MAGA Secret "Sheriff Fellowship" Curriculum Smells NAZI [View all]

[Kid Berwyn]

Here’s the Secret “Sheriff Fellowship” Curriculum From the Country’s Most Prominent MAGA Think Tank

BY JESSICA PISHKO
Slate, SEPT 21, 2022

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

Public information requests and other reporting have provided insight into the stated and unstated reasons behind the Claremont Institute’s recruitment of county sheriffs, and revealed the curriculum of the fellowship. (You can read the full curriculum at the bottom of this article.) What emerges in reviewing this information is a portrait of the far right’s deep investment in sheriffs. They seem to be a key target of the movement because the office is already vulnerable to extremism and because sheriffs can enable other extremist actors like vigilantes and militias to wreak havoc on society. Claremont provides a historical and intellectual cover for selected sheriffs to continue a march into white Christian nationalism; for Claremont, the sheriffs are elected influencers who can push their message into the mainstream, far from the coterie of intellectual elites. They also have the authority to use violence under the color of law to enforce these principles in their communities.

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

While the Claremont Institute hosts a variety of other fellowships, the Sheriffs Fellowship is the first program to focus on elected officials who are currently serving. For that reason, information about the fellowship and the program is important for voters who live in counties where these sheriffs run jails, serve warrants, detain individuals at traffic stops, and help federal officials enforce immigration laws. Sheriffs also have a great deal of discretion in important contested legal areas like the enforcement of gun laws, where they are often in charge of issuing permits and confiscating weapons under red flag laws, and in how to handle health orders, including enforcement of anti-COVID-19 measures like mask mandates, business closures, and vaccination policies. At least some of the Claremont sheriffs were recruited because of their resistance to COVID orders from state and federal governments. Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County, California, was specifically praised by the institute for “the courageous stand taken over the past year,” clearly a reference to Bianco having allied himself early in the pandemic with anti-vaxxers and with right-wing anti-abortion advocates in Southern California. Most recently, Bianco accused a Latina Riverside city councilmember, Clarissa Cervantes, of defacing the county courthouse because of her presence at in a pro-choice protest, spurring calls for his resignation. “You are lucky we couldn’t arrest you!” he threatened Cervantes through social media.

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

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https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/09/claremont-institute-secret-sheriff-fellowship-curriculum-revealed.html?hwystvwidotkenxjshwb