.
Maybe they're claiming asylum.
So the sheriffs might help.
This is sort of like a joint operation.
They usually work together in this way.
And then the third important thing that I think people may not think as much about is the role of sheriffs in terms of propaganda.
So because sheriffs are elected, They have a First Amendment right to say what they want.
This has basically been acknowledged by all the major organizations.
In other words, a sheriff can go on TV and say, the Biden administration has created a border crisis.
And there's nothing to be done if they say that.
True, false, political, not political.
They could say, Biden's border crisis, everything is terrible.
Can you believe it?
I can't wait till Trump is president, right?
When Trump's president, they're like, thank goodness Trump is president.
He's going to fix the border, etc.
But this is really important because they go on TV in their uniform and spread propaganda, right?
A lot of them are very friendly with Tom Homan.
Tom Homan's been recruiting sheriffs for, like, the last two years.
And, you know, they'll sort of flood the TV with their uniforms and their hats and their authority and say to people, hey, we think this is bad.
We think this is a crisis.
Look at all these bad guys in jail.
We know bad guys because we're, like, tough lawmen.
And people tend to believe it, right?
And this is a thing they can do, whereas most police chiefs are a little limited.
They could get in trouble if they make a political statement.
So it's sort of like, yeah, they could get fired if people didn't like it.
It's a sticky area.
They tend not to do that.
Sheriffs, on the other hand, it's fine.
They just say whatever they want.
They've campaigned with Trump.
They can go out with Tom Homan.
They can go on Dr. Phil's show.
It's all good.
So if I'm a police chief, there's a sense that...
My comments could go up a chain somewhere and get me in hot water with my superiors, with someone else, and maybe I can get fired.
A sheriff cannot be fired.
It's hard to recall a sheriff.
It's hard to remove a sheriff.
And a lot of sheriffs are, the elections are kind of hard to, it's hard to find a competitor in an election, especially if that competitor has a widely different platform than the incumbent and such.
You can get on the TV as the sheriff.
And sound wildly partisan, wildly like the most right-leaning member of the GOP, and yet people are interpreting you as law enforcement, and the police chief can't do that, right?
They just can't do that kind of propaganda work.
And it's a really ingenious strategy to use them for that purpose, and it's also really, I think, quite insidious and hurtful to our public square in many ways.
I want to ask you some big takeaway questions about what you found.
You reported all of this.
After years and years of work and investigation, I will say your book is voluminous.
It is so well documented and there's no way to ever criticize the amount of evidence you provide because it is extensive.
One more aspect before we just go to big takeaways, just briefly.
One group that has taken a keen interest in sheriffs over the last couple of years is the Claremont Institute.
The Claremont Institute that most people know from John Eastman.
The Trump lawyer who really cooked up the legal strategy of the big lie and January 6th and stealing the election and so on and so on and so on.
The Claremont Institute, though, really the kind of intellectual epicenter of MAGA-ism and the big lie, the place where policy wonks and nerds like myself go to write papers.
I mean, I'm not ideologically with them.
I am a nerd.
Go to write white papers and also articles.
That are basically kind of intellectual cover for any conspiracy theory or myth that comes out of MAGA Nation.
They have perhaps unexpectedly become quite invested in sheriffs, offered sheriff fellowships, provided money, resources.
What is there in that partnership between the Claremont Institute and the Constitutional Sheriff?
The Claremont Institute basically started, as you say, doing a sheriff fellowship.
So they started it around 2020. And they invite, like, basically, they have many fellowships.
So they added it on.
So they invite, like, a cohort of about eight sheriffs every year.
They spend a week at Huntington Beach.
So the readings have adjusted over the years.
But in essence, they read about the dangers of woke, why Black Lives Matter is bad.
They read quite a lot about how George Washington is.
There's kind of a weird emphasis on proper propriety and morals.
They read this sort of handbook about being a good...
Kind of masculine citizen.
This also sort of goes with, I think, the Claremont theme.
And quite a lot, again, about the Second Amendment.
It's very focused.
And being anti-immigration has been a recent ad.
And I think one of the things is, first of all, I will say all the Claremont fellows have been men from the sheriffs.
They've only invited men so far.
And Ryan Williams, when he became the president of Claremont, he really had this interest in the West.
From the best I could tell, this was a Ryan Williams idea.
He thought the West was really neat, is how it seems.
He just thought it was cool.
He liked the values of the West.
And I think there's things, you know, we think about like manifest destiny, the idea of the American empire.
And I think even this anti-immigration, right?
To be clear, the Claremont Institute is extremely anti-immigration, as in they believe in basically...
A white Christian nation.
I don't really know how to put it any blunter.
Like, they believe everyone should be white and Christian.
They are very, very anti-diversity in the most extreme way.
Like, no legal immigration whatsoever.
And, you know, so it kind of goes along with this idea.
You know, I sometimes talk about how sheriffs, police...
Or kind of the policing of the empire, right?
That the idea of a sheriff was that they would ride out to the far reaches of the West and preserve the nation, not just by, you know, getting rid of bad guys who might be inside, but also keeping, you know, the bad guys from coming across the U.S.-Mexico border.
And I think that that's part of the appeal for Claremont.
I mean, among that, there's just quite a lot of very Western things.
They watch a John Wayne movie as part of it.
So they watch The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
I'm not sure.
Have you seen that, Brad?
So in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, there's a lawyer.
Jimmy Stewart plays a lawyer.
He's a nerd.
He goes to Arizona, gets mugged by the...
Bad guy.
There's a bad man.
He gets mugged by the bad guy.
And John Wayne is like, you're a big nerd.
We need to go shoot this bad guy.
And Jimmy Stewart's like, no, no, I will do it with the laws.
We'll use the books and the laws.
And so there's finally this shootout where John Wayne secretly shoots the bad guy and pretends Jimmy Stewart did it.
And so Jimmy Stewart becomes like a famous governor or senator.
And he's all like, well, it's because I shot this like super bad guy.
But he really didn't.
It was John Wayne.
And so I think the Claremont Institute sees themselves as the Jimmy Stewart and the sheriff as the John Wayne.
The sheriff will shoot the bad guy.
The Claremont Institute will go on to be great.
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Coming up, we have the debut of Andrew Seidel's One Nation, Indivisible.
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